Category: Entertainment

Near the end of May, the Field Museum’s newest rotating exhibition opened: the Pokémon Fossil Museum. (You probably figured that out from the title of the post.) Naturally, we avoided going immediately after opening due to potential crowding, opting to wait a month and visit on a weekday. That may have reduced the overall crowding at the museum; the exhibition still sold out for the day. The exhibition tickets were timed entries, we scheduled ours for mid-afternoon to avoid being rushed in our arrival or lunch.

Not having visited the Field Museum in over a decade, we knew we weren’t going to cover everything in a day, especially with a special exhibition included. We opted to precede our Pokémon exploration with a visit to the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet & SUE the T. rex, which segued pleasantly into the overlapping information at the Pokémon Fossil Museum.

But what is the Pokémon Fossil Museum? It’s an exhibit comparing special Pokémon, theoretically restored from fossils, to “ancient life from our world”. What can I say? Someone decided Pokémon should be educational, and they did a delightful job of it. Each Pokémon fossil on display was paired with something from our world, such as the combination of a Tyrantrum and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Pokémon world items were a blue background and our world had red, making it easy to distinguish between them; both included detailed explanations in English and Spanish. The T-Rex skull pictured is a replica of SUE’s, the most complete T-Rex ever found, who is housed in the Evolving Planet exhibit.

As we stepped into the special exhibition, we were each handed a Pokémon card… a reprint of an existing card, rather than a special promo one. Apparently a special promo card caused some problems at a previous location for this traveling exhibit. Each admission does get you access to the special Pokémon store across the hall, with a limit of 5 items, no repeats allowed, per admission. This includes an Excavator Pikachu plush that they seemed to have in remarkably large quantities, though everything in the store is “while supplies last.” (Some of the items are also available at the Pokémon Center.) For those of us that play Pokémon Go, there’s an Excavator Pikachu available in the game in and around the exhibit, as well as some themed stickers and themed Pokéstop/Gym images.

Sadly, due to time constraints, we did not see all of the regular exhibits or any other special exhibit that day, so I expect we’ll have to return to the Field Museum again soon to remedy that.

If you recall, back in April we visited three zoos – and two airports – in just over a week. The first zoo we visited had Fahlo bracelets at some of the stores, which was the first time I had heard of the organization. The concept sounded appealing, purchasing an accessory to digitally track an animal and supporting the conservation efforts, yet we managed to leave without acquiring any of their items.

And then we saw them again, at the airport, alongside Fahlo stuffed animals. And we knew, since we were flying on Southwest out of Chicago Midway, that we’d be coming past those same stores when we flew home a few days later. On our return a few days later, I acquired a soft hammerhead shark, though the tracking is for a tiger shark named Summer. Different animal types support different organizations; my new plush support Saving the Blue, which focuses on threatened marine organisms.

Each Fahlo object comes with a QR code to scan, which links you to the supported animal on their app, showing you where they’ve mostly recently been tracked and providing additional details, like how far they’ve traveled since the tracking began (March 9th, in her case) and their average speed. Summer has travelled over 2000 miles since acquiring her tracking tag!

More recently, in the app, there was an offer for a red panda bracelet, which tracks Ninamma, who lives in a protected forest in Nepal. Similar to Summer’s tracker, the app shows a dot for each date she’s been tracked dating back to December 20th. Compared to Summer’s relatively stable placement off the coast of northern Florida and southern Georgia for the past month, Ninamma’s map (in the app, not pictured here) looks chaotic… but has only covered 239 miles. Presumably there’s an advantage in distance to being aquatic. However, Nimanna’s updates periodically include new photos.

In both cases, there may be gaps in their tracking: Ninamma’s because of the mountainous terrain or dense canopy cover, and Summer’s when she’s moving in deep water. The optional notifications will notify you when there’s a new ping on the map for your sponsored animal. Well, a potentially delayed ping, to protect the animal based on standards set with the partnering conservation organizations.

I discovered both of these word games through Waffle, a letter-swapping daily game I’ve been playing on and off for a while now. I feel like I’m better at OneWordSearch than I am at Stackdown, though I like both enough to play almost daily.

OneWordSearch looks like a standard, small word search – it’s only a five by five grid. The catch is that there’s only one findable word at a given time, following the standard word search rules – vertical, horizontal, or diagonal, going either direction for each of those. When you clear that word, replacement letters fall in. That’s an important part to the strategy for this game, realizing that if you remove the fourth row, everything above it will drop and there will be a new row at the top. If you remove a column, that entire column is replaced. If you remove a diagonal, well, that shift is a little harder to plan for.

In this particular puzzle, the first word to find is “style”. When that cleared, the bottom letter of that first column became an ‘o’, creating “organ” in a diagonal. (You’ll see a partial word list in the next image.)

Why do you need a strategy for a word search? It’s scored! Specifically, it’s scored based on how long it takes to find all ten words in the puzzle. This screenshot was from a particularly good day – a full five stars, based on finding all ten words in under a minute. Some days, my brain gets stuck and a single word can take a minute on its own.

The clock doesn’t start until you find that first word. From there, it’s a race to find the next nine as they become available. I try to find the second possible word before I select the first one, and then wing it after that. Sometimes I see a possibility that’s waiting for a single letter and it takes a couple more found words to get there. Other times, the potential word gets split because of how the letters drop when something else is found.

In contrast, Stackdown is timed, but doesn’t score based on the time… which is good, cause the timer starts as soon as you open the page. Similar to OneWordSearch, only one valid word is available at a time, with more of the thirty tiles becoming available as letters are used. The scoring runs down from a starting five stars based on the number of hints you use, which are accessed by swiping the lightbulb near the bottom of the screen. These are crossword puzzle-style hints, so the degree of usefulness may vary depending on where your brain is at compared to the clue.

The strategy I’ve found for Stackdown is to look for letters that make vowels accessible. This particular puzzle starts with an E as one of its four available tiles, which would have been great if there had been an H in the next layer to simply make “fetch”. In fact, this particular day had many ‘e’s, I count six, all on the left side of the puzzle. The first word used two of them – clearing ‘f’ and ‘e’ make the ‘n’ available, followed by the ‘c’ and another ‘e’ to form “fence”.

What daily puzzles help keep your brain going?

As I was cruising in the Caribbean (posts about that coming soon!), playing my daily puzzles like Wordle and Zip, I noticed that LinkedIn was suggesting a new puzzle: Patches. How new? Yesterday’s puzzle was numbered 16; I have a 14-day streak playing it.

Like Zip, Patches is a spatial awareness game, trying to fill the entirety of a grid. Instead of numbers to connect, there are blocks, some with specific numbers or shapes that they must match. In the first image of the slideshow, there’s a gold 9 in the upper left corner with crossing rectangles, with no other blocks in the 3 by 4 squares below and to the right of it; the placement for that one seemed obvious at a 3 by 3 square. But in the bottom left, one space to the right of the edge, there’s a blue block with a 2 shaped as a wide rectangle; that could go either direction, depending on what other blocks fill. And the bottom right has a red block with crossing rectangles without a number; that means it can go any direction, any number. Any direction does still mean rectangular; you can’t drag one block to form just a corner.

The second puzzle in the slideshow has a whopping ten blocks to place, still in a 6 by 6 grid. Is that easier or harder?

I realize, without context, there are a lot of options for the word “zip,” not the least are “zipper” or “zipline”. In this case, Zip is the name of a daily puzzle game available on LinkedIn. It’s one of a handful of puzzles I like starting my day with, along with Wordle, Waffle, and Connections.

Zip is a spatial rather than word puzzle, where you need to connect all of the numbers in order while also passing through each space only once. The quantity of numbers varies, so you never know until you click into that day’s puzzle how many you’re trying to connect and what the layout looks like. The grid pictured in the first image above had no obstacles; sometimes there are borders to work around.

The second image is the completed puzzle for that day, and the third image shows how my time compared to other players’. That was a particularly good day for me, completing the puzzle in 15 seconds when the average was 26. The “flawless” text at the top of the third image means I didn’t undo any of my path while completing the puzzle. That is certainly not always the case, some puzzles trip me up in different ways, hitting a mental block that sometimes prompts me to close the window (pausing the timer) or use a hint.

What does your daily puzzle routine look like?

Capricon 46 has come and, alas, gone, as is the way of annual conventions. I had waves of free time alternating with “why did I schedule myself like this” intervals… again, that’s kind of the way of conventions. The meal times I left myself were not necessarily convenient, except for breakfast, since most convention scheduling starts around 10am.

One of the first items on my checklist, after checking into the convention and hotel, was setting up my display in the Art Show. The bulk of my items were displayed on half a table (mental note: next year, get the whole table… bid sheets take up space), theoretically shared with another artist. As it happens, the other artist only sent items that needed hanging, so they were on the grid above my selection.

“Super Cabra,” however, was my Artist’s Challenge piece, and went in a separate space with other competing contributions, making it easy for attendees to see the choices they were voting on. There were three this year, all meeting the challenge requirements: “incorporate a goat (the convention’s mascot) and three of the following items: a flag, a hand, a brick, a broken robot or computer, or the color purple.”

As with my other pieces, “Super Cabra” had a bid sheet for people to purchase or – had he received 3 bids – send to auction. The Artist’s Challenge prize – a purple brick with “Capricon 46” on one long end, “Rise of the Humans” (this year’s theme) on the opposite, and goat head on one side – came home with me, while “Super Cabra” went home with the winning bidder.

Much of the convention was normal for me: I hosted a Stitch & Bitch, where people bring craft projects and chat while working on them; I volunteered in a couple places including at the art auction; I helped a little at Box Fort (more about that below). What was new this year were a couple “actual play” role-playing games – RPGs with an audience – and I was delighted to participate in a one-page RPG called “ShenaniGoblins,” where goblins working for the ominously named Dark Lord scramble to correct whatever they messed up on their assigned mission. Apparently setting buildings on fire and flinging goblins from trebuchets are fairly common in this setting, and our game was no exception.

My main duty at Box Fort is the Sunday morning collapse of the boxes for recycling, though I help sometimes with set-up and door duties. I did realize though, looking back at my previous posts about Box Fort, that I haven’t really explained convention parties here. To be clear, each convention has its own rules – if they officially allow parties – and each party may have separate rules too. And both of those must follow the rules established by the location hosting the convention.

In the case of Capricon, which is fresher in my mind than sister convention WindyCon (where Box Fort also had a party), the convention’s Code of Conduct explicitly requires all parties to be coordinated with the Party Liaison, who among other duties, assigns the appropriate rooms for each party based on preference and availability. The book launch party doesn’t usually need a suite; Box Fort and Barfleet (among several others) prefer to have the extra space.

While the parties are all technically private – not run by the convention – coordinating through the convention keeps the party hosts in both the convention’s and the hotel’s good graces, ensuring that the hosts and people attending the parties are all subject to the aforementioned Code of Conduct. This is also a reason to turn away normal people who may be staying at the hotel and happen to stumble into the party hallway (they may have seen the flyers display as the exited the elevator)… they haven’t agreed to the Code of Conduct, and if they misbehave, it’s your problem as the party host.

Some of those parties may be completely private: my bachelorette party, for example, was hosted many years ago at a Capricon, coordinated through the convention to have a suite not on the party floors. (There was also a wedding on-site that weekend, using a much larger area in programming space.) Some may be intermittently private: Barfleet shuts down “early” on Saturday (if you consider midnight early) to become a members-only event, and several parties will “soft-close” late at night as they prepare for the next day.

The difference between “open” – for anyone to walk in – and “soft-close” is also a difference between private and open parties: having the door fully open, sometimes with signage and people standing at the door to card partygoers, versus just propping it open with the security bolt, like when you dash down the hall to fill the ice bucket. If you don’t know the person with the barely open door, you don’t walk in; any conventiongoer (well, depending on party rules) is welcome to walk in and introduce themselves at the party with an open door.

Any open party serving alcohol has to verify your age, which is done either at the door or the bar; at the door typically gets you a stylish wristband that will last the rest of the evening. (Any private party hopefully knows your age, since they invited you.) Some parties will also restrict admission to people who have achieved drinking age or better, reducing the workload for their bartenders. You’ll still get a wristband, they just won’t need to check for it at the bar; they’ll check it at the door if you leave and come back in later. (For clarity, each party typically has a different colored wristband than the other parties, and different for each night as well.)

By the end of Saturday night, partygoers have usually perused the various parties and scanned the QR code to vote in the various party award categories for the year. This year, those voting categories were best mocktail, best alcoholic drink, and best overall party. And yes, Box Fort won the best overall party this year… by a single vote.

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association is quite the handful for a book name, and I’m delighted that this book by Caitlin Rozakis lived up to that handful.

Our local library typically hosts summer and winter “reading” challenges, providing sheets to track your checkouts and rate them. Anything available through the library counts, whether books (in various formats), games, DVDs, or even “how to” kits that they have available. I’ve found these challenges offer a great opportunity to explore what’s available at the library, from movies we haven’t seen yet to picking up books off the new fiction or the recommended by staff shelves.

That’s how I found The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, on the new fiction shelf, as it was just published in May 2025. The basic premise is that Vivian and Daniel are struggling with their integration into a magical community after their daughter, Aria, was bitten by a werewolf. As mundanes, Vivian and Daniel are entirely out of their depth, lacking so much magical knowledge that the rest of the community takes for granted. This is, of course, an ideal perspective for telling such a story, as the readers are exposed to the worldbuilding along with the characters.

Having relocated to be closer to the exclusive Grimoire Grammar School, one of a handful of magical schools in North America, Vivian, as former accountant turned stay-at-home mom, throws herself into the school’s PTA and the parents’ WhatsApp group in an attempt to fit in. To her dismay, she discovers that the prophecy of doom overshadowing this hidden magical town sounds distressingly like it’s about Aria, and the town’s welcome becomes remarkably chilly as more signs of the Reckoning emerge. In the midst of that mess, she and Daniel struggle to prepare for the required testing that will allow Aria to remain at the school, particularly after discovering that other magical schools rarely mix different types of magical creatures and are much less likely to admit a werewolf with human parents. Navigating parent cliques and suppressed controversies from the school’s past, Vivian struggles to find where she fits and how she can express her experience to her mundane therapist without her sanity being questioned.

This is a refreshingly unique take on magic schools and how people interpret the concept of the Chosen one from a cryptic prophecy to their own advantage. And while it’s a standalone novel (for now?), our library has the author’s other book, Dreadful, which also sounds like a distinctive approach to a fantasy setting.