@Sats 4 Snacks the variety pack arrived. Thanks for the extra strawberries and handwritten note! So far I've had the freeze dried mangoes, which taste great. Looking forward to trying the rest soon.

My wife did beautiful gouache art of locations in Banff, Switzerland, and Iceland (left to right).

Excited to try some honey and maple syrup from @SweetSats. I'll probably put the former in some tea and the latter in some coffee later. And I appreciate how secure the packaging was. The box could have been tossed out of a helicopter and the contents would have been fine.

In The Hunger Games, the nation is called Panem. In Juvenal's Satires, he coins the phrase "panem et circenses," or "bread and circuses."

The author of Mandibles has a new novel out, might read it after I finish Lyonesse by Jack Vance. 🤔 Fun Fact: Vecna of Stranger Things is an anagram of Vance, whose stories I think had an influence on aspects of D&D.

HarperCollins

A Better Life

In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant�...

Jack Vance Website - Shop

Jack Vance Website - E-book shop, buy up to 70 titles by Jack Vance.

Looking forward to the mastered mix 🎧

Wavlake

Obsessed (unmastered premix) • Kavinya

Play, boost, and more on Wavlake ⚡️🎵

View quoted note →

Democracy: A Guided Tour is a good political philosophy 101 kind of book. Democracy is a tool, not a poem, and we can judge how well it's working from the standpoint of standards like stability, virtue, wisdom, liberty, and equality. The table of contents itself is useful for developing a mental model. 1. Democracy: Why or Why Not? 2. For Stability: Stability through Shared Power 3. Against Stability: Passion and Polarization 4. For Virtue: Does Democracy Enlighten and Ennoble? 5. Against Virtue: Does Democracy Make Us Angry, Mean, and Dumb? 6. For Wisdom: Two Heads Are Smarter than One 7. Against Wisdom: Garbage In, Garbage Out 8. For Liberty: The Consent of the Governed? 9. Against Liberty: Democracy as the Many-Headed Master 10. For Equality: Democracy as the Public Expression of Equal Standing 11. Against Equality: Is Democratic Equality an Illusion? In general, I found the "against" chapters more persuasive. #books #bookstr

Ordered To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism with @Whitepaper Books after requesting it and getting notified that it had been added. Excellent service, and paid in sats. Looking forward to making more purchases. #bookstr

Shōbu (2019) feels like a game humans could have been playing for hundreds of years. You win by pushing all your opponents stones off any one of the four gameboards. The twist is that you get two moves on your turn, a passive move followed by an aggressive move. The passive move is setup, no pushing allowed. The aggressive move must involve a different stone, and must mirror how the passive stone moves. Pushing is permitted here. #boardgames

@Great Ghee Tastes delicious in coffee.

Signal (2025) is a cooperative game for 2+ players, which thematically reminds me of the film Arrival (2016). The humans supply the inputs (wooden pieces of different shapes and colors), then the alien moves them around according to certain hidden rules. The humans and alien win if the goal output is created after the alien manipulates the inputs. #boardgames

boop. (2022) is a two-player abstract strategy game where you try to be the first to line up three cats in a row (or get all eight of your cats onto the bed). But you start the game with only kittens, which then "graduate" into cats only after you have lined THEM up in a row of three. The twist though is that placing a piece bounces any adjacent pieces one space away, so lining up three is trickier than it looks. And yes, the box converts to a bed, and yes, your kittens can be "booped" off them. #boardgames