A Very Great Miscellany

I've always had fun with these kinds of posts.

Baking seems poised to become my Number One hobby--which is odd, since gaming has held the title for twenty-two years (seizing the crown from model rocketry). I'm not sure what that'll do to my self-perception; it'll be interesting to see. I'm having fun, anyway. This week was exciting: I got two new bundt-style pans in the mail. I jacked up my original, plain-jane bundt pan when I made/burned a Kugelhopf a while back; looking to replace it, I decided to get a little snazzy. I discovered some neat pans from Kaiser that are super-heavy, nonstick (plusses/minuses), and, well, look pretty great, like "Domus" here. I like to make pound cakes (which are good for bundt pans), since they're really moist, dense, and keep a lot longer than spongier cakes. Since I'm the only one eating the things during the summer, that's all important.

I decided to get a copy of Karten Schach, Knizia's collection of chess variants, off the BGG marketplace. I like chess variants, like I just said earlier this week, I really like Knizia (when he's taking himself seriously, anyway), and I think I'll have an easier time getting rules-light two-player games to the table than anything else going forward, until/unless I move somewhere with a more active game community. And some of these variants look seriously clever. Still plenty of room on the shelves...

Speaking of, I looked at the shelves and figured that I could probably sell at least another 25 games and not die; not enough to be worth it, but worth keeping in mind.

Welcome, by the way, those of you who discovered this blog via the Chess Variants article. Between my post on Facebook and Russ's post on BGG, that article has brought in a serious number of hits; the first post since the reboot that has been more popular than my supposed picture of an FT-17 tank. I hope you enjoy your stay; we can probably call this a "game blog" for lack of anything better, although my guess is that no more than 40% of the posts are going to be game-related over the coming year.

On Sunday I head off to Washington DC for a month, working in the National Archives (which is powerfully, powerfully unpleasant if you're not nationally-known) and the Library of Congress (much better). This means I have to entertain myself. Sadly, my suite doesn't have a kitchenette so I can't make pound cakes for myself/the cleaning staff, so it's books-and-games time. Bookwise, I'm reading Yankee Warhorse, of course (of course), since I have to review it; I'm also bringing along Shadow and Claw, which is an odd book. I enjoy it, vastly enjoy it, and over the past eighteen months I've made it almost, almost all the way through Shadow of the Torturer (i.e., book one of four). Hopefully some enforced downtime will see me make real progress. Inspired by how much I liked The City and the City, I'll also bring along Perdido Street Station.

Gamewise is tougher. I know I have a table, but I don't know how big. I'll probably bring along Barbarossa Campaign in the hopes of having enough room. I want to write about this one in some depth for the blog; it touches on a lot of important points about wargames and what they're capable of (and incapable of). If there's not enough room, I'll probably go with another Victory Point game, Ancient Battles Deluxe, which is good clean fun in an hour or so. I might talk about that one, too, and about how as a simulation it is not obviously worse than Great Battles of History or other more highfalutin titles. (I'm reentering an "All Wargames are Crap" phase. They're fun crap, but crap. It usually passes in a few months.)

I also have an article to write. Can't forget that.

The next month will see either exceptionally heavy, or exceptionally light blogging. I don't think there's a middle ground. There's lots of downtime in the National Archives; if you get out of synch with the document-pullers, you can find yourself with nothing to do, nothing at all, for an hour and a half. You can't even leave. It's awesome. So there might be some blogging from within the hallowed bowels of America's junk drawer. And I've found that blogging sometimes inspires more Useful Work, so that might see some time. Or, I'll be such a research/reading/writing machine that I'll barely have time to eat, never mind blog, and I'll be a blur of high-functioning academia.

Expect lots of blogging.