Not a holiday I've ever paid much attention to, but apparently it's kind of a big deal around here. Although this is not exactly how I'd ever pictured St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, I guess it could work!
Completely unrelated to the above photo (it was too good not to share), walking through the park near my apartment today I found 5 four-leafed clovers today and one five-leafed, in an under-20 minute walk. Luck o' the Irish for me this St. Patrick's Day, apparently!
Can you spot the four-leaved clover in this photo I took today?
(Hint: it's in tbe south-west quadrant.)
I seem to have a knack for spotting four-leafed clovers and have found several there before, and I never know what to do with them. So, I've been playing around with jeweler's resin. I tried small paperweights first, then had the idea to try necklaces.
Paperweights/keychain:
Necklace (first attempt):
I took some photos of making necklackes as I went. Tradeskilling ftw!
First: bought some jewelry findings. I tried out a couple of different shapes, including sterling silver hoop (above) and rectangle (below). Plus, some silver flat head pins.
Next, resin. I tried ICE jeweler's resin brand, from Amazon. Mix equal parts from the 2 bottles:
Then pour into the jewelry findings. I tried a few shapes. I used masking tape on the back, and poured in just enough resin to cover the bottom. Mixing causes a lot of bubbles which slowly come out as it hardens, but I found using a pin to help smooth them out also was useful.
It takes about 24 hours to harden fully. Next day, I removed the tape. It left a rough surface, but I flipped over each one, then added more resin on the back to make the back smooth.
Once that is hard, add the clover (or whatever else will go in the pendant) and cover with more resin to make a convex surface.
If using a clover or other plant, you need to press and dry it first. I'd previously pressed my clovers for at least a few weeks under some heavy books; if you don't, they may decay inside the resin which obviously doesn't look good. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials with detailed walk throughs.
Finally, once the resin was hard, I added a chain and some extra beads to finish it off as a necklace.
Since this one was a gift for someone who loves ladybugs, I also added a small ladybug charm I got from Etsy.
And a gift box - plain cardboard from Michael's:
Plus some paint and wire, which I already had lying around:
A little box of good luck and good wishes, ready to deliver!
Still not quite sure what to do with all the clovers I found today, but they're in a book now being pressed and dried. These do make nice little gifts for friends who're needing a little luck. And, of course, great accessories to go with your St. Patrick's Day tutu!
Update: adding some photos of more clover pendants I've made since the original post!
Over the years playing various games I've created a few random videos, all just for fun, when inspiration struck. I'm certainly not a master of video creation, lacking both talent and time, but occasionally I get an idea that amuses me. And if you don't spend your life doing things that amuse you, then what's the point of your life, right?
I was looking at the stats on my YouTube channel today and I noticed I have some pretty impressive view numbers for some of them (considering they're just random things I did for fun). And I realized I haven't ever linked any of them on my blog, or at least not that I recall.
So here's a blog post about some of the videos I've made. For the very first one, flash back to October 2006. I was living in Australia, playing a lot of EverQuest II, and trying to convince them to hire me too. Back then I was part of a wonderful family type roleplay guild called Saga, which had carried over from the original EverQuest. We hosted a tavern night on a semi-regular basis which included a quiz game for prizes and well as chat and entertainment. One night, a trio of male halflings stopped in and offered their dancing skills to entertain us: they jumped up on the bar and did a fantastic synchronized dance in perfect time, using various emotes to coordinate their movements. It was hysterically funny and they showed up for a number of subsequent tavern nights to repeat the performance. I assume the trio were probably the same player running three accounts and with macros set up to coordinate the movements perfectly, and the enjoyment from those performances inspired me to create this video using my halfling and an alt of my then-boyfriend's; with the computers side by side and some macros set up, I could also coordinate the dancing to create the same effect.
And thus was created: The Secret Life of Halflings. I sent it to the EQ2 dev team to give them a good laugh, as they were hard at work crunching away on the upcoming Echoes of Faydwer expansion. Over 4000 views as I write this. Maybe not even all halflings.
A month or two later I created a video tribute to the EQ2 Echoes of Faydwer expansion, set to Van Halen's "Jump", which featured the fae jumping and flying around (and at the end, a halfling also trying to jump and plummeting off Kelethin to her death). It reached over 7100 views before YouTube said I had to remove it due to unlicensed use of the Van Halen song, so alas, it is no longer viewable.
In April of the following year, 2007, I was actually hired by SOE to work on EverQuest II as the tradeskill developer. I had very little time for making fan videos during those years, though I greatly enjoyed a lot of the ones that other fans created. (One of my favorites is still the "Pirates of the Saskatchewan" video created by user Monkeydarren. The Arrogant Worms, who sing the song, are actually a Canadian band from my own home town of Kingston, and in case you're not familiar with the geography of Canada, Saskatchewan is an entirely land-locked province. Ok, I might be a little biased by the awesomeness of the song, but it's catchy!)
In 2011 as I started playing a lot of Minecraft on a multiplayer server and having tons of fun creating (and destroying) things, I started playing around with some videos again. A friend and I built an amazing snow castle for Christmas 2011, complete with an aerial powered mine cart track that played "we wish you a merry Christmas" on musical note blocks as you circled the castle. We invited everyone on the server to join us one weekend before Christmas, build stacks of snow golems, and let them loose at night to battle skeletons and zombies in a huge snowball fight. It was epic and wonderful and I filmed parts of it, and although sadly the details of the snowball fight didn't film very well (since it had to be at night to get the monster spawns) I incorporated parts of that into an overall video that I set to the same music the mine cart plays, to show off the details of the castle. I finished this video very late at night on Christmas eve, hunched over my laptop desperately trying to get it finished in time to give it to my co-builder as a Christmas present (via an in-game treasure hunt leading to the URL written on an in-game sign). The ending of the video is footage from the snowball fight, and for days afterwards as the snow golems escaped across the landscape, you'd hear random "KABOOM!"s as they encountered annoyed creepers.
A month later, a server upgrade mysteriously changed the world biomes around, causing snow to fall in areas that previously weren't snow biomes, including the snow castle (which wasn't actually originally in a snow biome), my original tower, and several other people's home bases too. A second video set to Frank Sinatra's "Let It Snow" was inspired:
For several years while working on EQ2 I'd been wanting to make more EQ2 videos, but time and inspiration didn't hit until after I'd left the EQ2 team. In August 2012 the "SOEmote" feature was added to EQ2, which allows players to use their webcam to capture their facial expressions and mirror it with their character's face. Having worked on the team I knew this was coming many months in advance, and had been impatiently awaiting its arrival to create a masterpiece of pop culture, "EverQuest II Numa Numa". In case you're not familiar with the meme, the "Numa numa guy" posted a short video of himself lipsyncing to the strange Romanian song "Dragostea Din Tei" by O-Zone. It went viral and many parodies and some new versions were made, including a WoW video which misinterpreted the Romanian words into similar sounding English phrases. I chose to use the English translation of the song, and picked a male halfling to sing it, and the result has had almost 4000 hits since August:
The video I most wanted to make, however, I'd been contemplating for at least three years but had never found the time or enough motivation to coordinate it, since I knew it would take a lot of help from other people to create. Basically, I wanted to recreate in EQ2 the beautiful 2008 video "Where the Hell is Matt", created by Matt Harding as he traveled through the world and recorded himself dancing with people of all nationalities and backgrounds. Matt's video not only went viral but also made the news in Time magazine and many other press outlets. If you haven't seen the original, click through now and watch it; it's beautiful.
Anyway, I had been contemplating how to recreate this video in EverQuest II for years, but hadn't figured out the best way to do it. It was the revamp of the old Qeynos city zones that finally spurred me into action in September, long after I left the EQ2 team: with the city revamp, the old racial villages were being removed from game and would no longer be accessible except in quests. Hastily, a few days before their final removal, I logged into game and put out a call for players of the appropriate races to come dance with me in each zone to record them for posterity. A wonderful, helpful bunch of tradeskillers, decorators, test server players, and random others spent a couple of hours following me around the world and dancing on queue in all sorts of zones, which I compiled and then assembled into the following tribute to "Where the Hell is Matt". The main character in this one is Domino, the character I created to represent myself when I was a game developer, and she's wearing many of the tradeskilled items that I'd created over the years for various tradeskill quests.
The video includes scenes from many zones now retired from the game, as well as featuring a couple of cameo appearances from some of the well-known players of EQ2 including Jethal Silverwing, author and singer of many wonderful filk songs themed to EverQuest and EverQuest II. My main regret with this video is the haste I had to film the disappearing zones meant I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to round up other EQ2 devs and players that I'd have liked to include. But it still makes me smile to watch it. Favorite scene: the section of the Matt video where he mimics the indian dancers in saris is mirrored by me mimicking the goblin in the Isle of Refuge treehouse. The video is now up to 1300+ views, clearly not as catchy as dancing Numa Numa halflings, but still pretty respectable!
Alas, my video editing skillz are pretty basic and I've been using freeware programs so haven't had the ability to do anything sophisticated. Still, they amuse me and that's the important thing, and hopefully the view counts mean they amused a few other people too!
I can't create videos yet for the game I'm currently working on - it's not yet released and still very much under NDA - but who knows. Come April, maybe inspiration will strike again. We'll see!
Smash Up is a relatively new card game I got to play last weekend. Requires 2-4 players (preferably 3-4), takes about an hour, depending how long people spend thinking about moves.
There are 8 factions of cards to choose from (indicated by the little drawing on the bottom right corner): robots, ninjas, pirates, wizards, dinosaurs, aliens, tricksters, and zombies. To start the game, each player picks two factions, and shuffles them together to create his or her custom deck: for example, I played zombie robots. Each faction has certain strengths and a certain theme to the game play which mean they're best played in slightly different ways. Faction cards may be either Minions, or Actions.
In addition to the faction decks, there are bases. The goal of the game is to gain victory points, which you obtain primarily by capturing bases (there are a couple cards that can directly award a point here and there too, but they seem rare). Four bases are randomly chosen and laid out to start the game. Each base has a strength number that indicates how much power is required to capture it (top left) as well as three point values indicating how many victory points are awarded when it's captured. The first number is what the person who contributed the most points to the capture gets, the second and third numbers go to the second and third contributors. As shown in the examples below, the first place is USUALLY the most points, but not necessarily always. Each base also has text describing its specific special properties.
Play progresses as each player in turn can play minions or actions against a base. You get to play one minion and one action each turn, unless the cards or the base tell you to do otherwise (which they often do). Each minion has a certain amount of power points associated with it. Once the sum of the minions' power equals is enough to capture the base, the cards are totaled up to determine which player won the base (whoever has most power there) and who got which victory points, then the base is removed from play and a new one replaces it.
First player to reach 15 victory points wins the game. Simple! But the fact your deck is different every time depending which factions you pick makes each game very variable. We found some faction combinations felt better than others (Ninjas and Tricksters seemed a little too similar in function to combine well for example) but both games we played were extremely close in score which indicates it's surprisingly well balanced considering all the multiple variations possible. I really liked the fun factions, the simple rules, and the many variations that combining the two factions can create in each game.
More good news: there's already an expansion planned adding 4 new factions, and the original box has plenty of extra space leaving lots of room for those expansions!
I used to play board games as a kid, but switched to computer games and the occasional card game long ago. I hadn't really touched board games for years when I moved to San Diego 5 years ago, but as I moved into the computer game industry I also discovered many new friends and co-workers who still enjoyed playing board games, so I've been catching up on some great board games (and card games) in the past few years.
Someone on Facebook asked me to post some reviews of my favorites, but having realized how long it would take to write up a top 10 (or even decide on them), instead I will just post about a board or card game from time to time.
To start, here's one of my favorites: Revolution. It's published by Steve Jackson games, a well-respected name you'll see on many board and card games including the infamous Munchkin series.
I like it for a number of reasons:
It's very simple to explain and play. No hours of reading a 50 page rule book here.
There's no luck or memorization involved, it's all about guessing what your opponents are planning.
It's short: takes about an hour, even the first time you play.
So what's it about? The board shows you the layout of a small town, which contains a town hall, cathedral, market, barracks, harbor, and similar buildings. Each building has a certain amount of room for people who work in it. For example, you can see from the photo below that the cathedral (the cross-shaped building in the top right) has room for 7 people (who stand in those little white squares). The harbor has room for 6, one in each boat. Etc.
As the game's name suggests, there is a revolution afoot, and all players are vying for control of the town. Whoever gains the most influence in the town will take over and win. Players gain influence by outright buying it (as you accumulate influence directly, you move a token around the outside track on the board to keep count), and also indirectly, by gaining control of the buildings in the town. Each building is worth a lump sum of influence which goes to whoever controls it at the end of the game.
To gain influence directly and to gain control of the buildings, players can bribe, threaten, or blackmail the town's key residents. Each resident has influence over a different area of the town and can benefit players in different ways. Each turn, all players try to bribe, threaten, and blackmail the residents they choose, and then their success (or not) affects their presence in the town. For example, if you win over the priest to your side, you'll gain influence in the cathedral, meaning you can place one of your people in the cathedral that turn. Next turn, you could try to win the priest again and place a second person in the cathedral - or perhaps someone else will win him away from you. At the end of the game if there are more of your people in the cathedral than anybody else's, you'll gain the influence points that the cathedral is worth to add to your total.
The turns are simple: everyone has a combination of tokens indicating either bribes (gold coins), blackmail (black envelope), or force (red fist). Everyone has a card listing the 12 key residents in the town who can be influenced. In secret at the start of each turn, all players allocate their tokens onto the people they wish to attempt to influence. Some residents are immune to certain types of influence: for example, the General cannot have force used on him, the Magistrate cannot be blackmailed. This is indicated by the colour of that person's square on the board: you can't use a red force token on someone whose square is coloured red, and you can't use the blackmail token on someone whose square is coloured black. Everyone can be persuaded by coins.
Once all players have placed their tokens, as shown below, the privacy shields are removed and players evaluate who won influence over which town resident. There is a hierarchy: force beats blackmail which beats coin, and more of something beats less of it. So for example, one force token beats any number of blackmail or coin; but two blackmail beats one blackmail. One blackmail and three coin beats one blackmail alone. In the case of a tie, nobody wins.
Depending on the town resident, they will have different effects. Some directly give influence on the board's outside track. Some allow you to gain influence within a town building, as in the priest example. Others give you less direct reward but may give you extra tokens to be used the next round. Some allow you to change places of markers on the board. The strategy can be quite simple but can also become as complex as you want to make it, if you try to not only second-guess who your fellow players will be trying to influence but also who you need to influence this round to gain useful tokens to win next round also. Many's the game I've seen where nobody puts even a single coin on the most valuable town resident, all assuming that someone else will have done so.
And that's all there is to the game. Rounds continue until all spaces on in the town buildings are completely filled up, and when that happens, the influence from controlling buildings is added to the influence scores on the outside score track to determine the final winner overall.
The base game is from 2-4 players (best with 3-4) and there is an expansion which adds an additional building and more town residents, and takes the player total up to 6.
A Minecraft cake is something I've been wanting an excuse to try making for a while, since I'm a big fan of Minecraft, and of cake. So what could be better than a Minecraft cake? Duh, NOTHING! This was made for fun and given away as an attempted peace offering. It was fun to make and pretty simple!
I used my super quick and easy egg-free cake recipe (see below - instead of chocolate chips I used a bar of orange dark chocolate, chopped up into small chunks), and a whisky-heavy dark chocolate butter cream icing. Conveniently, I already had a whole tub of the home made buttercream icing made up in the fridge, since I've been making a lot of cupcakes and cakes for people having birthdays at work and at my former work. As I made this, I found myself saying "it's always useful to keep a tub of chocolate buttercream icing handy in the fridge!" ...Words that 10 years ago I would never have expected I'd find myself saying, but there you go.
So anyway, I needed two square cakes. All I had was some square pyrex dishes, but I lined them with some parchment paper for ease of extraction and then trimmed the edges off once they were cooked to make them fully square and flat sided.
Cake trimmings: just as yummy as the cake. Although I gave the cake away, I did get to eat the trimmed off edges. Part of a nutritious and delicious breakfast!
Once the cake was cooked and cooled it went into the freezer overnight (because it's easier to frost a frozen cake). Meanwhile I was melting white chocolate chips in a plastic freezer bag, in a bowl of warm (but not too hot) water. If you get chocolate too hot the texture changes and becomes all grainy, so you have to melt it very slowly and carefully. Most of the white chocolate chips were melted in one big bag, as shown below, but I separated out a few into a smaller ziploc bag and added red food colouring to that bag only.
Once the chocolate was melted, I poured it out onto a sheet of parchment paper, used a spatula to smooth it flat into an approximate square, and covered with cling film to keep it clean while it cooled.
The red coloured white chocolate had to be mixed up carefully before the colour was smooth and homogeneous. It was softer than the pure white due to the added colour, but that just made it a bit easier to work with. It too was spread out flat to cool.
Once the sheets of chocolate were mostly but not entirely cool, I used a sharp knife to cut them into squares. If the chocolate gets too cool it'll just shatter when you try to cut it, so it needs to be cut before it's totally cooled.
Next day I removed the cake from the freezer and put the first layer of cake into the container it would be delivered in, and covered it with buttercream icing. You don't have to freeze the cake, but it has to be cool (or the buttercream will melt) and it's much more crumbly if it's not frozen which makes icing it neatly a lot harder.
The container is just a simple clear box with lid picked up from an office supply store. The base of the container is a layer of cardboard which (a couple days before) I'd cut to fit the container, and painted to look like a sheet of Minecraft grass, and then wrapped in cling film. It took a little extra time to make this base, but it ended up looking great!
Once the first layer of the cake was iced top and sides, I put the second layer of cake on top, and also covered it in butter cream. Once that was in place, it was time to start decorating. The sheets of white chocolate had been cut up into squares previously and stored in the freezer to keep them hard. I placed the white chocolate squares so they covered the top, with small spaces in between to keep the pixellated look. Around the upper edges I placed full and half squares, alternating, to look like the Minecraft cake edge you see above. Technically I should have done 7x7 squares instead of 5x5 to be completely accurate, but I failed to plan this well enough when cutting the squares. This was easier anyway and still looks good!
Finally, on top of the white chocolate, a few red chocolate squares of varying sizes, to match the pattern of the Minecraft cake as much as possible.
I'm definitely not a very skilled cake decorator so I was happy this worked, and was also pretty easy. I think it turned out really well, although I will improve a few things for next time.
Ta da! Minecraft cake! Looks awesome and tastes absolutely delicious.
Egg-free chocolate cake
3 oz salted butter 2 oz cocoa powder 8 oz (1cup) sugar 7 oz all-purpose flour ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 1/3 cup organic apple sauce (note: this substitutes for 1 egg) 2/3 cup water ½ tsp vanilla ½ cup mini dark chocolate chips or your favorite chocolate of choice
Melt butter gently and allow to cool for a minute or two. Add everything else except chocolate chips and mix well using a fork or whisk until smooth. Add chocolate chips (can either mix in, or leave sprinkled on top). Pour into a cake pan and bake in a preheated oven at 350F for about 30 minutes, until a toothpick stuck into the middle comes out clean. Wait until cool (refrigerate or freeze so it won't crumble when being iced), then cover with the icing below. (You can also use this recipe to make cupcakes, these will bake faster in about 20 minutes so check sooner.)
Buttercream icing
4 oz (½ cup) salted butter, at room temperature 2 cups powdered confectioner's sugar 1-2 shots of whisky or other strong alcohol (e.g grand marnier, brandy, rum, Bailey's) or cream ½ cup cocoa powder (or more, for a stronger chocolate taste)
Mix well, adding more liquid if needed to soften up. Spread on cooled cupcakes then refrigerate.
Note: the icing ingredient measurements are pretty flexible - add more or less of anything according to whatever tastes good!
All the Avengers and other super hero costumes last year inspired me to try a Wonder Woman costume for Halloween 2012. I loved the old Lynda Carter TV show way back when it was new, so I started looking at the details of her costume:
After making my Felicia Day "Codex" costume 3 years ago, and sewing the corset from scratch, I swore I was never going to do that again, so the first task was to find a corset of the right color that I could use as a base.
To the rescue: sexy "Santa Baby" costume, which I think was from Amazon, or possibly ebay:
The straps were already removable, and the hat, belt, and g-string no use, but the corset itself was just the right colour and a good starting base.
However, this corset had metal hook-and-eye fastenings up the front, and laces up the back, which were both problems. I unpicked the stitches and removed both. The front had to be solid fabric, because the gold eagle would be sewn on top of it; and the laces at the back looked wrong for Wonder Woman. I sewed both up, and instead unpicked the side seams and sewed in zippers.
Since removing the laces and the hooks made the corset width smaller, it was now too small, and I needed to add some extra fabric at the sides also so I could fit into it! Fortunately, a matching red satin was pretty easy to find at the local fabric shop.
Once the corset fit comfortably, it was time to sew on the golden decorations. The fabric shop also had gold spandex and thread, so I sewed a lot of gold tubes, and the cat was VERY helpful as I tried to lay out the eagle wings.
The spandex was a real pain to sew; I think I wasn't using the right type of needle, but I'm definitely going to avoid spandex again as much as possible! However, eventually the feathers and then the eagle and rest of the gold detail were in place, and the top was done.
I didn't try to make the outfit a one-piece; I ordered some stretchy blue athletic shorts from Amazon and simply sewed some white stars onto them. Comfortable and not too high cut.
The shorts were still fairly short however and female super hero costumes tend to be rather more revealing than male ones, and since I'd likely be wearing it around work colleagues, I decided an added skirt would be appropriate. I came across this great blue gauzy material with silver stars in the "seasonal" fabric section: apparently it's Christmas-y? It was perfect for a skirt. And, apparently, a cat tent.
Rather than make a full skirt, I just sewed the fabric to some more of the gold spandex as a waist band and added a fastening at the front so it would be open at front, but long at the back. I also sewed lots of gathers into the skirt so that rather than hanging down straight, it hangs in gathers.
Wrist band and headband were easily sewn out of the same gold spandex.
I'd found the boots fairly cheaply on Zappos.com back around February, and I used white bandage tape to add the highlights. Add some flesh coloured stockings, and of course the invisible plane.
And so it was assembled!
This took a LOT of work, probably more than last year's dalek outfit, but everyone seemed to like it. And it was actually pretty comfortable too - the headband (which was slightly too tight) and the contact lenses were the most uncomfortable parts.
Just got back from an afternoon with friends at the Del Mar Racetrack, watching the horse races.
This is only the second time I've been to horse races, and I was really just there for the fun and the company, not expecting win anything since I certainly don't have the knowledge needed to put the odds anything close to in my favour. And nor did anybody else there; the others with me that I asked said their strategies for picking horses were:
pick a particular colour in each race (in this case, pink)
pick the names you like best
bet on the horse with the longest odds (backing the underdog ... or underhorse I suppose)
Reverting to my scientific training not to mention game design habits of thought, I decided to take the opportunity to do a little experiment. My plan: in each of the races I would put a bet on two horses to win.
logical method: the horse ridden by the best of the top 3 jockeys listed for most wins this season; or if none of the top jockeys were in the race, the expert's recommendation in the official race booklet listing the race details;
irrational method: the horse with the most romantic sounding name.
Then I would compare the overall results and see if there was a significant difference.
Here are the results (I missed the first 2 races as I arrived late):
Race 3:
Logical pick: Awesome Annie. First place winner.
Irrational pick: Wink and Wish. Didn't place.
Race 4:
Logical pick: God of War. First place winner.
Irrational pick: Nearly Was Mine. Didn't place.
Race 5:
Logical pick: Gab Power. Placed third.
Irrational pick: Until You. Didn't place.
Race 6:
Logical pick: Starlight Magic. First place winner.
Irrational pick: River Kiss. Didn't place.
Race 7:
Logical pick: Flashy Dame. Didn't place.
Irrational pick: Romantic Wish. Placed 2nd.
Race 8:
Logical pick: Take Control.
Didn't place.
Irrational pick: Prayer for Relief (ok, not a very romantic name, but choices in this race were very limited...) Didn't place.
Race 9:
Logical pick: Smoken Legacy. Placed 2nd.
Irrational pick: Frisky Moment. Didn't place.
Final conclusion: out of 7 races, the logical choice based on my criteria above won 3 and placed 5 times (placed means 1st or 2nd). The irrational pick based solely on the name didn't win at all and placed only once.
While this certainly isn't a big enough sample size to be statistically significant, it's still a pretty suggestive difference. I used the jockey win record as a basis for picking the winner because it seemed logical and just happened to be available in the race booklet. I imagine it would be possible to take a little longer to study more information and find some other important factors besides the jockey's track record which would give better odds. (I'm told my grandfather used to supplement a meagre student income by betting fairly successfully on horses, but felt it was appropriate to give this up when he became a clergyman.)
That said, the successful jockeys are riding good horses and are expected to perform well, so the odds on the bets don't return a whole lot. For races 3 and 4 I just doubled my bet, and for bet 6 I quadrupled it, but these do not make the kind of big wins you retire on. Overall I still did not break even (I was betting on each horse to win). If I'd bet on the horses to place (first or second) instead of win, I would have won 5 times instead of 3, but won only half as much money since that changes the odds, so I still don't think I would have come out ahead.
All of which just goes to show that:
randomly picking names is not a good way to bet on horses;
jockey experience does seem to make a big difference to a horse's success;
I am probably not going to retire based on horse betting winnings; and
being romantic doesn't pay off.
Also, that you can look for game design in almost anything if you try, even horse races. This is the kind of thing that scientists, and game designers, think about when they look at any kind of game ...
