Volumetric Underwear Analysis

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Craig

I had a look at various travel & backpacking sites, forums, & YouTube channels, to get an idea of what approaches to laundry while travelling are out there.

My previous approach of “I’ll take enough stuff that I don’t need to do laundry” won’t work with what I have planned, so it comes down to how many ‘days’ of clothing to take.
Some folks advocate for a very low number, to minimise the amount of stuff being lugged around.
I know someone who does conventions with three changes of clothes, so that one can be worn, one is ironed & ready to wear, and the other is drying in the bathroom of the hotel, having been washed in the sink.

I’d had the idea that I could try a couple of weeks worth of clothes, and if it turned out that this was too many, I’d figure it out in New Zealand, so I could just post the excess home. Wasn’t sure what 14 days of stuff would look like, so I got out the pack and did a test with 7 shirts/socks/underwears.
Figured I’d then add another 7.

Well, that answered the 7 or 14 question, didn’t it?
Things could be stuffed down more, but not a whole lot more, and doubling the amount would just about fill the central volume of the pack. There’s an extra bit at the bottom, and a top compartment, but … It doesn’t seem like the best move to fill almost the entire volume with clothing.

All in all, a good result, I think, and it fits in with this very valuable piece of advice;

It’s kind of a plan. It’s the bit that requires pre-booking and passports

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Craig

Auckland to London via Dubai, then London to Chicago, then Chicago to London via Iceland

Time for an update.
I’ve been working on travel plans, which is, I suspect, another way of saying that I’ve been procrastinating and not actually booking anything, as is the custom among my people.

Booked some flights and a hotel yesterday, so I think it’s past time that I announced what the hell the plan, if it can be said to be one, actually is. I’ve put a map up there, from the nice folks at www.greatcirclemapper.net, mostly because I wanted one.

Tried to do it in PowerPoint, which annoyed me, GIMP, which annoyed me in different ways, and MS Paint, which … had a certain “We’ll Put This On The Refrigerator, Little Billy” charm to it.

Here’s the plan;

March 31st – Move into the spare room at House Needs-A-Name
I aim to be packed up, my stuff reduced to what can feasibly fit into a backpack (and maybe a daypack too, we’ll see how that goes) by the end of this month.
That means that the storage unit will be downsized (doing that on Thursday); the furniture sold, donated, or abandoned in the woods to fend for itself; and personal stuff either stored, trashed, or given away.
Administrative things would be nice to sort out in that timeframe too, but I have a little bit more wiggle room there, thanks to, …
April & May – Sort out remaining stuff, then go see the South Island
The only bit of the South Island I’ve seen is Christchurch, and, well, they’ve redecorated since then.
The plan is to have no plan, and to travel based on “Where Do I Want To Go Next”, with a side order of “Can I Find A Backpacker Hostel With Space For Me”.
I’m looking at this as part tourism & part dry-run of backpack & hostel travel; If it turns out that I’m carrying to much, or the wrong stuff, or I just really really hate it, better to know while I’m still in New Zealand and can alter the plan.
Assuming I don’t throw in the microfibre tramping towel, these travels would lead to, …
June 2nd – Au Contraire 2016, the NZ National Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention, in Wellington
The convention runs from the 3rd to the 5th, but I’m getting there the day before.
Well, I have a hotel booking for the day before, so I certainly intend to get there the day before, and stay a day or so afterwards, so as to catch up with Wellington folks before …
June 7th – Fly back to Auckland
I’m beginning to worry that these lead-on things are getting old, or at least annoying.
Back in Auckland, for a last chance to sort out & fine tune anything which needs it, see the parents, see the Auckland folks, probably do some laundry, pick up some foreign money, and then head for the airport, because …
June 13th – Fly to Dubai, arriving on the 14th
Emirates turned out to be a pretty cheap option, and they have that ridiculous 17+ hour direct flight from Auckland to Dubai. I’ll miss out on the delightful experience of people arguing with Australian Customs Officers over duty free booze & bottle sizes (the limits are different over there), and I made sure to book an aisle seat.
Did look at bulkhead & exit row, but the few unbooked seats were tagged as “if there’s a family with infants, we’ll probably move you”, so I went with middle-of-the-section side-block aisle.
Because there’s no damn way I will be wanting to get back on, or even look at, a plane after 17+ hours in one, …
June 14th & 15th – Dubai
Found a hotel near a metro station & not too far from things I might find interesting, and my plane gets in before 6am, so that gives me basically two days & two nights in Dubai.
Hilariously, it’ll be during Ramadan, to really maximise that culture shock.
Worst case, it’ll be devoid of life, explosively hot & humid, everything will be closed, and I’ll spend my time in the hotel enjoying air-con, retreating to my room to eat & drink during daylight hours, and annoying everyone with increasingly inane Facebook posts. And that doesn’t sound so bad.
Best case, Ramadan will be an extra layer on top of a place which is already trying to mix tradition with … modernity? conspicuous capitalism? … , and it’ll be filled to bursting with interesting things to ask dumb questions about.
Plus I’ll try to catch up with a friend/coworker who’s based there, which will be fun.
June 16th – Fly to London
Went with the window seat option here; It’s only an 8-hour flight, in daylight, and it’s mostly over land, so there’ll be something to look at.
The Rest of June, plus July – Probably the UK, or more accurately, Great Britain
We’re back to planning to have no plan for this bit.
I’m going to book accommodation for the first few days, and hilariously enough, the hotel I stayed at for the London WorldCon compares favourably with a private room in a hostel, and with many of the AirBnB options. Probably because it’s in the Docklands, which isn’t a dealbreaker for me; The Underground holds few fears for me, and I found my Oyster Card from 2014 yesterday, so it’s a 2-3 train trip, which isn’t that big a deal.
Beyond that, ramblings as I feel like it, hopefully visiting a friend who lives in Essex, hopefully visiting another friend who might be rampaging around Edinburgh, and generally wallowing in tourism & trying not to end up working in a pub which caters exclusively to New Zealanders & Australians on their OE.
In retrospect, joining the Kiwis In London Facebook community could be seen as being counterproductive on that particular point.
July 30th, or possibly 31st – Fly to Chicago, then get to Indianapolis
Which date I leave on, and indeed arrive on, depends on the airline & the route. IcelandAir do some cheap flights, but some of them involve at 17 hour layover at Keflavík, which sounds like no sort of fun I’ve ever heard of.
Aer Lingus, via Dublin, seem reasonable, though I’m still struggling to tell the difference between airlines which are low cost & honest about it, and those which are low cost and will screw you every chance they get.
Regardless of the route, the plan is to be in Chicago on the 31st, so that I can get to Indianapolis for the 2nd of August, for Gen Con. There may be a road trip with some friends from Chicago, or it might turn out that another flight is a better idea, depending on how their plans/jobs go.
I did look at the train options, but the arrival times are … suboptimal. Midnight is an annoying time to arrive, ’cause it’d feel like a waste to have a hotel room, and I don’t know that a hotel would be entirely keen on someone turning up at midnight, asking to store a bag, and then chillaxing/sleeping in the lobby for 12-14 hours.
August 2nd-9th – Gen Con and related events
Gen Con nominally runs from the 4th to the 7th, but Day Zero is the 3rd, and that’s still a pretty big part of the thing, as is the day after, on the 8th, when people pack up to go, and the whole thing is dismantled.
August, September, and some of October – Wombling About In The USA
Same routine as with NZ & the UK; Go see some things, stay in places as long as they interest me, then move on when they don’t. Ideally, visit some folks along the way, go to local conventions if the timing works out & the event interests me, that sort of thing.
The Visa Waiver Program allows for up to 90 days, which would take me out to the end of October, but I figure setting a limit of 80 days gives me some wiggle room for things not going according to plan, and it might make the Customs & Border Protection folks happy to see that I’m not running out the clock to the last possible minute. I also plan to have my exit flight booked before I arrive, so that I can prove that I plan to leave, and to make it an easily-changed flight, in case I run out of money, energy, or interest in seeing another bloody scenic wonder.
Speaking of exit flights, leaving from Chicago makes a kind of sense to me, as I know some folks in the general area. And in adjacent states. And states adjacent to those states. Which, with luck, lets me catch up with them before flying out to …
Iceland!
IcelandAir will not charge you any extra for a stopover of up to 7 days if your flight with them goes through Keflavík, so I thought I’d take advantage of that. Should probably pick up a “How Not To Sound Like An Idiot In Icelandic” guide to kill time during the US portion of the trip; I know that most folks there speak English, but it’d be nice to be able to pronounce things, and read the signs.
As for what to do there? It’s Iceland, I’m sure I can find something entertaining & expensive. That thing where they give you a dry-suit and a snorkel, then point you at a Continental Rift, has a certain appeal. (There’s also a SCUBA option, but I am barred from that on medical grounds, so snorkel is the way to go)
Back to London
Well, it doesn’t have to be London, but it’s an air-travel hub for a reason.
By this point it’ll be towards the end of October, and I’ll have been traveling for … counts on fingers … somewhere between six and seven months. That’s a long damn time, and it seems an excellent point to pause, take stock, and figure out what the next step is.
It’s certainly a fine time to stop outlining the Grand Plan; I have no idea what state I’ll be in by then, what my finances will look like, and whether I’ll want to continue wandering, find some short-term contract work, find a longer-term job, …, could be anything.

And that’s the plan, such as it is.

There are a lot of unknowns here.
I’ve never traveled without a detailed plan before; I don’t know if I can do that, let alone whether I like it.
I’ve not spent a lot of time in Backpacker Hostels, so that’s a new thing.
The spine is an issue, but that’s what Travel Insurance with Medical Cover is for; That bit worries me the least.

There are questions too.
What to see & do in the UK, and in the USA?
Iceland?

And perhaps the most important question, what to call any Blog, Podcast, or YouTube channel, if I find myself wanting to do reports from the road?
I’d been thinking of The Wandering Monster, which was suggested by one of the FlatLords, but it turns out that there’s already a games publishing company who use that name, so it’s too close for comfort. It’s a pity, I’d thought about getting a dinosaur onesie and making that part of the theme.
Wilderness Encounters, while a solid gaming reference, sounds like a dogging group who meet in a forest, and I think they’d be disappointed by the actual content. Wilderness Adventures has the same problem, and, to be honest, I’m not that adventurous.

If anyone has an idea, I’d love to hear it.

This is what it looks like when I say “Fuck It” and do the map by hand in MS Paint

NaGaDeMon – Halfway-ish

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Craig

Did a test-play of the system for my NaGaDeMon game yesterday, and it went surprisingly well.

It was also a test-play of a one-shot scenario, and that went well too – the players had some notes about having a variety of antagonists in the final scene, and pointed out that “Days Since A Lost Time Incident”, while it’s a common enough term in many places I’ve worked, sounds like an awesome Dr. Who/X Files plot seed to everyone else.

It’s a normal office workplace.
The door is jerked open, and one of the team races in, swipes their card on the ID system to unlock the cover on the emergency button, then hits it, causing the “Days Since A Lost Time Incident” counter to flip to zero.
Everyone groans, picks up their coffee, and heads towards the situation room.

So that might become part of a game at some point.

The main thing I was testing, system-wise, was whether an aspects-only variant of Fate would work as I wanted it to, and let players define a character using descriptions & nothing else. It seems to have worked, and got me around the conceptual problem I was having with Fate Accelerated for this game, in that the approaches just didn’t have the right feel.

I hate to go with “It’s the vibe” as a reason, but that’s what it was.

I figured out sometime during the process that my NaGaDeMon game, which is currently called CVR, and a scenario/game I’m working on for The Gutter Skypes, which I’m referring to as Depot 17, were both addressing the same sort of problem – How to easily have a system cover a wide range of character types, in both cases, machines.

In CVR, the player characters are robots; Specifically, Costumed Vigilante Robots.
They could range from Garbage Trucks to Delivery Drones, from ER Medical Triage Bots to Police Records Department Bots, so the range of sizes & capacities is enormous.
In Depot 17, they’re construction robots, and one of the PCs is described as being the flatbed version of the APC from ‘Aliens’, so the range there is also enormous.

Describing them using QAGS was … Disastrous. Made no sense to me to be assigning the ‘Body’ of a Load Hauler & the ‘Body’ of a Technical Bot on the same scale.
FAE was tricky, as I ran into the issue of approaches which simply don’t seem to apply. How sneaky is a load hauler? How forceful is a 3D Printer?

The system I ended up with has aspects which look like this;

Design – Features of the Bot; How it’s built, what it looks like
Downside – Bots aren’t perfect. The same features they were built with can also be really irritating
Job – What does it do?
Knack – Something unexpected they can do
Quirk – Outside of it’s job, what is the Bot like? What, aside from their servomotor system, moves them?

And, by way of example, here are the characters which ended up being played in the playtest;

Technical Bot

Design – A Spider Wearing Plate-Mail & A Ridiculous Number Of Tool Bandoliers
Downside – Do A Bodge Job!? Betray My Robot Heritage!? (perfectionist)
Role – Technical Expert
Knack – A Born, Or Rather Built, Swashbuckler
Quirk – ~~Movie Buff.~~ OK, Media Junkie

Constructer

Design – A Bulldozer With A Range Of Digging Attachments, A Nailgun Chambered For Reinforcing Bar, And A Squirtgun Of Concrete
Downside – As Subtle As A Bulldozer
Role – All-In-One Foundation Builder
Knack – Expert Shot
Quirk – Has Always Wanted To Discover A Fossil

NaGaDeMon, Week One

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Craig

This week, I planned to knock out a piece of linking fiction for the game (which I now have a name for, so Go Me!) in the first few days, then spend a bunch of time on system.

Clearly, this was never going to happen, though I have spent time staring at my computer.

Hmmmm, what's a good backcronym for 'name'?

I do have notes for how that linking fiction works, and what points to hit along the way; Some written at the aforementioned computer, some on my phone, and some scribbled in a wee notebook while seated on a couch at a shopping mall, waiting to see a movie, which were then photographed & uploaded.
(Did I mention how much I’m liking being able to access OneNote & Word documents, and my cloud storage space, from my phone? ‘Cause it’s pretty damn useful)

While this was happening, I’ve also been working on a one-shot RPG for an actual play podcast. As in, another podcast who do actual plays, The Gutter Skypes. I’ve run a one-shot for them once before, and they seemed to enjoy it, and asked if I could do another sometime, if I was free.

The two projects have kind of converged, as I realised that the system problems I was mulling over for my NaGaDeMon idea were being solved in the one-shot.
Bit of a time saver, that.

A conversation with Kev let me kick around a few of those ideas, and clarify something I’d not been able to decide on (how to handle damage), and has left me with a much better handle on the system.

So, yeah, surprisingly productive week.

NaGaDeMon, Day One

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Craig

I found out about National Game Design Month a few weeks ago, when it was mentioned by Taz, a guest on the Big Red Couch.
The idea is to create, talk about, and play (at least once) a game during November.

Initially I’d understood it to be RPGs only, and had an idea of what I wanted to do, but then discovered that it’s games in general, which … complicated things.
Spent some time trying to decide between a table-top RPG about costumed vigilante robots, and a tactical boardgame about Zombies clearing out & securing a shopping mall.

The RPG won, primarily because the boardgame would need map tiles, playing pieces, and I suspect some iterative testing just to get the physical parts of the game to work together, long before anything like a playtest could happen.
With an RPG, all I need is an internet connection and some dupes with a few hours to kill.

As preparation, I downloaded Scrivener & worked through the tutorial, so I have at least a rudimentary understanding of how it works. I figure that after 20+ days of using the free trial in writing a game, I should have an idea as to whether I’d want to buy it.

Today’s ‘Game Design’ time was spent setting up a Scrivener project for the as-yet-unnamed game, downloading some resources, and getting to grips with the particulars of the Creative Commons licence on Fate Accelerated, so that I’ve got some idea as to what I can and can’t do.
The answer to that seems to be “Anything I Want, So Long As I Attribute It” and “Imply Or Say That Evil Hat Endorse What I Did”.

My Spine Is The Bassline?

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Craig

Seriously, how often do you get the chance to use a Shriekback song title as a medical reference?

By Way Of A Preamble
By the time I got back to House Needs-A-Name from the airport, I couldn’t stand or walk properly; Back pain had turned into not being able to put weight on my right leg.

A day or so later, things were improving, but not as swiftly as I’d like, so I went to a physiotherapist, and we worked on it.
All good.

It’s What Happens Next
Then my calf muscle started cramping up, I assumed because of the limping.

I mentioned this to the physio, who explained the difference between a cramp & actual pain, and seemed … concerned … by this development.
Then I mentioned that the sole of my foot had gone numb.
I never want to see that expression on the face of a medical professional again.

Diagnosis, after determining that I couldn’t do a calf raise on my right leg, was a disc bulge, and I was sent off for some x-rays right bloody now.

Sometime around then I also found walking difficult, or at least walking without a limp, which is what the physio told me to do.
This may have paid off when I had to visit WINZ a day or so later, to assure them that I was still job-seeking; At that stage my non-limping movement was down to steps about the length of my own foot, and very deliberate turns, and my case worker looked horrified. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was apparently placed on the “Leave this guy alone” list, based on not really being fit for work that wasn’t an acting role as ‘Zombie #17 – Slow-moving Longhair’.

Skipping To The Last Chapter
A couple of months of physiotherapy, an X-ray, a visit to a spinal surgeon, an MRI, and a whole lot of wondering what was going on in my back later, here’s where its at;

There seems to be improvement – I can walk a whole lot better & further, and can do a wobbly calf raise on my right leg.
There has been a slow improvement on the calf-raise front. When the problem first became apparent, it was like the muscles weren’t there; No response whatsoever. Couldn’t even support myself on it.
By the time I saw the spinal surgeon, I could get maybe a centimeter of lift in the heel.
Now I can transition into standing on the ball of that foot, but can’t hold it for long.
I have another meeting with the spinal surgeon in a few weeks time, to go over the MRI results – I’m expecting, or at least hoping, that they’ll say that it seems to be coming right.
At the first appointment with said surgeon, they said that they’d not be considering any form of intervention at this stage anyway, because these things can heal themselves over a period of months, and it wasn’t causing me significant pain/distress/impact. I’m OK with that.

Something Of A Wrap-Up

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Craig

I’ve been back for 9 or so days, the laundry is done (and, indeed, has built up to the point where it must be done again), the suitcase is mostly unpacked (should get onto that this weekend), and importantly to me at least, my back seems to be on the mend.

One Last Thing From Las Vegas

While failing to see the Bellagio fountains due to a trifling error in basic reading comprehension, I noted that a place named the “Cabo Wabo Cantina” was playing a familiar song; Outlook For Thursday, by DD Smash
This was on a Friday, just to add to the oddness of a place in Vegas playing a New Zealand song from 1983.

The Back

Hauling my suitcase off the conveyor probably didn’t do me any favours, as by the time I got back to House Needs A Name in Meadowbank, I couldn’t put weight on my right leg for a while after I got out of the car.
Various amounts of stretching & rest brought it back from there, but do more than that, so I saw a physiotherapist today, whose verdict was “not the disc, though there may have been some inflammation from the way the pain was migrating down one leg”, and who has given me some stretching sort of exercises to do.

It does feel better, so that’s a good sign, and there are some appointments next week to try to unlock my spine a bit, on the grounds that basically everything has tensed up.

Gen Con 2016 Plans

Oh, c’mon, we all knew I’d be starting planning.

I’m starting to think that the way to plan the next year or so is to figure out the events I definitely want to attend, and try to build a plan around that.
Gen Con (August 4 – 7, 2016) is one.
Right now it’s the only definite one, though if I were to do some travelling in the USA, Who’s Yer Con (April 1-3, 2016) has a certain appeal, as it’s in Indianapolis.

Having actually travelled around in LA, I now feel a whole lot more comfortable with the idea of venturing outside of the airport during long stretches between flights into & out of LAX, so that’s a good thing.

Saturday – United Airlines Shenanigans, Shuttlebus Frolics, And Inside Out

Posted on August 10, 2015 by Craig

Checking out happened without incident, or much in the way of waiting, which was nice; Those queues get … impressive at peak times.
Then again, it’s a 4000+ room hotel complex, so perhaps that is to be expected.

I looked it up, and the hotel dates back to the early 90’s. I’d assumed that it was at least a decade od so older than that.

As is usual, I got to the airport ridiculously early, and could have been earlier if I’d raced to catch the shuttle which was there as I arrived at the lobby. I didn’t feel like that, so just sat around & chatted to folks who were also waiting until the next one came.

Airline check-in systems seem to have improved over the very few years I’ve been travelling.
For Holiday 2012, I could guarantee that the auto-kiosk would shit itself when I gave it my NZ passport, and I’d have to go to an actual check-in person. This time, they seem to cope fine, so I’m guessing that the e-passport rollout is going well.
I did get asked if I was OK, but that was because I was taking the time to read what was on the screen, and was possibly talking to myself as I did so. I got here, as did my luggage, so I guess I did it right.

The plane.
It all went a bit tits-up when the plane happened.
They’d oversold by 5 seats or so, and started calling for volunteers to be compensated with $300 and take a later flight.
I was sort of interested until they clarified that it was a $300 travel voucher, for United, at which point it became pretty damn useless to me. (United are a part of Star Alliance, which Air NZ is also a part of, but I don’t know whether the voucher would transfer to other airlines in the network, and I’m damn sure I wouldn’t be willing to trust them if they said it did. Plus, I had places to be)

They got a couple of takers at $300, then a couple more when they bumped it to $400.
Then, on the plane, they discovered that the off-duty pilot wasn’t rated for that aircraft, so couldn’t ride in the cockpit, so they had to find lucky volunteer number five, at $500, with the explicit threat that if they picked you to be bumped to a later flight, you’d get nothing. Someone went for it, and we eventually were able to leave, late, to wait 20 minutes or so for the next available take-off opportunity.

On the plus side, I got a window seat, which was nice; Las Vegas to Los Angeles is only an hour, so the plane never gets that high, and there was no cloud, so I got to see a whole lot of desolate landscape that I’d like to go and scuffle around in someday.
Maybe in winter?

At Los Angeles, the first couple of shuttlebus wranglers were not interested in the base concept of Santa Monica as a place that people wanted to go to, and a taxi driver pointed me at a bus stop.
The next shuttlebus bod, from SuperShuttle, looked at the address & said “Yeah, we can do that, take a seat over there”, and proceeded to get me onto a shuttle after maybe 20-30 minutes. Granted, I had to type Andrei’s address into the driver’s GPS app myself, because he was busy driving, but I got here, pretty much door to door, for $29 including tip, which doesn’t seem so bad.

Cluttered up Andrei’s lounge with my suitcase, and we went to see a movie, as Inside Out was playing, in a newly-revamped cinema with fancy electric-operated recliners.

Little Chunks Of Memory #1

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Craig

There are things which didn’t make it into the various daily posts, mostly because I forgot, so I’m putting them here.

On Gen Con Sunday, in the lobby of the Westin, we were set up in a spot under the escalators. Other folks were scattered all over the place, often playing with, or at least examining, their new games.
Someone going up the escalator leaned over, saw people checking out the Firefly game “Shiny Dice”, and called down to ask what they thought of it. The player’s reactions were to look around in an increasingly startled manner, until they looked up, because from their point of view the disembodied voice of God had just talked to them and solicited their opinion on a TV tie-in dice game.
Also that night, at the end of the meal, I may have agreed to do the Ork Stomp 5k with Moni, and possibly Frank, in 2016.
Steven wisely chose to be unwell, which seem suspiciously convenient in retrospect.
The plan as I remember it did not involve running the thing, just walking it, and may have happened over Baked Alaska, for added irony.
On Post-Gen Con Monday (OK, how the hell do you hyphenate that? It looks wrong) I found a flyer for a system I’d heard of, but knew nothing about, so I photographed it.
SixCess flyer

SixCess flyer, other side
There was also this one, which I’m mostly posting for the artwork.
Nefarious flyer
While wandering around Las Vegas in the easily-connected hotels, I found a punne, or play on words.
In the Shoppes at Mandalay Bay
There was also this poster for the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay.

Wednesday – Generalised Ambling, How Far Can You Get, And Roller Coasters

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Craig

I didn’t sleep in exactly, but also didn’t feel much like racing out to do stuff, so I had a leisurely morning.
Not sure whether there’s a Con Crud or G. Coli issue here; No big symptoms yet, but I’m keeping an eye on things.

View From My Window

Actual Landforms, As Seen From A Strangely-Angled Hotel Window

Landscape and an Airport, as seen from my hotel window

For today, I mostly wandered & rubbernecked, seeing how far I could get without leaving the hotel system.
One way connects through to the Mandalay Bay, the other to the Excaliber, and there’s a wee tram which also connects them, via the Luxor. Across the road from Excaliber is New York New York, and across from that is the MGM Grand, and the fourth corner of the intersection holds the Tropicana.

Lobby of the Excalibur Hotel

Red Square, at the Mandalay Bay

Not sure why, but the headless Lenin statue amuses me

The “foodcourt” area at New York New York. It’s less blurry in reality.

So, what have I noticed so far?
The decorated & themed bits of the hotels are all quite different; Luxor has the faux-Egyptian antiquity thing, Excalibur has castles and the like, New York New York has the obvious décor, and the MGM & Mandalay are going for general-purpose “Ooooh, swanky”, though the Mandalay felt a bit more like an airport.
The casino floors are all the same.
Dim lighting, laid out without much in the way of a system for navigation, the same machines in all of them.
The Tropicana was a little different, in that it had better lighting, and thus better navigation paths.

Amusingly, I am even less likely to want to play a game in the casino now that I’ve visited some.
The fact that the gaming floor is a smoking zone does not exactly help to make it my sort of thing either.

Because it’s Vegas, and because it was there, I rode the roller coaster at New York New York, and it was a lot of fun.
It’s an older style, with cars made up to look like New York Yellow Taxis, and what it lacks in high tech, it makes up for in throwing you through a lot of stuff in a small footprint; Kind of glad of the headrest stopping side-to-side neck strain, to be honest.

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