Know Thyself – In The Zeitgeist

Two More Board Games from the Top 10 List

October 31, 2024 Steve Comments 1 comment

Here are two more games for my GeekList about the top 10 games on my BGG user profile. They are both “old school” games that younger generations might not recognize, but that gamers my age would possibly remember from their youth.

Why am I making this list? Simply put, because I want to dig up my gamer past and put it on the Internet. I have all these artifacts that are like a record of my gaming life: beat-up old copies of games with customized rules and components, and piles of notes and ideas.

Obviously I’m not going to scan and digitize all of that, but I can at least put together some online content that captures that information – frankly, for posterity. Then, when I’m gone, you can still go to my profiles and get an idea of what it was like to be a game enthusiast in the late 1900s and early 2000s, should that interest you.

So, without further ado, two more games from my top 10:

#8 Illuminati

In my teen years, I was one of a certain breed of nerd who obsessively read The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the conspiracy theory novels by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. You could spot us carrying our dog-eared copies of the big red omnibus edition in the hallways of my high school. We all fancied ourselves fringe intellectuals with a keen understanding of the world denied to our mundane peers. We were resonating with the countercultural vibe of that time period.

How far down the conspiracy rabbit hole I really fell I could not say. Probably I enjoyed the genre with tongue firmly in cheek. But one part of Illuminatus! fandom was playing a card game called Illuminati, published by Steve Jackson Games. I know I played it in high school, because I have a fond memory of playing at one of the old GenCons, where I actually won a copy of the game in a tournament. I wrote about it in this sesson report, where you can see a picture of the copy I won, which I still own: The Gnomes of Zurich Take Over the World Sometime in the Early 1980s.

This was also a popular game at the WarGamers Club in college. The game came with blank cards so you could make up your own, and I still have those in my old copy. Here’s a couple of examples (I have others but they are not in great shape):

In the late 80s one of my friends ran a really cool play by mail (PBM) version of the game. He printed out a set of rules (which I still have) on perforated computer paper, written up as a roleplaying game he called “The Secret Wars.” The way it worked was your PC was the head of a conspiracy (which you could make up and could be anything you wanted) and acted as an agent. You could recruit more agents as NPCs, and build up a conspiracy power structure using rules like in the Illuminati card game.

Each turn, each agent and each group would get an action. All of this was submitted by mail, and after a bit you’d get back the results. What was so great about it was, since it was all done by mail, you actually had no idea how many players were in the game and what the big picture was. You had to slowly figure it out based on your correspondence with the gamemaster.

I don’t think the game ever officially ended, just sort of faded out. I ran my own game in the early 90s with new friends I had made in college, and still have all those notes and papers. It too faded out after a while. It’s hard keeping up with a play by mail game. With permission from my friend who gave me the rules back in the 80s, I’m planning to transcribe them into a digital document and upload them to BoardGameGeek and to my personal web site (it’s a medium term project of mine).

I’m not sure I would want to run another PBM Illuminati game in today’s political climate, with conspiracy thinking actually being an existential threat instead of a mere countercultural affectation. But it sure was fun when I did it before.

In the late 90s/early 00s collectible card games were the rage (I guess they still are), and an Illuminati-themed version was made called Illuminati: New World Order. I briefly got into it, but I never had enough cards to make a really competitive deck. I remember liking it though.

Although it’s been 20 years since I’ve played any version of Illuminati, this game will always have a special place in my heart for all the zany, subversive fun it has provided.

#6 Cosmic Encounter

This is a game that was hugely popular in my college years. It is very chaotic and luck based, unlike the kinds of games that are popular today. It also has a storied history, with many different editions published as the rights passed from game company to game company.

Back in those days, we would have considered this game, and games like Illuminati and Nuclear War, to be “medium weight,” or games to play when you only had a couple of hours, not a whole day. They were all random and chaotic, too, but that was how we liked our games back then.

I first played the original Eon edition with a group of college friends. The game has a goofy space conquest theme, and each player has one or two Alien powers. Each power comes with a matching card called a Flare. In this edition, you didn’t discard the Flares when you played them, which made them more powerful (and also made sense given the name). Later editions made it so that the Flares were one time use.

I know I’ve played the West End version, but the one that I’ve played the most is the Mayfair edition. I own a copy, with all the expansions stuffed into the main box, well worn from many, many plays. Even after I graduated from college, I was able to find players throughout the 1990s.

We had a game group at one my old jobs where we played at lunch time every Wednesday. This was actually at the dawn of the Eurogame era, and we played games like Settlers of Catan as well, but since we were older generation, we were comfortable with a game in the older style. When we played Cosmic, in order to expedite game play we would pick our Alien powers ahead of time. One of the guys in our group created a Unix program that generated random powers. Once we each picked our powers, then he would set the game up, including the Flares, so it would all be ready to go when our lunch break began.

In the 2000s, I haven’t had as much luck getting this game to the table. I played the Fantasy Flight version once but wasn’t thrilled, probably because I only played the base game. The few times that I’ve brought Cosmic to the table in recent years, it hasn’t caught on. I think it is too chaotic for today’s gamers, who are used to games which accomodate sure-footed strategizing. In Cosmic Encounter, the luck of the draw can overwhelmingly favor one player over the others. Some combos are insanely powerful, and others weak and ineffective. But I’ve always loved how frenzied and chaotic this game is, and would gladly play it, with all expansions, any time anyone asked.

I Can’t See Good and It Makes Me Cranky!

October 27, 2024 Steve Comments 0 Comment

My vision started deteriorating when I turned 50 years old. Before that, I had never needed any kind of visual correction. But, almost as if a switch got flipped on my 50th birthday, and the warranty on my eyes expired, my eyesight got progressively worse as I aged into my fifties. It got to the point that I needed corrective lenses to drive safely. I also needed reading glasses to read, including reading small text like preparation instructions on food packaging. I’m sure you other oldsters are familiar with this experience.

Now I constantly juggle among three sets of glasses: a prescription pair for getting about in the space of life, and essential for both driving and watching TV; another prescription pair for the computer (with the blue light filter); and then generic reading glasses for books and sometimes the cell phone. I should probably use the computer glasses with the cell phone, but some apps have such small fonts that I need better magnification to clearly read the text. It seems the only time I’m not wearing glasses is when I’m showering, or when I’m sleeping.

The worst part of it is that I have terrible double vision at medium and long distances. My prescription actually doesn’t do much for the focus of my eyes, but it has a feature called prism which bends the light going into one eye, fixing the double vision. Without it, I see double, which is incredibly annoying, and also makes it impossible to drive a car. So I’d better not lose those glasses.

It’s so bad, and so frustrating, that I’ve started seeing a visual therapist. My diagnosis is a turned eye – technically ‘esotropia,’ meaning the eye turns inward. My therapy consists of exercises to train my eyes on convergence and divergence (turning in and turning out), and also to work on my hand-eye and foot-eye coordination. My therapist wants to build new neural paths in my eye-brain system, and believes that working on my overall physical coordination is an important part of that.

So now our house has eye charts and patterns of shapes taped to the walls, and the family gets to watch me do fun, goofy exercises, and hear me reciting letters to the beat of a metronome. So far, I have noticed only a slight improvement; I seem to be able to fix my double vision at some distances, so long as I strain my eyes. But that’s still annoying, and my eyes are tired all the time, which I know is because I spend so much time looking at a computer screen, but that’s my work and my life, so what am I supposed to do?

I wake up with tired eyes, and can’t see straight, and stumble through my morning routine. When I need to find things, I have to strain my eyes, and turn my head, in an attempt to correct my double vision. It can make me quite cranky sometimes.

I’ve thought about how my double vision might relate to chakra health. Vision is connected to Ajna, the third-eye chakra, which is the seat of the intellect (the mind’s eye, as they say).

Maybe I see double because I can’t discern the future well. Two possible realities float in my visual field, but which one is the accurate image? What does it look like when it comes together? My vision reflects my mind’s confusion and uncertainty over the state of the world, in these uncertain times.

That could just be me overthinking things. Also not good for the third-eye chakra, I’m sure.

Apologies for the whiny post, but I am here to chronicle the changing times, which includes chronicling my own deterioration with age, as I already began to do years ago.

Blog Retrospective

September 5, 2024 Steve Comments 0 Comment

It’s been over 7 years since I started this blog. That was in early 2017, when I was strongly motivated by political events at the time to jump back into posting about the generations and the social era, as I had done in an earlier blog in the 2000s. The mood shift was palpable, I suppose.

In the years since, I have blogged the most about the current social era, which I call a “Crisis Era,” in keeping with the generational theory of which I am an advocate. This is a tumultuous time of political conflict and realignment (as you’ve probably noticed) and there will surely be much to blog about in the future.

I’ve also blogged about my personal life, including topics such as work, leisure, family and relationships. If you are a long time reader, you got to see me move from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, and then live through the pandemic. It’s been a time of rapid change both for me personally and for the world at large.

One theme of this story has been my adjustment to being middle-aged. For my generation, Generation X, this means (hopefully) calming down – refraining from the wild and risky behavior of the past – and settling down – finding one’s roots after a life adrift. That is the life script of my generational archetype, and I truly believe that those of us who are successful at living that script will fare better once this era has come to an end, as all eras must do.

There are a still a few more years left of this Crisis Era, just as there a few more years left for me as a middle-aged person. In a couple of years, God willing, I will turn sixty, and not long afterward age into elderhood. Who knows what the world will look like then? I’m not sure what more I’ll have to blog about either. Maybe I’ll just start writing poetry or something like that.

For now, thank you, dear reader, for staying with me. I can’t promise you a bright future, just encourage you to keep your chin up, because we have a lot more change to live through.

Oh, I Will Finish All these Books

August 30, 2024 Steve Comments 0 Comment

I love to read books, which you might have figured out about me if you are familiar with this blog. I typically I am in the middle of mutliple books at once, reading each one in bits and pieces, so to speak. It can take me a long time to get through a book at this rate, but as long as it is well written I can pick it up even if I have left off of it for awhile. I have sometimes spent a year or two to finish reading a book. Taking notes helps with retaining comprehension, and also with the review that I will eventually write on goodreads, where I’ve been tracking my reading since 2019.

I read multiple books at once because I like to be reading books in different genres simultaneously, for example a work of fiction and a short work of popular history, and then also a heavier history book that will take longer to get through. It also happens because as I read a book, I get drawn into the subject matter, and then want to read other related books in my reading list.

For example, I was interested in brushing up my knowledge of the medieval period, so I started a book I had picked up at a thrift store, Life in a Medieval Village. But I also had a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine I had acquired around the same time, and was intrigued to compare and contrast the villagers’ lives with that of a powerful noblewoman. But then while reading about Eleanor I learned that she was a patroness of Marie of France, famous for her poetic lais, so then I broke out my copy of The Lais of Marie de France to brush up on those.

What have I done? How am I ever going to finish my 2024 reading challenge now if I am always starting new books?

So you understand what I’ve gotten myself into, I’ve posted a screenshot of what I am currently reading above. It’s from the sidebar of this blog, but I gave a screenshot since the dear reader could be looking at this post at any time, long after I’ve finished the books pictured. I will finish them all! Maybe not by the end of the year, though.

Hulu, Take Us Back to the 90s!

August 23, 2024 Steve Comments 0 Comment

We watch a lot of streaming video, it can’t be denied. We’ve fully embraced the modern entertainment mode of binge-watching a television series. As a family we often watch shows together from beginning to end. For example, after finishing Better Call Saul, we just couldn’t help ourselves and rewatched Breaking Bad, all the way through, including the movie. Typically we watch a couple of episodes in a night, a couple of nights a week. You’d be surprised at how quickly you can go through multiple seasons of a series at that rate.

The girl and I have more time to watch other shows, when it is just the two of us, after the rest of the family has retired for the evening. We browse through our various streaming services, and pick a show we’ve heard good things about, or just try something based on the teaser. I like the mini-series format a lot; you can get a good story in without a huge time commitment. It’s a particularly good format for a mystery-type show – two that we’ve enjoyed recently are Bodkin (set in Ireland) and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (based on a young adult mystery crime novel).

When we like an ongoing show, we’ll tend to get caught up on it, but then we’re left hanging. We’re all caught up on Abbot Elementary (it’s just adorable, and set in Philly!) and now trying to figure out how to watch the last four episodes of Evil (you haven’t watched it? – it’s a hot mess but super fun!) but, as often happens, we find that we run out of content. We try some stuff out (there’s so much out there) but more often than not, a show doesn’t pull us in. There is a craft to good storytelling and a lot of what’s produced just doesn’t pull it off.

So then we go to YouTube and browse random informational videos, or watch the news which is just depressing (unless we watch it through the lens of late-night comedy shows, our preferred medium). How to overcome this television malaise?

Luckily, in this streaming era, it is possible to binge-watch old timey shows, from the good old days. You know the ones I’m talking about – the 1990s!

When we were still young, and life was full of promise.

The streaming platform Hulu is especially good for this kind of television watching, as they have the license to share a variety of old shows. We’re watching two from the 90s on Hulu now, depending on which group of family members is available for the evening.

One is The X-Files, for when we are all together. This is a show I actually didn’t watch much back in the day, so it’s mostly new to me. I just remember the general vibe of this show and its popularity then. It was pretty cutting edge in terms of graphic content for its time, which of course pales now compared to the 2000s stuff like Dexter. It has great writing and pacing, and an excellent score as well.

The other show we are watching, after Gavin has gone to bed, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In this case, I have watched it all the way through, but Aileen and Tiernan have not. They own the whole boxed DVD set, but just kept stalling out in the later seasons when trying to watch it (I suspect they got bored at Season 4, which is understandable).

Buffy has a sly sense of humor, and oh so much heart. It’s a joy to re-encounter the beloved characters, like reuniting with old friends. With me having to bite my tongue to not reveal any spoilers about what happens to them. What makes the show so wonderful is how, despite its completly fantastical supernatural premise, it is ultimately about friendship, loyalty and love. It’s a very Gen-X show that way, in my opinion; like Friends, but much more interesting and clever.

There’s something about these shows that seems simpler, more innocent. I know, an odd thing to say about the 1990s. It’s just that they evoke an era when the world’s problem’s seemed less intractable, the stakes lower. Both of these shows – Buffy and the X-Files – deal with otherworldy powers with immense potential to harm humanity, yet the characters confront them in an easy-going manner, with tongue in cheek. We all know we’re just playing with the idea of apocalypse here.

Apocalypse doesn’t seem so playful now, and screen entertainment has gotten darker, and more earnest, in response to the changing times. We’re living through an era of real-life danger now, which calls for courage and resolution, faith and hope.

And sometimes, it calls for a little escape, to a safe harbor in which to rest our minds and hearts. In our case, to the television shows of our past.

The Next Game on My Top 10 List

July 31, 2024 Steve Comments 0 Comment

My next top 10 game is Axis & Allies, #5 on the top 10 list on my BGG profile. I’m making it my next blog post because I played it around the same time I was playing Magic: The Gathering, which was the first top 10 game I posted about. My preference was to play either the United States or Japan, and focus on the Pacific theater. I much preferred the naval maneuvering to the slog of the two-front war in Europe.

At the time that I played this game extensively, in the 1980s and 1990s, we didn’t have all the new versions available which focus on specific theaters or phases of the war, with all the new units and new rules. There were fan-made expansions available, with pieces that didn’t match the base game, but they were hard to come by.

While we liked Axis & Allies, my friends and I found the game as designed too restrictive. So we invented our own variant, where we played on home made maps, and set up our positions randomly, like you would in a game of Risk. Eventually we mixed in other games, and created a whole slew of new units using pieces from Fortress America and Supremacy. We called our Frankenstein monster of a wargame simply “The Game” and played it obsessively, and partied pretty hard while we did. Games would last all weekend long. Those sure were some great times, in a more carefree phase of my life.

So it was really The Game that I played extensively, not actually Axis & Allies, but that is why I put Axis & Allies on my top 10 list. I created a GeekList which breaks it all down, as best as I can remember it: Games that made up ‘The Game’.

I like that so many reimplementations and expansions to the original game have come out since the days when I played it. I did get a chance to play Axis & Allies: Pacific once (as the United States) and thorougly enjoyed it (possibly because I won). But for the most part I haven’t done much wargaming since the 2000s began. I don’t hang out with my old wargamer buddies any more; we’ve all moved far apart. So it goes in the life of a gamer.

It’s Really Been A Year Already?

February 23, 2024 Steve Comments 2 comments

This photo showed up in the memories feed which my smartphone helpfully throws in my face every once in a while. It was one year ago today since I went back to the corporate campus of my previous job to turn in my laptop. I took this photo because this was a new building that wasn’t up yet when I left the campus to begin remote work in March 2020, and I was excited to see it on my return. It was under construction when I left and there was a lot of hubbub about it.

I think it’s a pretty building. The campus has this striking architectural design that resembles modern art, and this building fits right in. It also has a lot of stairs (I mean the campus as a whole does) which makes it challenging to walk around in if you are not physically fit. When I walked on that campus I felt my age. I felt like I was obsolescing as I was surrounded by the aggressive energy of a workforce that keeps growing younger with every new job I take.

I did go up that formidable looking staircase and go into the bulding. It was impressive on the inside, too, with a spacious lobby with some nice art installations. The security guy at the desk paid me no mind.

The campus was custom build for this corporation, and it must have cost a bundle. So I can understand why they wanted people returning to onsite work. Aileen and I speculated that maybe I was let go because I declined to go hybrid and wanted to stay 100% remote. They gave us the option to do either, and assured me that my decision to stay remote had nothing to do with my position being cut. But who knows.

I’m glad I made the choices I did, and that I amazingly was able to get a 100% remote job elsewhere after being let go. I feel very lucky to be in the position I am in today, and grateful for the support of my family here in Pennsylvania. I just can’t believe it’s been a year already at my new job. Tick tock.

Hi, It’s Me, Your Friendly Individual Contributor

December 18, 2023 Steve Comments 0 Comment

When I was unexpectedly laid off at the beginning of the year, I scrambled to update my LinkedIn profile and my resume. I was not prepared to suddenly be looking for work.

If you are a white collar professional like me, then you know the drill. When you start a job search, you have to review your resume, which has probably been languishing, untouched since the last time you got an offer. It did what you needed it to do then, and you promptly forgot about it.

But now you need to update it with your latest experience, maybe streamline it so it’s not too long. Tweak it a little to reflect what’s new in your industry, so you look like you’re keeping up with the changing times. I mean, you are, of course, since you are a brilliant professional.

When I was doing this at the beginning of the year, I was feeling vulnerable. As I stated in my blog post then, I was thrown off balance. There was no way of knowing how long it would take me to find another position. And I was anxious about age discrimination; that the older you get, the harder it is to get hired.

Now they say that when you are doing up your resume, you should always phrase your experience in terms of how you were proactive and made a difference, rather than just list out the tasks that you performed. You’re trying to convince some hiring manager that you provide some special value. But “proactive” isn’t my vibe. My vibe is, I do the damn tasks and get the shit done. I am a worker bot. As I’ve told Aileen, my aspiration is to be like R2-D2: not a main character, but resourceful and reliable. The one you call on.

In the parlance of the corporate workforce, I am an “individual contributor.” I have never held a management or leadership position, nor have I ever sought one. I have worried a bit about what this means for my prospects, as I’ve noticed how other workers around me are younger than me by more and more years as time passes. Everyone my age, it seems, has moved on to management, to more impressive titles. But I am not seeking position or status; I just want to get paid to do work.

I know that it’s possible to finish my career this way, because I recall a job where there was an old-timer who was in the same position as me, but in his sixties. He was white haired and a little bit stooped and he was just doing his little low-level tasks under someone else’s direction. He actually retired while I was still working there. God willing, I thought, that could be me in twenty years. And that was ten years ago.

So I decided to embrace the idea of being an individual contributor. To own the brand, so to speak. I mention it explicitly in my LinkedIn profile, as well as how well I fit into any team (which is true, I believe). I also took a new profile pic, with the most puppy-dog-eyes look I could muster, like I want the hiring managers to see me as a rescue they just couldn’t turn away.

I guess it must have worked, since I got hired pretty quickly. I’m very lucky to be in a field where there is high demand for workers, and to have found a company that was in a hiring boom. The economy still works for some of us, and I just need it to keep working for me for another decade (or two?) so I can R2-D2 along, making a small difference.

The Solo Boardgamer

November 30, 2023 Steve Comments 2 comments

What do you do when you want to play a board game, but your BFF who plays with you has gone away on a trip and left you home alone?

Why, you play board games solo, of course.

And no, I don’t mean playing a board game on your computer. I mean actually breaking out the physical game that comes in a box and setting it up on a table and playing a complete game. Not playing a pretend game where you are taking on the role of more than one player, but rather a single player game, with rules specifically designed for one player.

There are many multiplayer board games that have rules variations for solo play. In some games there is a goal, and you win or lose depending on whether you achieve it. In other games, you just play, calculate your final score, and then get ranked based on that score. Some games come with an “automa,” which is a set of special rules and usually a deck of cards to simulate an opponent taking actions on the board.

*Me getting ready to lob an asteroid at Mars in a solo game.*

Others, like my favorite, Terraforming Mars, just give you a challenge. You play the game as the only player and try to reach a certain game state within a fixed amount of turns. In the games I’ve played this week, I am trying to reach a certain score within 12 generations, showing how good I am at terraforming.

Is playing a board game by yourself really any fun? Well, yeah, if you are as much of a game addict as I am. You get the same challenge of figuring out your optimum strategy, the same tension as you’re not sure if the next random card draw will be in your favor or not, or if you’ll be able to achieve the game’s goal by the final turn.

And you get the same visual and tactile pleasure of working with physical components, which is why it is better playing on a tabletop than playing on a computer screen, even though it takes time to set up and break down the game. I feel the same way about multiplayer games, and there you get the bonus of face to face social interaction. And truthfully I would rather play a game with others than play a solo game, if the option is available.

But when it isn’t, a solo game will do. I’m not the only one who enjoys solitary board gaming, either. There’s a whole community out there; you can find them on social media sites and board game forums. It’s enough of a thing that there are articles about it, with recommendations of games to play when it’s just you and some time.

So if you find yourself hankering for a board game when there’s no one else around, see if any of the games on your shelf include solo rules. You just might find yourself enjoying solitary gaming as much as I do.

In The Zeitgeist

Chronicling these changing times

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