The first month of the new year came and went, and with it, surprise flurries of snow, episodes of frozen slippery fun, and sudden peaks in temperature once more confusing our shrubberies that are budding way to soon. It was my last month at the university (see why I am leaving academia), which felt especially bittersweet considering the fluency of publishing and the engagement of my students lately. I am excited and scared at the same time at what February will bring for me, and hope the new beginning will go at least somewhat smoothly. I'm sure you'll read about it here in a couple of months.

Previous month: December 2023.

Books I've read

Besides the continuation of the Mallorea series by David Eddings, nothing much. I did pick up and finish 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, and although it served as a great reminder that life is short, the book contains nothing new. Burkeman stands on the shoulders of philosophical giants, of course, and I ultimately felt it's perhaps better to study those giants instead. I took notes nonetheless.

Games I've played

I finished Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle in the beginning of January. Keen to move to a more mature strategy RPG, I moved on to Triangle Strategy, of which the story is about to wrap up. I don't like it. I wish I did: it looks like the Final Fantasy Tactics sequel we never got. The extremely heavy emphasis on story (and cut-scene after cut-scene) combined with a false sense of choice and limited possibilities to power-level and break stats left me wishing I played Disgaea instead.

For 2024, I will try to keep track of my board game stats once again, as I have the feeling too little games actually make it to the table, but I can't back it with data. The added benefit of logging plays means I (sub)consciously try to sneak in more plays. In January, we finally played Watergate a couple of times---so far, the strategy is paying off. I'm not sure yet whether or not to also start reviewing board games on the Codex. We'll see.

Selected (blog) posts

• Yacht Club Games broke down their sales a couple of months after Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon was released, revealing an interesting decline after the initial peak, that mirrors my feelings about the game.
• I really enjoyed this very long Leisure Suit Larry III review on The Good Old Days, written as a conversation between the editors.
• Blake Patterson lamented the end of the computer magazine era. Luckily he did manage to fill his Byte Cellar shelves to the brim over the years.
• Ruben Schade tells us to stop using pie charts and provides an obvious example to clarify the most important reason: deceiving people with data visualizations.
• Baldur Bjarnason reflects on two years of work after his Out of the Software Crisis independent book release.
• Henrique Dias shows how to create a digital shoebox---what a neat idea!
• Glenn Ramsey proves at Kiwi PyCon 2022 that plain text accounting can be fun (YouTube video)
• Brit Butler shares his favorite albums of 2023. I bought In These Times from Makaya McCraven thanks to this list!
• ProPublica knows like no other how to combine superb visualizations with gripping stories. Here's one night on a garbage truck in NYC.
• Joan Westenberg suggests a few radical changes that might help us quit capitalism. There's still a very long way to go. Yesterday I came across Kohei Saito's degrowth book containing similar insights, and added it to the wish list.
• Heather Buchel outlines why in 2023 your webdesign (still) sucks. An interesting front-end dev vs. web designer debate I came across via Brad Frost.
• According to Brian Bankler, Board Game Geek Is Becoming Unstable---or even unsuitable as a place to discuss board games.
• People are complex and are allowed to have multiple selves, says Rachel Kwon.

Other random links

• There's Yet Another Editor in town called Nova and I have yet to decide whether or not it could replace Sublime.
• My wife tipped me http://www.geekychef.com/. In case you want to do something with those Tears of the Kingdom recipes!
• How about a couple of Mega Man HAMA magnets to brighten up your office wall?
• In case you want to create a top nine board game list, use https://www.pubmeeple.com/rankings
• For people in Belgium and The Netherlands looking for an aggregate site comparing the best board game prices: https://bordspelprijzen.nl/
• Aleksandr Savenkov created a cool table with The Dice Tower's People's Choice Top Board Games of All Time, from 2011 up to 2024. It should be a bit more stable than Board Game Geek's Hotness list. I need to buy Ark Nova.
• Did you know there was a Pharaoh Remaster released last year? I didn't, and it looks as compelling as ever!
• While fiddling with Obsidian, I found a few interesting was to add metadata without using frontmatter: implicit fields---like so: key:: blah. Combined with:

```dataview
LIST key
WHERE key

Allows you to quickly list notes and the value (blah) as an enumeration. The idea was to piggyback on another idea, listing games won in Obsidian.