4/5/21
TLDR Update: Poll worker training Listening: Classical Music on Spotify Playing: Brindlewood Bay ends and Race for the Galaxy on Boardgame Arena Reading: Slow Horses by Mick Herron Watching: Godzilla vs. Kong on HBO Max End Notes: You can contact me at jadettman@gmail.com
THE UPDATE Poll worker (re-)training this week. By the time you receive this, I will have completed the Zoom training and be prepping for the election on Tuesday. Which really just means getting a good night sleep and making sure that I've got a clean mask to wear.
My polling location is five blocks from our house at an elementary school, so I'll be walking there just before 6am to get the location ready for voters. In the last election, I was responsible for helping voters insert their ballots into the correct machine, because we were covering two different precincts, and making sure they inserted their ballots correctly. There are only a few wrong ways to put a ballot into the machine but folks still get uncertain, so it's good to have someone there to help them.
LISTENING I've got an ear-worm problem. I get catchy music stuck in my head, especially if it is new to me, and, often, that leads to insomnia. I don't seek out new music to listen to as rule. Most of the music I listen to is from my college days (something my wife regularly makes fun of me for). It's all stuff like: Barenaked Ladies, Billy Joel, Dave Matthews Band, Sting, The Police, XTC, etc. It's so familiar to me, that it doesn't get stuck in my head. Nice.
Lately, I've been listening to a playlist on Spotify when writing or working on my laptop. The playlist is called Classical Music for Studying. I haven't gotten very deep into the list (because it's 5 1/2 hours long and I work in bursts) but so far it is all instrumental and lovely.
PLAYING We got back to our Brindlewood Bay game on Saturday and now we're going to move on to something else because BB didn't really work for us. The setting was good but the mechanics didn't feel right for our procedural-loving brains. Now I'm thinking about a game that does both for us.
That was short, so I'm going to talk about online boardgames now.
Britt and I signed up for Boardgame Arena last year, at the start of the pandemic, and have been running twice monthly online game nights. Get friends together on Zoom and goof off with some games for a couple hours. It's been a good way to keep us social.
Since signing up, BGA has become a daily fixture in my life. Tired: BGA. Bored: BGA. I've got a group of folks playing some good turn-based games over the course of a week or so, which keeps me engaged and also lets us play some longer games without dedicating four hours to a Zoom call. And I've been playing Race for the Galaxy with "randos." Just pick-up games with folks from all of the world who I don't know.
Race for the Galaxy is a single-deck card game in which you get a hand of cards and try to build a galactic empire before your opponent does. It's a great game with lots of replayability and on BGA you can often play a game in about 5 minutes, start to finish (longer if you're just starting out, of course).
https://www.riograndegames.com/games/race-for-the-galaxy/ https://boardgamearena.com
READING Slow Horses was recommended on one of the podcasts I listen to (Ken and Robin Talk about stuff) and it was a quick interesting read. The premise is that when MI5 spies screw up, but not badly enough to be fired outright, they are sent to Slough House, a crumbling dead-end place where they are given nothing but scut work in the hopes that they will quit. Generally, the spies of Slough House are unhappy and either unpleasant or damaged people trying to make the best of a bad situation. They got into the business for their country and they don't want to be quitters (and there is the ever-present hope that they will eventually be allowed out of exile).
The first third of Slow Horses was tough. It's all about the spies of Slough House, who they are and how they are damaged. In several cases, they are not sympathetic people, at least, not at first. But then! We start really moving into higher gear as events begin to entangle our spies and we find that, maybe a little, they more sympathetic than we were led to believe.
I don't want to spoil anything, of course, which is why I'm being vague. By the end of the book, though the stakes were lower than many spy thrillers I've read, the tension and action begin to crank up and it becomes hard to put down.
I'll be checking out the next book in the series.
Slow Horses (Deluxe Edition) - Soho Press
Bold Literary Voices | Award-Winning International Crime Fiction | Groundbreaking Young Adult Fiction
WATCHING Godzilla vs. Kong is not a good movie. I would characterize it as two hours of pretty nonsense and barely worth watching even if, like me, you enjoy a good kaiju punching movie. Though the fights between our titular kaiju were spectacular (in that they were spectacles) and they showed off the various strengths of our giant monsters in different environments, there was just so much wrong with this movie. It's like the studio watched a classic Godzilla movie and created a checklist (monster punching, evil corporation, massive city destruction, screaming crowds of fleeing people) and called it a day. Add to that a complete disregard for showing us the passage of time (either a teenager wanders off for several days/weeks/months without her father really noticing or giant corporations can mount multiple enormous projects involving hundreds of people and billions of dollars of equipment with a literal snap of a finger). It's just weird and disconcerting.
And, yes, I know that I'm watching a movie about a giant lizard and a giant ape getting into a fist fight. A certain amount of disbelief must be suspended. Which I'm happy to do to get said giant creatures but, also, I would very much like the human level stuff to add up. Otherwise why even have it in the movie?
END NOTES If you'd like to send me some feedback or discuss one of the topics I've talked about here (or even a different topic), email me at jadettman@gmail.com
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