Thursday Things

August 31, 2017

What I’m Playing

I played the newish 2 player version of Caverna, Caverna: Cave vs Cave on 2017–08–25. Fun, tight and easy to learn 2 player game. Not sure I need to own it (still having fun exploring Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small) but will gladly play it any time.

Doug and I are deep into vehicles, guns, and more in Advanced Squad Leader. Progressing this far has opened up many doors for us (scenarios and campaigns) and we plan to play Blitzkreig in the West starting next week.

I read The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and it was good, not great. I liked the conversational tone and the history of past mass extinctions, but I expected more details and treatment on the possible next extinction.
I read about a third of In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs. I picked through a few that were interesting to me and enjoyed it, though it didn’t blow me away. Some of the stories gave more insight into the person than any connection to the song, which was great for people I knew of (Shawn Colvin) and not so interesting for ones I didn’t.

While Julie is away I’ll pick movies off my IMDB watch list that I doubt she’d like to watch and check them out from the library. This week it was La Dolce Vita, a movie I honestly didn’t expect to like. I watched the Criterion Blu-ray edition and enjoyed every minute of it. There isn’t much of a plot, but the filming was superb - the black and white reminded me of Ansel Adams contrast quality. Things I didn’t know but learned watching this:
- I thought I had a defective DVD because of a terribly synced audio track, but then I learned that Fellini would loop over new audio in post-production for just about all of his dialog. I guess it is something you just deal with as a viewer, but it was distracting at times (mostly when they were speaking English).
- Paparazzo is a character in this film, playing a freelance photographer who specializes in capturing candid photos of the rich and famous. Ever wondered where the term paparazzi comes from?
- Nico is in the movie, essentially playing herself.
I finished Ozark last week on Netflix and highly recommend it if you enjoyed Breaking Bad.