⛈️ Are You Telling This Story or Am I... [SPOILER ALERT] Over the holiday weekend we took the kids to see Thunderbolts* at the theater. It was my second time seeing it, and I have to say that it really resonated with me. I'm still enjoying the MCU, even if the bloom has come off the rose in the public perception. And I freely admit that a lot of the recent content has been not great ( Eternals ) and occasionally quite bad ( Secret Invasion ). At the end of the day, I'm fine with sitting through a so-so movie if I get to spend it hanging out with characters I like. But Thunderbolts* is actually pretty good, and it manages to tell a compelling story about something that you don't see represented well in mainstream blockbuster action flicks. Thunderbolts* is a movie about depression. Which is something I've struggled with off-and-on for my entire life. Let's take a step back, shall we? One of the things that I love about speculative fiction is the way it externalize...
🤓 Players Gonna Play, Play, Play, Play, Play... This last weekend was another annual installment of Geekway to the West, the convention where I spend four days playing board games. The draw every year is the Play-and-Win contest, in which you play games from a library of over a hundred recently published games (multiple copies of each, so it netted out to roughly 800 games in all). Every play gives you a chance to win one of those copies. Here's what I played! Tower Up Started strong out of the gate. This was easily my favorite of the con. It's a light, puzzly eurogame that plays fast, scales cleanly, has a great tactile component, and looks gorgeous on the table. You can either gather pieces or start a new tower. When you start a tower, you must also build on anything that's adjacent to it as well. You then put a roof on one of the towers you built. Playing a roof does not keep others from playing over it, though. Once someone plays their last roof, the game ends. Score p...