boardgames — Page 17

→ May 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/20/18.

I was busy this week, including posting another first-round mock for next month’s MLB draft (Insider).

For Vulture, I ranked the 25 best board game apps for mobile devices, considering anything available for iOS or Android. Steam-only titles were not eligible.

For Paste, I reviewed the light deduction/puzzle game Automata Noir, a fun filler title that lets you do a little more than most deduction games where you’re just trying to guess who’s the bad guy.

PennLive asked fifty Pennsylvania librarians for their summer beach read recommendations and one kind soul recommended my own Smart Baseball, now available in paperback.

I’ll be appearing at Washington DC’s Politics & Prose on July 14th along with Jay Jaffe to talk baseball & sign our respective books (or I can sign Jay’s and he can sign mine, whatever you fancy).

And now, the links:

One question I posed near the end of Smart Baseball and in the new afterword is whether we actually know if Statcast metrics actually predict better performance going forward – that is, it sounds great that a pitcher limits exit velocity or has a higher spin rate on his fastball, but does it lead to better results? Jonathan Judge looked at MLB’s x-stats like xwOBA, which are derived from Statcast data and used in much of MLB’s content, and found that they don’t seem to predict future performance well at all.
This long-ish read from WIRED looks at the myth of purely rational and non-tribalist thinking promulgated by Sam Harris, who likes to tell you he’s not subject to these extremely pervasive, human biases – but falls prey to them all the time, just as you and I do.
Are SNL cold opens just hackneyed, unfunny pieces of elitist-liberal propaganda? I think that VICE piece asks several separate questions, and they don’t necessarily all have the same answers. I also think the liberal/conservative dichotomy is kind of dead at the moment; this isn’t about liberal positions, but opposition to kakistocracy.
A Qatari investor and former government official claims that Michael Cohen asked for a million-dollar bribe after the 2016 election in exchange for information on and potential access to the president-elect. Meanwhile, the Middle East blockade of Qatar is about to enter its twelfth month.
The Basque terrorist group Eta, which waged a nearly five-decade long separatist terror campaign in Spain, claims it has completely dismantled.
Cape Town’s water crisis never quite reached Day Zero, but there are still important takeaways from the barely-averted catastrophe, including that we can live on just 50 liters of water a day.
E-books were going to kill off physical books; then we heard that dead-tree editions were making a comeback and e-books were fading. Neither is quite true, as self-published authors are driving strong e-book sales that don’t always show up in industry reporting because Amazon, like Netflix, doesn’t release data on internal content.
The American Association of University Professors says the University of Nebraska violated a professor’s rights when the school fired her for protesting an alt-right organization’s event on campus.
An idiot white high school student in Montana is claiming he has a right to wear a Confederate flag shirt (note: isn’t that ‘disrespecting’ it?) to school; the Missoula County school district says they have a clear right to ban such clothing based on court rulings in other states. You couldn’t wear a swastika shirt to any school without repercussions; this is no different, as the Confederate flag has always been a symbol of slavery.
The Trump Administration is considering a rule banning some doctors from even discussing abortion with some patients. The rule would cover doctors who receive Title X federal funds, which go to low-income patients, which in turn would mean providing worse medical care to poor people – all to satisfy evangelical voters, who make up just a quarter of the American population.
The White House is very mad about all the leaks, so Axios talked to some of the leakers about why they leak.
Kickstarters! Paradox Interactive is bringing four popular video game titles to tabletop in partnerships with various board game publishers. The first of them, Crusader Kings, hit Kickstarter yesterday and is already more than fully funded. I played a demo of this on Friday in Stockholm and liked what I saw.
Greenbrier Games’ Posthuman Saga Kickstarter has already quintupled its original goal in just five days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, books, first amendment, links, spain, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ May 5, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/18.

My first mock draft for 2018 is now up for Insiders, as is a short post on the Ronald Acuña show. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I did some podcasts with friends this week. I appeared on the Productive Outs podcast to talk some baseball and music. Then I talked with Seth Heasley on his Hugos There podcast to discuss To Say Nothing of the Dog, one of my all-time favorite comic novels (and a Hugo Award winner). And of course on Thursday I was on the BBTN podcast with Buster Olney.

By the way, if any of you happen to live in/near Stockholm, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to be there for a conference in the near future. Let me know in the comments what I should try to do or see in the few hours I’ll have free while there.

And now, the links…

I am quoted in this longread from Tim Grierson on the complicated legacy of sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, who invented the noxious save stat, ruining the sport for decades.
ProPublica investigates a private trash hauler in NYC that covered up the death of an off-the-books worker, claiming he was a homeless person who’d jumped under their truck.
Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources approved a plan to divert public waters from the Great Lakes to a Taiwanese electronics factory in Mount Pleasant.
Baseball Prospectus’ Matt Trueblood wrote about how Albert Pujols appears to have outed himself as age 40, at least if you follow the math as Trueblood did. Although rumors around Pujols’ real age have been around since he debuted in 2001, there’s never been anything more tangible than third hand hearsay. Also, if you’re a BP subscriber, Russell Carleton, author of the new and very good book The Shift, explains how many fans and writers misuse his ‘stabilization’ concept when looking at small, early-season samples.
Parker Molloy writes for GOOD that the White House Correspondents Dinner has always been a bad idea. I agree – it’s far too chummy for what should be an arm’s length relationship. And Charles P. Pierce wrote the best defense of comedian Michelle Wolf’s set at the WHCD in a column for Esquire.
Senate Republicans are prepared to ditch the so-called “blue slip” protocol by confirming a hard-right Ninth Circuit Court nominee over the objections of both of the candidate’s Senators (Democrats from Oregon).
Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history, according to the former CEO of Intuit and Paypal. I’m not worried: I’ve invested my entire 401k in tulips and South Seas stock.
The Arizona teachers’ strike is over, but not before Republican opponents came up with some bizarre conspiracy theories to attack the educators, who were fighting for living wages. Supermajority tax laws in many states, backed by the Koch brothers and other Republican donors, make raising teacher salaries difficult.
Speaking of the Koch Brothers, it turns out that George Mason University, the largest public college in the state of Virginia, gave the Koch foundation a say in hiring and firing decisions after taking a donation from the group.
Gilead update: Oklahoma’s House voted to let adoption agencies turn down LGBTQ couples (as well as single moms, Muslims, atheists, etc.). Meanwhile, Iowa has now banned nearly all abortions with a likely unconstitutional law that prohibits the procedure after a ‘fetal heartbeat’ is detected, around six weeks after conception.
Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams writes in Fortune why her $200,000 personal debt shouldn’t disqualify her from public office. Given the student loan burden of Americans, any stance that holds that people with large outstanding debts can’t be elected officials is awfully elitist and antithetical to democracy. For what it’s worth, I didn’t pay off the last of my own grad school debt until I wrote Smart Baseball.
The ‘biohacker’ Aaron Traywick, who injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience, was found dead earlier this week at some sort of weird spa. The life-extension advocate was 28.
Evolution in real time: Lizards on Redonda Island are evolving more quickly now that two of their main predators have been eradicated.
There’s a bird of paradise whose feathers are so black that they absorb 99.95% of visible light when faced head-on. It made the news in the last few weeks due to a new paper demonstrating there are two distinct species of this bird, rather than one, as previously believed. You can read the original research paper for free on PeerJ.
Orac details Chelsea Clinton’s #vaccineswork tweet and how it unhinged the denialists, including Andrew Wakefield’s partners in fraud.
Former anti-vaxxer moms say empathy is the way to get through to parents who still refuse to vaccinate their kids.
If you live in or near London, do not touch these caterpillars.
Private equity firm Alden Global Capital continues to turn big profits by gutting local newspapers.
Young Fathers’ third album, Cocoa Sugar, dropped in March, and their video for “Toy” features little kids as world leaders, with what appears to be a subtle jab at the President of the U.S.
Two board games designed by the CIA for internal training are now public and playable thanks to some FOIA requests and the print-and-play community.
Empyreal: Spells and Steam, a new fantasy-themed train game from Level 99, just hit Kickstarter this week.
Ruben Bolling’s latest Tom The Dancing Bug comic strip is titled What Trump Supporters See, although its ultimate target is the gullible media.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, boardgames, cryptocurrencies, evolution, iowa, links, oklahoma, rap, stick to baseball, vaccines, wisconsin

→ April 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/28/18.

My one Insider post this week looked at four pitchers who could go in the first round of this year’s draft, led by Florida RHP Carter Stewart, who was second on my latest ranking of draft prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Ancestree, a light, filler game from the designer of Blood Rage and Rising Sun, but one that I think borrows too heavily from other titles.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback, and it’s a bestseller … (checks notes) in Sonoma, California. I’ll be at Washington, DC’s legendary bookstore Politics and Prose at 6 pm on July 14th to discuss & sign the book.

And now, the links…

The Guardian had three superb longreads this week, so I’m including them all. The first calls for universities to ‘bulldoze’ their business schools, as the author, a B-school prof himself, argues they do more harm than good. I have an MBA, and I agree with many of his points, as well as the additional evidence that expensive full-time MBAs do not provide sufficient ROIs to students. But some MBA programs include useful material, including accounting and operations research. There’s a worthwhile course of study in there somewhere, but perhaps under a new name.
The second looks at the challenge in updating the Oxford English Dictionary, producing a third edition in the digital era when language appears to be changing faster than ever. A good read for fellow fans of The Professor and the Madman.
The third is a bit weird, as it documents people who pretend to be wealthy influences on Instagram as a way to make money, somehow, although the main subject is more poseur than profiteer.
The Atlantic has a longread that argues that American democracy no longer accurately represents the will of the people. The anecdote that opens this story, in Oxford, Massachusetts, is absolutely infuriating.
Black students nationally are several times more likely to be suspended or disciplined than white students are for the same infractions. The Obama Administration had begun civil rights investigations into the practice in Texas, but this ProPublica/Mother Jones longread explains how Besty DeVos is ending the effort. If you can’t re-segregate the schools by law, do it by fact.
BuzzFeed investigates Facebook’s role in recent anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka, where the government temporarily blocked access to the site because Facebook wouldn’t take down bigoted posts and videos calling for Sinhalese Buddhists (!) to attack Muslims and Muslim-owned businesses.
The British morning show Good Morning Britain, hosted by Susanna Reid (who seems to be sharp) and Piers Morgan (a pile of wilted romaine lettuce in an expensive suit) ran a feature on people who didn’t vaccinate their pets for fear their pets would get autism. No, that isn’t actually possible, and some people are just really fucking stupid.
More and more research on behavior shows that changing attitudes isn’t enough to get people to do the right or smart thing, nor is giving them more information: If you want to change someone’s behavior, you need to convince them that everyone else is already doing what they should be. That’s why vaccine denialism is contagious, and why drowning out these cranks and charlatans with reminders that the vast, vast majority of parents still vaccinate their kids is so important.
Canadian fraudsters (they call themselves “homeopaths,” but homeopathy is just bullshit) are telling parents of autistic children they can ‘cure’ autism with diluted doses of vaccines. This nonsense, called CEASE, is just stealing money from desperate parents, and anyone who offers it should be tried for fraud.
A new study shows evidence that Trump’s election was driven by white racism, not by economic anxiety.
The Alfie Evans tragedy has been co-opted by grifters and vultures, looking to score political points off bogus claims of liberty that ignore the sad fact that there is no hope of recovery for the severely brain-damaged child.
Finland will not continue its Universal Basic Income trial after it reaches its scheduled end in 2019.
A former reporter for a Sinclair-owned station says she was pressured to include climate change denialism In her reporting on climate change itself.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kodachrome mocked students protesting for reforming gun laws, and later in the week a law reporter found a huge gaffe in Kobach’s filings in the ACLU’s ongoing suit against his voter suppression law, which has done a great job of eliminating the voter fraud that didn’t exist in the first place.
Some Delaware news: a recent attempt to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.25/hour failed, but it looks like a “red flag” gun bill will be signed into law soon.
Writer Rebecca Solnit, a contributing editor at Harper’s, asks who gets to control the narrative in a country that claims to want equality but is awfully abstemious about handing it out.
A fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to the university’s alumni magazine about better ways to detect and fight the spread of disinformation online as we head towards another round of elections this fall.
Sacramento DA Anne Marie Schubert, who is up for re-election on June 5th, has a history of declining to prosecute police officers who injure black civilians or suspects in the line of duty. The Intercept reveals that she took $420,000 in donations from police organizations across her three campaigns. She may soon be handed evidence that would support charging the officers who killed Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, in his own backyard.
Senator Marco Rubio writes for CNN.com that it is time to force Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from power. I agree, but how? Sanctions, Rubio’s main solution, are unlikely to work in isolation. Maduro is planning to abolish more voting rights soon and has been raising capital by selling the “petro,” a new cryptocurrency that I’m sure is an excellent investment.
My employer ran a fairly favorable profile of Cleveland pitcher and climate change denier Trevor Bauer this week; Deadspin offered a rebuttal.
The EU is set to ban neonics, pesticides suspected of contributing to bee colony collapses worldwide. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., EPA chief Scott Pruitt proposed adding neonics to drinking water.
This essay on Theness.com makes a good point about GMO labeling: The government can’t regulate what it doesn’t understand, and in the case of GMOs, a functional definition of what O’s are GM and require labels may not be feasible.
Texas Monthly looks at the Texas gerrymandering case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 2014 suicide of a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania has spurred an ongoing focus on mental health among Ivy League athletes, including the “success culture” that may have contributed to her death.
Protests in Armenia against a power grab by the country’s outgoing President have led to his resignation, although the protests have continued as the ruling Republican Party refuses to relinquish power.
Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and the son of Pakistani immigrants to the U.S., writes for CNN about the controversy over the Simpsons character Apu.
The alt-right front group Turning Point USA has hired numerous employees with histories of racist and/or bigoted tweets. I wonder why that is.
Could a postal banking system help ‘unbanked’ Americans while also providing much-needed revenue for the US Postal Service? Lack of access to capital is a huge obstacle to the upward economic mobility that is, or at least was, a hallmark of capitalist economies.
The Ringer examines Netflix’ strategy of buying or funding original movies no one can find on its service. Grierson and Leitch have discussed this as well on their podcast – the Netflix algorithm doesn’t even seem to effectively push this content to viewers whose own histories would indicate interest in these indie films.
A study funded by the U.S. military on climate change and sea level rise found that nearly a thousand islands risk becoming uninhabitable this century as a result of man’s effects on the global climate.
Citing low sales and supply chain problems, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing production of a pump used by cancer patients that extends their lives by two years. The headline makes it seem like this is just an evil corporate decision, but the story is more involved than that.
A British activist with cerebral palsy is asking the government to rethink a proposed ban on plastic drinking straws, saying for people with movement disorders, straws are critical to help them drink. (Perhaps reusable, more durable plastic straws, or straws made from paper, would work?)
The CJR interviews Steve Fishman about his podcast, Empire Of Blood, the story of how he helped exonerate a man who served 22 years for a murder he didn’t commit.
The Guardian looks at how the Michael Cohen case has exposed the extent of Sean Hannity’s real estate holdings, which is now in turn leading to stories on substandard living conditions and poor treatment of tenants in his buildings.
Jeet Heer’s Twitter thread on Kevin Williamson and the “troll three-step” move resembles all too well how opinion writers with extremist views try to both appeal to their base and dance around valid criticism from the center or the opposite end of the spectrum.
Alexandra Petri follows this by writing about how she’s been silenced In a column for a small paper in Washington called the Post.
Asmodee Digital announced an upcoming adaptation of the Lovecraftian board game Mansions of Madness, due out on Steam early in 2019.
I loved the Bard’s Tale PC RPGs when I was a teenager, eventually finishing the first two (I never tried the third), so I’m stoked to see inXile is developing a new sequel/update more than 30 years after the series appeared to be finished.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Armenia, boardgames, climate change, Economics, gmo, guns, history of language, links, longreads, mental health, pseudoscience, racism, rpgs, social media, Sri Lanka, stick to baseball, texas, tv, vaccines, Venezuela, voter suppression

→ April 15, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/18.

Two new posts for Insiders this week, both on draft prospects I went to see: one on Ryan Weathers, Ryan Rolison, and Ethan Hankins; another on Kentucky’s Sean Hjelle and Tristan Pompey. All five are likely first rounders, although Hankins, coming back from a shoulder issue, could end up going to Vanderbilt if teams aren’t willing to pony up.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the dice-drafting game Sagrada, which is easy to learn but has very high replay value. Players choose dice from a common set, rolled each round, to fill out their personal boards resembling stained-glass windows. I’ve also been playing a ‘pre-alpha’ release of the Terraforming Mars app on Steam, and it looks fantastic.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! Buy a zillion copies for all your Linkedin contacts. You should also sign up for my free not-quite-weekly email newsletter, which has more personal essays and links to everything I’ve written.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Dayn Perry writes about the new White Sox ballpark that should have been but wasn’t, a tight stadium in Armour Park that would have preserved more of the neighborhood and allowed for more economic development. Instead, the city and state caved to team ownership, funding a monstrous stadium, forcibly removing hundreds of families from their homes, and failing to even charge the team rent for 18 years.
The BBC has a story written by an American man who was a schoolteacher for 17 years despite being illiterate. He didn’t learn to read until he was 48, and how he got as far as he did is incredible.
The Guardian‘s long read of the week looks at the ongoing debate over the minimum wage, which tends to be expressed solely in economic terms and often involves one side or the other rushing to claim victory based on a single study.
Author Junot Diaz (The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) revealed in a first-person piece for the New Yorker that he was raped by a family friend when he was eight years old, never got therapy or any kind of help, and spent the next few decades dealing with the consequences.
Also in the New Yorker, staff writer Adam Davidson looks at the Michael Cohen case, calling it the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency; I’m not so sanguine. The lawyerly folks at Popehat weighed in on what Monday’s raid on Cohen’s office implied.
A professor of social psychology and decision-making writes in Scientific American that targeted stories and fake news likely affected just a small percentage of voters in the 2016 U.S. election, but that small number was also more than enough to swing the overall result. The author also looks at why those stories were effective.
Adweek looks at the change in Facebook’s news feed is killing digital publishers. I’m still there with a public page for readers, but I get less traction there than on Twitter or via this site.
Franklin Foer writes in Atlantic about our new era of fake videos – not just the ‘deepfakes’ of the porn world, but the new potential for fake news videos or videos of politicians ‘saying’ things they never said.
Hamilton Nolan has an angry “guide” to how private equity firms are gutting companies for shareholder profits, which was in evidence recently at the Denver Post. A writer at the Boulder Daily Camera wrote an editorial about this very topic that the publisher refused to print, so he posted it on his own blog instead.
The former Texas Deputy DA who rejected a recommendation to pursue charges against Trump University just landed a nomination to a federal judgeship. I’m sure that’s all a coincidence, though!
The National Academy of Medicine is resisting efforts to expel a member who plagiarized and fabricated major parts of his C.V..
Australian novelist Tim Winton argues toxic masculinity in adults leads to the raising of misogynist boys as the latter are discouraged from showing empathy or tenderness to meet a one-sided standard of macho behavior.
The belief that people have different learning “styles,” usually categorized as visual or auditory, is not supported by any evidence. And folks have certainly tried.
Antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is on its way, and North Korea may be its incubator, exacerbated by cuts to global funding (including sanctions by our current Administration) that will include money to try to fight the disease. While looking more into this I found an article from February 2017 explaining how human encroachment on rain forests leads to the emergence of new viruses, profiling one researcher trying to identify new pathogens before they start killing humans.
CMON Games announced the August 2018 (scheduled) release of a board game based on the Kick-Ass comic book series:

In 2018, @CMONGames will release Kick-Ass: The Board Game. Dudes on a map w/players managing social media, too. —WEM pic.twitter.com/vxOeKOfgsV

— BoardGameGeek (@BoardGameGeek) August 16, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, Economics, links, ptsd, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ April 8, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/7/18.

Three new pieces for Insiders this week – looking at the most prospect-laden rosters in the minors, and draft blog posts on the top prospects at the NHSI tournament and on Kentucky’s 6’11” RHP Sean Hjelle. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! You can buy it through HarperCollins directly or at any bookseller.

And now, the links…

Longread: Novelist Rana Dasgupta, writing in the Guardian, looks at the ongoing decline of the nation-state system and the lack of a promising structure to replace it.
The Useless Department of Agriculture ruled this week that organic food producers can use the bogeyman emulsifier carrageenan, derived from seaweed and blamed (without evidence) for lots of health ills. The real problem here is that the USDA shouldn’t be ruling on what organic means; it’s not clear any more that that term has any use, and one major reason is that the federal government has watered it down.
ICE is trying to deport a U.S. Army veteran, contrary to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ directive that they should not do that. I feel safer already!
The Thai government has had a long-running endeavor to open more Thai restaurants abroad, reasoning that it would help drive tourism to the southeast Asian country (which has a not entirely undeserved reputation for unsavory tourist business). It’s been successful enough, at least, that other countries are mimicking their strategy.
This week’s NPR Hidden Brain podcast, a repeat of an episode from about two years ago, covered the scarcity trap, or how a lack of something leads us to focus inordinately on getting it. Among other things, it helps explain why people who live paycheck to paycheck (or with less) have a hard time spreading out the funds they do have until their next deposit.
The Outline looks at why Wilmington, Delaware’s ongoing problem with gun violence hasn’t abated even as the national homicide rate has declined. Three major reasons: Urban poverty, the effects of trauma, and bureaucratic infighting.
JAMA ran an anti-glyphosate editorial recently without disclosing the authors’ substantial conflict of interest. The authors are running what sounds like a scam site offering to test customers’ urine for the presence of glyphosate for a significant fee.
The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece that includes a Q&A with Rob Manfred on MLB’s end run around the courts to suppress minor league salaries, and why Manfred’s answers don’t add up.
The Good Phight’s Paul Boyé looks at Nick Pivetta’s new, sharper curveball. Pivetta was a sinker/slider guy in the Nats’ system, and had no real weapon for left-handed batters back when I first saw him in 2015, when he had a wide platoon split. He had virtually no split in 2016, then had a huge reverse split in the majors in 2017. With two effective breaking pitches now, though, I’d absolutely expect him to show substantial improvement against right-handed batters.
Tim Grierson discussed the new film You Were Never Really Here with director Lynne Ramsey and star Joaquin Phoenix, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this performance.
A pair of stories around my alma mater: I saw folks claiming on Twitter that Harvard had somehow suspended its largest evangelical students’ group; the truth is that the Undergraduate Council suspended funding for an evangelical group that violated the Council’s rules on non-discrimination by expelling an officer who came out as LGBT. The UC is a student-run organization, not the university proper.
There’s also a stalking-horse lawsuit against Harvard alleging that the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants; the truth is that the lawsuit is arranged and funded by a white conservative who opposes affirmative action.
The headline here is terribly misleading, but there was a flurry of stories this week like this one, about a new study arguing that diet affects mental health, particularly depression. The quick-and-dirty: eat more fiber in your diet from vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. As a whole, the prescription doesn’t sound that different from the so-called Mediterranean diet.
James Beard award-winning chef Sean Brock went public with his alcoholism last year, and in a new piece for Bon Appetit he describes his new diet and self-care regime, a combination of good nutrition, mindfulness, and pseudoscience.
Serious Eats has a guide to Italian amari, potable bitters that include Campari and Montenegro. The guide includes comments from Sother Teague, owner of tiny Manhattan bar Amor y Amargo, profiled this week on Liquor.com. I’ve been to Amor y Amargo and it’s superb; Teague uses only bitters, no sodas or fruit juices, in his drinks, creating clever flavor combinations with some serious alcohol kick.
George Will writes that there’s no good reason to prevent felons from voting; there’s a reason states like Florida do it, of course, but it’s not a good one.
Board game news: The Fireball Island Kickstarter was fully funded in an hour and crossed the $1 million funding mark inside of a week.
Z-Man Games announced Taj Mahal, the upcoming game from Reiner Knizia, due out later this year.
Asmodee Digital announced the imminent release of the Terraforming Mars app, with Steam coming first and iOS/Android soon after.
In what appears to be an April Fools’ Day tradition, Berkeley Breathed released a new “Calvin County” crossover comic, bringing Calvin back to the meadow of Bloom County.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, links, stick to baseball

→ March 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/10/18.

I had two posts for Insiders this week, with another one on Shohei Ohtani just posted this morning. One piece looked at potential #1 overall pick Casey Mize, a right-handed pitcher at Auburn who threw a no-hitter last night. I ranked potential impact prospects for the 2018 season, which differs from my top 100 ranking, which looks at prospects’ long-term expected value. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Smile, a new, light card game designed by Michael Schacht, best known for Zooloretto.

The paperback version of Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday! I’ll be at Twitter HQ that day, and will answer questions from readers via the site’s Q&A app. To submit a question, tweet it with the hashtag #smartbaseball.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Atlantic on a serial con man who bilked a dozen women out of $1 million by finding them on dating sites, establishing relationships with them, and then doing everything from using their credit cards to pawning their jewelry to stealing one woman’s passport and birth certificate.
Politico examines how the Obama administration’s decision to normalize relations with Myanmar may have led to the ongoing genocide of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, many of whom now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The country, formerly known as Burma, made superficial moves towards democracy after decades of rule by a military junta, and the U.S. responded in kind by lifting sanctions, but in the process we never pushed for protections for threatened minorities, and still aren’t doing so.
The New York Times‘ news section remains excellent, as in this long profile of a once-promising dancer who ended up homeless in Manhattan, suffering from untreated mental illness. What the writer never seems to question or explore, however, is the link between the subject’s sexual abuse as a child and her mental illness as an adult.
Their opinion section remains a tire-fire, as anti-Arab troll Bari Weiss, who now writes for the NYT full-time, used a fake ‘antifa’ Twitter account as evidence for some point she was making.
Jane Coaston takes a long look for Vox at the current trial of several alt-right leaders for inciting violence in Charlottesville. Are they criminally liable for speech that the prosecution argues led to the death of Heather Heyer?
A new study in Science found that false news stories spread faster than true ones, because it’s more novel or interesting. They also found that bot accounts don’t spread false stories faster than true stories.
David Gorski, at Science-Based Medicine, goes long on the ‘unholy alliance’ in Texas between ultra-religious conservatives and anti-vaxxers to fight vaccine mandates under the bullshit guise of ‘choice.’ You have a choice not to give yourself medicine when you’re sick, because doing so only makes you an idiot. You do not have the choice to deny your children such treatments, nor do you have the choice to endanger vulnerable members of your community who can’t be vaccinated or who could die of vaccine-preventable diseases. If you live in Texas, speak up, assuming you’re not hospitalized with the mumps.
WIRED looks at our extremely vulnerable medical supply chain, as shown by how two hurricanes in Puerto Rico have led to a massive shortage of IV bags in the U.S. Too many drugs and supplies are made outside of the U.S., and, of course, the current Administration’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been unacceptable.
An upcoming trial in Virginia (just postponed to May) will test an anti-abortion tactic of trespassing in abortion clinics to harass and obstruct patients seeking abortions or other related health services. I wonder what would happen if the abortion clinic employees invoked Stand Your Ground laws and shot the trespassers.
Cavaliers power forward Kevin Love wrote a piece for the Players’ Tribune about suffering a panic attack and the good that talk therapy has done for him since then. If you have mental health issues that aren’t trauma-induced, cognitive behavioral therapy can be a wonderful solution, or a major part of the solution.
WNYC’s On the Media podcast did an episode on how various reporters and outlets cover white supremacists. Is giving such racists and cranks publicity only helping them find new members?
An 83-year-old herbalist is now on trial in California for killing a 13-year-old diabetic boy by giving him herbs instead of insulin. The story doesn’t say if the mother is charged, but she should be.
Sinclair Broadcasting is taking over more and more local stations, and they’re forcing news anchors to read promos that bash mainstream media and report on right-wing bugbears like terrorism rather than cover local news.
Vaccines: There’s an epidemic of oral cancer in men, caused by the HPV virus, which men can catch while performing oral sex. The point of the article isn’t to tell me to make like Fat Joe, but to encourage parents to get their sons the HPV vaccine.
StatNews looks back at Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine. He died 25 years ago this week and was lauded in his time for refusing to patent the new vaccine, thus making it cheap and affordable for patients around the world. With news that Nigeria appears to have gone a year without any new cases of polio, the disease’s wild form appears to be once again endemic in the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan and nowhere else.
Natural News, a pseudoscience site that trashes valid medicine so Mike Adams can sell you a bunch of useless supplements, was kicked off Youtube after posting videos arguing that the Parkland shooting survivors were just ‘crisis actors.’
GlobalNews looks at the spreading measles outbreak in Europe, which the authors trace back to the fraudulent Andrew Wakefield study that claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism (it doesn’t, no vaccines cause autism, and Wakefield fabricated the data).
Chefs and cooks are notorious for adopting a lifestyle that can be harmful to their long-term health. Kat Kinsman interviewed eleven chefs about their self-care routines.
The short documentary “Heroin(e),” which you can watch on Netflix, looks at three women in Huntington, West Virginia, the ‘overdose capital’ of the United States, who are trying to fight the tide of overdoses and opioid addiction. Vanity Fair looks at the film and story behind it.
High St. on Market is my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, and now three alumni of the all-day café, built around their amazing house-made breads, are opening a new BYOB dinner-only restaurant called Cadence on the border of Fishtown and Olde Kensington.
LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold reviews the reopened Copenhagen restaurant Noma, often ranked as the best restaurant in the world.
The Irish Times looks at former billionaire Chuck Feeney, who gave his entire fortune to charity, mostly through his own foundation, which has wound itself down by using its endowment.
An ACLU-backed lawsuit accusing Kansas Klown Kris Kobach of voter suppression began this past week; the suit argues that the policy he crafted unfairly disenfranchised thousands of Kansans, and could do the same to a few million American voters if the law spreads. Two things you can do to fight this: Vote against politicians pushing voter suppression under the guise of “stopping voter fraud,” and get a passport.
Boardgame stuff: Designer Grant Rodiek argues that upcoming title Rising Sun is extremely important given the industry’s trend towards more complex games with overlong rulebooks or highly asymmetrical setups that can deter newbies to the hobby – and frankly just don’t have good designs.
Another designer, Bruno Faidutti (Citadels), writes about the flood of new releases every year and how it shrinks the selling windows for most games. I don’t think he has any answers, but his point, that 3000 new games a year probably isn’t sustainable for most publishers, is a real concern.
Restoration Games has updated its Design Diary for the upcoming Fireball Island, a reissue of a Milton Bradley title from 1986.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, con men, links, longreads, philadelphia, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 27, 2018
→ By keith

Abalone.

Abalone is an abstract two-player game from 1987 that looks a bit like Chinese checkers but plays with much more complexity thanks to a short list of very narrowly defined potential moves. It got a digital release late in 2017 from Asmodee Digital that offers a variety of starting boards and has a mostly superb interface, although they might need a harder AI player for a future update. It’s available on iTunes and Google Play for $2.99.

Abalone is played on the central, shared area of a Chinese checkers board, a hexagon with nine rows ranging from five spaces on the exterior to nine spaces in the center row. Each player begins with 14 marbles, black or white, and must try to push six of the opposing player’s marbles off the board to win. The potential moves are:

1. You can move one marble one space in any direction, as long as the space is empty.
2. You can move two or three marbles in a line forward, as a unit, one space. If the next space has an opposing marble in it, but your group has more marbles than there are opposing marbles in the same row, then you can push them one space backwards. So you can move two marbles, one behind the other, to push a solitary opposing marble into an empty space beyond it, and you can move three marbles in a line to push two opposing marbles.
3. You can move two or three adjacent marbles on the perpendicular, rather than moving them in a line (moving them like you’re sweeping them with your hand), but can’t push any opposing marbles that way.

The game requires players to consider offense and defense; setting traps is a huge part of Abalone, and avoiding them by setting up lines of three marbles when you can is just as important, but with 14 marbles (a number that will decline as the game progresses), that’s not easy to do. You have to watch the edges to make sure you don’t lose sight of a marble that’s in danger of being pushed off the board on the next turn.

The easy AI player is really just a tutorial/newbie opponent, while the hard player is good but I think a bit too beatable. The hardest AI will take advantage of pieces on the edge, but its trap-setting capabilities are a little weak, and I have seen it fail to take the occasional risk-free ejection. (Sometimes you can eject an opponent’s marble, but doing so always puts your marble in the vacated space, and thus you might be giving your opponent an easy push.) I’ve lost to the hard AI player, but I beat it more often than I lose, needing as few as 63 moves to win and as many as 199.

The nicest starting arrangement in Abalone.

The app comes with more than 30 starting boards; some players think the official, classic board is “solved,” or at least confers too much of an advantage to the start player, although given the sheer number of moves required, the game being “solved” would still require you to memorize a ridiculous number of steps. There’s also a chance of a stalemate, especially with the AI players, where both players end up repeating a loop of steps indefinitely, until one player chooses to make a more aggressive move instead. I do think the various “Daisy” boards – the app includes four – present a better challenge, reducing the chances of a temporary stalemate, and as I quickly learned, they also give the start player a great opportunity to do something very stupid at the beginning.

I’ve never been a huge fan of chess, because the game requires more study and more forward planning than I like in a game – it’s a serious intellectual challenge, but begins to feel more like work, and mapping out the potential scenarios creates a fairly large decision tree in my head. (I’m also not great at discarding moves – I think the best chess players can prune those trees because they know their opponents will make a specific move in response to each of their own moves.) Abalone has that chess-lite feel that I love in games – yes, there are lots of potential moves, but the tree is limited because you only have one piece type, and it’s definitely easier to figure out your opponent’s likely next move.

I won this game rather nicely.

The app is very easy to play even on the small screen, and lets you undo any move before confirming it. You can also see the last move with a rewind feature that’s very useful, and at game end it tells you how many moves the game took and replays the entire thing from the beginning. One minor quibble is that when you leave the app for a while, resuming a game requires you to enter the menu to start a new game and then hit the Pause button in the upper right, the only thing in the app that felt non-intuitive. The tutorial is also excellent.

Abalone was briefly on sale for 99 cents, and I imagine it will be again at some point; I’ve found it quite addictive even as I’ve gotten to be good enough to beat the AI more than half the time (which I interpret as a weak AI, not that I’m some skilled player). It offers a pass and play mode as well as networked play, which might be the better option if you’re looking for a more serious challenge instead of a minor brain teaser. I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth from it already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, boardgames

→ February 19, 2018
→ By keith

Otys.

Otys is a new-ish midweight strategy board game from Asmodee’s Libellud imprint, released here right around the holidays, and the first title from designer Claude Lucchini. It’s a sort of futuristic deep sea-diving themed game, where players try to gather resources to complete contracts, and must manipulate two sets of tiles to be able to make moves. There might be a better game in here somewhere, but I found it rather overdesigned, and the mechanics aren’t well-connected to the theme.

In Otys, two to four players each work with a player board that has six tokens, numbered one through five plus a neutral “X” token, and eight diver tiles, each of which has a different ability. The board has slots for the numbered tokens, and then a column where you randomly stack the diver tiles in a way that has five of them adjacent to the five numbered slots. On a turn, you will pick one of the numbered tiles, slide it to the right, use one of the five “sponsor” tiles from the central board to get something (a credit, a battery, the right to use your diver’s skill twice, etc.), and then use the ability of the adjacent diver. Four of the divers get you specific resources. The others let you add abilities like gaining a new contract card only you can complete or trading credits for resources.

The contracts come in two forms. The game has four resources – white, green, blue, and black, which I think mean actual things like plants and water, but it really doesn’t matter to the mechanics – and some contracts simply require you gather two to four specific resources to fulfill them, gaining points and sometimes a credit or battery token. The other contracts tell you to acquire specific combinations of any resources – so, two of one type, two of another, and one of a third – where you get to pick the colors, and then have similar rewards.

The Otys board; diver tiles are in the center column.

The big catch in Otys, and the only mechanic here that I thought was novel, is that each token/diver row on your player board has a storage space for resources, and to fill a contract, you must have all the right resources in one specific storage space. The spaces can hold three to six resources, but in practical terms, you’re going to use maybe two of them heavily, because gaining resources in all of your storage areas will leave you unable to ever fill contracts. You can also add tokens via one diver (the ‘explorer’) that let you pay two credits, take one resource or victory point or battery now, and then place that token on its other face next to a storage area, providing you with a permanent bonus whenever you fill a contract from that area. The divers are also double-sided, with each bringing an ‘upgraded’ side that lets you invoke its power for one fewer credit or that gives you something else in addition to the single resource.

The numbered ‘key’ tokens must be placed in the ‘hacker’ track below your board after they’re used; you can only bring them back up when the track is filled, which at the start of the game would mean using all of your tokens at least once before using them again. You get one X token to place in any row where you’ve already used the key, and there’s a way – very poorly described in the English rules – to acquire more X tokens from the central supply. This mechanic felt trite, reminiscent of games from Puerto Rico and San Juan to last year’s Entropy, where you have to use all or most of your roles and then ‘reset’ your hand, and the combination of this mechanic and the diver one – when you use a diver, s/he has to ‘resurface’ by going to the top of the queue, with everyone above him/her moving down a spot – just made the game overly complex.

The game ends when anyone gets to 18 points, after which you finish the round so everyone can try to complete one more contract. In practice, that means 3-4 contracts plus the random point or two you’ll add along the way, and it does play in about an hour. The theme has almost nothing to do with the game, and there are way too many restrictions and twists here for me to enjoy the experience. I wish more effort had gone into streamlining the rules, even if it came at the cost of some of the artwork or component design.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, strategy games

→ February 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/17/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covered the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft, in advance of yesterday’s opening night in Division 1. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday. Unfortunately I did not recover enough from whatever ailment I had this week to make the trip to Myrtle Beach, but hope to be on the road next weekend.

I reviewed the board game Seikatsu, one of my daughter’s new favorites, here this week, with another review hitting Paste‘s site next week. Also, I never tweeted this link at all, but reviewed the Romanian-language film Graduation, from Oscar-nominated director Cristian Mungiu, on Wednesday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! Some readers have reported difficulty finding the hardcover version in stores, but it is still available on amazon at the moment.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Outline looks at Delaware’s opioid crisis, mentioning a high school in the district where we live (which has a local reputation for such things). Does any state not have an opioid crisis? And is there anything states can do to stop it without support from the federal government?
WIRED looks inside the last two years at Facebook as the company faces criticism from multiple sides for its part in promulgating fake news and, in the words of one former executive, “ripping apart the social fabric.”
Lawfareblog breaks down what the latest indictment from Robert Mueller’s office means — and what it doesn’t.
Buzzfeed talks to Aviv Ovadya, Chief Technologist at UMSI’s Center for Social Media Responsibility, about the imminent potential for technologies that can quickly create and disseminate new levels of fake news, including forged audio and video that could make it appear that world leaders said things they never said or did things they never did.
This November post from Rantt Media looks at how backpropagation, often mislabeled as “AI,” threatens millions of jobs, and what policy prescriptions we might enact to mitigate its effects. The idea that this is happening no matter what, so we should change our funding priorities, is very different from the “how do we stop this?” conversation that dominates instead.
An Indonesian province on the island of New Guinea that is home to the world’s biggest gold mine is home to a measles outbreak and widespread starvation among natives whose traditional environment and way of life has been destroyed by the mining companies with the full compliance of the Indonesian government.
Nigeria’s massive oil industry has long benefited foreign investors and a tiny local elite rather than enriching the country as a whole, which is the most populous country in Africa. The son of one of the country’s billionaires opened a window on how little the industry helps the Nigerian population when he tried to invest in European oil and gas assets, exposing how difficult it is for most Africans to participate in the wealth generated by natural resources. He’s no hero, but he inadvertently showed how badly the west takes advantage of former African colonies to this day.
EPA head Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier who is thoroughly unqualified to head the agency, has wasted tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on first-class travel … because taxpayers accost him over his disastrous policy decisions when he flies coach.
Have you seen tweets or reports that the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was the 18th school shooting in the U.S. this year? It wasn’t. That number comes from a gun-control advocacy group that counts any gun-related incident on a school campus as a “school shooting,” even if there wasn’t a threat to students.
Of course, deaths by firearm are still one major reason the U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born in.
This Paste op ed is from November but could run weekly without ever seeming out of date: Ban Assault Weapons, Idiots.
If you live in California, be aware that a group of cranks and pseudoscience advocates are pushing a ballot initiative to overturn the state’s mandatory vaccination law, remove fluoride from water, and more under the innocuous-sounding name “California Clean Environment.” All this would do is damage public health, especially for children, to satisfy a few charlatans who profit off the ignorant.
I know you’re shocked, but former Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has been accused of hiding profits from Miami-Dade County, claiming a paper loss on the sale of the team (for $1.2 billion) that let him avoid paying a portion of the proceeds to the county.
Cobb County ripped off its taxpayers to fund a stadium for the privately-owned Atlanta Braves … and now the county can’t even fund its existing libraries. The county also opened a new $10 million “cultural center” despite lacking a sustainable operating budget for the facility.
West Virginia is run by industries busy destroying its environment, including the oil & gas industry. A Democratic candidate in the state’s 7th District tried to read the names of sitting state legislators with how much money they received from oil & gas companies and was physically dragged from the floor, especially since she dared point out that committee chairman John Shott (GOP) took $40K from First Energy. How crooked is West Virginia’s government? The governor hired a gas company board member for an undefined role in the state house that gives him 24-hour access to the Governor’s Office.
Marie Newman is a Democrat running in Illinois for a seat held by another Democrat, Dan Lipinski, because Lipinski has supported so many right-wing positions, including voting for a 20-week abortion ban, voting to extend the government’s right to warrantless spying, voting for a permanent ban on the use of federal funds for abortions, voting against a minimum wage hike, and voting to expand the death penalty. Lipinski has long enjoyed the support of labor unions in his gerrymandered district, but several broke with him in the last three weeks to support Newman.
The songwriters behind the 2000 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play” sued Taylor Swift over the lyrics to her song “Shake It Off.” She won … because the judge ruled that the lyrics in question were too unoriginal to warrant copyright protection. I think this adequately burns both sides.
The Washington Post hired Koch Brothers mouthpiece Meghan McArdle to write for its editorial page, even though she got caught fabricating data to support an argument against the Affordable Care Act.
That wasn’t even the worst editorial page move of the week; the New York Times seems determined to drive itself into a ditch with recent hires and columns, including the hiring-and-immediate-firing of neo-Nazi apologist Quinn Norton. Justin Charity wrote for the Ringer about the paper’s seeming desire for self-immolation. I cancelled my digital subscription on Monday over the paper’s decision to run a column from climate change denier Bret Stephens that claimed the world is “smearing” Woody Allen, whose stepdaughter says he molested her.
Researchers at Rockefeller University may have discovered a new class of antibiotic compounds by sifting through dirt. Malacidins were effective in laboratories against many multi-drug resistant Gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA, by binding to calcium compounds that would eventually go into bacterial cell walls.
You can retain new material you learn more effectively if you take a short break of doing absolutely nothing after studying it.
Board game news: Calliope Games announced the long-delayed arrival of its three new Titan Series titles, including Ancestree, on retail shelves. Ancestree was among the best light games I played at Gen Con last year; it’s from designer Eric M. Lang, best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and the forthcoming Rising Sun.
Bezier Games released Palace of Mad King Ludwig to retail about three weeks ago; it’s a standalone sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig, but dispenses with the earlier game’s odd shapes and now has all players working on the same building with square tiles of differing values. Bezier’s site still says “pre-order” but it’s on amazon for $43.
Gen Con ticket sales are already outpacing sales from last year, with the event, held August 2-5 in Indianapolis, on course for its second straight sellout. I intend to be there the whole time, as I was last year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, boardgames, guns, links, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ February 16, 2018
→ By keith

Seikatsu.

Seikatsu was one of my honorable mentions on my list of the top ten games of 2017, maybe the best-looking game I played last year with gorgeous artwork and solid, heavy tokens. It’s listed as a game for 1 to 4 players, but really works best with 3 and fairly well with 2, not with the other counts.

Seikatsu calls itself “a game of perspective,” which is true for the final scoring, which accounts for the bulk of the points in the game. You score two ways in Seikatsu: once when you place a token on each turn, and then once for each row on the hexagonal board at the end of the game – but the rows you score depend on where you sit, so each player scores those rows (or columns, if you want to get all pedantic about it) differently. The result is a fast-moving game that asks you to balance two different scoring methods with every turn, but that keeps those turns short because your options are finite and it’s not that hard to figure out an optimal move.

The tokens in Seikatsu each show a bird and a ring of flowers, which correspond to the two scoring methods. You can place a token anywhere adjacent to another token or the neutral center space, and you score 1 point for that token plus another point for each adjacent token with the same bird image on it. In theory, you could score a maximum of 7 points, but in practice you’ll get 1 to 3 each turn and maybe luck into a 4 once every other game or so. There are four koi pond tokens that function as wild cards; you can place one and name any bird type to score it, after which the tile no longer scores as any bird type for tokens placed adjacent to it.

The flowers come into play at the end of the game. There are pagodas on three vertices of the board, each of which corresponds to one player’s perspective for scoring, splitting the board into seven columns unique to that player. In each column (or row … I’ll stop that now), the player identifies the flower type that appears on the most tokens, and scores points based on that number – 1 point for a single token, then 3, 6, 10, 15, and 21 points for the maximum possible number of six tokens with the same flower type. Koi pond tiles are wild again in this stage, and each player can assign whatever flower type s/he wants to those tiles.

Seikatsu is ideal with three players; with two, it’s a little easier to work the board independently until the last few moves, whereas with three you can’t plan ahead as easily. You only get two tokens in your hand each turn, so long-range planning is just not part of the game, but with two players you can set up your rows of flowers with less interference from other players. We’ve found that with two players, the scores are extremely close – we’ve tied once and never had a margin of victory over 5 points. That makes it a great game for a parent to play with a child, because it’s hard for the parent to run away with the game and thus doesn’t require playing ‘down’ to the younger player’s level. With four players, it’s “team” play, which I don’t think works very well; there’s a solitaire mode I haven’t tried. Seikatsu lists for $40, which I think reflects the high quality of the components but is a bit dear for this type of game; now that it’s been on the market for six months, though, I’m seeing it for under $30 (e.g., $28 on amazon) which is just right.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, family games, two-player games

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