"You look Time Lord."

Despite the fact that both my husband and I love tabletop games, we actually own surprisingly few of them. Part of it is that we prefer cooperative games, rather than playing against each other, and the majority of games are competitive. The other part is that we've been historically reluctant to spend money on physical games, though I'm not really sure why.

We coincidentally bought a number of games in the two days before the COVID lockdown. We went up to Seattle with a couple of friends because we'd rented an Air BnB with them to attend Emerald City Comic Con but the owner refused to reimburse us when the con got canceled, so we figured we might as well use the apartment we'd paid for. While we were there, we visited Mox Boardinghouse (a game store) multiple times and bought a pile of games, and we found them to be a boon during the next few months of being cooped up in the house.

Much more recently, we finally got our own copy of Marvel Zombies, which we've played at a friend's house, and we've been loving that.

A few weeks ago, we went up to Portland on an ill-fated quest to buy a Squishable I really want (turns out that Squishables closed that store, even though it's still listed on their website and in Google), and so we took the opportunity to visit the Portland Mox Boardinghouse. We bought four games: Kinfire Delve, Timeline Twist, Tesseract, and Buffer Time.

Now, I'm not going to talk too much about Kinfire Delve because we spent some amount of time in the store searching it on our phones and reading reviews and discussions before buying it -- exactly the opposite of the "impulse-buying" I noted in the title here. But I will say that it is a good game. The players each play a character with specific abilities and together, they have to investigate and solve anomalies in the forest, then defeat the big baddie that's causing them. It takes a lot of strategy and cooperation, which is exactly what we enjoy. The next time we go up to Mox, we'll be buying the other versions of Kinfire.

But, the other three, we bought them for various reasons, without much research:

* Timeline Twist: It's a cooperative variant on the original Timeline game, which was competitive. (Everyone gets cards with events on them, and on your turn, you guess where your card fits in the timeline on the table; if you're wrong, you have to draw more cards. The player that runs out of cards first wins.) We thought, hey, we like Timeline, so playing it cooperatively would be awesome!

* Buffer Time: This game is based on Star Trek: Lower Decks, which we love. So, we got the game.

* Tesseract: The main item in this game is a cube made randomly out of 64 dice, set on a spinning platform. Seriously -- go look at the images in the Amazon listing. How could I *not* buy this?

And now we've played them all.

( Timeline Twist )

( Buffer Time )

( Segue: Good Omens )

( Tesseract )

The bottom line is two terrible games and one amazing game. Luckily, the expensive one was the amazing game; I would have hated to throw out the $60 game. But, that should teach us to not buy games on a whim.

I do not have perfect pitch. Not only do I not have good absolute pitch (i.e. "That's a C#."), I don't really have good relative pitch (i.e. "This note is higher than that note."). Which makes it kind of funny, how much I enjoy music, both listening and playing. So that's why I've come here to borrow your ears. In "Stupid in Love" by Max and Huh Yunjin, at around 2:19 when they sing "Book a flight to Paris only one way," am I correct in thinking that he's singing a higher note than her? It sounded that way to me when I was listening to it in the car yesterday, then I started second-guessing myself, thinking it might be an illusion because he was singing in the upper part of his range while she was singing in the lower part of hers. Then I tried listening to it under headphone this morning and I started thinking that maybe they were singing the same note, and now I can't even hear it properly. And so I've come here to borrow your ears. Any thoughts?

Saw all of the Fatty Arbuckle + Buster Keaton shorts.



They got better as they went on, but never to the point of genius. Usually ranged from "decent and harmless" to "JUST END ALREADY!". There's quite a lot of racism and misogyny, most notably in the "JUST END ALREADY!" category. The decent and harmless had some clever gags. Arbuckle can juggle knives like it's nothing.

As the shorts go on, Keaton's roles(s) get more prominent (I think it was his second short, he shows up for half a minute as a beggar. By the last short he's Arbuckle's sidekick.)

My favourites were The Bell Boy, The Cook, Back Stage and The Garage. (I didn't dislike Coney Island, it does have Keaton in a lifeguard outfit doing standing backflips and a very funny camera gag.)

Let's see what Ingmar Bergman film I'll watch now. Yesterday I saw Persona, which was good (don't ask me what it's about though).

A. and I have recently started watching Lie to Me. We're up to s2e7 and I've got a couple of questions. After my recent experience with Person of Interest, I'm coming to you hoping that one of you will either know the answers or else care little enough about Lie to Me spoilers that you'll be willing to try to find the answers:

1. What's up with the way Lightman walks? He just sort of flops around as he walks, and he tends to stand with his head tilted. I've come up with three possible explanations, but of course it might be none of them:
   1. Something in Lightman's past (which we'll learn about later in the series) explains it.
   2. It's an effort to try to make Tim Roth look shorter. (A. and I were both very surprised when I looked it up and he's 5'8"—we had both thought he was shorter than that.)
   3. It's just How Tim Roth Walks™.
2. Is the science in the show at all accurate? If so, to what degree is it accurate and to what degree is it handwavium?

I practically never remember my dreams, but I remember part of last night's dream. Not enough to reconstruct any sort of plot summary, but enough to remember that it contained the following elements:

• Heavy metal music (centered around a band named "Jihaad" — spelled that way to try to convey that the last syllable should rhyme with "bad," not with "sod")
• Low-quality animatronic dinosaurs (they couldn't consistently count on the stegosaurus to walk, so they had four wheeled platforms that they'd put on its feet to move it out from backstage, then they'd let it take 2 or 3 steps in front of the audience, and pray that it didn't break down during that time)
• Luchador wrestling (the wrestlers, the dinosaurs, and the band were on tour together in sort of a Mad Max type environment)
• Male menstrual cramps (which I suppose implies the existence of male menstruation, but only the cramps came up in the dream)
• Asshole bosses
• The importance of proper punctuation

I've no memory of reading this at all. The back makes it sound both interesting and memorable - a retired brigadier stumbling upon shenanigans from WW2 recruiting the sixth Doctor for help. Richards and Cole are both solid Doctor Who authors who I rate but none of it stirs a memory.

AKA Obsessing over minutia

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*If you can call a "rewatch", watching an ep picked by randomizer that you've watched way too many times already.