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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

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if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

If you are still in the GOP, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickle?”

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

This blog will pay for itself.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

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You are here: Home / Archives for Popular Culture / Gamer Dork

Gamer Dork

It Has Arrived

by John Cole|  August 3, 20239:54 am| 124 Comments

This post is in: Gamer Dork, Popular Culture

It Has Arrived

It Has ArrivedPost + Comments (124)

Rest In Peace, Klaus Teuber, the Original Settler of Catan

by Anne Laurie|  April 8, 20232:39 pm| 25 Comments

This post is in: Absent Friends, Gamer Dork

It is with profound sadness that we at CATAN Studio acknowledge the passing of Klaus Teuber, legendary game designer and creator of the beloved board game CATAN. Our hearts go out to Klaus' family during this incredibly difficult time. pic.twitter.com/gPPIVtleHJ

— CATAN – Official (@settlersofcatan) April 4, 2023

Dan Zak, at the Washington Post — “In a world of Monopoly and Risk, the maker of Catan settled for more” (unpaywalled gift link):

At some point early in the pandemic, I began to dream in hexagons. The hexagons were talismans of order and plenty. One depicted golden sheaves of wheat, another quarried gray ore, another the tufted wool of sheep. The outside world was chaos, collapse and deprivation, but the hexagonal pieces of a board game called Catan imposed a geometric peace on a doomy evening, if only for an hour at a time, with a glass of cab sauv and three covid-bubbled friends.

“I developed games to escape,” Catan’s creator, Klaus Teuber, told the New Yorker in 2014. “This was my own world I created.”…

I grew up in the 1990s, in a house without Nintendo, playing antique products of the Great Depression and the Cold War: Monopoly and Risk, with their 20th-century mandates of greed and confrontation. The exorbitance of Park Place, the alien sound of Kamchatka and Irkutsk — these were backward-feeling games that urged ravenous competition. The board game of my eventual adulthood, my pandemic, was being born around that time, but it would not become globally popular for several years.

In the ’90s, as I was fiendishly fortifying the Americas on a 1959 board of Risk, Teuber, a dental technician from a small village in central Germany, was descending into his basement to escape the doldrums of dentures and to craft a sort of utopia in the form of a board game. It would be a game of graceful simplicity, requiring both competition and cooperation, that would invalidate the zero-sum, total-war ethos of prior parlor pursuits. His invention was born of a childhood rapt by the beauty of an atlas.

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“I loved the old, musty-smelling, ragged maps that were rolled out as lessons,” Teuber wrote in his 2021 memoir. “I loved travelling in them in my imagination. Over mountain ranges in brown hues, the green valleys, blue rivers and lakes.” In elementary school, he began making maps of his own. He was fascinated by the Vikings, pictured their arrival in Iceland, envisioned the materials they would’ve needed to build a settlement. Teuber loved geography, then history, then chemistry. You need the essence of all three things, he would say later, to create a good board game.

In his basement he made hexagons of wool, ore, wood, brick and wheat that would make up an otherwise characterless, mystical island (“Catan” had no special meaning, he said). Players would stake out initial territory and use those natural resources to build roads, then settlements, then cities. Catan’s genius is its intrinsic leveling dynamics. On a board of finite resources, it was impossible to succeed without working with your opponents; academics made it a metaphor for nuclear proliferation and then climate change. Dice added luck and chance to a game of strategy and bartering, which kept all players involved even when it wasn’t their turn to roll…

The Settlers of Catan, as it was first called, debuted in Germany in 1995 and the United States in 1996. In Europe it won prizes and filled convention halls. Its success allowed Teuber to quit the dental field in 1998, though he never lost the qualities of a man whose initial tradecraft was small, precise implements for delicate parts of the body. Among hobbyists and gamers he was revered like a rock star, but he looked and acted and sounded like a man who tinkered with stuff in his basement. He didn’t have the swagger (or the command of English) to fully engage with American praise or interrogation. He was, at heart, a hobbyist.

Teuber credited a 2009 story in Wired magazine — headlined “Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre” — for helping to mainstream Catan in the United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly a fan. At one point the Green Bay Packers had a Catan obsession. During the first five months of 2020, as covid colonized Earth, sales of Catan climbed 144 percent, according to NPR.

I was one of the buyers. This sounds insane, but it was true in the darker months of 2020 and 2021: A game of Catan was a Brigadoon of cheer in an America gone rotten. Even now, a game of Catan at the end of a workweek — with all its slights, disappointments, imperfections and imbalances — settles a bit of the chaos. Or at least brings a gathering of friends together for more than repetitive gossip. It doesn’t require a cosplay fetish or a familiarity with specific lore. It takes skill, but not mastery; rookie players can win. It urges exuberant competition, not destruction. Players are in a race to accumulate points, and territorial disputes occur, but they are not truly at war…

Neil Genzlinger, for the NYTimes (also a gift link):

… “In the beginning, these games were just for me,” he told Forbes in 2016. “I always have stories in my head — I would read a book, and if I liked it, I wanted to experience it as a game.”

That was the origin of his first big success, a game called Barbarossa, which grew out of his admiration for the “Riddle-Master” trilogy, fantasy books written in the 1970s by Patricia A. McKillip.

“I was sorry to see it come to an end,” he told The New Yorker in 2014, “so I tried to experience this novel in a game.”

In 1988 that game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in Germany, considered the most prestigious award in the board game world, Germany being particularly enthusiastic about board games. He won that award twice more, in 1990 (for Hoity Toity) and in 1991 (for Wacky Wacky West), before scoring his biggest success with what was known in German as Die Siedler von Catan…

Mr. Teuber told Wired in 2009 that creating Catan felt different than his other efforts.

“I felt like I was discovering something rather than inventing it,” he said.

The initial run of 5,000 sold out so quickly, according to Wired, that Mr. Teuber didn’t even have a first-edition version. Within a few years he was able to give up that stressful day job and devote himself to games full time.

Catan has been widely hailed as being challenging yet intuitive — children play it — and has been credited with jump-starting a new era of board games, which moved beyond the staid confines of Scrabble and Monopoly. Instead of sitting idly while other players take their turns, as in Monopoly, Catan invites constant wheeling and dealing.

“The secret of Catan,” Mr. Teuber told Wired, “is that you have to bargain and sometimes whine.”

For Mr. Freeman, that is what elevates it above older games.

“I truly believe Klaus created the greatest board game of all time,” he said. “Both complicated and approachable, it combines skill, luck, strategy and my favorite aspect: the power of persuasion. You can’t talk your way into winning a game of chess, but you certainly can in Catan.”…

Last year, in an interview with Nikkei Asia, Mr. Teuber was asked why he thought Catan was so popular.

“There may have been a good balance between strategy and luck,” he said. “For example, roulette is only about luck, and chess is all about strategies. However, if you win in Catan, you think, ‘My strategy was good,’ and when you lose, you might think, ‘I was just out of luck.’ This is the same as life.”

Ian Bogost, at the Atlantic, grudgingly admits that it wasn’t bad when “We Settled for Catan”:

Board games are hostage situations. “C’mon, it’s fun!” your brother or so-called friend says, and then for the next two or eight hours you’re stuck. Rules are read, cardboard chits are distributed, and rounds of wit or chance (or both) transpire. But it is fun, because the joy of gaming first involves accepting arbitrary rules just to feel the sensation of having embraced them.

And yet, board games are terrible. Candy Land is stupid, Scrabble takes too long, Risk is how you learn your dad is an asshole, and Monopoly—let us not speak of Monopoly. Better, nerdier options have long existed (Diplomacy, Vector, Gettysburg—not to mention chess, go, backgammon), but the same few products dominated American rugs and tabletops for much of the 20th century, and thus defined board-gaming as a mainstream activity…

Why did Catan become so popular? Not because the game is good. Look, Catan is fine, but both connoisseurs and amateurs tend to tolerate it more than love it. That’s the game’s secret: Teuber fell upon a design that every kind of player—geeks, kids, your mother—could stomach playing.

Reading about how a game plays is almost as awful as listening to someone explain how to play it, but here we go: Catan’s board is made up of hex tiles representing different land types (forest, field, pasture, etc.). Each bears a number, and the tiles are laid out differently for each game. On every turn, a player rolls two six-sided dice, and the corresponding land tile gives resources to the players with settlements surrounding it. (Unless a robber token has been placed there; rolling a seven allows the player to move the robber.) The player can then trade resources and build roads, settlements, or cities to expand.

That wasn’t too bad, actually! And it’s one reason Catan took off: It is not horrifyingly oppressive to teach or learn. A round can be played in an hour or two, which helps Catan avoid the common board-game fate of interruption and abandonment. If board games are prisons, then the best ones offer mild sentences.

Board-game aficionados—the kind who would insist I call their passion “tabletop gaming”—tend to find Catan insufficiently strategic. The use of dice gives luck a strong role in victory, and purists prefer to win by reason. But luck also prevents an experienced player from dominating novices, and the dice provide a familiar board-game ritual of rolling to start your turn. Their six-sidedness also distanced Catan from subcultural artifacts, such as Dungeons & Dragons: These are normal dice, the sort used for respectable activities such as Yahtzee and craps.

Catan is a social game, too. Trading resources with other players can mean the difference between winning and losing. It gives players something to do when they’re waiting for their turn, and encourages them to pay attention to what’s happening rather than zone out because, ugh, board game. But unlike, say, Cards Against Humanity or Pictionary, the game’s social dimension is constrained: You’re not expected to be creative or performative, merely to persuade others to swap bricks or wool. That makes Catan less embarrassing for misanthropes like me, and also saves it from the isolation of a game like Scrabble, which is played mostly in your head…

This is Klaus Teuber’s great accomplishment, and I mean that earnestly. One needs a deep supply of both skill and luck to make a game that lots of people love. But creating a game that will be universally indulged is much harder still. Producing something that brings so much modest pleasure is a worthy goal. Too many people want to change the world; too few yearn to roam its pastures.

Rest In Peace, Klaus Teuber, the Original Settler of CatanPost + Comments (25)

Friday Night Cat Update

by Major Major Major Major|  April 1, 20231:45 am| 30 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

My parents are cleaning out a storage unit so we got to take some furniture from it. We got a nice leather armchair and a matching ottoman, and we’re going to get a couch later too. The armchair is great. I’m working on a reading/writing nook in the office, and it’s perfect for it.

No sooner had I gotten it set up, when…

Friday Night Cat Update 1
Friday Night Cat Update

I’m ambivalent about the protector I put on… it’s ugly, but I can shore up the fit, which should help. More importantly it will keep the chair from getting ruined in a month. But now I never get to see most of the leather… choices, choices.

Open thread! I’m playing Return to Monkey Island, which is really fun and also good homework for the adventure game I’m working on. What are you all up to?

Friday Night Cat UpdatePost + Comments (30)

What The Kids Are Reading

by Major Major Major Major|  January 14, 20235:00 pm| 105 Comments

This post is in: Books, Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Recommended Reading

‘Tis the season for retrospectives. Since I don’t read or watch that much stuff the year it comes out, my annual lists are always about what I consumed during the previous year, regardless of when it was made. Last year I wrote about John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. This year I have a little more to say. I’ll write my Best Books post later (Le Guin, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Gene Wolfe, this time around); right now I want to talk about the other books.

In 2022, I tried to catch up on some popular contemporary fantasy, and I was sorely disappointed. I hope I simply ran into Sturgeon’s Law—ninety percent of everything is crap–but I suspect I was also dipping into some pretty craptastic wells. Recent trends are… not promising. I took a number of recommendations from the r/fantasy subreddit. It’s Reddit, so a lot of the users either are or act like fourteen-year-olds, but I wanted to see what the youths were up to. It turns out they’re up to two things: loving Brandon Sanderson, and reading self-published anime clones.

Sanderson is fine. I like the writing podcast he spent many years contributing to. His books are, whatever, not to my taste, but I get it. Characters a bit shallow, plots a bit paint-by-numbers, narration a bit overlong on exposition, everything rather unsexy (befitting his devout Mormonism), but he builds great worlds, and is loved in particular for his intricate magic systems. He is one of the best-selling fantasy authors of the modern era. He’s also insanely prolific–during the pandemic he woke up one morning and found he’d accidentally written four extra novels. Good for him! But his success has led publishers to release a lot of high-concept mimicry–it’s like Brandon Sanderson but xyz–which, unsurprisingly, is not to my taste.

I was especially disappointed with Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. I’d seen its (excellent) cover on shelves for a few years and finally decided to read it. I was sort of excited. I adore Bennett’s City of Stairs, which I’d recommend if you’re in the mood for a good diplomatic spy thriller. But–nope. This book was not for me. The huge Brandon Sanderson blurb on the jacket should have been hint enough. Intricate magic system? Check. Decent action? Check. Bloodless romance… check… twisty-yet-predictable plot… you guessed it. Check.

On to the next trend: self-published anime clones. Let me begin by saying that I am not trying to crap on self-published authors, who have written some excellent books and who we have a number of among our readership. No, this is about a narrow slice of contemporary fantasy, largely written by people who got their start with fanfiction. And it’s an interesting phenomenon.

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There are two major subgenres here, isekai and LitRPG, which are not entirely new ideas, though in this context they share an important attribute: they are not, at a fundamental level, inspired by books, but rather by anime and video games. Add in the tendency for these authors to not use developmental editors, and you get some unusual (or all-too-typical) stories. One fun thing about them is the palpable, insane enthusiasm level of the authors–they love writing these things, and it shows. That’s great! A lot of trad-pub authors don’t manage this. But they can also get swept away by their own, ah, brilliance. Less great. Ultimately, though, what I take issue with is the lack of… I hesitate to say literary merit, barf… let’s just talk about the specific subgenres.

Isekai. Portal fantasy. Not a new idea. A person is displaced from their reality–usually our own–and ends up in a fantasy or science-fiction land. But these particular books are inspired by anime, usually episodic anime, and often originally written as web serials. This works well enough with an episodic structure, if you’re into that, but collected into a ‘novel’, it… does not. Especially when authors don’t try to fix the pacing and arc issues when it’s time to bundle it up for Kindle Direct. The novel is a form, with conventions and expectations, and these often just don’t engage with that.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good serial. I’ve been reading Pale this year, a dark urban fantasy story inspired by “magical girl” shōjo anime (e.g. Sailor Moon; Puella Magi Madoka Magica). I’ll pick it up before bed sometimes. But it’s long, and it’s a serial, and it can be a grind, just a constant, episodic ratchet. I wish it felt like a series of novels, but it doesn’t. It feels like a series of cliffhangers. Still, I want to see how it ends.

LitRPG shares many of these flaws. These are stories like Ready Player One and Sword Art Online–a character is in a video game, engages with video game dynamics, gains power in video game ways, does video game stuff. Needless to say there is a lot of Japanese material inspiring these works. Video games usually take the form of episodic loops, so it’s no surprise to find that structure here. There’s a power progression, at least, which shares a lot with traditional hero’s journey stories, but these are mostly still serials with a fanfiction vibe. They also often feel like adolescent male power fantasies, which is hardly new in fantasy, but at a certain point, to quote Stephen King, everything starts to taste like beans.

So yeah. That’s what the kids are up to, I guess. I think I’ll go back to being an old fart who reads classics that have withstood the test of time, and leave the anime and video game stories for when I watch anime and play video games.

They say to end blog posts with a prompt, so: what disappointed you last year? Haha.

What The Kids Are ReadingPost + Comments (105)

Late Night Open Thread: All the World’s A MMOG MMRWG

by Anne Laurie|  September 13, 20221:55 am| 77 Comments

This post is in: Gamer Dork, Open Threads, War in Ukraine

Ukraine's ambassador to Japan is really something else pic.twitter.com/7h6aAOUUlv

— Oryx (@oryxspioenkop) August 31, 2022

MMRLG = Massive Multiplayer Real-World Game

Russians now urgently looking for that February save game file they had there somewhere

— Wedge Fellales (@Vuukowski) September 10, 2022

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I do not think even system restore would help…
Clean install may be the only option if you know what I mean ??

— Wojciech Pilecki (@pileckiwojciech) September 10, 2022

pic.twitter.com/eweu8sHz1Y

— volo ?????????????? (@volostrom) September 10, 2022

I can't stop laughing at the fact that one day before the launch of the most successful Ukrainian counter offensive since the battle for Kyiv Tucker Carlson did a segment talking about how Russia is winning and its inevitable that Ukraine loses the war pic.twitter.com/OR3MjnO7KH

— Dylan Burns ?????????????? (@DylanBurns1776) September 9, 2022

Russia must stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. They're only prolonging the conflict.

— Bucktron ?? he/him (@bucktron2021) September 10, 2022

I hope the war ends with a diplomatic settlement as soon as possible with as little loss of life and human suffering as possible and i call upon the Russians to surrender immediately to make that happen

— your himbo boyfriend (@swolecialism) September 10, 2022

Serendipitous global benefit:

Use of Wagner Group in Ukraine is wearing down Russian mercenary force

https://t.co/dgqToT55s9

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) September 12, 2022

To all you guys coping hard out there rest assured that, if he were in Ukraine, Erik Prince would be on your side. Especially if you offered 10 kilos hidden in a shipment of purity rings and an expense-paid weekend in Macau. https://t.co/mbMBzoHmdQ

— zeddy (@Zeddary) September 12, 2022

Late Night Open Thread: All the World’s A <del>MMOG</del> MMRWGPost + Comments (77)

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Happy Nice Things

by Anne Laurie|  September 10, 20227:54 am| 89 Comments

This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, Gamer Dork, Healthcare, Open Threads, Science & Technology

The Biden-Harris Administration wishes you and your loved ones a happy and prosperous Mid-Autumn Festival. pic.twitter.com/YB5DB5tDEP

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 9, 2022


(Mid-Autumn / Moon Festival — as I understand it, roughly analogous today to Thanksgiving in America)

The James Webb Space Telescope recently captured this image of Wolf-Rayet 140 ?

The six spikes of light are instrument artifacts caused by diffraction.

The concentric rings around the star, however, are really there in space. Cosmic dust, spanning 1.4 trillion kilometers. pic.twitter.com/k30bx0g6Tt

— StarTalk (@StarTalkRadio) September 7, 2022

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Encouraging new data on a malaria vaccine from Oxford University bodes well for global effort to combat the mosquito-borne disease that kills a child every minute, its makers said on Wednesday. https://t.co/fcJ7hV5XgX

— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) September 8, 2022

This is pretty big news! https://t.co/ao993O2NK2

— Stephen McDonell (@StephenMcDonell) September 8, 2022

… It has taken more than a century to develop effective vaccines as the malaria parasite, which is spread by mosquitoes, is spectacularly complex and elusive. It is a constantly moving target, shifting forms inside the body, which make it hard to immunise against.

Last year, the World Health Organization gave the historic go-ahead for the first vaccine – developed by pharmaceutical giant GSK – to be used in Africa.

However, the Oxford team claim their approach is more effective and can be manufactured on a far greater scale.

Trial results from 409 children in Nanoro, Burkina Faso, have been published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases. It shows three initial doses followed by a booster a year later gives up to 80% protection…

The team will start the process of getting their vaccine approved in the next few weeks, but a final decision will hinge on the results of a larger trial of 4,800 children due before the end of the year.

The world’s largest vaccine manufacturer – the Serum Institute of India – is already lined up to make more than 100 million doses a year.

Prof Hill said the vaccine – called R21 – could be made for “a few dollars” and “we really could be looking at a very substantial reduction in that horrendous burden of malaria”.

He added: “We hope that this will be deployed and available and saving lives, certainly by the end of next year.”

Malaria has been one of the biggest scourges on humanity for millennia and mostly kills babies and infants. The disease still kills more than 400,000 people a year even after dramatic progress with bed nets, insecticides and drugs…

Gareth Jenkins, from the charity Malaria No More UK said: “Today’s R21 vaccine results from Oxford’s renowned Jenner Institute are another encouraging signal that, with the right support, the world could end child deaths from malaria in our lifetimes.”

Much more detail at the link.

Please note that in retweeting this piece of good news I am not implying that we should become complacent or take anything for granted or stay home in November or anything else that people who lecture anyone who posts good news want to lecture me about. I'm just happy. https://t.co/afHYfltIvX

— Jerry 🍨 (@js_edit) September 9, 2022

This is a fun D&D thread to eavesdrop on (trigger warnings: mild disrepect towards public figures, cartoonish violence against Piers Morgan)…

Your stats:

Cute: 16
Combat: 12
Smarts: 14
Stealth: 14

These are the numbers you must roll at or under to pass an unmodified skill check. Modifications may make the rolls easier or harder.

You also have 10 HP. If you get to 0, you die. https://t.co/lofdAIH2sm

— Starfish In Charge Of WB Tax Evasion Dept. (@IRHotTakes) September 9, 2022

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Happy Nice ThingsPost + Comments (89)

Couch Potato

by Major Major Major Major|  April 24, 202212:12 am| 31 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

…no, the headline isn’t about me, even if I’ve been a bit of a couch potato lately. Get a load of this guy:

No real updates here at chez Major. Just been playing a lot of Elden Ring. I hadn’t played a From Software game before, mostly because I didn’t like the aesthetic, and I still don’t, but boy is the actual gameplay a real blast. It’s making me wish Breath of the Wild 2 would come out already.

Oh, and I’m doing the latest “expedition” in No Man’s sky. Super fun! I wish there were a few more player bases, though. There were a bunch on the first planet—I found one giving away free copper with big refiners you could use—but people aren’t settling down much elsewhere so far.

What’s been on all your TVs lately?

Couch PotatoPost + Comments (31)

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