Last week, I talked about the joy of various online niches, and this week’s a subset of that: it’s very cool to see the different subsets of nature photography! One of them is Michael Nordeman Photography, which I’ve already talked about, and another is Wiley Treehouse Gardens, with a variety of outdoor plants in the Pacific Northwest and indoor varieties, especially succulents. This was the first plant blog I found on Tumblr, and it’s easily still one of my favorites! Plus, they traveled to Madagascar a while back, so somewhere in that tag are lemurs.
May I just say once again I adore the variety of niches I’ve acquired? So particular is the joy of learning someone else has and is willing to share an extremely specific passion. In this case, Venusaur!
In short, this Tumblr user has taken it upon themself to draw every other Pokémon somehow interacting with Venusaur, for an eventual total of one thousand and twenty-five. A task I can’t fully imagine, but they’ve taken to it with gusto! And as I’ve only had partial and sporadic experiences with Pokémon, “I like the art style and the characters’ expressiveness” has incidentally taught me a lot. Mostly that in the right context, every single one of them can be cute!
Have you ever read Shel Silverstein’s “How Not To Have To Dry The Dishes”? It goes about how you’d expect. I remember encountering it during our fourth grade class poetry show, at just the right age to both empathize with the “consent of the governed” of it, and have a vague crisis of conscience. After all, the story goes, to not have to dry the dishes, something has to break.
I was also nine for this story, and had yet to encounter the notion that dishes could be fixed.
All of which is to say that Broken and Beautiful is a game about kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. Or silver, or platinum, but notably something shiny and obvious, marking breakage as a part of something’s story, and not the end of the bloody world.
In terms of the game, it’s gorgeously simple: get pottery! Break pottery! Fix pottery, at a cost. When you’re done collecting, score! It’s what I’m inclined to call “mechanically compact” – nearly every feature serves multiple purposes. Your candidate cards to choose from, on a given turn, are a quantity of (two per player) plus one, giving you extra options and, per the one left over, defining what type of dishes this turn are going to break. If the last card available is a cup, everyone’s cups shatter! Each different card type has a given cost to fix, which is also the gold you can sell it for when you first acquire it – no deciding later that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. And given that broken items are worthless, come the end of the game, you may want to! When an item is fixed, however, it’s not only untouchable – it will never break again – it’s worth more points than it was unbroken! (It puts me in the mind of wood glue, something else that feels like poetry and isn’t quite the point. I’ll drop the link.) Flip the card over, and bask in the improvements.
‘But Cassandra,’ you might ask, ‘if the back of the card is largely identical to the front, how does the deck work?’ It’s easy! The top card’s not a secret. In fact, that top card type will also break each turn, regardless of what you do. You see what I mean? Efficient.
When there are no longer enough cards left for a proper draft, the game ends, and each type of item is scored differently. Some have different stacking bonuses with others of their type; cups’ scores are multiplied when paired with saucers; teapots gain value by what else is of the same pattern/set. And then there’s serving trays and storage boxes, wooden items that cannot break, one of which scores a flat rate and the other per your remaining gold ingots! You can see, then, why I’ve never been able to predict which of us will win a game until we stop to score. With nine distinct scoring methods – who on Earth can?
Because sometimes, the end of the world is adorable. Right? Right. It’s certainly the case in Doomlings, “a delightful card game for the end of the world”! Though, to be totally fair, the game only ends at the End of the World. It is, more accurately, about the possible courses of life on Earth! Or some unspecified, distant planet…
Doomlings is a game of populations and traits, like Evolution for amoebas. Perhaps your organism is eloquent, or warm-blooded! Each trait comes with its own bonuses and setbacks, even if they’re just opportunity costs, and make up the tapestry of a complex, hopefully well-adapted life form. Your options always stabilize per the scope of your Gene Pool, so the higher that value is, the more cards you have in hand! Your default is always playing one, but some cards have actions that let you play others, or End of the World bonuses per certain cards still in your hand.
The End of the World is, sadly, inevitable. How else would the game end? Rounds are tracked by Ages, starting with the Birth of Life and instituting different effects, some immediate and some lasting the whole Age. Eventually, you hit a Catastrophe! Catastrophes mark the ends of Eras, of which the game has three, and at the third Catastrophe, the world ends. The poor planet can only take so much. Between World’s End effects, traits’ face values, and any bonuses and modifiers, this one is very much anyone’s game right up to the end. Which is thematically on-brand! Doomlings offers a very cheerful, carefree apocalypse experience, with jokes aplenty and the doctrine that there is no secret perfect path in life. It’s sprawly and swingy and colorful in a way that brings me joy. And the fact that it’s cute sure doesn’t hurt!
As a youngling I discovered that there are holidays for everything, from food to awareness to that which is just plain silly. Of course, that was on a paper calendar, which quickly fell out of function, and I took to the internet to find something similar. What I found was Checkiday! Defaulting to the day-you’re-checking, Checkiday also lets you search by dates or keywords, and has a truly impressive range of holidays, from National Black Forest Cake Day, to Champion Crab Races Day (and I’m very curious about this one now), to International Day for Monuments and Sites. There’s always an “On This Day In History” link, too!
I have to remind myself occasionally that I can’t celebrate everything to my interest – not to overthink it – and in that light: it’s fun, it’s educational, and it brings to light things you may not realize how much you appreciate, until someone calls attention to it. Like pencils!
We were in West Palm Beach, Florida recently without a concrete plan for how to spend a day, so we went brochure fishing and found ourselves at Cox Science Center and Aquarium! It’s right next to Palm Beach Zoo, which I thought was pretty convenient, and it partners with a variety of food trucks on weekends so that there’s food. More importantly, it’s a neat little science museum!
First of all, dinosaurs. This is both the temporary exhibit currently on display and a theme of their outdoor space, where a handful of dinosaur chairs and things abound; the indoor, more involved version includes animatronics and a Mesozoic tour of Pangaea, mapping out dinosaurs by continent! This was especially cool to me, as it put eras and geography back in context in a way that growing up with Jurassic Park did not. Similarly, even for dinos where I knew which current-day continent they were found on, it hadn’t occurred to me that at the time that they existed we still had supercontinents, and so where those species were relative to each other was very different! It was just a hike from South America to Australia, once upon a time.
Outside, along with the dino walk, a number of physics-based exhibits, a splash pad, and a gem panning station! You were welcome to buy a bag of gemstones, shark teeth, or fossils, complete with mining substrate, and experience panning for yourself. Inside, some engineering-for-kids stuff that reminded me of the DuPage Children’s Museum here in Illinois, a meteorology exhibit, space rocks, logic puzzles, and, of course, the aquarium! I was especially excited about this bit, as it’s specifically focused on the Atlantic and Florida. Also, animals. I spent a lot of time here, taking photos and reading signage, of course, but also attending a number of activities! Including alligator petting. And feeding! Which were, notably, separate events. Turns out it’s also very entertaining to watch fish demolish a piece of lettuce!
If you’re ever in West Palm Beach, this is a great something to do that’s mostly inside, a little bit outside, and easily spanning multiple interests – we didn’t really get to the Planetarium schedule, and they have that too! There’s whole sections that are definitively aimed at kids, and as adults we wound up making most of a day of it.
JoyousJoyfulJoyness (say that three times fast) makes colorful, cozy capybara paintings and pet portraits. If that wasn’t cool enough, they also did this one of a teddy bear and Totoro! Their work is super wholesome and chill, as capybaras so often are. Go check them out!
This is old, old advice, right? The more you know about where you are and how you got there, the easier it is to find your way elsewhere! I’ve recently had cause to consider that in combination with the strange, fuzzy way that stress muddles your sense of time. ‘Yesterday passed in an hour, but this week’s been a year,’ right? And it got me thinking about ways that I anchor my concept of normal and of movement – now, then, later – against the fact that everything I experience is, has been, or will be “now.”
I take a lot of notes. I’ve mentioned this before, mostly in the context of “nebulously in the future,” as is the case with my recommendation lists and to-write work – both in many ways the predecessors to this post. As part of my ongoing character arc from “I can hold it all in my head!” to “why, actually?” I’ve expanded that concept to include the near future and the past! I’ve taken particular notice to the visibility of deadlines. Coupon expires next week? Add it to the calendar. Crucially, add it to a calendar that I already look at. Make travel plans by this date, submit Hugo nominations by then… On the subject of the Hugos, I’ve also taken to writing down eligible material as I encounter it! No more mad scramble for what all I’ve done in the past year and which of it is relevant.
Of course, there’s also the broader matter of things I’ve gotten done – a sentence that has soured in other contexts, and proven quite useful in this one, especially for the odd little things that don’t seem like Major Accomplishments. I keep a container of them now, on paper, with things like “real food,” “phone call,” and “found something I was looking for”! There’s one that just says “put my desk back!” – I honestly have no idea where the desk was or why, but I can infer it was important. I mean… exclamation point!
Point is, when I ask “what has happened recently?” and my concept of time betrays me, I have answers. When I ask “what do I need to actively be working on?” and “what do I have to look forward to?”, I have answers. And as the rest of the world shifts beneath us, the value of that can’t be discounted.
I’m five hundred posts into this blogging thing – insert cheering here – and it’s only just occurred to me that alongside talking about artists, I can post about individual songs! I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me earlier, given the patchwork composition of my playlists, but it has now and here we are!
I’m Sorry Trojans is an excellent example. How did this wind up in my life? Unknown. Am I glad that it did? Hell yes! A sort of narrative nonfiction/literary analysis comedy duo about the Trojan Horse, complete with OSP-style info-packed art. Along the same vein of Greek mythology (in multiple ways – hisss), Plaything of the Gods is the story of Medusa, featuring the cutest head-snakes and Medusa’s own perspective, and not of Greek myth but similarly narrative/chaotic/quietly ethically ‘eh…???’ is Three Kobolds In A Trenchcoat! Once again, adorable – all of these animators seem to have had a delightful time. And as a fan of 9th Level Games’sKnuckle Sammich – also about Kobolds – this one is doubly entertaining for me. Their Kobolds would do that! Regardless of context, though, it’s both a journey and a bop.
My exposure to Sesame Street has largely been background radiation; a mention of Big Bird here, a mention of Cookie Monster there. The Elmocize DVD. So it never really held the nostalgia for me that it does for people who were raised on it.
…This is my new favorite Sesame Street anything.
They got the cast (read: Muppets) to do the WIRED Autocomplete Interview, featuring questions like “How does one get to Sesame Street?”, and the amount of comedy and consideration they packed into an eight minute video promises that those kids who do grow up with Sesame Street are having a good time. With absolutely zero prior emotions attached to this concept, I went back and watched it again! And then watched the second one! I liked the first interview more – Cookie Monster’s comedy especially – and if this was a cornerstone of your childhood, I expect you’ll enjoy them both!
