2024-11-27 10:13:04
I ain’t no student of ancient culture, but there’s one thing that I do know: The B-52’s didn’t do a ton of research when writing the song “Mesopotamia.”
But that’s kind of what the song is all about, and kind of why I love the band. They made songs about whatever weird shit they felt like: counterfeiting, driving in the south at night, odd beach encounters, how there are a lot of ruins in Mesopotamia.
Because we’re living in the future, Apple Music automatically showed me the lyrics as I was listening, and I realized I’ve had it wrong for 30 years. When Kate sings, “I know a neat excavation!” I had always heard it as “I know I need excavation,” which I’d always thought was some kind of weird horny double entendre. The real version is much more charming and in the spirit of the B-52s, of course.1
Another lyric I always misheard was from “River Euphrates” by the Pixies. I thought they were just saying “ri-ri-ri-ri” over and over again for River Euphrates, much like Shaggy would say “gh-gh-gh-gh” for Ghosts. Apparently the real lyric is “Ride a tire down the River Euphrates.” Which is also much more charming than I’d thought. It generates a calming image of the Black Francis and Kim Deal tubing through the cradle of civilization while Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson call from the shore to come check out some neat pyramids.
2024-11-21 14:58:46
Book
Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie
Synopsis
A collection of short stories about Hercule Poirot’s various cases, all narrated by his friend Captain Hastings.
Pros
Cons
Verdict
Light and mostly fun, especially good for establishing Poirot as a long-running character, with more presence than the full novel-length mysteries.
Side Note
My modest goal was to read 12 books this year, and I’m clearly not going to make it. It’s not been a great year, and maybe reading challenges are dumb?
2024-11-15 02:00:00
Agatha All Along ended a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve spent the time since then trying to figure out what exactly I thought of it.
My initial reaction was that I was a little disappointed. Midway through the season, it seemed like they suddenly decided they weren’t content to do another televised MCU installment, and they wanted to be putting out stuff for Emmy reels and best-of compilations. But I initially felt as if they’d managed to make all the plot threads fit together, but without the end result meaning much of anything.
The last two episodes were genuinely surprising. For WandaVision, the big “reveals” had been mostly figured out by fans of the comics early on in the season, so that series was a case of watching stuff we already knew was going to happen, but in a way that was so satisfying and fun that nobody really cared. I’d assumed that Agatha All Along was going to do the same, presenting some not-particularly challenging mysteries and let us all have fun pretending to be surprised. “Oh, she’s still under Wanda’s spell!” “Oh, that’s Wanda’s son Billy Kaplan/Wiccan!” “Oh, she’s the Marvel embodiment of Death!” “Her sudden outbursts are foreshadowing things that will happen later in the series!” I was perfectly satisfied with this level of engagement, only to get a double rug-pull in the last two episodes.
I hadn’t suspected at all that the Witches’ Road was Billy’s creation. I did expect that we’d meet a Great and Powerful Oz type character at the end, who had some connection to Rio, but hadn’t even considered the possibility that the entire premise of WandaVision was playing out again on a smaller scale. And it seemed kind of obvious that Agatha was lying about the road, and her experience with it in particular. But I’d thought it was going to be a simple case of undeserved bravado, claiming she’d been on it when she hadn’t. Or we’d see the rumor play out, where her previous trip on the road had presented a choice between the power she wanted (the Darkhold?) and her son. It never once occurred to me that the final episode would take agency back from Billy Kaplan and make the title of the series make sense! It was a really clever layering of surprises: he subconsciously created the road just like Wanda first created the Hex, but in the end, the instigator of the whole thing really was Agatha all along.
So my disappointment was that all of that cleverness seemed to be in service of something kind of shallow. No matter how well done, it ultimately felt like another MCU installment, instead of something with the ambition and reflection that WandaVision had. And the problem, as I saw it, was that the main character of the series had an unsatisfying story. And it would’ve been so easy to fix.
I saw an interview with Jac Schaeffer online in which she said they went back and forth on whether to make Agatha All Along a redemption story for Agatha. My first reaction to the conclusion of the series was that they’d never made up their mind. There were signs throughout the series that her selfish/callous nature was just a front, a defense against people who were afraid of her power, and a scary story that was easier to live up to than the truth of something painful in her past.
I had been expecting that once we saw the story play out, we’d see that she’d been feared and misunderstood, made a horrible mistake that somehow resulted in the loss of her son, and that set her on a path of being a villain intent on seeking power, since it was easier than being honest with herself. But then in the last episode, we saw that Agatha had been killing witches her whole life, ever since her first coven. She was a villain all along! It’s not just that there was no redemption; there was no arc at all!
After mulling it over for a while, I think it’s trying to tell a story that’s a little bit more subtle than my first interpretation. As I’m interpreting it now: it was Agatha’s betrayal by her mother, and the rest of her coven, that set her on the path of being a villain. She’d inadvertently killed them all, but it was traumatic enough that she no longer trusted any witches, and she instead chose to kill them and take their power. This ended up with her developing a rapport with Death, with the arrangement of Agatha “providing her with bodies” that they mention in the third episode.
Once her son was born, Agatha just began using him in her ongoing scheme of ingratiating herself into a new coven and then murdering them all for their power. This went on for years, and the lore of the Witches’ Road grew. Finally, his conscience made him decide he didn’t want to be part of it anymore. After that (the show makes it seem as if it happened that same night), Death finally took him. Grief and a desire for revenge make Agatha resolve to keep using the lore of the Witches’ Road, not just for survival, but to become more and more powerful.
It feels a lot more nuanced and mature than the version I’d expected from a show this broad and straightforward. The terrible revelation of the horrible thing that she did to her son, the thing that was so bad she can’t bear to face him even in death: she disappointed him. Even as a child, he was able to tell that what she was doing was wrong and unnecessary. She’d lost the only family she had, and instead of building a new one with her son, she was wiping out any opportunity for either of them to find a family beyond their “coven two.”
It also helps smooth out some of the pieces that didn’t seem to fit, to me. The “black heart” was definitively Billy, but Lilia’s sigil prevented her from using his name. He was essential to the coven, not just for the obvious reason that he created the road, but because he’s Agatha’s new family. Helping him find his brother is the closest thing Agatha is going to get to redemption.
The other witches’ stories fit thematically, more or less, since they’re all aspects of family, sisterhood, betrayal, and finding their purpose. The one that’s still out of place is Sharon Davis/”Mrs. Hart,” who I kept expecting to see resurrected but am still disappointed. I’m assuming that her character exists more as a misdirection than to serve a thematic purpose. Maybe it’s a reminder to people like me that Agatha is still a villain at series start, and not simply misunderstood?
Ultimately I’m really impressed that a series with so many different boxes to check off — MCU installment, sequel to WandaVision, Halloween season-scheduled horror comedy, woman-led series, story about fictional witches and the real-world significance of their characters — managed to be surprising and thematically resonant. One of the reasons I liked WandaVision so much was that it was completely and unabashedly a comic book story, but it still felt it had a reason to exist beyond its role in the MCU. I’m impressed that Agatha All Along went from feeling like a series of interesting escape rooms, to become another series that had ideas about found families and parenthood that went beyond just setting up the Young Avengers.
2024-11-11 13:06:50
It has been an absolutely beautiful day in my section of Los Angeles today. I went up to the roof for a while and enjoyed the sun and a very nice breeze, while appreciating the view around my house. Seeing mountains and palm trees all around is still such a novelty for me, and I hope I never get tired of it. There are two tall palm trees (which are perfectly framed by my office window) that have become a symbol of serenity for me.
I should’ve known after my experience with smoking, but giving up anything cold turkey just doesn’t work for me. So instead of being able to change my focus and priorities all at once, I should probably expect sporadic bursts of I Have A Take On Politics That I Must Share With The Internet.
I can’t know for sure, obviously, but I have a strong suspicion that many of the people I spent years aligning myself with online, who’d talk about equality and rejecting classism and capitalism, etc, are people who never talk to their Uber drivers.
That’s not purely a condemnation, by the way. I have a lot of scorn for hypocrites and snobs, but I also need to acknowledge that I’m out of touch with people. In the case of ride-sharing, even if I weren’t an introvert, I don’t think anybody doing their job should be obligated to make conversation if they don’t want to. And it’s inherently a deeply unfair situation, more than a taxi, because the company that doesn’t give them benefits still holds them accountable to driver ratings. You’re unlikely to get a candid conversation that will build bridges. But when I’ve been in a ride with a particularly gregarious driver, or an extroverted passenger, it’s been a reminder that I very rarely talk to people whose jobs and economic situations are different from my own.
Speaking of smoking: over the past few days, my brain keeps asking “What would it even matter?” if I had a cigarette. But I haven’t had one yet. And in the days since I last tried one and hated it, I haven’t been that interested in getting one. I’ve noticed I think of myself as a non-smoker now, too: whenever I do get the urge to have a cigarette, I think of it as a novelty, instead of going back to my default state of always having a pack on me. Plus the memory of my last one is still really gross. I have a ton of sympathy for people battling addictions.
While I was up on the roof today, I was reminded that I hardly ever go up there, and in fact have spent entire days without going outside. Worse, instead of being outside in the sun with a great view, I’m most often indoors on my phone looking at things that make me angry or sad, which I have no control over and no influence to do anything about. It drove home the fact that I’m not actually just being lazy and using social media or the news to procrastinate, as I’ve always assumed, but I’m actively choosing to look at it instead of doing something healthy.
I was reminded today that one of the best TV series of all time, The Good Place, ran from 2016 to 2020. It seems fitting for a series that was all about ethical behavior in a world that made ethics seem like an impossible luxury. The thing that I love most about the series was that it was so full of grace: never saccharine sentimentality, never compromising on its core values, but still understanding that there’s so much complexity in what makes a person good or bad.
Another thing I thought about while I was on my roof was how grateful I am to have that place to go to. It’s a luxury that I’ve been embarrassed to even talk about, since it often feels like I don’t deserve it. And if you spend too much time online, like I have, you’ll be constantly subjected to crucial ideas of societal injustice and inequity being used as a bludgeon, making a convincing case that you don’t deserve anything.
Today I reminded myself that although I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate, benefiting from the hard work of my parents, the incredible kindness of friends, and just plain good luck, that it’s not just luck and privilege. I’ve worked hard, made thoughtful choices, and set priorities. But the most important thing is the simplest: I’ve tried to be humble, kind, generous, and fair, always. And even when I haven’t succeeded, I’ve tried to be the kind of person that people want to work with. It’s always seemed like the bare minimum, but lately as I’ve been filled with despair at seeing arrogance, selfishness, and unkindness succeed, I’ve realized just how valuable humility and kindness can be.
2024-11-10 02:30:00
Heat: Pedal to the Medal is a board game published by Days of Wonder and developed by Sidekick Studio that came out in 2022. Each player controls a Grand Prix race car competing against up to 5 other racers to navigate the tight corners of a track, managing a hand of cards representing the car’s speed, the driver’s stress, and the engine’s heat.
And I am straight-up obsessed with it at the moment. It’s not just because it’s a lot of fun, but because it’s so elegant and clever. The core mechanic is so well-balanced, with every component having a clear cost-vs-benefit aspect that seems to generate an infinite number of interesting decisions from what should otherwise be the most tedious and repetitive process of going around a race track.
Even if you have no interest in auto racing, Heat is such a clever abstraction that it gives you a better idea of where the depth and complexity of the sport lie. Each track — there are four included in the base game — has its own peculiarities which can lead to surprisingly different strategies.
And then that core mechanic can be expanded on seemingly indefinitely, with a bunch of modules included in the base box, which players are free to mix and match. The game has been out long enough that the first expansion, Heat: Heavy Rain came out earlier this year, but I feel like I could play the base game dozens and dozens more times before needing to add anything else.
This is neither a tutorial nor a detailed review, but my list of the aspects of the game that impress me the most.
The most basic description of the game is straightforward: Each player has their own deck of cards, with speed values from 1-4. At the beginning of your turn, you can choose to shift your car up or down one gear. The gear determines how many cards you can play that turn: e.g. two cards for second gear, four cards for fourth. After choosing cards simultaneously, each player in race order moves their car forward according to their speed.
At certain points around the track, there’s a corner marker with an attached speed limit. Any car that crosses that line with a speed value greater than that speed limit has to pay a penalty.
Just that is enough to make a simple abstraction of car racing. In fact, Formula D manages to be a pretty engaging board game doing just that: putting players in charge of shifting gears, changing lanes, and watching their speed around corners. But the thing that makes Heat brilliant is that it doesn’t just try to abstract the mechanics of a car race, but the feeling of one.
It’s designed to challenge players to press their luck as far as they can, trying to get every last bit of speed from their engine without pushing it too far.
The way it does that shouldn’t be a surprise, since it’s in the title. In addition to the numbered speed cards, each player’s deck contains a number of heat cards. Generally, heat cards start out in your engine. You “spend” them for various actions or penalties by putting them into your discard pile.
For example: you can normally shift up or down 1 gear per turn. If you spend a heat, though, you can shift an extra gear, simulating the strain on your engine as you suddenly drop from 4th gear to 2nd while you’re turning a tight corner. You can also choose to spend a heat on an extra boost near the end of your turn, where you draw a speed card and add its value to your current speed.
Those are the bonuses, but you also have to spend heat for taking corners too fast: one heat for each point you are over the speed limit. If you ever need to spend heat but don’t have any available in your engine, it causes a spin out, which can be disastrous.
There’s a counterpart to the heat cards in the form of stress cards. Drivers can play a stress card to draw a random speed card from their deck. In the fiction, they’re intended to simulate the moments when a driver briefly loses concentration. In practice, it adds a much-needed bit of randomness to the game, so that it doesn’t come strictly down to careful arithmetic every turn. More importantly, it demands that players stay ready to react to changes as much as planning ahead.
What’s so clever about the heat cards and stress cards is that they’re both currency cards and penalty cards, with a built-in sense of pressing your luck.
Unlike the other cards, the heat cards and stress cards can’t ever be discarded from your hand. Stress cards have to be played, introducing a random value into your speed calculations. But you can only get rid of heat cards by using cooldowns.
Each cooldown lets you move one heat card from your hand back into your engine. You automatically get one at the end of your turn whenever you’re in second gear, and three when you’re in first gear, obviously since you’re not pushing the engine as hard. More cooldowns can be available from upgrades, varying weather conditions, and other bonuses.
It’s such a clever mechanic because it organically simulates the feeling of your engine overheating. If you keep pressing the engine without slowing down to let it cool off, your hand will gradually fill up with heat cards that can’t be played. You’ll eventually stall out or spin out, with no speed cards available to play.
There’s an interesting counter-balance baked into each of the non-discardable cards. Stress is mostly a beneficial card, but with the downside that it’s unpredictable. An unlucky draw could send you through a corner too fast, or leave you wasting an entire turn only moving one or two spaces forward on a straightaway.
Heat feels like largely a negative card, taking up space in your hand and preventing you from moving forward until you find a way to get rid of it. But it’s also the currency you spend to do everything cool in the game, like boosting, or speeding around corners with just enough control to stay on the track. There’s an element of risk and unpredictability to both of them, with the mechanics practically forcing you to push things as far as you can.
As the blurb on the back of the box says, “There’s no prize for crossing the finish line in a pristine car, so put your pedal to the metal.” One of the rare cases where the marketing copy doesn’t just feel like marketing copy, but the overriding mission statement of the entire game design.
And finally, I just think it’s fascinating how they were able to take a relatively small and straightforward number of mechanics and recombine them into so many different modular variations. I’ve had fun playing the 1-lap starter game with the base decks, expanding to more laps, expanding to different maps with their own numbers of laps and turns, and then adding the upgrade cards.
We haven’t even added weather yet, which randomly adds bonuses or penalties to the track overall (like hot weather adding heat directly into your discard pile) and to certain sections of track (like wet road causing you to slipstream farther).
There’s also a tournament mode, where players race across three different tracks, each with a different condition. And sponsorships, where you start with special upgrades, and you can earn more by performing exceptional stunts in front of the camera crews stationed at specific positions on the track.
It also supports any number of 1-5 players, since there are built-in mechanisms for “legend” cars, which are controlled by a set of rules determined by drawing cards as they cross certain points of the track.
There’s a version of the game on Board Game Arena, so you can play asynchronously with people on the internet, and that’s where most of my games have taken place so far. But on top of everything else I like about Heat, there’s a definite appeal to playing the physical version. The artwork is gorgeous and perfectly evocative of the “golden age” of the Grand Prix, and it’s nice just to have it spread out on a table. The cars are — not at all surprisingly — fun to move around the track. And there’s something satisfying about seeing cards flowing from place to place, evoking just a tiny bit the feeling of watching a cross-section schematic of an engine working.
Part of the reason I’m so late to the party with Heat is because the pandemic and the move to southern California combined to put an end to most of our board game playing. We’re slowly starting the hobby back up again, and I’m remembering the excitement of seeing a clever or novel design for the first time, with all of its systems and mechanics interacting with each other.
I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I’m an expert, but I do spend an awful lot of time thinking about game design. I often think of it as wrangling two disparate disciplines, trying to apply a meaningful idea onto a set of elegantly constructed mathematics. Expression vs science, in a way. I’m most impressed when designers are able to use the mechanics as expression. Especially when it’s abstract expression, not necessarily conveying a concrete idea, but a specific feeling.
Heat uses a set of simple, interconnected mechanics to give players the feel of a high-tension, high-stakes race, trying to maintain control over a powerful engine that could overheat or careen out of control at any moment. It takes what could’ve been simple arithmetic and makes it feel exhilarating.
2024-11-07 13:15:52
The internet doesn’t need to know the details, but my reaction to the election results last night and this morning were enough — and were physiological enough — to convince me that I haven’t been keeping it together as well as I’d thought. And I’d thought I’d been doing pretty bad at it.
So while it’d be better if I could share something meaningful about resistance and defiance and strength and resolve in the face of evil, that’s just not me, realistically. For about as long as I can remember, people have been yelling that it’s selfish and irresponsible not to be deeply concerned about politics, and I’ve believed them. Social media has amplified that, blurring the line of what constitutes genuine activism, and loading us all with more stress than I think any of us are equipped to handle. Maybe it is selfish and irresponsible, but I prefer to think that it’s simply being more conscious of the tremendous gap between awareness and influence. It accomplishes nothing for any of us to be filled with concern and anxiety over something that we have no control over.
I don’t feel naive, or regret the couple of months I let myself feel hopeful because of the Harris/Walz campaign. I’m grateful for it. It was a great feeling, after years of feeling my hope just dwindle and flicker, to let it flare up again, to say this is what I believe in, this is what I value. They did so much to fight cynicism. And I believe it worked, for me at least, because what I’m feeling isn’t rooted in blame, or second-guessing, or suspicion. I got the chance to declare what I believe in. And there’s no longer any need to give other voters the benefit of the doubt — they clearly chose what they believe in, and they said that the things I value don’t matter.
Unlike 2016, when people like me tried to find sages online who could explain exactly what went wrong, where the Democrats failed, and what we could all do better next time, I don’t feel any need to look at post mortems. Vice President Harris and Governor Walz connected with people, and they had so much support that they’d raised over a billion dollars. And it somehow still wasn’t enough. The message there isn’t to try harder; it’s that the current system simply isn’t working.
And I hope I can finally just come to terms with the fact that I don’t have an answer, and I don’t have to have an opinion. I’ve spent the last few months formulating and clarifying my opinions and putting my money behind the people I want to support, and keeping up to date on the news because it was encouraging again, and it’s been at the expense of everything else in my life, that’s actually important.
My life was so much better before Twitter existed. I haven’t actually used Twitter in several years, but its influence has lingered on, not just in other social media, but in the way my brain is wired now to have a take on everything. I used to make things. I used to spend my free time working on projects, and enjoying movies and television and games and books, and writing about them on here to think in more depth about how they worked. I’ve seen several people today saying that times of crisis and uncertainty are when it’s most important to make art — I agree, although I think that overstates the inherent importance of art works by quite a lot.
There is value in the work, but the greatest value is the part of your life you dedicate to creating it. Pouring yourself into the creation of something simply because it can’t possibly exist otherwise, the diametric opposite of creating “content” to fill the space between ad slots.
So if nothing else, I’m artfully excusing myself from politics indefinitely, apart from giving help to people who are threatened, and concentrating on smaller, more local topics that can actually benefit from my efforts. And I’m pledging to drastically change my relationship with social media. Focusing only on what I control, like this blog; or the parts that actually constitute community.
For most of today, it’s felt like my light was finally extinguished, after years of sputtering in naive hopefulness. I’m resolving to change how I think about it: drawing in and hunkering down to re-ignite it, to be more protective of it, to keep it from being blown out for good.