Historically, December is a difficult month for me, the darkest part of a yearly cycle. My wonderful friend Kristina, who practices Oriental medicine, decided to make a preemptive strike on this low season by prescribing some herbs. The Chinese name is Chai Hu Long Gu Mu Li Wan, but the more exciting, Potions class name for it is Bupleurum Dragonbone Oyster Shell. Already the herbs are taking the edge off.
I typically feel anxiety which rapidly snowballs into paranoia. Fantastical ideas about the people I know and their dark plots against me bloom in my mind. I realize how their supposed friendship was all just an elaborate ruse engineered to destroy me. No one actually cares about me and indeed they wish me harm. So I must be wary and watchful, striking first if I can. I peer out at the world from behind a veil, sensing that some unprecedented event is imminent. I fear that I will fall up into the sky or fly apart into my component molecules. The world fills with weird angles and indictments emanate from magazine ads and YouTube videos.
That’s how it usually goes. But in these past few years of doing actual work on these issues, they haven’t disappeared so much as become familiar monsters which I know how to handle. Having help in these times is an unexpected joy. I typically just go it alone, re-emerging on the other side. So I am very thankful for her.
Tags: Life, reft
Along with Fantastic Fest and, recently, GenCon, BGG is something that I now look forward to every year. A comparatively small convention (only about 700 people this year), the Dallas-based convention focuses exclusively on board games.
The highlight reel:
Although Agricola is still hugely popular, it came out at last year’s BGG. This year the new hotness was definitely Dominion. When describing the game, most people reached for the easiest comparison: Magic the Gathering. More specifically, the deck building mechanic and the strategy of playing from your graveyard. You essentially build your deck as you play, trying to saturate your deck with certain cards in order to increase the odds of drawing specific combos. Your victory points are also cards, effectively useless for anything but points at the end. So you have to decide if you want to go for a bunch of the low hanging 3s and fill your deck with cards that do nothing, or hold out for more valuable but more expensive single cards.
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Tags: board games
I’ve posted a new article for the Secure Immaturity podcast and website. This one is about life online pre-World Wide Web.
Read it here.
Tags: Geek, podcasts, retrogasmic, writing