10 Babylonia (37 all-time)
10 Coiffeur-Jass NEW!
8 Cowbell NEW!
8 Great Plains (9 all-time)
8 Pentalath x2 (20 all-time)
8 Push It (26 all-time)
8 Tsuro (8 all-time)
7 Fliptricks x6 (41 all-time)
7 Jekyll vs. Hyde x4 NEW!
7 Kluster x2 (11 all-time)
7 Oh Hell! (6 all-time)
7 Strike x5 NEW!
6 Dragonheart (2 all-time)
6 Fearsome Floors x2 (12 all-time)
6 Genesis NEW!
6 Medici vs Strozzi (2 all-time)
6 Ponte del Diavolo NEW!
6 Startups x2 NEW!
6 The Crew: Mission Deep Sea x8 NEW!
5 Gay Gordons x5 NEW!
I'm looking at those ratings and thinking that ratings are stupid.
At 37 plays, I've kinda stalled out on The Babylonia Century challenge. Back when, I thought that I liked it enough to crowd out all other new-to-me plays.
I do still think it's great. I just don't want to play it all the time. It's probably not a 10. Do I bump it down? Is this a moment when I go in and revise all my ratings? But ratings are stupid and don't matter. Why don't I leave them alone?
What is a 10? Coiffeur-Jass? Played once and an instant ten. But is that because I know I'll rarely get it played due to its length? It's another game I can say I love and then never play?
Cowbell made a great initial impression. Will I ever play it again? Or will it become another Mittlere that I say I love and never play? I see a pattern.
Great Plains can't be an 8 because I don't want to suggest it anymore.
Same with Pentalath.
I did just bump up Tsuro's rating to an 8 because I do want to suggest it now. I want to leave it out and play with my kids more often. How long will that last?
The rest of those 7s are honest, I guess, games I usually want to play, but not always.
4 face-to-face plays of JvH and probably about the same amount of live BGA plays with strangers. It's clever. I like it. So what? At 2p, there are so many options.
How about The Crew Mission Deep Sea? How dare I rate it a 6? Meh. I had some fun. I think I like Crew 1 better. I found the point numbers on the card weird. The original ramped up to everyone having a task, sometimes multiple tasks. In Crew 2, you can draw high numbered tasks on high missions and still only have two out of four people with tasks. It just isnt as satisfying with not everyone having personal tasks. I don't really need either, but I do gladly admit that its cooperative element is well done.
Finally, Parlett's Gay Gordon's is better with the correct rules, but it's still not my thing. It's probably better than Klondike, but Klondike has the advantage of being deeply familiar from youthful repeated computer play.
Other Stuff
Music
I've been out of touch with anything new. Mostly listening to "comfort music", old favorites, which this past month meant John Fahey and Elvis Costello.
I still think of All This Useless Beauty as a weak Costello album, but I've been giving it more listens this year.
“It’s easy to theorize songs for people, but they don’t always work out. For instance, I wrote ‘Why Can’t a Man Stand Alone’ for Sam Moore, but he didn’t take it. Now when I think about it, the song has too many words. Sometimes lyrics can get in the way of expression.” — Elvis Costello
Movies
October: Slashing Through Cinema.
November: Noirvember 4: What kind of a dish was she? The sixty-cent special- cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.
Books
Key: RR=re-read, +=loved it, DNF=did not finish (but read enough to have a strong opinion)
Children’s
Clap Your Hands
That Kookoory!
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
Time to get out of the bath, Shirley
Wait til the Moon is Full
Wanted: The Great Cookie Thief
21st Century
+Treacle Walker - Alan Garner
20th Century
Catherine Carmier - Ernest Gaines
The Custard Heart - Dorothy Parker (Penguin Mini Modern)
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell (Penguin Mini Modern)
RR+ Space Chantey - R.A. Lafferty
Pre-20th Century
Aphorisms on Love and Hate - Friedrich Nietzsche
RR+ Esther
Comics
Daisy Kutter: The Last Train - Kazu Kibuishi
Again, ratings are stupid, even if it's just a + for "loved it".
What does that tell you about anything?
Space Chantey is maybe my least favorite Lafferty novel. I just happen to think that a weak Lafferty novel is better than most everything else.
Catherine Carmier had some weaknesses in its style, with shifting of authority in the telling, sometimes descriptions of eyes communicating with eyes with accompanying descriptive interpretation, sentimental guck. But, there are also passages in it describing the rootlessness and alienation from place and loved ones that are strong and I think will resonate with many of us who have been uprooted and alienated.
The only book that I really hated was the small Nietzsche collection. Even that had a few punchy sayings that I enjoyed. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that no one should take relationship advice from Ol' Frieddy.
You're all wondering why I haven't mentioned Moby Dick. If I loved it so much, how could I not have finished it?
Instead of repeating myself, I'm going to plagiarize myself and copy and paste something I wrote recently in a private geekmail.
Quote:
Re: Moby Dick,
I'll probably write something similar to this in my next monthly recap, but here's where I'm at on it:
I still love it. I still think it's very funny.
After an initial burst of reading, I've been reading it slowly. My friend Ben made fun of me, teasing me that I was just avoiding it because I don't really like it. But nah, that's not true. I'm reading it slowly because I really, really love it. I savor every chapter, often re-reading all or some of it right after finishing it. Often reading a bit out loud to my wife or sending sentences via text to friends.
I'm reading slowly because I don't want this new-to-me experience to end. I want there to always be more new Moby Dick for me to read.
And, if I'm being completely honest, I'm also reading slowly because I'm afraid. I'm afraid that at some point this joyous romp of a novel that I'm reading is going to turn into some serious slog. Why else does this novel have the reputation it has? How am I the only one that understands how much fun this is? I'm afraid that maybe the tone shifts and by the end, all that anyone can remember is devastating existential despair. Maybe.
But, yeah, I'm still loving it, and right now I would (and have been) recommending it to everyone.
One More Thing
Caveat Lector: the fact that I share anything here, above, below, anywhere I write anything on this site, is not necessarily (it usually is far from) a full endorsem*nt of either the thing itself or the person or persons behind the thing.
Links:
Non-gaming stuff found online that made me pause and think.
https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/exit-the-supersensorium
At least with the superstimuli of food there is the belief that some foods are objectively better than others, which helps curb our worst impulses of consumption. In comparison, as the supersensorium expands over more and more of our waking hours, the idea of an aesthetic spectrum, with art on one end and entertainment on the other, is defunct…
In a world of infinite experience, it is the aesthete who is safest, not the ascetic. Abstinence will not work. The only cure for too much fiction is good fiction. Artful fictions are, by their very nature, rare and difficult to produce. In turn, their rarity justifies their existence and promotion. It’s difficult to overeat on caviar alone. Now, it’s important to note here that I don’t mean that art can’t be entertaining, nor that it’s restricted to a certain medium. But art always refuses to be easily assimilated into the supersensorium.
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over
The internet has enabled us to live, for the first time, entirely apart from other people. It replaces everything good in life with a low-resolution simulation. A handful of sugar instead of a meal: addictive but empty, just enough to keep you alive. It even seems to be killing off sex, replacing it with more cheap, synthetic ersatz. Our most basic biological drives simply wither in its cold blue light. People will cheerfully admit that the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it’s really done away with is your ability to think. Usually, when I’m doing something boring but necessary—the washing up, or walking to the post office—I’ll constantly interrupt myself; there’s a little Joycean warbling from the back of my brain. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience.’ But when I’m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not there. That rectangular hole spews out war crimes and cutesy comedies and affirmations and p*rn, all of it mixed together into one general-purpose informational goo, and I remain in its trance, the lifeless scroll, twitching against the screen until the sky goes dark and I’m one day closer to the end. You lose hours to—what? An endless slideshow of barely interesting images and actively unpleasant text. Oh, cool—more memes! You know it’s all very boring, brooding nothing, but the internet addicts you to your own boredom. I’ve tried heroin: this is worse. More numb, more blank, more nowhere. A portable suicide booth; a device for turning off your entire existence. Death is no longer waiting for you at the far end of life. It eats away at your short span from the inside out.
https://medium.com/adams-notebook/my-scandalous-atheism-5eda...
Can poetry and music ‘stand-in’, as it were, for the religious life in those individuals who cannot make the Kierkegaardian faith-leap into ‘actual’ religious belief? Cannot make the leap because it’s not in us, because it doesn’t make sense to us, or because — a person of faith might suggest — we are too prideful in our mortal humanity to open ourselves to the divine. It’s probably one of the three. And to answer my own question straight away: no, they can’t. I don’t think poetry and music can substitute religion in life.
I say so with a certain sorrow, for, like Kermode, poetry and music are very important to my life, and in them I often find the transcendence, the holiness of which he speaks here. But I don’t think his larger point is correct, actually. I cannot avoid the self-knowledge that this merely secular pseudo-faith lacks the blood, the force — lacks, the stationed and parrhesiastic surrender to absolute otherness — of religious faith in the Kierkegaardian sense I just mentioned — which is to say, in the sense that Kierkegaard understood the Christian idea of eternity as something applied to every moment of human existence.
https://www.cahiersducinema.com/actualites/martin-scorsese-g...
In his foreward to Truffaut's letters, Godard wrote: "Francois is perhaps dead. I am perhaps alive. But then, is there a difference?" Now Godard, like Truffaut, is perhaps dead. You could say the same of Robert Johnson or Herman Melville or Sophocles or Homer. But the work is absolutely and indisputably alive. Work that, whether we viewers are ready for it or not, makes us free.
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I'm feeling the need to get off of BGG again. It has become a cliche. I don't care.
There were a couple of days this month in which I did not pick up any screens at all. No desktop. No tablet. No pocket communication computer (how can anyone honestly call these "phones"?). Those were the best days of the month.
I'm going to write a few more geekmails and send out some packages.
I'm going to update the noir geeklist. (Join us.)
I'm going to unsubscribe to a bunch of stuff again.
I'm going to keep getting rid of more games.
And so on.
I sometimes wonder how bootleby is doing.
I think about Lee, who loved Babylonia, who was angry about dying. How is he? Is he?
I think about others who are gone. Maybe I should write letters.
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I began re-reading Wes Jackson's Becoming Native to This Place yesterday afternoon.
Spending so much time online connects us to all sorts of things, but disconnects us from our present surroundings. I type this as my younger children are discussing and distributing last night's Halloween candy in the next room. Shouldn't I be in there stealing their candy?
Some speak of online presence as disembodied. It's not quite right. Maybe our online actions are ethereal, but we're still bodied. I'm sitting here at the table, my bottom firmly planted on a chair, starting to feel a little sore from sitting too long, my fingers clacking on a laptop keyboard. A slight ache in my neck, maybe from the way I slept last night, maybe just from being old, because if I start to pay attention to it, I notice aches in other places. I really should have just gone for that walk I had thought about taking when I first woke up.
I can talk with knowledge about 20-year-old German games and recent Japanese games, yet I couldn't name half the weeds growing in the ditch in my front yard. It does seem like there's something fundamentally wrong about that.
Maybe I should go door to door around my block (it takes 6 miles to go "around the block" out here in the country) and ask around to see if anyone is interested in a Coiffeur-Jass night. It's probably a better way than most to become widely known as the neighborhood nut.
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I'm rambling. Got to go.
