Wikipedia Is… Actually Well-Organized!

“Don’t use Wikipedia as a source,” the teachers said, which may well have been my first introduction to the platform’s existence. Since then, it’s become a sort of shadow monolith – a baseline for perusing matters on which I know nothing or need very specific details formatted coherently, without extending much thought beyond the individual pages or the search function. It’s served me well! And, rather abruptly, I’ve realized how impressive that is.

In the last couple months, I’ve been doodling plants from different countries, coupling geography practice with gorgeous flowers and some really fascinating ecology – like the fact that there’s a parasitic, ant-pollinated plant growing around the Mediterranean. I’d never have found that out otherwise! It’s a funky lookin’ thing, too. This is the point in my life when I discovered the Categories feature.

Categories have saved this art-science pursuit so many times over, my friends. “Flora of Tunisia” on a search engine? Informational roulette. “Flora of Tunisia” on Wikipedia? An organized list of both species that qualify and adjacent topics, to do with the Mediterranean in general. Some countries have a subset for endemic plants specifically! More importantly, the superset “Flora By Country” guarantees this same lack of headache in the future.

What this is is an exceptionally niche use of a much broader application, I know. And isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?

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Pride Knights

Friends, if you’d like pride dragons, pride swords, or pride playing cards, I highly recommend you check out Pride Knights. Their dragon and sword pins currently feature eleven different flags, and they’re working on another! And their playing cards are gorgeous. Each suit has a different theme, and if you lay out cards 2-9 you’ll make a castle – hearts’ theme is animals, clubs’ is flowers, diamonds’ is gemstones, and spades’ is space!

Continuing with those themes, their 10’s are swords, their Aces are shields, and the face cards are the Pride Knights themselves, with dragons for the Jokers. And if you don’t want a deck of cards? You can buy the uncut sheets as wall art, or a large print of a specific knight!

There’s so much thought and care in every piece of their work that it genuinely lowers my stress levels just to look at it. The world is messy – and groups like Pride Knights give me hope.

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Faun

Once I’ve been studying a language for a while, I make a mission of finding music in that language that I really, really like – the kind you can happily listen to over and over again until you have all the lyrics memorized. For German especially, I hit the jackpot! The first song I listened to was one of Faun’s.

First off, the vibes are impeccable. I could not understand a word of this and be having a good time. On top of that, it’s like listening to a fairytale! In fact, sometimes it is. Rosenrot, for example, tells the story of Snow-White and Rose-Red. Non-fairytale story-songs, meanwhile, include Gold Und Seide, Feuer, and Federkleid! These three especially have some of my favorite uses of language as a craft, and Faun’s work collectively has become a crucial memory device for the particulars of German grammar. Vocab, too – there’s nothing like humming your way to the word you were looking for!

Alongside all of that, they also delve into Pagan traditions, like the Celtic festival Lugnasadh!

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Munchkin Loot Letter

With only 16 cards and some loot cubes, Munchkin Loot Letter is quick and compact, featuring familiar cards from Munchkin and mechanics reminiscent of Knuckle Sammich. It’s a simple “draw one, play one,” with a hand size of one, leaving you choosing between two cards each turn. Each card has a value and an effect – the goal is to be either the last player standing, or the one with the highest value card when the deck runs out!

Effects come in a few different flavors, mostly ways to eliminate other players depending on what’s in their hand. By far the most common card is the Potted Plant, a 1-value card that lets you make a guess at what someone else is holding. If you’re right, they’re out! (You cannot, however, guess Potted Plant.) The higher value cards are deliberately inconvenient, meanwhile, like the Turbonium Dragon which must be discarded if you ever have the Net Troll or Dread Gazebo in hand. For a tiny, tiny deck, it’s impressively well-balanced! You’re meant to play multiple rounds, best-of fashion, with the loot cubes to keep track of who’s winning.

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The Wide, Wild World of RPGs

I’ve spoken previously about Overly Sarcastic Productions and their gloriously chaotic educational material, and today I want to specifically recommend Detail Diatribe: TTRPGs That Aren’t D&D (And Why They Slap) The Detail Diatribe series are long-form presentations digging into the real meat of a subject, and in this case it’s nearly two hours of RPG systems, their stories and mechanics! It’s a fascinating variety and you may hear about some of the particulars from me later, once I’ve had a chance to try them.

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Thud!

I would loosely describe Thud as asymmetric chess – an all-strategy game for two players, but in which each player is operating off of different rules. It’s based on a battle in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld featuring a smaller force of larger opponents, and a larger force of smaller ones.

Due to sheer size, the Trolls (the larger characters) both move more slowly and need only land adjacent to a Dwarf to capture it. Dwarves, on the other hand, zip about the map much like chess’s queens – but they can only capture if enough of them have lined up to fling the front Dwarf into the nearest opponent. Who must be directly in line with them. It’s rather challenging.

To the rules’ credit, they warn you that the Trolls are much easier to play, and the Dwarves take some getting used to. Also to their credit, the game is played in two rounds, so each player gets to play both sides – overall victory is scored not so much by who won, but by who lost less. If you fielded the Trolls’ jump-‘n-thump and their shove propulsion – their version of flinging a friend – enough to actually capture any of them, you’re doing pretty well. Presumably, it’s possible with enough practice for the Dwarves to present a serious challenge.

Ultimately, we decided this game wasn’t for us, and I hope our copy finds someone who cherishes it and enjoys the puzzle it presents.

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Welcome to Gallery 200!

Gallery 200 is an art gallery in West Chicago that’s run by artists, for artists, featuring the work of local creators in all sorts of mediums! Paint, markers, felt, jewelry, dishware… to paraphrase, “you can walk through three times and always find something new.”

My experience so far has specifically been at the exhibit openings, an evening reception with snack food, several of the artists, and, this month, live music! The gallery is usually open on afternoons, Wednesday through Sunday, and I’ve just learned they offer workshops as well! It’s such a magical little corner of the world, truly, full of pretty things and lovely people.

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Show Us Your Wild Side

I have to tell you, looking up whether I’d already blogged this one was substantially more difficult than I expected – apparently there’s a lot of posts with “wild” and “side” in some combination or another! Today, however, I’m specifically talking about Wild Side, a dice game that actually takes a decent amount of precision!

Rather than the behavior of the players, “Wild Side” refers to the “Wild” side of the dice, which is a crucial part of gameplay. This is, in essence, a speed matching game – all players roll at the same time, and if any players match both a Wild side and something else, the first to slap the card in the middle steals a die from the other. Multiplayer is uncomplicated by only scoring one match per roll, no matter how many are possible – excepting multiple matches with the same person – and all-Wild matches with anything, while your last die has to match with everyone. More overarchingly important, however, is that the rolling is targeted: you have a designated square of felt your dice have to land on, or you can’t benefit this turn! You can match – that is, other people can match with you – but you can’t cash in your match with anyone else. Additionally, false positives are penalized, with the gun-jumper sacrificing a die to the middle. The next person to actually match gets that die too!

All of this comes together to form a game that’s surprisingly difficult, balancing precision, speed, and perception in the struggle to steal your neighbors’ dice. As one does. The game ends when someone runs out of dice to lose, and whoever has the most wins!

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Hispanic Heritage Fest at the Zoo

Yesterday played host to Brookfield Zoo’s Hispanic Heritage Fest, an absolute blast of an event I hope they bring back in future years! Events we didn’t get to included the bilingual story times and games, and… that’s about it! There was enough in the schedule that we didn’t make it to every single item in a given category, and enough room in the schedule to hit a little bit of everything.

Events we did get to included multiple Zoo Chats featuring thematically appropriate animals, like Andean condors, llamas, and Eastern screech owls; various dance performances; and the general wandering a zoo entails, with special signage listing which Spanish-speaking countries each species heralds from! Say that five times fast. There were also community groups and vendors set up for a few hours in the East Mall, and special menu items at the nearest food sources. All in all, a lively, educational time!

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Out of Office

My friends, I am deep down the rabbit hole of garden planning and recipe research and can’t bring myself to write an in-depth post this week. Instead I will offer you a handful of the meals we’ve enjoyed: a watermelon, mint, and feta salad which needs no real recipe; a spinach mint dip, with equal parts plain yogurt and spinach and smaller parts dried mint and walnuts; and Kulajda, a Czech mushroom soup we had with poached eggs. The first two especially have been helping with our mint problem!

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