video games

→ January 6, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.

President Biden won’t just be facing Donald Trump or another GOP opponent in the 2024 election – he’ll be opposed by the News Corp misinformation machine, too. (Related: The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote of how journalism needs to defend itself in the face of bad-faith actors. He might start with his own paper’s opinion section.)

The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.

Parenting is hard. It’s been harder thanks to the pandemic. That and other factors have led to the rise of the “accidentally permissive” parent, especially in my age cohort.

Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.

mRNA vaccines do not cause cancer, and there is no such thing as “turbo cancer.”

Measles is on the rise around the world thanks to vaccine denialists and misinformation peddlers like RFK, Jr.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) has introduced two bills to block military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates due to both nations’ atrocious human rights records. Omar is Muslim, and Islam is the official religion of both nations. Just imagine a similar scenario with Judaism or Christianity instead of Islam.

Meanwhile, Israel has censored its press on eight topics relating to the war on Gaza.

On the coordinated attacks against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay: It was never about plagiarism, but about DEI (from Don Moynihan); American Jews’ moral panic over Gay’s and two other college Presidents’ answers to Congress is misplaced (from The Forward); and Gay’s own editorial in the New York Times on what happened, which I thought was far too reticent.

Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.

The science is clear: Masks work to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses, no matter what the misinformation merchants tell you.

The Guardian looks at the unfunny punching-down comedy specials from Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais. Chapelle was so groundbreaking at his peak that it’s sad to see him pitching with an 80 mph fastball now.

A list of all 673 books removed from classrooms in Orange County, Florida. I don’t know how anyone with the means to move could still live there. Even if you send your kids to a quality alternative school, your tax dollars are supporting this anti-education.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) declined federal food aid to provide lunch to schoolchildren over the summer, making a specious argument about obesity. This is free money for the state, and they would rather turn it down than feed poor children in Iowa.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has drained the city payroll of over $24 million to pay for 293 “special assistants,” many of them major donors to his campaign.

Adams (still D) also tried to kill a bill that requires police to report when they stop anyone on the street to ask for identification, promising to restore budget cuts to other programs if council members voted against it. The bill passed anyway.

Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.

New York bookstore Bluestockings is facing eviction for providing Narcan to save people who have overdosed on opioids.

Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.

The Las Vegas Business Journal announced a new editorial policy that it will not publish economic impact estimates for stadium projects and other events unless they can see the methodology and criteria used to reach those estimates (which, in my view, are usually bullshit).

Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Missouri, has seen white conservatives take over its school board; the board recently backed off a plan to eliminate all Black History and Black Literature courses after massive opposition, including from the NAACP. The same white conservatives are trying to ban trans students from using the appropriate bathrooms. School board elections matter, folks.

Speaking of Missourah, a St. Louis cop crashed his car into an LGBT bar, Bar:PM, and then cuffed one of the owners, who was later charged with a felony. The police didn’t do a toxicology test on their colleague, and now they’re trying to hush up any investigation and refusing to release body cam footage to the public.

Shoegaze had its moment in the early 1990s as a subgenre of alternative music, mostly heard from British acts like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Slowdive. It’s had a huge comeback thanks to TikTok.

The data from Insomniac Games released by hackers shows that big-game video game development is not sustainable, per Nathan Grayson of Aftermath, a great new site covering video and tabletop gaming.

I own a fantastic sweater and very warm hat from Quince, specialists in inexpensive cashmere clothing items. It turns out that cheap cashmere has a stark environmental cost.

The seams on a baseball have a higher-than-expected effect on the trajectory of the ball in flight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, Economics, environment, florida, harvard, iowa, journalism, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, Music, new york, new york city, parenting, police, science, shoegaze, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ November 19, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/19/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote two pieces this week, one on the Angels’ signing of Tyler Anderson and the Yankees’ re-signing of Anthony Rizzo, and one on four trades from earlier this week before teams had to set their 40-man rosters. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke to Jessica Grose, New York Times opinion writer and author of the new book Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, about the book and what we might do to make being a working mother easier in the U.S. You can pre-order her book, which is due out December 6^th, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With Twitter imploding, you can find me in a bunch of other places, including Facebook, Instagram, counter.social, and cohost, as well as here and on my free email newsletter, which went out again yesterday. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Population projections have the stretch of West African coastline that runs from Lagos, Nigeria, to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, becoming the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth by 2100, with about 500 million people in it. The Guardian looks at what this means for the region, its people, and the planet as a whole.
Clint Smith’s story in the Atlantic on his visits to Holocaust memorial sites and what they might tell us about how to grapple with our own shameful past is one of the best things you’ll read this year.
And this New York Times Magazine article on the theft of an Afghan baby by a network of American evangelical Christians should win a Pulitzer. The lawsuit is still ongoing, but we should not be in the practice of stealing babies from countries we invade.
The United States lags badly behind other developed nations in researching and preventing stillbirths. We still have 20,000 stillbirths every year in the U.S., and at least a quarter of them are (likely) preventable.
A woman visiting Ohio had a miscarriage and began to hemorrhage. Because of Ohio’s anti-abortion law, the emergency room sent her home to wait because they couldn’t “prove there was no fetal development.” This is how these religiously-motivated laws will kill women.
I was obsessed with the computer game Age of Empires when it first came out in the late 1990s. WIRED has an interview with the current CEO of Microsoft Gaming and the head of the studio that makes the Age games as the game celebrates its 25^th anniversary and two new civilizations were added to the most recent version, Age of Empires IV.
ProPublica has the inside story of how anti-abortion groups helped write Tennessee’s extremely strict ban on the medical procedure and are working to defend it.
Colombia faces a difficult challenge as its new President wants to stop extracting fossil fuels and move to climate-friendly energy sources, including the lack of a transition plan for affected workers.
This 12-minute BBC podcast looks at online harassment and threats against scientists investigating the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The CARES Act led to the release of 11,000 inmates from federal prisons during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 17 reoffended. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world and we spend nearly $200 billion just to keep people in prison. Maybe we should rethink this?
A new research paper in Nature found evidence that climate change is increasing the risk of bat pathogens spilling over into humans.
Yoel Roth was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, and wrote an op ed explaining why he quit a few weeks after Elon Musk took over the site. It’s not good, but it also explains how the company’s dependence on advertisers may prevent Musk from turning it into 8chan. Roth himself has some bigoted tweets from 10+ years ago.
Eighteen unvaccinated Ohio children, all but one under the age of 5, have contracted measles in an ongoing outbreak across two day care facilities. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses we know, and it can cause death up to ten years after the infection from a progressive and incurable neurological condition called SSPE.
More anti-vax loons are demanding “vaccine-free” blood and are trying to set up so-called “safe” blood banks.
Meanwhile, America’s Frontline Doctors, a quack group that took in millions from prescribing useless COVID-19 treatments and offering online “consultations,” is imploding now because founder and January 6^th insurrectionist Simone Gold may have been embezzling the group’s funds for personal gain.
Also, it appears that someone contracted dengue fever from a mosquito bite in Arizona. Climate change makes this almost inevitable.
Tucker Carlson’s attempt to play kingmaker this election season ended mostly with embarrassing defeats.
It’s a weak substitute for the real thing, but Democrats should codify Roe v. Wade right now, and force SCOTUS – with five justices who are religious zealots or otherwise openly anti-abortion – to grapple with it, according to The Nation’s Elie Mystal.
Mystal also wrote elsewhere about how Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the House to his fellow Republicans by gutting voting rights laws.
Tom Scocca writes that Trump’s hold on the GOP is stronger than ever despite the drubbing many of his preferred candidates took in the midterms.
The Virginia state education department has proposed major changes to social studies standards, written by five new appointees of the state’s Republican governor. Educators oppose the changes, calling them jingoistic and derogatory towards non-whites.
Moms for Liberty, the astroturfing, pro-white/anti-LGBT activist group that’s been targeting school board elections, threw out a Black superintendent in South Carolina and banned critical race theory
A Connecticut school district is so wedded to its racist mascot (the Redmen) that they’re forgoing $94,000 in state funding just to keep it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is shipping more migrants to Philadelphia in another instance of human trafficking, but the government of the City of Brotherly Love has posted a list of resources for folks who want to help welcome these new residents. Love > hate.
And Texas Republicans have filed a bill that would criminalize gender-affirming care for minors – yes, putting parents in prison for getting medical care for their kids. Why is MLB putting the All-Star Game there?
The Biden Administration is giving Saudi Arabian “Prime Minister” Mohammed bin Salman immunity from a lawsuit filed by the fiancée of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, because oil.
All the news about Republicans investimigrating Hunter Biden’s laptop or something is overshadowing the real damage they’re going to do by going after science agencies.
Board game news: Pandasaurus Games owners Molly Wardlaw and Nathan McNair face accusations from former employees of creating a toxic workplace environment through “negligence, mismanagement, and manipulation.” I have met Molly and Nathan, although I can’t say I know either of them well, and I’ve reviewed many Pandasaurus Games over the years. The company denied the allegations and their response is at the bottom of the linked article.
Tabriz, the new game from the co-designer of the amazing Cascadia, is crowdfunding on Gamefound for two more days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, africa, anti-science, board game news, carceral state, colombia, links, longreads, measles, philadelphia, scotus, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, trans rights, vaccines, video games, virginia

→ July 9, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/9/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote another scouting blog, looking at some Phillies, Orioles, Nats, and White Sox prospects, including the four big arms the Phillies had at Jersey Shore; and did a quick breakdown of some of the highlights and omissions from the Futures Game rosters. I’ll have an updated, final Big Board for the draft on Sunday, and then a new mock draft on Monday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Ouch!, a fun, silly game for kids as young as five, and pointed out why it works where games like Candyland, my bête noire among children’s board games, fail.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Eric Longenhagen, for an extensive conversation about this month’s MLB draft. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found my voice again and sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New England Journal of Medicine has a long story on vaccine hesitancy and how we might combat it.
Inside Higher Ed looks at the Great Resignation in academia, as even tenured professors leave their universities due to burnout, lack of institutional support, or greater financial opportunities elsewhere.
New York talks about how NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has shown no evidence of a clear philosophy of governing.
Jessica Luther, co-author of Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, wrote for Vox about the myth of “fairness” in sports and how transphobes are using it to further their anti-trans agenda.
Two law professors wrote on LawFareBlog that Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony changed their minds on whether former President Trump should be indicted.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik reviews Daniel Levin Becker’s new book on rap and rhyme, called What’s Good, and writes in praise of the variety of forms and styles of rhyming.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong writes in the Atlantic that we have stopped caring about the pandemic, and that leads to our inevitable defeat, where SARS-CoV-2 will kill hundreds of thousands of people a year and nobody will do anything to stop it.
Vanity Fair has the story of the great video game heist of 2019, where a collection estimated to be worth over $1 million was stolen and eventually recovered, but where many of these extremely rare Nintendo games were badly damaged by the incompetent thief.
The Washington Post ran an excerpt from the new book American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry, detailing parts of the lobbying campaign to keep the DEA from shutting down opioid suppliers.
The Verge’s Nilay Patel interviewed the TSA’s Chief Innovation Officer, asking some insightful questions about PreCheck and the relationship between data privacy and increased security. Patel also used one of my favorite phrases, security theater, which also applies to the metal detectors that are ubiquitous now at major sporting events.
U.S. road fatality rates are rising. One big reason is the increase in distractions in your car, or as this article puts it, “The problem is asking the brain to do too many things at once.”
What is the point of Sunday political news shows? They’re little more than propaganda vehicles, putting profit over accuracy.
The Internal Revenue Service didn’t notice that 76 registered charities all shared the same mailbox. Needless to say, it was all a scam.
An evangelical pastor who used to lead a religious right organization has bragged about wining and dining three current SCOTUS justices, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, to try to sway their views on issues like LBGTQ+ rights and abortion. Above The Law has more on this story, pointing out that the same group that prays with these justices also files amicus briefs with the court.
Jonathan Chait wrote about Blake Masters, who is running against Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for the latter’s Senate seat, calling Masters “Nazi-adjacent” and another sign of the GOP’s trend toward extremism.
The New Republic called Pamela Paul’s latest op ed for the New York Times her version of Great Replacement Theory, with an amalgam of anti-trans talking points common to the right and to gender-critical feminists.
Brynn Tannehill, author of American Fascism, called Paul’s column and those like it part of the right’s plan to demonize trans people the way the Nazi Party demonized Jews.
At the Raw Story, Thom Hartmann writes that the SCOTUS majority is planning to “pre-rig” the 2024 election.
Herschel Walker hid his two secret kids from his own campaign staff.
The Harvard Business School’s site posted a breakdown of the implosion of artisan ice cream maker Ample Hills. The founders expanded too soon, both in scale and geography, and didn’t pay attention to short-term cash flow.
Leon County School District near Tallahassee passed its own don’t-say-gay “guide” for teachers, which requires parental notification if a student who is “open about their gender identity” is in their child’s PE class or on an overnight field trip. So the school will be outing kids to the entire community.
Also in Florida, the state’s Florida Healthy Kids Board kicked off a pediatrician for taking a public pro-vaccine view, which puts her in line with (checks notes) every major medical and scientific body in the world.
A Detroit police officer was shot and killed in the line of duty, and the Police Chief said there is too much gun violence in the city.
Texas’s soi-disant “Freedom Caucus” is threatening companies that help employees travel out of state for medical procedures.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Brashear released emails about President Biden’s plan to nominate an anti-abortion judge to a lifetime district court appointment in that state.
My editor at Paste wrote about the Hyperspace Lounge, a cocktail bar on a Disney cruise ship with a $5000 drink on the menu.
You do not, in fact, have a constitutional right to have dinner.
A particle physicist wrote about the possible discoveries in Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider.
I haven’t seen a good link on this yet, but Alea/Ravensburger have announced a new version of the board game Puerto Rico called Puerto Rico 1897, which tries to eliminate the rather questionable elements of the original game, not least the use of “colonists” who, in historical terms, were slaves, and who in the game were unfortunately represented by dark brown discs.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, detroit, disney, drugs, florida, frauds, heists, kentucky, links, longreads, physics, scotus, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, vaccines, video games

→ March 10, 2022
→ By keith

Out of Line.

I don’t play many video games, just because of the time involved in them, not due to any lack of interest – I often enjoy them and get very sucked in, and I can lose dozens of hours to a good narrative-based game, almost regardless of genre. Somewhere along the way last year, I heard about a shorter puzzle-based game called Out of Line, and was caught immediately by the novel 2-D art style. I picked it up last week when it was on sale on Steam, and played through the whole thing in a couple of hours this week. I think it’s fantastic, and that shorter play time works so much better for me than a 100-hour game like Elden Ring – even if I might really enjoy the latter game too.

You play as the very cute character San, and must complete a series of tasks as you move left to right through an underground space to try to escape whatever weird situation you’re stuck in. Early in the game, you get a spear, which is the only weapon you’ll own in the game, although you can use it to do a number of things, like severing branches, creating tightropes, or, most often, shooting it into a wall so you can use it to climb. You get a couple of instructions in the game when you encounter a very specific new challenge, but otherwise, you’re left to figure it out on your own, using nothing but the left and right arrow keys and the two mouse/trackpad buttons. You’ll get some help from NPCs along the way, but you nearly always have to do something to ‘earn’ that help.

The majority of the puzzles involve a combination of figuring out what you need to do, usually using your spear, and some difficulty executing it with a combination of mouse clicks and keystrokes, often before something bad happens. When you do fail, you just restart from a point usually just prior to the point of failure, so it’s not that devastating if you can’t do it the first time – I did one task at least eight times before I got it right, and I was annoyed, but I wasn’t driven to give up or think the game is impossible or something. There was also one sequence in the game that I couldn’t figure out, and went to a playthrough video on Youtube to get the first clue.There was another puzzle I did know how to solve, but couldn’t execute, and thought my idea was wrong, so I went to the walkthrough and it turned out I just had to do the steps more quickly. I don’t have a ton of experience with games like this, but that seems like a reasonable ratio, and it’s possible the issue was my inexperience rather than anything with the game.

There’s a story behind the game, but it doesn’t matter much to the game play. You don’t need to know anything of it to play, and getting to the end doesn’t give you a conclusion to the narrative, either. The lack of a prologue, combined with the absence of any sort of tutorial, did mean that I didn’t realize there were certain tasks I could have completed to get to 100%, some of which were as simple as just moving to the left in a new environment to collect a cube before resuming the endless scroll to the right. There are 16 achievements in the game, and I only got 12 of them, so I clearly missed some cues here.

I do recommend Out of Line, based solely on how much I enjoyed the playing experience. It looks incredible, with a unique hand-drawn art style that also made it simple to see the goal for each challenge – crossing a chasm, climbing something, opening a gate, and so on. Some puzzles were very simple, some appropriately difficult, but nothing was impossible, even the one where I had to go online for a tip. I’m not sure if there’s much replay value here; twice might be the limit, once to learn the game, then once to try to do it 100%. The walkthrough I found online only takes about 70-75 minutes all the way through, while my one play probably took me 2.5 to 3 hours of active playing time. For the $5 and change I paid for the game, that’s great value.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: video games

→ March 5, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/5/22.

I answered some questions on the Blue Jays’ farm system this week, which was a transcription of my appearance on our Spin Rates podcast. The Klawchats returned this week. I’m planning to start written draft coverage this upcoming week with a top 30.

On my own podcast, my guest was author and journalist Kathryn Schulz, talking about her wonderful new memoir Lost and Found, about the death of her father and how she met and married her wife, the author Casey Cep. Listen via The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes, Amazon, that other site, or wherever you get your podcasts. I appeared on the Romantic About Baseball podcast as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Why are Wisconsin judges charging women who accuse their husbands of abuse? ProPublica documents the case of one woman who did just that and lost custody of her four kids because the judge charged her with contempt four times and ordered her arrest.
The New Yorker has a tremendous interview with J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, conducted by Helen Rosner, as his new book The Wok hits shelves on Tuesday.
My friend Tim Grierson wrote about Tears for Fears’ enduring hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
I don’t know if this New York Times piece, on how RFK Jr.’s family friends feel about his descent into anti-vaxx grifting, is helpful or not.
Two new pre-prints show more evidence for a zoonotic origin for the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. There’s also a follow-up thread that underscores one of the findings that wasn’t well-covered in that article. Needless to say, the lab-leak grifters were quick to attack – the author of a book that depends on the lab-leak hypothesis asked her followers on twitter to harass one of the journal’s editors to try to stop publication, and is trying increasingly desperate attacks on the pre-prints.
Also, a new journal article found that gender-affirming care improved mental health outcomes in transgender children. Just in case you weren’t clear on what was going on in Texas and anywhere the Republican Party is in charge. Oh, Texas Children’s Hospital has paused hormone therapies for trans kids, thanks to the state’s directive. These could be your kids. We should all be outraged.
Of course, now pro-Putin propaganda is flooding anti-vax groups online, along with the usual anti-science and anti-Semitic nonsense.
There’s no evidence that wearing a mask leads to physical or psychological harm for kids. They don’t cause carbon dioxide poisoning, don’t lead to developmental delays, and help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The Biden Administration’s most recent moves have killed our collective approach to slowing the pandemic, by taking measures designed to protect the most vulnerable members of society and making them into personal decisions.
Now anti-vaxxers are trying to convince parents not to take their kids to the pediatrician.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and state Sen. Wendy Rogers are both directly connected to white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. The connection may be part of why Ducey declined to run for the U.S. Senate this week.
Supreme Court nominations have become a farce because of a Supreme Court ruling, writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.
While nobody was paying much attention, Trump endorsed a right-wing plan to take over the GOP – and steal an election or two.
The newly-elected government of Honduras is going to ban open-pit mining, a profitable but environmentally disastrous practice.
A small bit of good environmental news: the scourge of purple sea urchins that has devastated the California coast’s kelp forests has led to a new industry that harvests and farms the urchins to sell uni, the roe of sea urchins often found at sushi restaurants, in turn easing some of the pressure on the kelp forests.
Missouri lawmakers are rushing to legalize sports betting, but only in casinos and sports stadiums. So who’s funding them?
Legendary video game designer Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon) warned of the dangers of the industry’s shift towards in-game purchases.
My friend Zabe Bent was quoted in a brief NY Times piece on how best to design bike lanes in cities.
Board game news: Capstone Games opened pre-orders for the Terra Mystica: Big Box, including the base game, two expansions, and a solo “Automa” mode, for $149.95.
Library Labyrinth, a cooperative library-themed board game from the left-wing publisher Dissent Games, is now on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, longreads, missouri, Music, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp, video games

→ November 28, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/28/21.

I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic – one on the Puerto Rican Winter League, and how MLB needs to support the league more; and one on the Starling Marte, Mark Canha, and Steven Matz signings.

My guest this week on the Keith Law Show was Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. You can subscribe and listen on iTunes and Spotify.

I appeared on the Five Games for Doomsday podcast, talking mostly about boardgames – my favorites, my interest in them, writing about games and about baseball, and more.

I’ll send out a new edition of my free email newsletter Monday or Tuesday this week. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: An investigation by local TV channel 11-WXIA in Atlanta revealed corruption and sexual harassment among Johns Creek police officers, leading to the termination of three of the department’s officers – although others involved haven’t been sanctioned and remain on the force.
This seems especially vile, preying on truly vulnerable people: scammers are using fake job ads to defraud would-be applicants.
Over 200 American academics, researchers in history and political science in related fields, signed an open letter in support of the Freedom to Vote Act.
Two conservative commentators quit lucrative roles at Fox News in protest of Tucker Carlson’s program that pushed false narratives and outright misinformation about the January 6^th insurrection. One of them, Jonah Goldberg, explained his decision in an editorial for the L.A. Times.
The QAnon JFK Cult in Dallas is tearing families apart. Did you know “Q” hasn’t posted in a year? Yet the hoax’s adherents still can’t let it go. The cognitive dissonance is strong with them.
The Kenosha protests were not violent or deadly until Kyle Rittenhouse showed up. Media coverage of his acquittal is revising history.
One of the co-creators of the game Oregon Trail says he never made any money off the game, but that was never his goal anyway.
The USFL is coming back! I’ll believe it when we get the first kickoff, but I’ll wash my Tampa Bay Bandits jersey just in case.
An epidemiologist wrote a lengthy overview of what the omicron variant of COVID-19 might mean. Dr. Peter Hotez says it’s a concern, but “the sky isn’t falling.” Our bodies aren’t helpless against new variants, though. The emergence of new variants is an inevitable outcome of rich countries hoarding vaccines (or destroying them).
COVID denialists like to say that Japan used ivermectin to stop the virus’s spread there. They are wrong.
It’s better than nothing, I guess: A St. Louis cop who assaulted an undercover colleague posing as a protestor was sentenced to a year in jail.
The superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools in Florida wrote an op ed in the Washington Post saying that the state’s new ban on any future mask mandates or quarantines robs schools of critical tools to fight the virus and keep kids in school. DeSantis’s pandering is going to kill people.
South Carolina Republicans are trying to cancel tenure, replacing it with five-year contracts and requiring at least a 2/2 course load, which will go a long way towards killing research at universities there.
Civil Liberties International added the United States to its list of “backsliding” democracies for the first time.
A Tory MP in the UK claims that having a woman play the main character in Doctor Who is hurting boys by removing a role model for them, and contributing to young boys turning to crime, never mind that the Doctor is a genderless alien who takes human form. He obviously doesn’t even watch the show, since the main character is not named “Doctor Who.”
Jared Leto is unrecognizable in House of Gucci under prosthetics and a bald cap, part of a growing trend toward physical verisimilitude on screen. Is that a good thing for actors or viewers?
A new paper published in Nature describes superionic ice, a newly-discovered phase of water that might resemble what’s found deep inside outer planets like Neptune.
A “good guy with a gun” took down a mass shooter, and then was shot and killed by a cop who mistook him for the bad guy. That cop will not face charges.
There will also be no charges for the man who “accidentally discharged” his gun and killed a 10-year-old boy the other day.
Ark Nova, an upcoming heavy game from Capstone, is available for pre-order. The description and images make me think it’s at least inspired by Wingspan but more complex.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coronavirus, democracy, football, frauds, guns, links, longreads, physics, south carolina, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ November 13, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/13/21.

My one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week looked at some 2022 draft prospects from last month’s Future Stars Main Event at Citi Field. My ranking of the top 50 free agents on the market this offseason went up last week, also for subscribers.

My latest game review for Paste looks at Brew, a midweight game with incredible art that I couldn’t warm up to – the combination of area control, resource management, worker placement, and take-that mechanics left me feeling more confused than anything. It really does look great, though.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Sam Ezersky, the digital puzzles editor for the New York Times and the guy you should all yell at when the Spelling Bee doesn’t take ACIDEMIA. You can listen and subscribe on Apple or Spotify. On the Athletic Baseball Show this week, Derek Van Riper and I talked about the Mets’ disastrous GM search, among other things.

As the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

Longreads first: This Guardian profile of a French expert on serial killers who wasn’t quite what he said he was is riveting.
As is this New Yorker story on a multi-million dollar fraud in the organic food world, which probably affected every consumer who bought any organic grains in the 2000s and early 2010s.
A reader suggestion: how two wealthy benefactors tried to save Kalamazoo, and perhaps made the failing city worse in the end.
From my friend Tim Grierson, in MEL magazine: How Kenneth Branagh has spent much of his career trying to live up to Henry V.
The University of Florida tried to prevent two of its professors from testifying in a lawsuit against Governor DeSantis. They’re now suing on First Amendment grounds.
Writer Michele Genthoni tells the story of how she lost two adult siblings to COVID-19 because they were vaccine deniers.
Getting back to normal is great, until you test positive.
This 2017 WIRED piece on how false memories work, focusing on researcher Dr. Julia Shaw, is fascinating. People can remember things that absolutely never happened to them, and it’s not even that hard for someone else to convince them.
The NRA mapped out its 20-year strategy of defiance and opposition to any attempt at gun control in a conference call in the wake of the Columbine massacre. NPR obtained a recording of the 1999 conversation.
Portugal has made it illegal for your boss to text you outside of work hours.
I loved the first two Age of Empires games – Civilization in a two-hour package! Although if you play it six times in a row, I suppose you’ve spent the same amount of time not eating or sleeping. Anyway, there’s an Age of Empires IV, and Paste decided to go and call them Dad Games.
The New York Times asked Daniel Radcliffe and director Chris Columbus to look back at Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone on the film’s 20^th anniversary. I enjoyed it even though I think the film is pretty flawed.
I’m sure you heard about the latest right-wing grift, the so-called University of Austin, which doesn’t exist, and promises to offer “forbidden courses” but is really just going to sell bigotry in a nice suit. The school’s main obsession appears to be complaining about anything and everything. I’m curious why Harvard has allowed two of its faculty members, Stephen Pinker and Larry Summers, to join its board of advisors, although both men also associated with Jeffrey Epstein and my alma mater didn’t seem to care.
The same people saying that we need more freedom in classrooms to discuss controversial subjects are also trying to ban – or even burn – books about controversial things.
Speaking of grifters, J.D. Vance missed a campaign finance filing deadline and is ducking two debates in his dubious effort to win the Republican nomination for Ohio’s upcoming Senate race.
There’s a growing body of work that shows how women in the workforce fared worse during the peak of the pandemic, and here’s more, this time showing that women leaders took on more ‘invisible work,’ like work supporting employees or fueling DEI initiates.
The pandemic also drove college-educated mothers out of the workforce because of the added labor required from child care.
One new survey found that 4 in 5 respondents had fallen for at least one piece of COVID-19 misinformation.
The Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan’s series of self-owns on Twitter this week was something to behold. She is consistently wrong and impervious to correction.
Two of the women in the group Moms for Liberty, one of the factions leading these silly school board protests over Critical Race Theory and the like, wrote an editorial in the Washington Post explaining why politicians ignore them at their peril. What they do not mention, however, is that Moms for Liberty is an astroturf group almost certainly funded by the Koch Brothers.
Board game news: Z-Man Games announced Ultimate Railroads, a long-awaited reprint of and update to Russian Railroads, one of the best heavy games I’ve played, in one box that includes all of its expansions.
Gartenbau returned to Kickstarter for one last go-round.
If you like super-long, heavy games, like Lisboa and On Mars, the designer of those games, Vital Lacerda, has a new game out called Weather Machine up on Kickstarter and it looks huge and heavy and not really the kind of game I care for.
The creators of Glen More have a Kickstarter ending in 3 days for a new game called Caral.
W. Eric Martin, the editor of BoardGameGeek News and the site’s main writer, has a fascinating essay that points out that the site’s rankings aren’t that useful, in which he also admits that he hasn’t played a lot of the very heavy games near the top of the rankings – just 28 of the site’s top 100, fewer than I have (about 38, eyeballing it).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astroturfing, board game news, coronavirus, first amendment, guns, links, longreads, organic agriculture, psychology, stick to baseball, video games

→ July 18, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/18/20.

I didn’t write anything this week other than the review here of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing and my review of the lovely little light strategy game Walking in Burano. I will do a season preview with some picks for breakout candidates this week for subscribers to The Athletic, as well as a new game review for Paste, and a Zoom Q&A session on The Athletic’s site on Thursday at 3 pm ET. I answered reader questions on a mailbag episode of my podcast last week.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now, just in time for Opening Day (okay, three months before, but who’s counting). You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this week once I have some new content.

I’ll be speaking at the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Weaponized Information Virtual Conference on Tuesday at 9:30 am ET, talking about topics from The Inside Game. You can register to watch the event here.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Data scientist David Shor, fired for tweeting that nonviolent protests tend to push public opinion leftward (a conclusion based on data), spoke at length to New York about what the data say about the Democrats’ chances in 2020 and beyond. It’s sobering, but comes with evidence-based recommendations that start with not taking any swing states for granted in October.
The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of Nespresso, which faces low-price competition, criticism of environmental impact, and growing consumer awareness.
Politico has a long profile on Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D), a first-term representative from Michigan running for re-election in her purple district, and what lessons she may have to offer Democrats nationwide.
The inspiration for the original text-based adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure (often just abbreviated as Adventure) was Patricia Crowther, ex-wife of the game’s co-creator, who didn’t credit her with the cave mapping that he used to design the game.
Orac looks at the controversy over airborne transmission of COVID-19. His conclusions: the virus can be spread via respiratory aerosols, but we already guessed that, and mandating masks and physical distancing is part of the solution.
Cases have been rising, but deaths weren’t, which isn’t the good news it might appear to be, writes Alexis Madrigal for the Atlantic. The death rate has begun to rise since Madrigal’s piece went up, though.
The CDC’s longtime status as an agency beyond the reach of partisan politics has left it defenseless against attacks from the science-deniers in the White House.
Vox looks at why Arizona has the nation’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, and may be undercounting cases since they have so little testing. They closed too late, reopened too soon, people didn’t take the masks and distancing guidelines seriously.
The New Yorker looks at how Texas Republicans politicized the coronavirus pandemic, leading to an ongoing outbreak, and over 600 deaths in just the last four days.
An Alabama jail refused to give masks to prisoners because, jail officials claimed, the prisoners would eat them.
There’s a threat to American democracy beyond that posed by the President and his sycophants – the ongoing disappearance of local news outlets. When nobody watches local officials, they can get away with a whole lot more.
Why are federal law enforcement agents arresting protestors in Oregon, using unmarked vehicles? When did the feds start looking at the Sicherheitsdienst as a model?
Multiple employees of color at ESPN spoke to the New York Times about racism behind the camera at the company, from limited career opportunities to a lack of diversity in leadership. I can’t say I ever witnessed any of this, or heard about it from people affected, but given the ways you get into leadership positions at ESPN, a lack of diversity is a feature rather than a bug.
Authorities in Selah, Washington, including the city leaders, are trying to criminalize speech in the form of chalk writing of “Black Lives Matter.”
Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler (guess!) is running against Black Lives Matter, opposing the WNBA’s use of the term (she owns part of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream) and claiming that BLM harbors anti-Semitic and anti-Christian views (they don’t, as BLM is not a single, coherent organization). Here’s a list of some major companies that donated to her while proclaiming support for Black Lives Matter and efforts to fight structural racism.
Three articles on the additional challenges working mothers are facing during the pandemic: “They Go to Mommy First,” from Jess Grose in the New York Times; Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever, by author/economist Emily Oster in the Atlantic; and how a lack of childcare options is keeping women unemployed, in Politico.
A woman who had been tested for COVID-19 but didn’t self-isolate while she waited to get her results dropped off her child at a day care facility in upstate New York. She tested positive and gave it to 16 other adults and children.
A meeting in Utah to discuss requiring students to wear masks in schools was postponed because dingbats without masks filled the room, some carrying signs opposing the mask requirement. Their ‘arguments’ mirror those of anti-vaxxers’, which should be reason enough to overrule them.
An activist couple who support Palestinian causes found themselves attacked online in columns appearing in the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner by a student at the University of Birmingham named Oliver Taylor … except that Oliver Taylor doesn’t exist, and seemingly accurate photos of him are just well-made deepfakes.
A Toronto health official has the right to intervene in the case of two children whose dipshit mother doesn’t want to get them vaccinated. Vaccines work. They are safe and effective, and it turns out that the MMR vaccine may even protect you against some of the worst symptoms of COVID-19.
Walt Disneyworld is permanently closing three attractions, two rides and a show, none of which will be particularly missed.
Board game news: Renegade Game Studios announced a new line of puzzles based on art from four popular board games, including Raiders of the North Sea and Arboretum, with pre-orders now open.
Grail Games has a Kickstarter up for Whale Riders, a new game from Reiner Knizia, which is always of interest to me. I’m not sure about this theme, though; those look like Inuit people, and there’s no reason to use them in the artwork.
Marvel Villainous, the new standalone game in the Villainous line from Ravensburger, is available for pre-order exclusively through Target. I have a review copy and have played it once; it’s quite good, with five new villains from the MCU, but can’t be played with any of the 15 villains from the previous four boxes in the series.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, board game news, coffee, coronavirus, disneyworld, frauds, links, longreads, michigan, stick to baseball, utah, vaccines, video games

→ April 11, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/11/20.

I didn’t publish anything this week at the Athletic, but hope to have two pieces up next week, as well as a new review at Paste and possibly new pieces at Ars Technica and Vulture as well. I did hold a short Persicope video chat on Friday.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold.

My publisher is holding a contest where one winner will get a 30-minute chat with me before the baseball season starts, and several other entrants will win free copies of The Inside Game. You can enter for free here.

Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

I appeared on the Big Fly Baseball podcast this week and spoke with WHB’s Soren Petro about the shutdown, the draft, and the Royals for almost a half an hour.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The New Yorker looks at how cervical cancer is on the rise in the developing nation of Alabama, where sex education and Medicare/Medicaid coverage both lag behind most other states.
ProPublica finds that white nationalist authors have a haven on Amazon’s self-publishing platform for their racist and anti-Semitic works.
It’s hardly worth calling it a dilemma. If the President is going to lie and equivocate when talking to the public about COVID-19, the press should not give him a platform to do so. Don’t cover his ‘speeches’ when they contain disinformation or outright bullshit (like his touting of hydroxychloroquine or claims that the virus has ‘outsmarted’ antibiotics).
Scientific American looks at what developing antibodies to COVID-19 might actually mean – maybe two years of immunity, but perhaps less, and almost certainly not lifelong immunity as with some other, unrelated viruses.
“A fiasco of incredible proportions:” Epidemiologists tell The Guardian how Trump abdicated his responsibilities as President, dithering for six weeks over testing, a failure that will lead to thousands of needless deaths. Compare the U.S. debacle to the New Zealand government’s swift, decisive actions to shut the country down, thus far avoiding any significant outbreak of the virus.
Daniel Kahneman spoke to the New Yorker about why the scope of the pandemic is so hard for humans to grasp.
The Federalist – funded by nobody knows who, although their talking points often mirror those of Koch-funded entities – has engaged in dangerous coronavirus trutherism throughout the pandemic.
Clay Travis, a football/gambling writer turned meninist conservative heel, has also become a COVID-19 denialist – apparently because doing so is quite profitable.
Sean Hannity is trying to paint Trump as some sort of heroic leader – but his own statements serve as an indictment of Trump’s botching of the crisis, including multiple moves to undercut his own people.
Kansas Republicans overturned the Governor’s order to limit religious gatherings to no more than ten people, so that more people can get sick and die this Easter.
East Asian countries that successfully stopped the first wave of COVID-19 infections have seen new cases pop up as people brought the virus back in from outside countries – a huge warning for the U.S. not to let our guard down whenever we finally do get to a point where we might reopen things.
Here’s the apology Donald Trump should issue to the American public for his failure to act early enough to slow the pandemic and for his promulgation of false or misleading information as it has spread. I wouldn’t hold my breath for this to happen.
Helen Rosner explores the ethics of ordering take-out during the pandemic … and concludes that it’s okay to do so, but if you do you should order directly from the restaurant.
“If there were ever a time to take a few extra moments to order through your local bookstore, it’s now.” Dave Eggers writes for McSweeney’s about the need to save local bookstores.
Afar.com listed 25 independent bookstores in the U.S. that they love. I’d add Phoenix/Tempe’s Changing Hands and D.C.’s Politics and Prose as well.
Ars Technica found that 80% of Steam games earn under $5000 in their first two weeks – which certainly doesn’t bode well for developers’ long-term business outlooks.
The Athletic’s Nando di Fino remembers Glen Waggoner ($), one of the original members of the first Rotisserie Baseball League and the author of several of the books that first described the game.
Finally, if you’re still confused about the role that our Administration played in making the pandemic more severe in the U.S. than in any other country, well:

Other countries responded quickly and aggressively to combat the spread of coronavirus.

Trump failed to do the same—and now the U.S. has the most cases in the world. pic.twitter.com/JpYn0okt2j
— CAP Action (@CAPAction) April 9, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, bookstores, coronavirus, fantasy sports, links, racism, stick to baseball, video games

→ November 9, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/9/19.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents this winter went up on Monday for ESPN+ subscribers, before the actual start of free agency and thus the deadline for some player options, so a few players are on there who ended up staying with their teams (J.D. Martinez, for one). I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Silver, the new deduction/take-that card game from designer Ted Alspach, who set this new game in the same ‘universe’ (loosely speaking) as his One Night Ultimate Werewolf games.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, will be released on April 21, 2020, and you can pre-order it now. We’re working on some bookstore events for late April as well, with Boston, New York, DC, and Harrisburg likely in that first week after release.

I also have this free email newsletter, you may have heard about it, it’s kind of cool.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic story on a San Francisco woman who repeatedly stole packages from porches in an affluent neighborhood, despite multiple warnings, arrests, and eventually the loss of of custody of her daughter, is something to behold. It’s a story about technology, including how customers are using video-camera doorbells without considering the loss of civil liberties that may come with it. It’s a story about race, certainly. But the one theme I felt the author understated was that it’s a story about mental illness: The ‘porch pirate’ is ill-served by the prison system, especially since she continues to steal packages even while out on bail, and is not getting the help she probably needs.
A Louisiana parish DA lets defendants pay his foundation to get out of doing community service, according to this investigative report from Radley Balko in the Washington Post. The article appeared on Sunday; since then, I see zero coverage of this in any Louisiana publication.
This episode of the podcast Citations Needed looks at ‘pundit brain’ and the increasingly less data-driven Nate Silver, whose track record of predictions has tapered off since 2008 and who has had to walk back numerous statements on Twitter. Jacob Bacharach covers similar ground in a post on Common Dreams.
Alex Pareene writes about the death of what he calls ‘rude media’, including two entities for whom he used to work, Splinter and Gawker Media.
The New Yorker‘s Louisa Thomas weighed in on the killings of Deadspin and Sports Illustrated by private equity bros.
A new study in Nature (journal access required) found that many ICU patients who received probiotic capsules developed bacteremia as a direct result, using DNA comparisons to show that the bacteria in the patients’ blood came from the same bacteria in those probiotic pills. There’s also zero evidence that probiotic pills are helpful; the acid in your stomach destroys bacteria in those pills, or in fermented foods we consume like yogurt or kombucha.
Aaron Calvin was fired by the Des Moines Register because, in short, the Twitter mob demanded it; he wrote his side of the story for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Clark University dismissed a graduate student who had complained about possible gender discrimination and mishandling of data. This is her side of this story, but Clark issued a general statement, saying that federal law prevents them from commenting on a specific student’s case.
Youngstown State disciplined a student-athlete who sexually assaulted a classmate by (checks notes) letting him serve as a volunteer coach on both the men’s and women’s tennis teams (blinking guy GIF).
Anti-vaxxers use a strategy called ‘firehosing,’ repeating the same lies over and over to drown out the facts and those who try to speak the truth. Fighting these tactics involves more than just debunking falsehoods, but disrupting them by removing their podiums and forewarning people about how these propagandists manipulate them.
A white judge in Virginia sentenced a black woman to ten days in jail because he didn’t like that she slammed the courtroom door.
This is America: A San Diego man brutally assaulted a Syrian teen for speaking Arabic. He has since pleaded guilty and will serve five years in prison.
This is America: A white Milwaukee man threw acid in the face of a Peruvian-born U.S. citizen after asking “why did you come here and invade my country?” Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett blamed President Trump for feeding and encouraging anti-immigrant sentiment.
A new book that fawns over President Trump claimed that the Obama Adminstration held regular “PC (political correctness) meetings.” The author didn’t realize those were NSC Principals Committee meetings, and obviously didn’t bother to confirm it, nor did Fox News before promoting the book and this claim on its site.
If you’ve seen the surprise hit film Parasite, which will pass the $10 million mark for U.S. box office this weekend and is by far the highest-grossing Korean-language film ever in the U.S., you know the use of basements is key to the movie’s story. NPR has snippets from writer/director Bong Joon-hoexplaining a bit more about why basements are so critical in South Korean society.
Martin Scorcese’s explanation of why he doesn’t care for comic-book movies is worth reading, as it’s far more nuanced than the quote that got MCU fanpeople all up in arms. (I tend to agree with him. Comic book movies are entertainment, but I would not say they rise to the level of great cinema.)
I reviewed Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations this week; he emailed me to point to a post he wrote on October 22nd explaining the role of luck in short series in baseball.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a plan to ban political ads, but the plan is toothless and misunderstands the nature of free expression.
A tweet asking people to RT if they were spanked as children but didn’t become violent later in life went viral this week, but it misses the point: Corporal punishment is ineffective and harmful, while other methods of discipline, including positive reinforcement and setting clear expectations, do work, without the negative consequences of spanking.
Alison Turkos writes about how her Lyft driver raped her and the company took no action. The driver continued to work for Lyft, and the company even charged her for the trip.
I agree with Cass Marshall: I do not have time for or interest in video games with hundreds of hours of material. Pre-parenthood, I played the Baldur’s Gate trilogy all the way through, hitting almost every side quest, and I’m sure I put over 100 hours into it. I doubt I’ll ever have the time for that again or the attention span.
Board game news: A reader of mine, Kevin Bertram, has designed a game called The Shores of Tripoli now on Kickstarter. This was on my BGG wishlist before I even knew Kevin was a reader.
A digital adaptation of the acclaimed co-op game Spirit Island is also on Kickstarter, and just got funded this week.
PAX Unplugged takes place in Philadelphia on December 6-8 this year. The convention schedule is now up and badges are on sale. I’ll be there as usual.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, health, links, louisiana, media criticism, social media, this is america, vaccines, video games

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