Working back towards normalcy
What even is 'normal' these days?
The Basement is Back!
After over two months of dealing with insurance adjusters, contractors, and project managers, our basement is finally ours again!
For those not in the know, back at the end of January a pipe burst in our down stairs living room and flooded half of the basement. We had to tear out all of the vinyl plank flooring as well as a good bit of the drywall two feet above the floor. We lost our new(ish) couch but mostly everything else we lost was just junk furniture from Facebook Marketplace purchases. We consider ourselves relatively lucky that I had water sensors set up.
Fast forward 9 weeks and the floor has been replaced, walls put back together and painted, a new couch has been purchased, as well as some other bit of furniture to tie the room back together. It was a painful stretch of time for the whole family, but despite us needing to pay a little bit out of pocket to supplement the insurance claim, I think we made out much further ahead of where we started.
Movies
Project Hail Mary - After constant nagging from friends and strangers alike I finally made it out to the theater to see the new Lord/Miller sci-fi adventure from Andy Weir, author of The Martian. I had read this book a couple years ago and was intrigued to see how it would translate onto the screen and was very pleased to see that the humor, intelligence, and optimism made it through unscathed. I do think it drags a bit at parts in the first half, but it’s extremely entertaining nonetheless. It’s also good to see a science fiction movie that’s not relentlessly dour and pessimistic.
My Neighbor Totoro - I guess I can officially mark this down as the first movie I watched with my son. He sat through the vast majority of the film without interruption, a feat that astounds me seeing as he’s not even two years old. The movie is essentially plot-less, which lends itself well to being ideal entertainment for toddlers, but it was also surprisingly scary for him at time, especially when Totoro roars and bares his teeth. Overall, I think he really enjoyed it. Look out for his letterboxd account, coming soon.
Hoppers - I’ll go out on a limb and say Hoppers is one of the best things Pixar has put out in years. It’s an original property with a pro-environmentalism message that’s darkly comedic and very shocking at times. A great deal of the jokes are likely going to go clear over the heads of most of Pixar’s usual audience, but it’s still cute and thrilling when it needs to be. I found myself reminded frequently of Pixar’s Seeing Red in its irreverence and jokes that seemed laser-targeted at millennial parents.
Books
North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud - This is the second short story collection I have read by this author and fourth book of his overall and I have to say I think it may have been one of the most disappointing collections of stories I have ever read. The stories are described as a mix of horror and dark fantasy, but to be honest these elements are frequently barely at the edges of more mundane and dull narratives. There wasn’t a single story that stuck out to me at the time, nor is there one I can even recall in retrospect.
The Odds by Jeff Strand - This short novel follows Ethan, a man with a gambling addiction that finds himself in a death game of sorts when offered a 99% chance to win $10,000 in exchange for a 1% risk for his arm to be shattered. As you might guess, this quickly spirals out of control and Ethan finds himself in an ever-escalating game that threatens to envelop and ruin his life. The story progresses pretty much exactly as you would expect and nothing really ended up surprising me. The last few chapters try to dip harder into dark humor and satire, but it felt really out of place with the rest of the book and didn’t quite work for me.
A Man With One of Those Faces by Caimh McDonnell - I listened to this as a buddy read with my wife, looking for a light-hearted crime thriller and finding exactly that. This Irish mystery follows Paul, an every-man who spends his free time pretending to be the loved ones of dementia-addled senior citizens as a form a community service. When one of this “clients” attacks him and then dies, Paul is thrust into a mystery surrounding one of Ireland’s more notorious crimes. I thought this book was hilarious, only made better by the excellent narration by Morgan C Jones. I instantly wishlisted the other eight books in the “trilogy.”
Hollow by Brian Catling - This is a book that I picked up a long time ago and bounced off it due to its dense prose and archaic language. This time I was able to soldier ahead and really enjoy what it had to offer. Inspired by the arts of Hieronymus Bosch, the story weaves three tales in an alternate medieval Europe where the barrier between our world and hell is starting to diminish. I really enjoyed two of the three narratives this one offers, with the third feeling a bit tacked on and inconsequential to the events of the book. Nonetheless it was a grotesque blast to read.
You Invited It In by Sarah Jules - When a man who can commune with the dead goes after a phony psychic, he accidentally welcomes a malicious presence into his home. This was a very quick read for me and I’m not sure much of it stuck. There was nothing that I particularly disliked about it, but it evaporated from my mind the second I logged it as read.
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker - Rounding out the month, I just finished this one after I saw it pop up on a bunch of best-of lists for last year. Set during the early days of the pandemic, this novel follows Cora Zeng, a Chinese-American woman after the abrupt death of her sister at the hands of a serial killer targeting Asian-American women. It hit that metaphorical sweet spot by entwining a story about racially-motivated hate crimes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and restless spirits all together in a way that really worked for me. My only gripe is that the first half took a while to get going and felt very disjointed compared to the latter half where the mystery starts to come together.
Video Games
Vampire Crawlers - My sole digital obsession for the past couple weeks has been poncle’s follow-up to their genre-defining Vampire Survivors. This time, everything from that game has been retrofitted into a dungeon-crawler deck-builder format, down to the items, characters, locations and enemies. Compared to its predecessor, it’s a much more active game, requiring a little bit of thought when it comes to playing cards and racking up combos. Compared to other games of this ilk, I do think it’s a bit easy as I’ve almost unlocked everything a little more than a week after release. Thankfully, if the game is anything like Survivors, there will be plenty of updates and DLC to keep it rolling.
Board Games
Lightning Train - The only new board game I really got around to breaking out this month was Lightning Train, a route-crafting bag-builder designed by Paul Dennen and published by Dire Wolf. After roughly a 20-minute teach, the game played four of us in about two hours. I’d rank the complexity somewhere in the mid-heavy tier, akin to something like Great Western Trail or Lost Ruins of Arnak.
The main gist of the game revolves around players building train routes across a map of the United States, not dissimilar to something like Ticket to Ride. Rather than collecting sets to do so, however, players draw tiles from their own curated bags. In a fashion similar to deck-builder games like Dominion, tiles in your bag are used to perform actions or spend as currency to get more powerful tiles. From here, you use the tiles to lay down routes, build stations, and secure contracts to deliver goods from producer cities to stations with specific demands. The game ends when players complete a route from New York City to San Francisco or 12 rounds elapse, whatever happens first.
Having only one play under my belt, I’m not sure if I have fully formulated a definitive opinion yet, but I can say that there was certainly a point where everything began to click for me and I was really enjoying myself. The first few rounds were very slow and unproductive as we all got our bearings with the flow of the game, but towards the middle I could see the proverbial gears turning across everyone’s faces.
One of my favorite aspects that sets Lightning Train apart from other train games I’ve played is that routes from one city to another do not have to all be from the same player to be used for delivery. Players share in the points depending on how big of a presence they have in the deal, which creates and interesting balance between trying to keep a portion of the map to yourself or instead spreading yourself out in pockets around the board to hoover up a point or two off over other players’ ventures.
Setup and teardown were a bit of a weak point in the game, if I had to point to something I didn’t like. There’s a ton of tokens that have different functions and come into the game at different points, but they’re really difficult to tell apart at a glace. I will probably end up 3D printing a storage solution if I decide that this is going to be a game I keep for a long time.