my circle

On Tuesday, February 3, because sometimes it's like that.

Games: More Witchcraft. ( My thoughts as I continue playing. )

We also obtained Fishy, Squishy, Crusty, Quirky, another "kawaii [insert category here] card game" offering from Unstable Games. It is, as hoped, turning out to be an ideal Geek BBQ game: lightweight and small with minimal set up, simple/intuitive/derivative (take your pick) enough to learn quickly, possible to keep playing even if the environment gets loud or distracting, over in an appropriate amount of time for a big social setting, and with enough interesting mechanics to keep it, well, interesting. (In this case, reversed cards that other players can see but you cannot, among others.) I'm also a sucker for kawaii octo and squid pictures, so, yeah. It works.

Music: Well, the gubmint is shut down again, and once again in such a fashion that no one aside from the gubmint employees who have to work without being paid will notice that the gubmint is shut down. Predictably, this put me into a funk. I skipped the pub session and considered not going to the house session but ultimately dragged myself out to do it, knowing that future me would benefit from being jolted out of my doldrums. And future me did. The start was admittedly rocky (which it would be given that the session starts past my bedtime and I was bummed and distracted) but got progressively better as I was able to focus more on just playing music. I left in a pacific state. It's also a 6 mile roundtrip walk, and there's still plenty of snow around, so I was in my element both on my way out and on the trip back.

Podcasts/Articles: Two longform articles Exploiting Meta's Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election, which angered me for all the reasons it says on the tin + did nothing to allay my suspicion that meta outsources the discovery and reporting of such content to investigative journalists instead of "wasting" money doing it themselves; and Extropia's Children, which is a series of not particularly well-written substack posts about a topical and ostensibly fascinating topic. Unfortunately, the author's thesis? argument? basically amounted to "Look! The same group of people who were theorizing about AI in the 90s are still doing AI things today!" And, yeah. That makes sense. I don't understand the author's conspiratorial "Get out the red string!" framing.

Roleplaying: Nothing this week, again. Gah.

Television: We're an episode away from finishing Max Headroom Season 2, and with it, the entire show. We watched Neurostim, one of the series' weakest episodes, both because it basically repeats the plot of the previous episode, and for its wealth of "You Can Do That On Television!" 80s-isms that...have not aged well, to be very polite about it. Japanese people are a conniving cultural and economic threat! (And for some reason speak with Chinese accents?) South Asian people are slimy used car and suit salesmen! (And for some reason sitar music is always playing while they're around?) The next episode, Lessons, is a return to freaking form, and one that anticipated: social media mogul-led censorship, oligarchs war against educating the non-wealthy, and how both news media and entertainment television are willing to bend the knee to both.

Online, I watched the first episode of The Remarkable Life of Margaret Barry. I primarily know Barry as the composer of The Strayaway Child, an absolute hypnotic banger of a double jig. I was also aware that she was famous as a banjoist and ballad singer, and for her collaborations with Michael Gorman, but this was first time I'd actually heard any of this work. Barry had a powerful freaking voice, and the stuff she accomplished, despite being both a woman and a Traveller, is impressive. That said, I am just not a fan of Irish ballads or pub songs in English. Give me the tunes.

Video Games: Machinarium, which I've lost a bit of steam on as I've hit a particularly tricky puzzle (I know I can just look up the solution in a walkthrough but I won't, dammit! I have standards!) and Baldur's Gate 3 and omg I don't remember what I was doing on this playthrough at all 😭)

これで以上です。