February 2019 Reading

• 2/28/2019: The 18th-Century Craze for Gin - historyextra.com
• Brilliant, if only for the Puss-And-Mew machine that distributed gin.
• 2/27/2019: How to Play an RPG Anywhere, Any Time
• 2/26/2019: The Fairest Soul Brother in England - The Baffler, Andrew Marzoni
• All about Clapton and building on a racist rant during his career."His technical precision is obvious, but so is Kenny G’s"
• 2/25/2019: 
• 2/24/2019: Keyforge Match #1: Lewis v. Ben - Youtube [28:17]
• It's funny how many corrections they had to list at the bottom.  I can already see some things Eryn and I were doing slightly wrong.
• 2/24/2019: Super Tutorial 5000: Keyforge - youtube [15:24]
• There are a few more matches to watch - I think part of learning the game is watching enough rounds to pick up the finer points like chains and the archive (which was important in the game I played as it earned me one of my two keys).
• 2/23/2019: What Is The Yahweh Cult? A Sordid Tale Of Slavery, Torture, Sodomy And Murder Among Farmers In Nebraska - Benjamin H. Smith, Oxygen.com
• Christian Identity related.
• 2/22/2019: Ong's Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real
• People don't like it when you take away their magic.
• “Not everybody can function with a level of elasticity in their reality,” said Matheny.
• 2/21/2019: How 'The Vampire Clan' Went From Teen Blood Rituals To Killing Parents - Benjamin H. Smith, Oxygen.com
• I like the hanging upside down photo.
• 2/20/2019: The Rising Value of APIs: How APIs Can Transform Your Business by Mulesoft

• whoa....if those stats are right, way more companies use APIs than I expected
• 2/19/2019: Practical Time Series Analysis: Prediction with Statistics and Machine Learning by Aileen Nielsen - Chapter 2, "Storing Temporal Data"
• 2/18/2019: Practical Time Series Analysis: Prediction with Statistics and Machine Learning by Aileen Nielsen - Chapter 1, "Time Series: A History and a Future Forecast"
• 2/17/2019:  How the US has hidden its empire - The Guardian, Daniel Immerwahr
  • I read this right before career day for the middle schoolers.  They had a big map of the US they'd been discussing in the room I was in, so this was an interesting read right before encountering that.  There was also a kings and queens of England poster which, on a career day where I'm explaining I didn't start in tech but in Tudor/Stuart history, was amusing.
  • "The reason is not hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese empire to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars, a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time."
  • "At various times, the inhabitants of the US empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen."
• 2/16/2019: Top 10 (the full first series) by Alan Moore, Gene Ha and Zander Cannon  [issues 1-12]
• I enjoyed it.  A lot little hidden items like The Hamburgler, Mary Poppins, the Hall of Justice (as the precinct hall) tucked away even for someone who wasn't paying particular attention.  The overall storyline wasn't cohesive (in the sense that Watchmen was), but basically Hill Street Blues meets a town full of super heroes.
• 2/15/2019: Exercises for Programmers: 57 Challenges to Develop Your Coding Skills by Brian P. Hogan - The Pragmatic Programmers.  Chapter 2, "Input, Processing, and Output"
• 2/14/2019: The Posters That Warned Against “the Horrors of a World With Women’s Rights” - Kyle shared this one with me; a good look at the paranoia that used to exist (and still does in many ways).
• 2/13/2019: Tell us: what books are the most shocking or disturbing? - The Guardian
  • The one I might want to read is Colson Whitehead - Zone One
  • hmmm....and Brian Aldiss' Hothouse.
• 2/13/2019:  How to Drink Scotch, According to a Guy Who Does It for a Living - Kirk Miller for Realclearlife.com.  I don't think I can follow the option for making a cocktail out of my scotch.  That sounds like a waste of scotch...but the rest is valid:
  • Use a glencairn glass (I have some) and then....
  • 1. room temp
  • 2. don't swirl
  • 3. sniff the front then top while keeping your mouth open
  • 4. toast (“Slàinte mhath,” pronounced SLAN-tchih-vah) and a sip
  • 5. sip again to identify secondary flavors
• 2/13/2019: The Forgotten Story of the American Troops Who Got Caught Up in the Russian Civil War - Erick Trickey at Smithsonian.com
• Alt and some cool photos: http://ss.sites.mtu.edu/mhugl/2016/10/14/detroits-own-polar-bears-in-northern-russia/
• The U.S. soldiers in northern Russia, the U.S. Army’s 339th regiment, were chosen for the deployment because they were mostly from Michigan, so military commanders figured they could handle the war zone’s extreme cold. Their training in England included a lesson from Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton on surviving below-zero conditions. Landing in Archangel, just below the Arctic Circle, in September 1918, they nicknamed themselves the Polar Bear Expedition.
• 2/13/2019: Six Strategies To Maintain Employee Motivation - Rebecca Skilbeck, Forbes.com  I'm in a business focus.  Probably the 57 exercises swinging part of my brain over to something non-technical.
  • 1. Set Goals to create meaning - which reminds me, I need to set mine for my team.  She talks line of sight.  That's difficult when there are reorgs going on - but it's easier with a single focus to the product (and how it ties into business value).
  • 2. Celebrate the milestones - and accomplishments.  I did this today.  Trying to make it part of the retros, among other things. I like her idea of setting mini-milestones in order to feel like there's progress and reason to celebrate.  For us, that might be our first POC customer.  Crap, that's the roadmap that's on my list to create.  It needs to mark those milestones.
  • 3. Provide Meaningful Feedback: tie it to benefits to the company/teams (ah, the GraphQL feedback I gave today tied it to multiple teams...good me?).  LOL, I like the five positive to one negative "rule".
  • 4. Empower Problem Solving and Learning
  • 5. Follow thorugh on promises - trust.  There's a psychological contract.
  • 6. Experiment and learn - iterate
• 2/13/2019:  Want to reinvent your career at midlife? Stop and read this first - Paul Keegan, theladders.com.  Some straightforward and commonsense advice I've heard before.
• keep a long hand journal
• get constant feedback
• practice self-acceptance (he doesn't say it, but avoid impostor syndrome)
• plan your reinvention (and, per my experience, iterate and determine how to maintain focus even in the distracting/depressing cycles).
• bring it outside yourself (to the world) and make a network
• go gradual
• don't get stuck looking toward the past
• if you deliver value, someone will pay you for that value
• it takes six to twelve months
• 2/12/2019: My Life at 47 Is Back to What It Was Like at 27: Post-divorce, I’ve returned to my old ways
• Sort of depressing, although I'm not so sure it's supposed to be.  Maybe I think it's worse because I do have a kid, and going back to some stage before that seems....strange.  And splitting my house payment into two smaller houses that are more expensive is depressing.  And splitting my income into two smaller incomes so no one can really do anything fun is depressing.  And not having spare cash to just throw at my kid in college is depressing.  And splitting retirement funds so that no one has quite enough is depressing.  Depressing.  Her dating woes make me sad, and I have friends who have divorced and found significant others through dating apps and in the old fashioned way (work/church/bar).  It sounds awful.  Personally, I picture myself getting on my bicycle and living in tents and on my bike for years and meeting someone (if I was divorced) who just sort of biked past me, and maybe wanted to hook up, but they're all sweaty, and gross...ok
• 2/11/2019: The Japanese tradition of raising and eating wasps on Splendid Table, courtesy of Kyle.  Some cool pictures and, as Kyle says, the sound on the podcast makes it amusing.
• When Did Ramen Come to Japan? - also from Kyle stating Ramen basically isn't that old, which I knew.  I again recommend ONE MAN’S MISSION TO BRING BETTER RAMEN TO THE INCARCERATED as some good reading.
• You can order Mama Pat's noodles on Amazon...bit spendy compared to my usual Ramen bulk purchases from United Noodles, but might be worth trying...hmm...good cause too.
• Vietnamese Blood Soup - Kyle seems to be on a food binge today.
• 2/10/2019: Exercises for Programmers: 57 Challenges to Develop Your Coding Skills by Brian P. Hogan - The Pragmatic Programmers.  Chapter 1, "Turning Problems Into Code"
• 2/10/2019: Salad Fingers: Glass Brother (14:00) - so weird.  Poor little flesh boy.
• 2/10/2019: What the Meat Paradox Reveals About Moral Decision Making - BBC
• You can see this if you take a break from drinking - you'll have a few friends upset because they think not drinking says something about their drinking.  It doesn't.  But they're in the same headspace as the meat paradox (drinking comes with costs/tradeoffs, even if only financial).  And, to go to the extreme end of this, it applies to turning horrible acts into a process - almost gamifying them in terms of how many and how efficient instead of human terms.  You can figure out what historical political and business cultures that created without much effort. And...you can apply it to political thought at the moment.  It's pretty much one of the underpinnings of human culture across the board once you start watching for signs.
• 2/10/2019: Cthulhu goes post-apocalyptic in Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones
• Added it to my steam wish list, although I should really finish Bards Tale first (and figure out Scythe).  Too much online entertainment in this day and age.  But this looks fun, old school RPG style which I grew up on.
• I would not have guessed Can Oral is pronounced Jon Rahl.
• Kind of cool it has an ending process like Nier Automata where the game can end early based on a decision.
• 2/10/2019: The Paradox of the Bottle Imp - Boing Boing
• Take a math / ethics idea and turn it into a story.  Bought myself an e-copy to read (versus the library because I like having a few story books in my Kindle for airplane/emergencies).
• 2/10/2019: How your stolen personal data is sent to the dark web, and what hackers can do with it - South China Morning Post
• Nothing specifically new, but the idea that 6.5 billion accounts (roughly) have been hacked means there's a bulk of data there that can be stitched together (ML wise) to make some assumptions about account specifics.  Nasty.
• 2/9/2019:  Found: Snakes That Hunt in Packs: Cuban boas coordinate their strikes from cave ceilings. - Kyle pointed me at this article on Atlas Obscura.  The linked videos and articles are pretty amusing.
• Animal and Behavior Cognition Journal paper - includes a hand drawn map that would make for an amusing D&D experience.
• Science Alert article with some video of snakes catching bats and the iguana escaping (non pack snakes, though they look like it) in a Beeb documentary.
• 2/8/2019: The GetAbstract summary of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
• 2/7/2019: New Exhibition Highlights Story of the Richest Man Who Ever Lived: Read about Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, who once disrupted Egypt’s economy just by passing through
• "Imagine as much gold as you think a human being could possess and double it"
• 2/7/2019: How Do You Tell A Story With Data Visualization?
• Chronological with callouts/highlights.  High level with supporting data.  Not a very in depth article.  But it made me want to spend some more time in Tableau.
• 2/6/2019: The Pendulum is Swinging Back to People. Act or Get Left Behind - a bit of a commercial as it's by SmartBear that has testing and review tools, but a good article.
• Monozukuri is a Japanese term which translates as “the way to make things and the way to develop human beings”.
• There are static analysis tools that can automate some aspects of code review, but they can’t answer contextual questions like:
• Does the code change match the requirements?
• Is the annotation clear so future team members can understand it?
• Is the team onboard with making this change?
• What resources could help the developer do this better?
• “How are we actively teaching each other?” and “How are we recognizing each other’s successes?”.
• 2/6/2019:  Down the Rabbit Hole I Go - Buzzfeed
• "How can you ever know, really know, that any piece of information you see on a screen is true? Some will find this disorienting, terrifying, paralyzing. Others will feel at home in it. "
• 2/5/2019: Flat Earth rising: meet the people casting aside 2,500 years of science – video - The Guardian
• 2/5/2019: Google Brain and DeepMind researchers release AI benchmark based on card game Hanabi
• https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.00506.pdf - full paper, look for Python framework
• https://github.com/deepmind/hanabi-learning-environment - the code
• cool little AI drawing game: https://iconary.allenai.org/
• 2/4/2019: Corporate Animals is one of the most ruthless dark comedies in ages
• 2/4/2019: Black Holes Are Strange, But White Holes Are Stranger
• "nothing can get inside them"
• Wikipedia entry on white holes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole
• 2/4/2019: Fragments of ancient Merlin story discovered in a library: The handwritten manuscript dates back to the 13th century
• I did not know there was an International Arthurian Society.  Should have guessed.  Apparently one of the board members or past presidents is out of U of WI, Madison.
• 2/4/2019: Astronomers Accidentally Discover a Hidden Galaxy Right Next Door
• "cosmological fossil"
• 2/3/2019: Mysterious fast radio bursts detected from deep space: The precise source of these signals is not known
• Delayed repetition "rules out" catastrophic events.  (does it?)
• Could Mysterious Cosmic Light Flashes Be Powering Alien Spacecraft?
• If it's powering spaceships by pushing them it wouldn't melt if it were "water cooled"....water cooled? Really?
• 2/2/2019: Cluster of ‘super-Earths’ found hiding in dust: Astronomers spotted gaps in the dusty discs around stars that can only be filled by planets.
• "This is fascinating because it is the first time that exoplanet statistics, which suggest that super-Earths and Neptunes are the most common type of planets, coincide with observations of protoplanetary discs," said Feng Long
• Needed a lot more meat to the article.

• 2/1/2019: Chapter 6: "GraphQL Clients" - Learning GraphQL: Declarative Data Fetching for Modern Web Apps by Eve Porcello and Alex Banks

Fantasy Flight Games

This was Saturday, Day 2, of my nine days away from work.  It's not succeeding entirely because, well, work.  But for the most part.  Eryn and I did low key today.  Cup of coffee while I cleaned up a back log of things I wanted to blog about so I don't forget them, admired the new book shelf which I added to the kitchen because two bookshelves weren't enough for all our games.  Three aren't either - I have all the big box games on the bedroom upper shelves - Axis and Allies, Sid Meier's Civilization, Shogun, Tide of Iron - the sort of things you'd need a shelf apiece for.  But the others are now set up book shelf style so they're readable for gamers, and the tops of the shelves free of piles of games and available for bicycling knickknacks and the like.  I also made it halfway through cleaning up Eryn's pile of stuff that sort of mounded over one of the shelves and her little table.  We were long overdue for a decluttering.  Which is less a decluttering and more of a new pile destined for Goodwill this week (and the foodshelf, and Best Buy recycling, ad naseum).

Yesterday, I thought Eryn could help me go find a copy of a card game Troy at work wants me to play.  I was pretty sure I'd get soundly trounced without knowing how to play and, while the online rules are good, they don't really give you a feel for play.  So I looked up stores where I could buy a copy of Call of Cthulhu and what pops up?  The Fantasy Flight Gaming Center in Roseville.  Plans changed. If I was going to buy the game, why not get it directly from the source of the game.  And the web noted there was a cafe as well.  Eryn and I rolled up there just prior to opening at 10:00 a.m. to check it out.

Why had we not been up there before.  The place is amazing.  The production facilities are across the lot and this is the gaming/retail/cafeteria space.  Way over there is the front door, Followed by lots of retail and a huge Warhammer display for the miniature folks.  Eryn thought all the layouts and miniatures were interesting.  And if you hate painting, there are painters on sight who seem to paint for a fee.  The games are FFG only.  There were hundreds of them for sale, including some I've only seen on Kickstarter.  Now I know who pays the "get 10 copies" level.


And there were large play areas to the left of us in that picture and a whole separate hall devoted to card tournaments.  There was a mini-Magic the Gathering tournament underway.  In the room we were in other players were having a board game tournament with a game I didn't know.  And those two are playing Dead of Winter, which you can watch on Tabletop, and which I've seen played at work twice by Jon and Dan and folks.  It's pretty neat looking, although it looks more fun with four as opposed to the two in this photo.


Those are the guys having the board game tournament on the far side of the room.  And those shelves...you can take a game and play it.  Take. A. Game. And. Play. It.  It's a damn game library.  We walked over there and drooled for 30 minutes before I pulled Call of Cthulhu off the shelf so we could give it a spin. It's not every game I've ever wanted to play, but it's more than enough.


It took us a while to figure out Call of Cthulhu until I realized it was like a cross of the iPad game and Magic the Gathering.  You use the cards to make "pools" of energy and then you can use them to play spells, events, artifacts, monsters, and investigators.  At least one color in the pool has to match.  And you have to spend the whole pool, so if your character costs one and you have five cards in your pool, you still spend all five.  You can add pools via means, but that's the gist of it.  The tentacle-y monsters are to mark which pools you've used and attract little girls to the table (not Eryn, an employee's daughter) who want to play with them like Fisher Price people.  Her dad said, "That's Cthulhu honey.  Remember him?"  At which she very excitedly nodded her head.  I like how Eryn's Tardis' (Tardi?) mirror the Cthulhus (Cthuli?) in this picture.



Anyway, take two factions, shuffle a deck with some neutrals, and use your pools to play your cards.  The factions differ in strengths and you try to win story cards from the center by investigating.  A point for strongest on the story.  A point for most investigation symbols on the story.  And extra point if you're uncontested because your opponent doesn't commit, you drive him/her insane, or you kill him/her.  The order of how you do those things and which stories are committed to is determined by the current player.  Two player game.  Lots and lots and lots of expansion cards (which we didn't play with).  FFG calls it a living card game and there are a variety of them, like Netrunner and Star Wars and Game of Thrones, in case you prefer scifi or fantasy to horror.

Check out the dork in the Reavers Steak House hoodie.  That was a present to myself recently.  I love it.  It's difficult to get it off of  me.  Eryn was amused that the barrista/cashier told me it was simultaneously cool and scary.  And note the trash bin behind me.  If you order food, or coffee, you can eat it at the table while you play.  Eryn actually had wings.  They were boneless and they included a fork without being asked (good planning), but no one blinked an eye about saucy wings and fries and grilled cheese heading out to the table.


We played a game and 2/3.  The first game was to figure out how it worked.  The second game was to take advantage off what we knew.  Eryn rocked the invulnerability of some big terror-inspiring monsters.  I had a mix of immunity from terror and damage dealing.  So the second round decks played against each other nicely.


She realized I was taking photos.  The place got more and more full as the day went on although there were usually some tables available and it appears you can reserve a table or two if you're a group.


We finished off our gaming (note more people) with a game of Cthulhu Fluxx.  Eryn destroyed me the first game.  And we both lost the second game until I dug through the 24 cards I'd just swapped and realized that one of them said "if you both lose, you win."


There were a lot of people playing Star Wars miniatures, a favorite of my nephew Ollie since we got him two sets for Christmas, so I include this photo for him.  The above-urinal advertising has a slightly different flavor at FFG than it does at a bar.

New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

I enjoyed New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, edited by Paula Guran.  She made a very good selection of stories. None of them was out and out bad, which is usually the case with Cthulhu fiction.

"Lesser Demons" by Norman Partridge wasn't the best, but I reference it because as a short story, it was much better than the whole The Strain trilogy that's coming out as a t.v. series soon and was analogous.  Evil stuff shows up, guy has to fight it.  Pretty straight forward.  Except for once it's not vampires or zombies, but Cthulu-esque monsters and infection.  I read The Strain series back in 2012 just before I got hurt.  The idea that it might have been the last thing I ever read still bothers me.  It read like it was set up for a tv show or movie.  Apparently I'm not the only one who thought so.

I liked Steve Duffy's "The Oram County Whoosit" which read like a western tall tale.  And I'd read "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman before, a mash up of Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu where the royal families are the monsters returned.  It belongs in any good collection. I was startled to see references that were in the first episode of BBCs Sherlock, meaning I obviously have not been a particularly voracious Holmes reader during my life.  "The Essayist in the Wilderness" by William Browning Spencer was my favorite.  The idea that a pretentious English major would know so little about nature that he'd leave strings for himself to find his way home and would have no idea that crayfish would strip off their shells to dance while appendages wobbled on their backs is amusing.  That they'd snap each other together and apart like jigsaw puzzles to make bigger crayfish and then hunt frog sacrifices in order to share the organs, the best crayfish getting the frog skin to wear like a little cloak...well, that's pretty creepy.  And when they start to dance in the pest control spray, they definitely have a Cthulhu quality.

Mieville's "Details" was interesting in that echoed a very specific HP Lovecraft theme about cracks and corners being dangerous entry points into the beyond.  However, Kim Newman's "Another Fish Story" struck me as more like his writing, coming right after "Details" in the collection.  "Another Fish Story" involved a sort of Cthulhu anti-Christ who was angling (ha - fishy) for a slow death for humanity by all the ills afflicting modern society.  Because of his desire for a particular lingering hell for humanity, he was making deals to derail other possible hells, like a merfolk/Ia flooding of the West Coast.  Charlie Manson makes an appearance, as does Lon Chaney, Jr., who I knew almost nothing about, but the details of his personality are spelled out pretty well after looking at the Wikipedia biography.  The story definitely had aspects of Perdido Street Station or The Scar.

"Mongoose" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette was science fiction where there was bleed over from the Cthulhu dimensions.  Enjoyable.  And "A Colder War" by Charles Stross posited an alternate cold war/history where the great powers had discovered the great powers from beyond and were trying to harness forces they didn't understand and couldn't possibly control.  Analogous to the real cold war and nuclear weapons.

A good diversion, but I'm excited to get back to something with more substance.  As an addendum, here's an amusing story I saw from Fail Blog today about a book store (Waterstones on Oxford Street) with a Necronomicon problem.  [Waterstones' Twitter Feed].