Books I finished reading in May 2024. Designing and 3D-printing things sucked up a bunch of my free time this month, but I still got some reading in.
The Returning by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Not sure how I ended up with this book, but it's been sitting on my ereader for years.
The writing was pretty good, but the antagonist was kind of a Saturday-morning-cartooon, mustache-twirling, caricature.
Civil unrest in a sci-fi setting.
Silo 49: Going Dark by Ann Christy
Fan fiction of Hugh Howey's Wool/Silo world. This has also been sitting on my ereader for years.
Well written and edited, decent story. I enjoyed it. Explores what happens to a silo besieged by illness with a failing population.
The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li
Our most recent book-group book at work. A sort-of-memoir, sort-of-history of the work on artificial-intelligence and machine-learning systems.
Though I found it a little grandiose to compare the (impressive, yes) improvements in AI capabilities of the past ~5 years to anything close to the revolution in chemistry and physics that was quantum mechanics and relativity.
Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay
I saw a description of this in a internet discussion and it sounded interesting. However, it was disappointingly shallow and short.
The concept is someone in the year 4000-something falls into an old late-20th-century motel and draws erroneous conclusions about the purpose of the contents found therein.
My coworker and I won the 8-team cornhole tournament at work this week. Not bad considering that before this tournament I had played corhnhole one time 11 years ago. While I didn't contribute much to the first game, I did carry my weight for games 2 and 3.
Jess and I continued our campaign in Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall successfully completing quests 17 and 4 with Feyn and Roland making their way to the great city of Din'Lux.
We played two games of Wyrmspan while in Arkansas for the eclipse (of course we brought a suitcase full of games, do you not when you travel?). I won one (by 1 point!) and lost one.
Round 3 of our second game which I was to win by 1 point.
Also while in Arkansas we played Ex Libris, which I lost.
I also played a few rounds of Cobra Paw (have the fastest paw to collect the tiles) and Exploding Kittens (be the last one standing after all the kittens have exploded) with the girls in Arkansas.
Back at home we introduced friends to Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle by playing year 4; we lost. This is a game some friends introduced us to years ago. I was skeptical at first because there are so many money grabs where a crappy idea is skinned over with a popular theme and they sell a million copies just because. But it actually is a solid game at its core and the theming generally only enhances the mechanics.
It's a cooperative deck-building game which increases in complexity and difficulty as you move up the years (representing the years in the books). You must enhance your deck with more powerful cards to defeat a set of villains before they take control of a set of locations. My biggest complaint is that the difficulty can vary wildly depending on the ordering of the villains.
At a board-game meetup I jumped into a game of Millennium Blades--which seems to be as post-modern as you can get in gaming. It's a game in which your characters are collectible-card-game players (e.g., Magic: The Gathering). In the game as your character, you buy/sell/trade cards to form a deck and then you play tournaments of the inner-game card game against the other players.
Points are awarded for how you rank during the inner-game tournaments. The game alternates between these inner-game tournaments and a buy/sell/trade/deck-build phase until you've held three tournaments. We didn't have time to finish the whole thing. We did 2 tournaments and one buy/sell/trade/deck-build phase. I lost. It was a bit of a strange game.
At another board-game meetup I played another game of Mystic Vale. I lost. I still find the core mechanic interesting from a technical perspective, but the game doesn't really speak to me.
After Mystic Vale, we played The Guild of Merchant Explorers which I really enjoyed. It's a quick game with simple mechanics, but I found the core concept and theming to be very engaging and fun. It's the first game in quite a while that I played and then immediately put on my wishlist.
It's a "group solitaire" kind of game played in 4 rounds. In each round you build out trade routes on your map (everyone has their own, identical map--no resource contention with other players). Everyone can play each turn simultaneously which keeps things moving. With your trade routes you score points in various ways (connecting cities, exploring ruins, building villages, etc.). Most points wins.
The game comes with 4 different maps to play and several different objective cards (3 used per game). There's randomization of how you can build your trade routes and players get asymmetric special-building powers that really drive differences in play between players. So there's some decent variety built in. With 3 of us playing for the first time I think we completed a 4-player game in 30-45 minutes.
This is a collection of short stories by Greg Egan which I really enjoyed. The stories are usually hard-sci-fi nuggets--explorations of "what if this were true about the universe?"
Some really great, though-provoking pieces.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
A "first contact" story. But it's not about space-faring species exploring the final frontier. Nor a nascent space-exploring species being welcomed into the intergalactic fold.
More of an exploration of what happens when fate puts a pre-industrial civilization at the center of an intergalactic incident.
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks
Sacks recounts the development of modern chemistry through the lens of his childhood in England before, during, and after World War II.
A time when an 11-year-old kid could wander down to a supply shop and come home with all manner of caustic, toxic, and explosive chemicals to play with.
Wild in how fundamentally different his youth was from anything that would be considered "normal" today.
And finally, The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick; which I read as a standalone short story. I think it qualifies as American Gothic in style--a brief horror story about an invasive species.
Games I played in March 2024. Like books, I didn't get nearly as much game playing done this month compared to February.
Wyrmspan - Expand your cave system and attract new dragons to live in it. This game just came out last month. It's an adaptation of the game Wingspan--changing some mechanics and swapping dragons for birds. This games falls under "group solitaire" in that what each player does has very little impact on the other players.
It's a game of resource constraints requiring careful analysis to maximize your actions for gaining points. If you want to score well, that is. You can just enjoy the artwork and collecting dragons and not worry too much about points.
We played once at the very beginning of the month and once more today. I lost both times (Jess won both times).
Escape the Crate - Sled Race - One of the "escape room in a box" companies for which Jess' parents gave us a subscription for Christmas.
This is the second box for us. The story set ups and narration are a bit campy, but the puzzles have been pleasantly reasonable and we've been enjoying them as a family. I think I enjoy them more than the "Exit" series. In this one we've time traveled to 1925 when a mustache-twirling-type nefarious time traveler had swapped the diphtheria antitoxin out before the dogsled relay rushed it off to Nome, Alaska. We have to work together to catch up and put the correct medicine back in place.
We completed the first half successfully at _just_ below expert speed--still have to play the second half.
Kinfire Chronicles: Night's Fall - Jess and I continued our adventure as Feyn and Roland and played Quest 16 (you don't necessarily complete them in numerical order).
We had a very successful little adventure and handily defeated the ursaur in battle and rescued the elven pilgrim. I'm still very much enjoying it and looking forward to continuing our story.
