T he kind folks at Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG) recently sent me a preview copy of Old West Empresario, which will debut at GenCon 2019 today. We already have about ten TMG games in our collection that we thoroughly enjoy (with Crusaders and Gentes being the most recent additions) and so my husband Chris and I were both feeling pretty good about the chances of this new release being a good fit for us as well.

Old West Empresario  picks up its narrative where its prequel, Pioneer Days (also from TMG) left off. Players take on the role of Empresarios, settling the old west. They are charged with building new towns so prosperous and populated that one will be chosen as the state capital, winning the game for its Empresario.

As with Pioneer Days, the  artwork from Sergi Marcet reinforces the Western theme and uses bright, appealing colors. I appreciated the racial diversity depicted in the illustrations.

Components include double sided building cards, currency tokens, victory point (i.e. population) tokens, and die number tiles (all constructed from heavy cardboard); as well as a set of eight brown dice, a wooden first player token, thin cards for the wanted and character cards, a scoring pad, and the rulebook.  Most of the components should last a long time under regular use but the character cards and wanted cards should possibly be sleeved to prevent bending or tearing.

The gameplay here is a bit reminiscent of Suburbia in that victory points (VP) are partially earned based on the placement of constructed buildings in a player’s town relative to other constructed buildings in the town. For example, the Mine scores 2 VP at the end of the game if adjacent to at least 1 Inn and 1 VP per adjacent Distillery. In addition to victory points earned based on the adjacency rules, a number of constructed civic buildings award end game points to the owning player based on meeting certain qualifications such as owning x amount of cash, y amount of victory tokens, or z amount of native settlement buildings. There are also four other ways to earn victory points in Old West Empresario :

• owning the largest contiguous block of native settlement buildings
• construction of buildings tied to the railroad, stock, or oil industries
• accumulation of wanted cards (awarded for being the first or second player to accomplish the objective listed on the card)
• accumulation of wealth (1VP for every 3 coins)

So how do we construct buildings in our towns and what else can they do for us besides award end game VP? Well, each round, the starting player rolls the set of dice (2 for each player + 1 extra) and then places each die on top of the corresponding die number tile. Each die number tile has two buildings positioned underneath it selected from the pool of unconstructed buildings and native settlements.  Unconstructed buildings can be activated later in the game once added and constructed in a player’s town.  Native settlements do not require construction and have a one time activation effect when added to a player’s town.

Taking turns beginning with the start player, each player selects a die from a die number tile and then either (1) collects one of the buildings underneath the die number tile to add to their town (2) activates all the buildings in their town that have the same number on their die icon as the die selected, or (3) discards one of the buildings underneath the die number tile to the game discard pile and collects $3.

Each player begins the game with only one constructed building in their town – the town hall – which has, as one of its activation effects, the ability to construct another building in the town for the resource cost of $1. In addition to the town hall, each player selects a native settlement or unconstructed building to add to their town at the start of the game. Note that the town hall can be activated by any die number. This means that on any player’s first turn, they are able to activate their town hall to construct an unconstructed building already in their town. If the first building they construct is the Carpenter building, they now have two constructed buildings capable of constructing new buildings when activated.

Aside from construction as an activation effect, the accumulation of VP tokens, cash, or additional building tiles are also possible, depending on the specific building under activation. One building (the Church) allows a player to activate another building from their town that otherwise would not be activated that turn for a small fee. And the Undertaker building forces opponents to discard cash (Aha! Take that!).

The game ends and victory points are tallied after the round in which one or more players host at least 15 buildings in their town, or the building supply deck or VP token supply runs out.

In my first game of Old West Empresario, I played against my husband. His strategy was to turn the game into some kind of massive engine builder. He worked hard to construct buildings in his town that ALL had the same activation number. I took the opposite approach and tried to cover all the dice outcomes so that I knew I always had at least one building other than my Town Hall to activate if desired. I focused on earning VP tokens through building activation effects and the wanted cards while he focused on earning VP through adjacency rules. I beat him by one point.

In another game with friends, I took the same approach and won again even though my friends also tried to focus on these items. Rinse repeat across a few more games. But when I played against my husband a second time and he focused less this time on adjacency rules and more on building activation effects to collect VP tokens, he was able to beat me. This is where his ploy to have several buildings with the same activation number gave him the edge – I might activate one building on a turn that gave VP tokens as an activation effect while he activated four on a turn that did so. I’ll need to match his strategy in grouping activation numbers if I am going to have a chance to beat him.

I have now played the game several times since receiving it, across all players counts. A few summary takeaways from these plays of Old West Empresario:

1. The game is easy to learn but it takes awhile for players to memorize the activation effects of each building. It can be helpful to photocopy the back cover of the rulebook that documents this information and give one sheet to each player for reference.

2. Game time consistently hovers around an hour, regardless of player count or number of previous plays under the players’ belts.

3. There are multiple paths to victory and winning strategies to explore due to a myriad of ways to earn victory points.

4. Huge spreads across the final player scores are unlikely. They never occurred in our games. It’s very much a neck and neck competition till the end and no one is certain of the winner until the final scores are tallied.

5. The iconography can be confusing for new players. The designer overlays a circle with a a slash through it on top of a picture of a resource to indicate the cost of an action. However, almost every new player interpreted the image at first glance to mean none of the resource was required to perform the action (perhaps thinking normally one  or more units of the resource is required by default).

Overall, Old West Empresario  is an engaging, lightweight to medium strategy game that can work with many different play groups. It’s a good game for drawing non-gamer friends into tabletop gaming and to give hardcore gamers a more relaxing hour of gameplay. I am going to keep the game and I’m thinking of picking up Pioneer Days  to set up a back to back gaming event where we begin with PD and move onto OWE, perhaps with a viewing of a film like Rio Bravo wedged in the middle. The $60 retail price point is a bit steep but strategy gaming market pricing continues to trend upward with the rising demand for new games so it would be a mischaracterization to imply TMG isn’t pricing games competitively; they are on par with other large publishers. 

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Publisher: Tasty Minstrel Games (TMG)
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 60 minutes
Game type: tile placement, tableau building

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me

There was a time – before I sank my teeth into the board game hobby and before I took on the demands of being a stepmom to three children - that I planned frequent trips for my friends circle. Each month would see us jet setting off to a different part of the United States (or a different part of the world) in search of adventure and great cuisine. I would pour myself into the research project that proper trip planning requires and create a custom itinerary for our group, working to ensure we caught all the highlights of our destination. This post is about the one I worked up for our last trip to some of the great Western National Parks in the United States.  I share it here with the hope that you might find the itinerary useful in planning your trip out west.

 

--> Full Photo Gallery – Come and Explore 

DAY ONE	MORNING Depart for Butte, Montana Pick up rental car AFTERNOON Lunch (& ice cream) at Matt’s Place (Butte) Transfer to Grand Teton National Park (4.5 hrs) Grand Teton National Park Visitors Center (open till 7pm) EVENING Stop for photos @ Mormon Row Historic District (Antelope Flats Road, Grand Teton National Park, WY) Dinner @ Peaks Restaurant, Signal Mountain Lodge Check in @ Colter Bay Village
DAY TWO	MORNING AND AFTERNOON 5:45am Sunrise excursion to Schwabacher's Landing • Roughly four miles north of Moose off of the main highway. The 1.5 mile gravel access road is currently closed to vehicles due to sequestration; 20 min walk is therefore required to reach the trailhead. The trail follows along the water, heads northwest then turns north to follow a trail along a smaller stream. Five minutes of hiking you should come to a large beaver dam that creates a pond. Circle around the water on the maze of paths that travel north through the woods for 5 more minutes and it will lead to an opening with the classic view. A log bench marks the area, and if you are arriving for sunrise, a photographer usually will also mark the spot. Breakfast @ Ranch House 8am Assemble in lobby to depart for morning tour Sightseeing in Grand Teton NP: • Lake Jenny- Hidden Falls, Inspiration Point, & Cascade Canyon Hike o Starts with a boat ride ($12; service from 8am) across beautiful Jenny Lake to where the trail starts. The half mile hike to Hidden Falls is short and easy. Half mile further to Inspiration Point. The hike from the boat dock to Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point is like a traffic jam after 9am. Option to continue onto Cascade Canyon where the crowds thin and moose and other wildlife are abundant. Signal Mountain Summit Road . The scenic Signal Mountain Road is a five mile, 1,000 foot climb of switchbacks to an observation area at the top of Signal Mountain. Set far apart from the next highest mountain peak, Signal Mountain provides breathtaking views of the Tetons’ towering peaks, the flat glacial plains below, Jackson Lake and the Snake River beyond. From Lake Jenny, travel N on the Grand Teton Road and take a right onto Signal Mountain Road. Lunch @ Signal Mountain Lodge (Trapper’s Grill or Leek’s Pizza) Afternoon at leisure at Colter Bay Village (horseback riding, kayaking, canoe rentals, etc) EVENING Dinner @ Ranch House or Chuckwagon
DAY THREE	MORNING Breakfast @ Ranch House Transfer to Yellowstone National Park (1.5 hrs) Optional brief stop at West Thumb for photos (keep bear spray handy) Sightseeing in the Upper Geyser Basin: • Old Faithful • Black Sand and Biscuit Basin Trails (1/2 mile easy boardwalk trail each) • Geyser Hill Loop Trail (1.3 miles easy boardwalk trail) • Morning Glory Pool AFTERNOON Lunch @ Old Faithful Inn Deli Sightseeing in the Midway and Lower Geyser Basin: • Despite its small size Midway possesses two of the largest hot springs in the world. Grand Prismatic Spring, nearly 370 feet in diameter, sits upon a large mound surrounded by small step-like terraces. The other feature, Excelsior Geyser, erupted nearly 300 feet high before the 1900s. It is now a dormant geyser and is considered a hot spring, discharging more than 4050 gallons of boiling water per minute. Other colorful springs include Turquoise and Indigo springs, known for their pale and dark blue colors. Across the Firehole River from Excelsior and Grand Prismatic springs are a series of small isolated, pristine springs and mud pots. The Rabbit Creek drainage possesses some colorful and unusual features and most are unnamed. Caution should be exercised while exploring this vicinity since the ground is unstable and trails are not maintained. • The Lower Geyser Basin encompasses nearly 12 square miles, with most of the thermal features widely scattered in small groups. We will visit the Fountain Group, White Dome Group, & White Creek Group at minimum and venture onto the Firehole Lake Group and the Imperial Group if there is time. The Lower Geyser Basin possesses a large variety of thermal features, including mud pots, geysers, pools, springs, and fumaroles. Great Fountain Geyser is one of the grand geysers in the Lower Geyser Basin. It erupts from a large, terraced platform with massive bursts exploding up to 150 feet high. White Dome Geyser does not have spectacular eruptive displays, but it does have one of the largest pink and white streaked cones in the Park. EVENING Check in @ Old Faithful Inn Dinner @ Old Faithful Lodge Cafeteria
DAY FOUR	MORNING AND AFTERNOON Breakfast @ Old Faithful Inn Traverse the Fishing Bridge Sightseeing in Hayden Valley: • Wildlife Viewing • Sulphur Caldron • Mud Volcano Interpretive Trail (3/4 mile, easy) Sightseeing in Canyon Area: • South Rim Drive o Picnic Lunch at Artist Point • North Rim Drive o walk from Inspiration Point to Grandview Point o Brink of the Lower Falls Trail (1/2 mile, steep/moderate)  Especially scenic, this trail branches off of the North Rim Trail at the Brink of the Upper Falls parking area • Canyon Visitor Center EVENING Check in @ Canyon Lodge Dinner @ Canyon Lodge Dining Room
DAY FIVE	MORNING 6am Depart for wildlife viewing in Lamar Valley (snacks in the car) 9am Breakfast @ Roosevelt Lodge Sightseeing in Northern Yellowstone: • Tower Falls o Stop at Tower General Store to pick up Picnic Lunch supplies • Undine Falls o Scenic pullout on the right • Gibbon Falls • Mammoth Springs (2 hrs) o Lower Terraces including: Opal Terrace Liberty Cap Palette Spring Minerva Terrace Cleopatra Terrace Jupiter Terrace Main Terrace Canary Spring Overlook o Upper Terraces including: Prospect Terrace New Highland Terrace Orange Spring Mound Bath Lake White Elephant Back Terrace Angel Terrace • Fort Yellowstone, time permitting • Optional stop @ Norris Geyser Basin, time permitting EVENING Check in @ Three Bears Lodge Dinner @ Taqueria Las Palmitas ($) or Madison Crossing Lounge ($$) Ice cream @ Espresso West
DAY SIX	MORNING Breakfast @ Woodside Bakery in West Yellowstone (world famous cinnamon rolls) Check out & transfer to Butte (2.5 hrs) AFTERNOON Lunch on the road Depart for home from Butte airport

There are some games in my collection that I get excited about when they arrive at my house but it takes me months to get them to the table. Typically in these cases the artwork is lovely, the theme is interesting, and the mechanics look promising but there is something standing in the way of playing the game right away. For Triora: City of Witches (designed by Michael C. Alves), what stood in the way is the game’s rulebook. It absolutely flummoxed me.  Even with the errata notes released a few months ago, it’s hard to make sense of the rules. It made a mess of things. And look what’s it’s done to my review – I usually like to start with a nice overview of a game’s theme, cover the components and artwork, and then dive into the gameplay.  But the rulebook is so awful in this case, I’m forced to lead with that. The publisher needs a skilled editor to rewrite the rulebook entirely. It’s laden with spelling errors and unclear language.

So that’s the bad news; the rulebook is subpar. The good news is the game itself is quite interesting. In Triora: City of Witches, players take on the role of witches and their familiars who have traveled to the city to face off against the nobility and the inquisitor, both of whom have been persecuting local women they suspect are witches. To win the game, a player must have the highest total victory points (referred to as doom points and sometimes ruin points in the rulebook) at the conclusion of the game. The end of the game happens at the end of the round in which one of two conditions are met:

[1] three of the four main locations in the city are destroyed,

or

[2] a witch is captured by the inquisitor after they have already accumulated the maximum inquisition points. Note that a witch captured this way is out of the game and ineligible for victory, as all of their doom/ruin points are forfeited.

Gameplay centers on making and using potions toward strategic ends. Players can create potions both by simply moving their witch meeple to a new location (grants 1 cauldron automatically, which can be used to make one type of potion from the requisite herbs held by the player) and by visiting a location with their witch or familiar that grants a cauldron as part of the action of that location. Note that there is an entire subroutine for generating the requisite herbs on a player’s board; once used to make a potion, herbs shift to a seed state and then must pass through planting and harvesting phases before they transform into usable herbs once more. Potions are consumed when visiting locations on the board that require a potion to complete an action at a location (either as an upfront cost to initiate the action or as an input to the action such as when changing potions into silver or taking control of villagers).  Certain locations on the board are defined targets for destruction; when players move their witch or familiar to these locations (there are 4 of them), as part of the location’s action, they place one of their wooden player tokens on the location. When the required number of tokens have been placed, the location is destroyed.

I’ve mentioned players moving their witch or their familiar on their turns. A player gets two turns per round; one turn to move their witch and the other to move their familiar. It is up to the player to determine which to move first. There is more freedom in moving witches (familiars cannot be moved to a location where a witch or another familiar is currently located) and moving a witch grants extra benefits (the automatic cauldron as mentioned above but also there is a witch’s bonus at each location that is granted only when a witch is moved to the location). However, there is also more risk in moving a witch and so it must be done with great attention to detail. This is because in addition to the witches and their familiars, there is also an Inquisitor meeple moving around the board (up to 2 spaces per round; it moves after all players have finishes their witch and familiar movements for the round). If the Inquisitor lands on a location where a witch is standing, the controlling player of the witch receives a penalty, which can include the immediate loss of the game if they have sufficiently high inquisition points already (inquisition points are assigned when completing certain actions as well as each time the Inquisitor catches your witch). In fact, in all of the games I played, the ending was triggered because a player didn’t carefully consider the Inquisitor’s upcoming movement when moving their witch on their turn and thus they found themselves caught by the Inquisitor and disqualified from winning. And these were smart opponents with several years of experience playing strategy games. So remember to be mindful of the Inquisitor’s current location and movement possibilities before you pick up your witch to move her.

In addition to the Inquisitor, there is a meeple representing the spirit of Morgana, the great witch who drew the witches and familiars to Triora. If Morgana catches up to a player’s witch on the board, the player is granted doom points or shovels (used in the seed to herb subroutine) if they are willing to accept some inquisition points as the cost for these benefits.

There is a moderate amount of analysis paralysis inherent in the game, but it’s not extreme. What will cause slowdowns during gameplay is trying to determine consensus on the rules as questions arise that the rulebook fails to address. For example:

1 . For the two player setup, the rulebook notes that two extra familiars should be placed on the board; these will move around the board each round and serve to occupy spaces and simulate the limitations on familiar movement that players would normally encounter during a three or four player game. Once they are initially placed (instructions say each player should place one familiar), are players limited to controlling the extra familiar they placed or can they select either of the extra familiars to move? The rulebook just states that before or after a player moves their own familiar they should move one of the extra familiars. We had much debate on this; I thought you should be able to move either familiar but my husband thought it made more sense that you should only be able to move the one you initially placed otherwise you could just move the one your opponent placed each turn to get it out of your way.

2. Do players alternate with other players their turns in which they place their witch and their familiar or does play pass from one player to another only after a player does both their turns?

3. When and how often do villager bonuses trigger? The rulebook states that they grant a bonus to the player in the final round, which implies the end of the game. But the bonus list includes “produce 1 shovel”, which would do no good in the final round so that doesn’t make sense. We think it should have read in each round, but we can’t be sure. Also, it’s a high price to play for a villager if you get its bonus only once per game as most villagers cost 3 potions.

4. More villager confusion: the rulebook notes that villagers may be used for actions in the Swamp House. But the only action available in the swamp house is to corrupt and acquire more villagers. It’s not clear how a player would use a villager to corrupt and acquire another villager.  And the rulebook also states that villagers may be used for the action in the City location. But the City is the other location where you corrupt and acquire villagers. Based on this, we think the rulebook was trying to convey that these 2 locations are where you get villagers, not where you use them as is actually written.

5. If a player is not at max inquisition points but the result of the Inquisitor catching their witch would take them over 32 points, does that also trigger the end of the game?

Once players get the rules sorted out (they will likely will need to decide on house rules for the questions above or request feedback from the publisher), they can dive in and enjoy the mechanics of the game. The artwork is lovely and the components are pretty well made (components include plastic coated cards, wooden meeples, wooden and cardboard tokens, cardboard player boards, and the large central board hosting all the locations).

I’m really indecisive on the final rating I should award Triora: City of Witches. A perfect rating (oui! oui! oui!) is out of the question because there are some minor problems with the game independent of the rulebook. For example, a round begins with nightfall and the movement of the Inquisitor and Morgana come after that during the day phase but on the top of the main board the Inquisitor’s movement is the very first item shown on the left, followed by Morgana’s movement; nightfall is shown at the end of the line. Why does the sequence of phases on the board not match the actual sequence of play? Is it possible that in earlier drafts of the game nightfall marked the end of the round instead of the beginning and the board was designed based on those drafts?  If the rulebook wasn’t a disaster the game could absolutely be worthy a oui! oui! rating.  So how heavily should the rulebook factor in here? It’s entirely possible that the problems with the rulebook aren’t the result of shoddy work but simply language translation issues (the game originated in Brazil; I am assuming the English rulebook is a translation). That makes me feel bad about dropping my rating down a notch. But with an oversaturated board game market (I heard last week that approximately 3000 new games are published yearly), I can’t in good faith recommend folks invest in a game that is such a headache to sort out how to play. So Triora: City of Witches gets a oui! from me for now. I’m going to hold onto the game and may play it occasionally and I’m happy to take another look at the game as a courtesy to the publisher should they fix their rulebook and ask me to re-evaluate.

Bonus side story: when posting pictures of the game to Instagram, I found out the village baker in Triora and other folks interested in the city track the #triora hashtag. This came to my attention because these individuals began to send me private messages on IG. They had heard a game was being made about their village but they didn’t know the details. They wanted to know the locations in the village depicted on the board (to see if they corresponded to actual locations). They wanted to know how one wins the game (imagine how awkward it was to explain that one of the goals of the game is to destroy the city). They wanted to see pictures of the game. It was a very entertaining series of conversations and now I’ve actually made a new friend from overseas after having chatted with him at length about the game and the village and its historical events regarding witchcraft.

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Publisher: Meeple BR Jogos
Players: 2-4
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): varies widely depending on whether the game ends via Inquisitor or destruction; 10-60 minutes.
Game type: worker placement, area control

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I don't keep my finger on the pulse of all the independent Kickstarter campaigns running at any given time. There's just too much unique content being produced month after month for me to sift through everything. I leave that to those who write previews and reviews for a living (I am an IT Consultant for a living; I write reviews as a hobby because I'm passionate about board gaming). The only way an independent Kickstarter campaign is going to be on my radar is if the designer/publisher reaches out to me to let me know the campaign is running or if it's created a bit of buzz already in the key circles that I frequent. I definitely wasn't closely monitoring Kickstarter campaigns four years ago when the original edition of Middara  was initially funded. It was an adventurous dungeon crawl that promised to be so much more than an ordinary dungeon crawl. With options to run in campaign mode for an ongoing narrative or crawl mode for one off gameplay, it could work as a long term project for committed game groups as well as a fun game for casual players. It was a long road from its 2015 campaign to its 2019 fulfillment with a lot of unhappy backers along the way who voiced frustration at the late fulfillment of the game. In early summer 2019, a few months after delivery of the original Middara  game was completed, Succubus Publishing launched their Middara: Unintentional Malum Triology  Kickstarter campaign. This offered a reprint of the original game (retitled Middara: Unintentional Malum Act 1), expanding it to over 80 hours of content, as well as two new adventure expansions (Acts 2 and 3) and a host of other Kickstarter exclusive add-on and stretch goal content. It also promised a faster turnaround on delivery to backers. Suddenly Middara  and its designers (Clayton Helme, Brooklynn Lundberg, Brenna Moncur, and Ian Tate) were the talk of the town and my husband Chris and I had an intense discussion about backing the second campaign. We were torn - yes the game sounded really cool, but we already own one behemoth campaign dungeon crawl (I’m looking at you Gloomhaven). Did we really need another? We hemmed and hawed and let the decision hang in the air. And then then publisher decided for us, by sending us a review copy of Middara: Unintentional Malum Act 1 (M:UMA1).

As soon as the box arrived at the end of June, I poured over all the components. So much stuff! Such a huge box! The artwork (conceived and illustrated by Stephanie Gustafsson, Alex Hansen, Hector Sevilla Lujan, Rhett Mason, and Jon Troy Nickel) is absolutely beautiful. The illustrations are well drawn, well detailed, and bursting with color.
The game could have an audience in the tween set if the drawings were a little less risqué, but as marketed to older teens and adults, everything is within decency standards.

The minis are of good quality; well sculpted. I do wish that at least the starting adventurer minis came pre-painted (I always wish that because I have no painting skills or supplies) especially when M:UMA1 is priced at $150. The components are sturdy and should hold up to regular usage. We haven’t sleeved our cards yet and because of the sheer quantity of them (hundreds) they’ll likely remain unsleeved. I especially enjoy the custom dice, separated by color to indicate which dice should be used during dice rolls.

After examining all the game contents, my interest was definitely on the upswing and Chris and I  set about assembling a crew to play the game in adventure mode. It’s daunting to find others willing to commit to 80+ hours of gameplay, but soon enough we had a happy foursome. One of the players, Craig, actually owned the original edition of Middara but hadn’t found the time to assemble a group and get it on the table. Our other player was his coworker and friend Matt.
Craig showed up for our first night of gameplay with a sweet surprise – he had ordered the fancy game mats and was happy to share them with us for our adventure.

In M:UMA1  adventure mode, players begin the first game by taking on the roles of young students preparing for their Magical Aptitude and Skill Test (MAST). We spent that first evening getting to know the four starting characters (called adventurers) and deciding who would role play each one. Every adventurer has their own unique backstory, motivations, starting equipment (armor, weapons, relics, consumables, etc.), and vivid personality.  I chose Nightingale because I saw myself in her and thought I would really enjoy playing her. Chris chose Rook, Craig took Remi, and Matt selected Zeke.
M:UMA1  adventure mode breaks down the overall campaign (called the adventure) into many sessions called encounters. We typically play one or two encounters each evening we get together, with each encounter lasting anywhere from one to two hours. To start an encounter, all players gather round the table and lay out their adventurer cards and equipment. The narrative is read from the Adventure book, or alternatively listened to on the Middara app. We all really love the app. It’s available on the Apple App store or Google Play store and allows players to hear the narrative bits of the story without requiring one of them to do the reading aloud. The voice actor Succubus Publishing hired is fantastic; she is an expressive reader who brings the characters alive. While the entire adventure in M:UMA1  is narrative driven and so every encounter advances the plot at least a little bit, there are some encounters that have several pages of story so using the app is really nice. After the narration is finished, the location boards are set up for the encounter, forming the terrain, similar to any other dungeon crawl. Directions for setup are given in the Adventure book with modifications in the Diagram book. Some elements of the terrain may have their details partially hidden, such as loot tokens (which hide the exact reward until a character performs an encounter adjacent to the token) and totem tokens (which hide what they represent until an adventurer comes within line of sight of the token). The starting spaces on the board for each adventurer and the monsters (called combatants) are specified in the Adventure book. Once everything is setup, the game begins; turn order for adventurers and monsters is driven by initiative cards that were shuffled and randomly laid out in a row during setup.
During the encounter, players spend their turns moving their adventurers around the terrain, following movement rules, as they work to complete the encounter goals. Usually this involves reaching the exit token, but other goals are possible. Since players typically get rewards (gold, equipment, experience points, etc.) each time their adventurer slays a monster, most will want to prioritize battling the monsters over making a quick run for the exit token. There isn’t a lot of analysis paralysis during game play as the best options for next steps on a player’s turn are usually fairly obvious. Combatants spend their turns completing actions as specified on their description cards. Those that are designated as adventurer opponents are called intelligent combatants and have intelligent combatant cards, while the ones that players control and that fight on behalf of adventurers are called command combatants. 

Exploring the terrain and battling intelligent combatants are governed by an extensive set of rules (60+ pages!) provided in the rulebook. It took us at least three encounters before we really understood most of the basic rules and even now, we find ourselves frequently checking the summary poster we printed out as a giant player aid. There’s just too much information to memorize it all, especially when the information is subject to change due to errata. Which brings me to one of the few complaints I have about this game -the large volume of errata. You either have to remember to frequently check the long list of corrections and changes (to the 1.0 rulebook and to the text printed on various components such as equipment cards, combatant cards, etc) and update gameplay as you go along,  or dedicate a session to reviewing all the changes and corrections and marking up the components with the correct text in one sitting. We started off trying to do the former but it was so frustrating that we switched to the latter and it took me at least an hour.  For the rulebook errata, you can take a shortcut to getting the updates in place (if you don’t mind the ink and paper expense) by printing out the updated 1.08 rulebook from the Succubus website. Another note on the rules- deciding which rule set to play under has become a complicated issue that players will need to come to agreement on as Succubus has compiled and released an entirely new version of the rules (v1.1) that changes several of the fundamental aspects of the game. This was done in response to the feedback from players who have extensively played through the game using the original 1.0 rulebook with errata corrections. The major overhaul is meant to strengthen aspects of the game that felt too weak and weaken aspects that seemed overpowered, but not all players agree on the changes. Also, the 1.1 changes are still in Beta release and so they are subject to change as they continue to be finalized. Our little group likes to keep things simple, so we opted to stick to the 1.08 rule set, at least for now.
Theme is really important to me, so I was very happy to discover that Middara’s theme is well implemented across all components and the gameplay thus far in M:UMA1 . This is where the game really shines over its competitors. Its narrative is extremely detailed and offers so much depth in the characters. More so than Gloomhaven. More so than any other board game I’ve played. An experienced  screenwriter could easily adapt the storyline into a fantastic adventure film for the big screen and I’d go see it. My two year stint playing through the Pathfinder Skull and Shackles Adventure Card Game is a distant second in plot development, and even then, that game only had such a rich narrative track because we employed a user written storyline that we found on BGG (the publisher offered little in the way of quality narrative for the game). I come back to the table each week to play M:UMA1 , not just for the fun of fighting monsters and gaining rewards, but also to find out what happens next in the story. Bonus: as the plot unfolds, adventurers grow in skill and discipline and new content becomes available.
At the time of this writing, we've played through all of Chapter 1 and are partway through Chapter 2 (about 10 distinct sessions). Once we are finished with M:UMA1  in adventure mode (we estimate it will take us over a year, meeting weekly) there are plenty of scenarios and special content for us to replay M:UMA1  in crawl mode.  In fact, a large portion of the Kickstarter promo box is content exclusively for use with crawl mode and I’m excited about eventually digging into that.
Based on my experience with M:UMA1  so far, I highly recommend the game. Not only is the game worthwhile on its own merits, but the friendship building that comes from playing a year+ long adventure with others is wonderful. You can make a full afternoon or evening out of each session, sharing a meal together before sitting down to play the game. Although I was given a review copy of Act 1, I like Middara so much that I’ll be purchasing Acts 2 and 3 myself (or putting them on my Christmas list). You can pre-order the entire trilogy or any part of it on the Succubus Publishing website once the publisher reopens wave 2 pre-orders.
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Publisher: Succubus Publishing
Players: 2-4 (We played with 4)
Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 1 - 3 hours per encounter
Game type: narrative driven, dungeon crawl, campaign, action points, role playing, cooperative, dice rolling, grid movement
Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:
OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.
OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.
OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.
NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

I will be traveling quite a bit from this weekend until the end of October for conventions!

Event Yaoi's Yaoi Yuri Con - I will be a guest of honor at this convention in Lyon, France! I don't get to travel abroad for conventions very often so I am really looking forward to meeting European fans! :)

NYCC - I will have a table in the Artist Alley! (Table T12)

Nijicon - I will be a guest here! (I'll have a panel!)

So, I have three cons this month (IT JUST SORTA HAPPENED), one of which is overseas, so the Starfighter updates will have to wait until I get back! That sucks, I know, but I will be meeting with friends and fans at conventions, so it's all for a good cause! :) I will be back shortly after I return to wrap up Encke and Keeler!

I hope to do you all proud! Thank you so much as always for your support! -Hamlet

Bonjour! Je serai l'invité d'honneur à Yaoi Generation.

October 21st, Lausanne, Switzerland

This is the event's first year and I think it will be very special! I am not able to visit abroad often, so if you are able to come, I hope we can meet!

I look forward to seeing everyone soon! <3 -Hamlet

Americké ministerstvo financí v pondělí uvedlo, že si v současném čtvrtletí půjčí rekordní 3 biliony dolarů (v přepočtu asi 75 bilionů korun), aby mohlo pokrýt obrovské náklady spojené s koronavirovou krizí. Peníze vláda potřebuje na testování, zdravotní péči, pomoc pro firmy a domácnosti a na opatření, která mají pomoci v boji s nemocí a zmírnit ekonomické dopady.

V dubnu bylo bez práce 254 tisíc lidí, nejvíce od března 2018. Nezaměstnanost vzrostla na 3,4 procenta, potvrdil ve čtvrtek Úřad práce. V evidenci přibývá lidí z oboru služeb. O dubnových číslech hovořila již v pondělí ministryně práce Jana Maláčová (ČSSD). Podle ní jsou data stále příznivá.

Hospody a restaurace Češi prostřednictvím projektu Zachraň hospodu podpořili deseti miliony korun. Poukazy do více než 1 500 podniků si od začátku dubna, kdy byl projekt spuštěn, koupilo přes devět tisíc lidí. Stravovací zařízení budou moci od pondělí obsluhovat hosty na zahrádkách, iniciativa se tím však nezastaví.

Nezaměstnanost se šíří světem podobně jako virus. Nejhorší je situace v USA. Tamní centrální banka čeká až třetinovou nezaměstnanost. Jednou z nejvíce postižených zemí v Evropě bude Španělsko, kde se může ocitnout bez práce více než pětina lidí.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

We're doing this for two reasons:

1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We'll keep you posted about this.

If you're currently running SETI@home on your computer, we encourage you to attach to other BOINC-based projects as well. Or use Science United and sign up to do astronomy. You can stay attached to SETI@home, of course, but you won't get any jobs until we find new applications.

We're extremely grateful to all of our volunteers for supporting us in many ways during the past 20 years. Without you there would be no SETI@home. We're excited to finish up our original science project, and we look forward to what comes next.

CEOs of the major Wall Street banks have been summoned to the White House to discuss the coronavirus...

How to Prepare for the Trump Recession

The global coronavirus pandemic has put our economy in free-fall.

Even through Donald Trump’s reckless economic policies, like his pointless trade war with China or his deficit-busting tax cuts for his billionaire donors, the economy has somehow managed to keep chugging along — until now. 

All of the stock market gains from Trump’s time in office have been wiped out, and over the course of just over one week in March the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced its five largest drops in history. 

Worse than a plummeting stock market, businesses and major industries have been forced to shutter their windows to help combat the rapid spread of the virus, putting hundreds of thousands of workers’ paychecks at risk. 

A recession is inevitable at this point. Here are 3 things we can do to prepare.  

Number one: We need to reform unemployment insurance so it reflects the needs of today’s economy. 

When it was first created in 1935, unemployment insurance was designed to help full-time workers weather downturns until they got their old jobs back. But there are fewer full-time jobs in today’s economy, and fewer people who are laid off get their old jobs back again. 

As a result, only 27% of unemployed workers receive benefits today, compared to 49% of workers in the 1950s. We need to expand unemployment coverage so that everyone is protected.

Number two: We need to strengthen Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as  public assistance. 

Since its creation in 1996, the number of families receiving cash assistance has declined dramatically – and not because they’re doing well. Between 2006 and 2018, just 13% of families were lifted out of poverty, while the number of families receiving public assistance fell by 39%.

Already weak, the program didn’t hold up well during the Great Recession. Funding doesn’t automatically expand during economic downturns – meaning the more families are in need, the less money there is to help them. The program also has strict work requirements, which can’t be fulfilled in a deep recession. Worse yet, many individuals in need have already exhausted their five years of lifetime eligibility for assistance.

We need to reform the public assistance program so that more families in need are eligible. It should be easier to waive the strict work eligibility requirements during the economic downturn, and the lifetime five-year limit should be suspended.

Number three: We need to protect the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps. 

Unlike public assistance, SNAP responded well during the Great Recession. Its requirements are designed to expand during economic downturns or recessions.

Waiving work requirements during the Great Recession made thousands of people in need eligible for the program who otherwise wouldn’t have been. Between December 2007 and December 2009, the number of SNAP participants rose by 45%. The program helped keep an estimated 3.8 million families out of poverty in 2009.

But that might not be an option this time around, as SNAP has come under attack from the Trump administration, which is trying to enact a draconian rule change that would kick an estimated 700,000 of our most vulnerable citizens off of the program. Luckily, a judge blocked the rule from going into effect, but the administration is still fighting to enforce it — even in the middle of a global pandemic. We need to make sure SNAP’s flexibility and ability to respond to economic downturns is protected before the next recession hits.

Stronger safety nets are not only good for individuals and families in need. They will also prevent the looming recession from becoming an even deeper and longer economic crisis. 

Trump’s Failed Coronavirus Response

The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been a deliberate disaster from the beginning. But don’t take my word for it – just look at the facts.

Here’s the timeline: 

In 2018, he let the pandemic-preparedness office in the National Security Council simply dissolve, and followed up with budget cuts to HHS and CDC this year. That team’s job was to follow a pandemic playbook written after global leaders fumbled their response to Ebola in 2014. Trump was briefed on the playbook’s existence in his first year - had he listened, the government would’ve started getting equipment to doctors two months ago.

The initial outbreak of the coronavirus began in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019.  

By mid-January, 2020, the White House had intelligence reports that warned of a likely pandemic.

On January 18th, HHS Secretary Azar spoke with Trump to emphasize the threat of the virus just as US Diplomats were being evacuated from Wuhan.

Two days later, the virus was confirmed in both the US and South Korea.

That week, South Korean officials immediately drafted medical companies to develop test kits for mass production. The WHO declared a global health emergency. But Trump … did nothing.

As Hubei Province went on lockdown, Trump, who loves any excuse to enact a racist travel ban, barred entry of any foreigners coming from China (it was hardly proactive) but took no additional steps to prepare for infection in the United States.

He said, “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China,”

He didn’t ramp up production of test kits so we could begin isolating the virus.

By February, the US had 14 confirmed cases but the CDC test kits proved faulty; there weren’t enough of them, and they were restricted to only people showing symptoms. The US pandemic response was already failing.

Trump then began actively downplaying the crisis and baselessly predicting it would go away when the weather got warmer.

Trump decided there was nothing to see here, and on February 24th, took time out of his day to remind us that the stock markets were soaring.

A day later, CDC officials sounded the alarm that daily life could be severely disrupted. The window to get ahead of the virus by testing and containment was closing. 

Trump’s next move: He compared Coronavirus to the seasonal flu…and called the emerging crisis a hoax by the Democrats.

With 100 cases in the US, Trump declined to call for a national emergency.

Meanwhile, South Korea was now on its way to testing a quarter million people, while the US was testing 40 times slower.

When a cruise ship containing Americans with coronavirus floated toward San Francisco, Trump said he didn’t want people coming off the ship to be tested because they’d make the numbers look bad.

It wasn’t until the stock market reacted to the growing crisis and took a nosedive that Trump finally declared a national emergency.

By this time, South Korea had been using an app for over a month that pulled government data to track cases and alert users to stay away from infected areas.

Over the next weeks, as the virus began its exponential spread across the US, and Governors declared states of emergency, closing schools and workplaces and stopping the American economy in its tracks –  Trump passed on every opportunity to get ahead of this crisis.

Trump’s priority was never public health. It was about making the virus seem like less of a nuisance so that the “numbers” would “look good” for his reelection.

Only when the stock market crashed did Trump finally begin to pay attention…and mostly to bailing out corporations in the form of a massive $500 billion slush fund, rather than to helping people. And then, with much of America finally and belatedly in lockdown, he said at a Fox News town hall that he would “love” to have the country “opened up, and just raring to go” by Easter.

At every point, Trump has used this crisis to compliment himself.

This is not leadership. This is the exact opposite of leadership. 

The Solutions to the Climate Crisis No One is Talking About

Both our economy and the environment are in crisis. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few while the majority of Americans struggle to get by. The climate crisis is worsening inequality, as those who are most economically vulnerable bear the brunt of flooding, fires, and disruptions of supplies of food, water, and power.

At the same time, environmental degradation and climate change are themselves byproducts of widening inequality. The political power of wealthy fossil fuel corporations has stymied action on climate change for decades. Focused only on maximizing their short-term interests, those corporations are becoming even richer and more powerful — while sidelining workers, limiting green innovation, preventing sustainable development, and blocking direct action on our dire climate crisis.

Make no mistake: the simultaneous crisis of inequality and climate is no fluke. Both are the result of decades of deliberate choices made, and policies enacted, by ultra-wealthy and powerful corporations.

We can address both crises by doing four things:

First, create green jobs. Investing in renewable energy could create millions of family sustaining, union jobs and build the infrastructure we need for marginalized communities to access clean water and air. The transition to a renewable energy-powered economy can add 550,000 jobs each year while saving the US economy $78 billion through 2050. In other words, a Green New Deal could turn the climate crisis into an opportunity - one that both addresses the climate emergency and creates a fairer and more equitable society.

Second, stop dirty energy. A massive investment in renewable energy jobs isn’t enough to combat the climate crisis. If we are going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we must tackle the problem at its source: Stop digging up and burning more oil, gas, and coal.

The potential carbon emissions from these fossil fuels in the world’s currently developed fields and mines would take us well beyond the 1.5°C increased warming that Nobel Prize winning global scientists tell us the planet can afford. Given this, it’s absurd to allow fossil fuel corporations to start new dirty energy projects.

Even as fossil fuel companies claim to be pivoting toward clean energy, they are planning to invest trillions of dollars in new oil and gas projects that are inconsistent with global commitments to limit climate change. And over half of the industry’s expansion is projected to happen in the United States. Allowing these projects means locking ourselves into carbon emissions we can’t afford now, let alone in the decades to come.

Even if the U.S. were to transition to 100 percent renewable energy today, continuing to dig fossil fuels out of the ground will lead us further into climate crisis. If the U.S. doesn’t stop now, whatever we extract will simply be exported and burned overseas. We will all be affected, but the poorest and most vulnerable among us will bear the brunt of the devastating impacts of climate change.

Third, kick fossil fuel companies out of our politics. For decades, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP have been polluting our democracy by pouring billions of dollars into our politics and bankrolling elected officials to enact policies that protect their profits. The oil and gas industry spent over $103 million on the 2016 federal elections alone. And that’s just what they were required to report: that number doesn’t include the untold amounts of “dark money” they’ve been using to buy-off politicians and corrupt our democracy. The most conservative estimates still put their spending at 10 times that of environmental groups and the renewable energy industry.

As a result, American taxpayers are shelling out $20 billion a year to bankroll oil and gas projects – a huge transfer of wealth to the top. And that doesn’t even include hundreds of billions of dollars of indirect subsidies that cost every United States citizen roughly $2,000 a year. This has to stop.

And we’ve got to stop giving away public lands for oil and gas drilling. In 2018, under Trump, the Interior Department made $1.1 billion selling public land leases to oil and gas companies, an all-time record – triple the previous 2008 record, totaling more than 1.5 million acres for drilling alone, threatening multiple cultural sites and countless wildlife. As recently as last September, the Trump administration opened 1.56 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, threatening Indigenous cultural heritage and hundreds of species that call it home.

That’s not all. The ban on exporting crude oil should be reintroduced and extended to other fossil fuels. The ban, in place for 40 years, was lifted in 2015, just days after the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement. After years of campaigning by oil executives, industry heads, and their army of lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry finally got its way.

We can’t wait for these changes to be introduced in 5 or 10 years time — we need them now.

Fourth, require the fossil fuel companies that have profited from environmental injustice compensate the communities they’ve harmed.

As if buying-off our democracy wasn’t enough, these corporations have also deliberately misled the public for years on the amount of damage their products have been causing. 

For instance, as early as 1977, Exxon’s own scientists were warning managers that fossil fuel use would warm the planet and cause irreparable damage. In the 1980s, Exxon shut down its internal climate research program and shifted to funding a network of advocacy groups, lobbying arms, and think tanks whose sole purpose was to cloud public discourse and block action on the climate crisis. The five largest oil companies now spend about $197 million a year on ad campaigns claiming they care about the climate — all the while massively increasing their spending on oil and gas extraction.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans, especially poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, already have to fight to drink clean water and breathe clean air as their communities are devastated by climate-fueled hurricanes, floods, and fires. As of 2015, nearly 21 million people relied on community water systems that violated health-based quality standards. 

Going by population, that’s essentially 200 Flint, Michigans, happening all at once. If we continue on our current path, many more communities run the risk of becoming “sacrifice zones,” where citizens are left to survive the toxic aftermath of industrial activity with little, if any, help from the entities responsible for creating it.

Climate denial and rampant pollution are not victimless crimes. Fossil fuel corporations must be held accountable, and be forced to pay for the damage they’ve wrought.

If these solutions sound drastic to you, it’s because they are. They have to be if we have any hope of keeping our planet habitable. The climate crisis is not a far-off apocalyptic nightmare — it is our present day.

Australia’s bushfires wiped out a billion animals, California’s fire season wreaks more havoc every year, and record-setting storms are tearing through our communities like never before. 

Scientists tell us we have 10 years left to dramatically reduce emissions. We have no room for meek half-measures wrapped up inside giant handouts to the fossil fuel industry. 

We deserve a world without fossil fuels. A world in which workers and communities thrive and our shared climate comes before industry profits. Working together, I know we can make it happen. We have no time to waste.

Corporations Will Not Save Us: The Sham of Corporate Social Responsibility

Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their shareholders. 

They said “investing in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities“ is now at the forefront of their business goals — not maximizing profits.

Baloney. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.

One Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM’s hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers’ demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Nearly 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn’t save any jobs. Barra was paid $22 million last year. How’s that for corporate social responsibility?

Another prominent CEO who made the phony Business Roundtable commitment was AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to use the billions in savings from the Trump tax cut to invest in the company’s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs. 

Instead, even before the coronavirus pandemic, AT&T cut more than 23,000 jobs and demanded that employees train lower-wage foreign workers to replace them.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable commitment, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce.

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is $117 billion – makes in a few hours. Bezos’ wealth grows so quickly, this number has gone up since you started watching this video.

GE’s CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. So much for investing in employees.  

Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, also committed to the phony Business Roundtable pledge. Shortly after making the commitment to “deliver value to customers,” Muilenburg was fired for failing to act to address the safety problems that caused the 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people.  After the crashes, he didn’t issue a meaningful apology or even express remorse to the victims’ families and downplayed the severity of the fallout to investors, regulators, airlines, and the public. He was rewarded with a $62 million farewell gift from Boeing on his way out.

Oh, and the chairman of the Business Roundtable is Jamie Dimon, CEO of Wall Street’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. Dimon lobbied Congress personally and intensively for the biggest corporate tax cut in history, and got the Business Roundtable to join him. JPMorgan raked in $3.7 billion from the tax cut. Dimon alone made $31 million in 2018.

That tax cut increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. This was before Congress spent almost $3 trillion fighting the pandemic – and delivering a hefty portion as bailouts to the biggest corporations, many of whom signed the Business Roundtable pledge. 

As usual, almost nothing has trickled down to America’s working class and poor. 

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before in order to further boost runaway profits and unprecedented CEO pay. And not even a tragic pandemic is changing that. 

Americans know this. A record 76 percent of U.S. adults believe major corporations have too much power. 

The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be – for example, giving workers a bigger voice in corporate decision making, requiring that corporations pay severance to communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day.  

If the CEOs of the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws, not make phony promises they clearly have no intention of keeping. Don’t hold your breath.  

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of our politics.

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the sham it is. The next step is to emerge from this pandemic and economic crisis more resolved than ever to rein in corporate power, and make the economy work for all. 

Well, in just a few short days I am off to Japan on what I think is a very well-deserved vacation! The dogs will be on vacation, too, on their first ever trip to a boarding facility. I put a lot of care into choosing a place for them and I am optimistic that everything will work out well in my absence. Nervous, but optimistic. It will be really good for all of us, I think, since I have never boarded them and need to lighten up and it will be a good "out in the world" experience for the browns. Cutting the cord... I will report back on how everyone does.

Last week at Doga Maizy was such a pill that this week I put in an untested rookie. Probert was up to the challenge and made a LOVELY Doga companion. He taught a wonderful class and he just might be my new Doga co-teacher.

My boyfriend brought over this poster for Probert this weekend and hung it above his crate. Probert came in from playing outside to see it for the first time, walked straight into his crate and stood there staring at it. I think he likes it!

Last week was my friend Flo's birthday and we surprised her with this photo (which was a huge pain in the butt, let me tell you!). ;)

After all those people and animals, here's a vegetable.

In the latest episode of their high-flying double-decker podcast, Ken and Robin talk making mind control fun to play, Nadar, the occult adventures of Bruce Lee & Jimi Hendrix, and the Rotodyne.

Congress Sets Up Taxpayers to Eat $454 Billion of Wall Street’s Losses. Where Is the Outrage?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 7, 2020 ~ Beginning on March 24 of this year, Larry Kudlow, the White House Economic Advisor, began to roll out the most deviously designed bailout of Wall Street in the history of America. After the Federal Reserve’s secret $29 trillion bailout of Wall Street from 2007 to 2010, and the exposure of that by a government audit and in-depth report by the Levy Economics Institute in 2011, Kudlow was going to have to come up with a brilliant strategy to sell another multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout to the American people. The scheme was brilliant (in an evil genius sort of way) and audacious in employing an Orwellian form of reverse-speak. The plan to bail out Wall Street would be sold to the American people as a rescue of “Main Street.” It was critical, however, that all of the officials speaking to the … Continue reading →

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U.S. Financial System “Monitor” Failed to Flash Warning as Fed Pumped $6 Trillion Emergency Liquidity into Wall Street

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2020 ~  The Office of Financial Research (OFR) was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) informed on emerging threats that have the potential to implode the financial system — as occurred in 2008 in the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. The Trump administration has gutted both its funding and staff. One of the early warning systems of an impending financial crisis that OFR was supposed to have created is the heat map above. Green means low risk; yellow tones mean moderate risk; while red tones flash a warning of a serious problem. On September 17, 2019, liquidity was so strained on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve had to step in and began providing hundreds of billions of dollars per week in repo loans. By January 27, 2020 (before … Continue reading →

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U.S. Unemployment Reaches 14.7 Percent – Chart from Great Depression Shows Risks Ahead

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2020 ~   The data is out this morning and it’s not pretty. Nonfarm payrolls collapsed by 20.5 million jobs in April and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7 percent. The United States is now seeing the worst unemployment rates since the Great Depression. We prepared the above chart from data available at the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) archives at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Following the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, it was not until August 1931 that the unemployment rate reached 15.01 percent. We’re now at 14.7 percent unemployment from a rate of 3.5 percent just two months ago in February. Consider using the chart above to figure out just how much cash on hand you need to maintain.

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Shaenon: I started this wallpaper illustration at the beginning of the month, and now it’s a nostalgic image of the days when people could gather in groups. Ha ha, the world’s gone mad and we’re all going to die. But[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry...

USA Badminton has been taken off probation by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which tried to decertify the organization for noncompliance to protect athletes from sexual abuse.

The IOC Session -- an annual meeting of approximately 100 members -- will be held in July via a video conference rather than the originally scheduled gathering in Tokyo prior to the Summer Olympics.

Posted by: thezmage

Some MCU mashups from Liu-Psypher aka Prime Premne, who has designed most of my shirts

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Posted by: iamrman

I had the idea of crossing over the New Mutants with Dungeons and Dragons. The classes I have assigned to various characters don't necessarily correspond to canon D&D classes, so die hard fans will probably hate it.

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Firmy i finanční trhy mají za sebou první letošní kvartál. Bilance obou není z důvodu preventivních vládních opatření proti šíření nákazy covid-19 nikterak růžová. To potvrzuje i Partners index podílových akciových fondů.

The finalists are:

• Tommy Arnold
• Rovina Cai
• Galen Dara
• John Picacio
• Yuko Shimizu
• Alyssa Winans

Just looking up those websites has given me a lot of pleasure - my art knowledge continues to be "I don't know much but I know what I like" - and I'm looking forward to taking more time to consider each of the finalists more carefully.

I'm pleased to see Galen Dara on the shortlist, I've seen her work frequently in Uncanny, Lightspeed & Fireside Magazines, and usually like it. I was lucky enough to get into a kaffeklatsch with John Picacio at Dublin Worldcon last year (although I came there sideways, through interest in his work founding The Mexicanx Initiative, which was a finalist for Best Related Work), which was a great experience.

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Planted 365. 

To the women from all over the world I'm privileged to know, and everybody who loves international women.

I have been saving up some articles for the occasion: here are two marvellous bios of trans lesbian elders.

Jan Morris. [Content note: the article is in the Guardian which takes a somewhat transphobic editorial stance, though this article is very positive towards trans women. However it does deadname Morris and includes a picture of her from back when she was presenting as male.]

Sandy Stone, a couple of years old from Vice but it came to my attention recently.

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As of some time last night, I have novel respiratory symptoms. I'm basically fine but it feels safest to act as if I am infected.

My lungs hurt, and it's not the tightness I associate with mild asthma symptoms, or the tired muscle ache / burn I associate with a bad cough (whether asthma or viral). Not badly, but pretty much continuously. I'm coughing a bit but not severely, and I don't feel feverish. I have a slight headache and sore throat, but that could be just about anything including stress. I am somewhat distracted but I've been able to get on with useful work today.

I'm probably being over-cautious, but I feel like the balance of probabilities points towards suspected case. So this morning jack and I activated our self-isolation plan. We've divided up the house so that I "live" upstairs and he stays downstairs apart from using the bathroom. We have separate towels and we're cleaning metal bathroom surfaces constantly. jack has taken on food prep for both of us and he's leaving me plates of food and cups of tea and retreating to the bottom of the stairs.

And we're preparing to avoid leaving the house at all until it's more likely that we're not infectious than that we still are. We have plenty of supplies, and we managed to get an online supermarket delivery order in by virtue of going on the website just after midnight last night, which was fortuitous timing. It's going to suck, more so if my symptoms progress beyond the almost ignorable level, but since we can do this I think it's the right thing.

The most likely (and in some ways comforting) narrative I can come up with is that I picked this up when I had to attend a dental appointment two weeks ago. I had very mild symptoms (including a tell-tale sore throat) within a few days of that surgery, which in retrospect I can imagine might have been the first phase. And now, 12 days after the first symptoms, I have potential lower respiratory tract symptoms, so hopefully this is the second phase. That's comforting because it suggests my source of infection is a necessary medical appointment rather than either something frivolous I did, or just being unlucky even though I've stayed at home except for exercise for ten days now, and jack has been doing minimal necessary shopping with careful social distancing. And if I picked it up at the dentist it's unlikely I infected the dentist or any of his staff or patients. Also, if my guess is right I'm probably approaching the end of the infectious phase.

We are really not sure how long we should maintain full isolation at home. UK guidelines say 7 days from start of symptoms (me, today), or 14 days from contact with a symptomatic person (Jack). But I suspect this is not entirely adequate especially as it's much less restrictive than the WHO advice. If my symptoms don't get any worse than this and jack doesn't get sick at all, which is definitely the brnach of the timeline I'm hoping for, I won't know whether I've actually had Covid. Currently we're thinking that if nothing changes we'll start interacting with eachother again after 7 days, but not go outside until we're more confident the incubation period has passed; I think the safest is 14 days from the end of symptoms but we might not be able to sustain that.

Send hugs and support to jack, please? He's doing amazingly in a somewhat scary situation.

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I'm doing basically fine but continuing to be careful.

I still have the same single worrying symptom I had on Thursday, sore lungs. I don't otherwise feel ill, feverish, tired or anything else, so I'm really second guessing myself over whether isolation was the right choice.

The last few days have been mostly pleasant though stressful for jack who's handling everything on his own and worrying about me getting seriously ill or possibly infecting him.

Friday was 19 days since the government started taking action. I worked in my new upstairs den (previously jack's den.) We had a weird date where jack brought me up a tray with the Shabbat ritual things, I made kiddush sitting at the top of the stairs and he sat at the bottom, and we ate dinner in parallel but at a distance. And then we played Potion explosion over Steam, which worked pretty well.

The weekend was ridiculously lovely, and we were both good and only sunbathed and exercised in our own garden. Saturday, day 20, I went to virtual shul, which on only the second iteration starts to feel almost normal. Bigger than usual congregation, including some of the people who are usually strict about not using electronic technology on Shabbat. And in the afternoon I attended the second half of wildeabandon's Stardust readthrough which was generally satisfying and companionable. And I had a long phonecall with ghoti_mhic_uait.

Sunday, day 21, had slightly fewer online social commitments. We had a lot of time in the sunshine in the garden, remaining carefully distanced. cjwatson came by to wave to me from the street while I looked out of an upstairs window like some ridiculous fairy tale princess. We video chatted to jack's university friends; it's been a long time since the original trio got together since one of them lives in Croatia and has two small children. And I did my online chevruta just like the previous week, slightly sheepishly admitting I was Skyping from bed because I was isolating for basically no reason. And I had a long conversation with cjwatson in the evening.

Since today is day 22, and two weeks of lockdown, it's now been a whole two weeks since I last interacted directly with anyone other than jack. jack has also not left the house or allowed delivery people to come close to him since I got the weird symptoms on Thursday, so five days so far.

I now know eight people who have pretty clearly been through a bout of coronavirus, and 21 who like me are being careful because they have suspicious symptoms.

Thanks to everyone who made nice comments on my last post, I really appreciate all of you.

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Continued from Day Four. (From the beginning.) On Friday we packed all of our stuff back up and headed out.  We were barely out of the resort when: This tire is flat. Apparently all that gravel out to Horne Lake Caves the day before also included a small screw.  We limped around the corner to … Continue reading Summer Horrification — Day Five — Englishman River and Rathtrevor

We started going to a personal trainer at the end of the summer, and it’s been really good–building strength, getting healthier. But the one thing that she badgered me about was bread. “You have to stop eating bread! Gluten is terrible for you. It’s what’s making your knees hurt. It’s causing inflammation in your finger […]

It may be tempting at the start of a new project to create the first database tables manually, or write SQL scripts that you run manually, especially when you first have to spend a significant amount of time on sifting through all the migration libraries and then some more to get it working properly.

Going through this process did slow me down at the start of the project but I was determined to use a migration tool because hunting inexplicable bugs that only happen in production just to find out there is a definition mismatch between the production and development databases is not fun. Using such a tool also motivates you to write both the setup and teardown steps for each table while the current design is still fresh in your mind.

At first I considered a standalone migration tool because I expect them to be very good at that single task. However, learning the idiosyncrasies of a new tool and trying to make it fit seamlessly into my development workflow seemed like more trouble than it is worth.

I decided to stick with a Common Lisp library and found the following seven that work with PostgreSQL and/or Postmodern:

• Postmodern-passenger-pigeon
• database-migrations
• cl-migrations
• Mito
• Crane
• Orizuru-orm
• cl-mgr

I quickly discounted Crane and Mito because they are ORM (Object Relational Mapper) libraries which are way more complex than a dedicated migration library. Development on Crane have stalled some time ago and I don't feel it is mature enough for frictionless use yet. Mito declares itself as being in Alpha state; also not mature enough yet.

I only stumbled onto cl-mgr and Orizuru-orm long after making my decision so I did not investigate them seriously. Orizuru-orm is in any case an ORM which I would have discounted because it is too complex for my needs. CL-mgr looks simple, which is a good thing. It is based on cl-dbi which makes it a good candidate if you foresee switching databases but even if I discovered it sooner I would have discounted it for the same reason as CL-migrations.

CL-migrations looks very promising. It is a simple library focusing only on migrations. It uses clsql to interface with the database which bothered me because I already committed to using Postmodern and I try to avoid adding a lot of unused code to my projects. The positive side is that it interfaces to many different databases so it is a good candidate if you are not committed to using Postmodern. It is also a stable code base with no outstanding bug reports.

The two projects I focused on was Postmodern-passenger-pigeon and Database-migrations because they both use Postmodern for a database interface.

Postmodern-passenger-pigeon was in active development at the time and it seemed safer to use than Database-migrations because it can do dry runs, which is a very nice feature when you are upgrading your production database and face the possibility of losing data when things go awry. Unfortunately I could not get it working within a reasonable amount of time.

I finally settled on Database-migrations. It is a small code base, focused on one task, it is mature and it uses Postmodern so it does not pull in a whole new database interface into my project. There are however some less positive issues.

The first issue is a hindrance during development. Every time the migrations ASDF system (or the file containing it, as ASDF prefers that all systems be defined in a single file) is recompiled it adds all the defined migrations to the migrations list. Though each one will only be applied once to the DB it is still bothersome. One can then clear the list with (setf database-migrations::*migrations* nil) but then only newly modified migration files will be added. The solution then is to touch the .asd file after clearing the migrations list.

The second negative point is quite dangerous. The downgrade function takes a target version as parameter, with a default target of 0. This means that if you execute downgrade without specifying a target version you delete your whole database.

I am currently using Database-migrations and it works well for me. If for some reason I need to switch I will use cl-migrations.

Using Database-migrations

To address the danger of unintentionally deleting my database I created a wrapper function that does both upgrade and downgrade, and it requires a target version number.

Another practical issue I discovered is that upgrades and downgrades happen in the same order as they are defined in the migration file. If you create two tables in a single file where table 2 depends on table 1 then you can not revert / downgrade because Database-migrations will attempt to delete table 1 before table 2. The solution here is to use the def-queries-migration macro (instead of def-query-migration) which defines multiple queries simultaneously . If you get overwhelmed by a single definition that defines multiple tables the other option is to stick with one migration definition per file.

I have finally obtained the first batch of the printed "Programming Algorithms" books and will shortly be sending them to the 13 people who asked for a hardcopy.

Here is a short video showing the book "in action":

If you also want to get a copy, here's how you do it:

1. Send the money to my PayPal account: $30 if you want normal shipping or $35 if you want a tracking number. (The details on shipping are below).
2. Shoot me an email to vseloved@gmail.com with your postal address.
3. Once I see the donation, I'll go to the post office and send you the book.
4. Optionaly step: if you want it to be signed, please, indicate it in your letter.

Shipping details: As I said originally, the price of the dead-tree version will be $20+shipping. I'll ship via the Ukrainian national post. You can do the fee calculation online here (book weight is 0.58 kg, size is 23 x 17 x 2 cm): https://calc.ukrposhta.ua/international-calculator. Alas, the interface is only in Ukrainian. According to the examples I've tried, the cost will be approximately $10-15. To make it easier, I've just settled on $10 shipping without a tracking number of $15 if you want a tracking number. Regardless of your country. I don't know how long it will take - probably depends on the location (I'll try to inquire when sending).

The book was already downloaded more than 1170 times (I'm not putting the exact number here as it's constantly growing little by little). I wish I knew how many people have, actually, read it in full or in part. I've also received some error corrections (special thanks goes to Serge Kruk), several small reviews and letters of encouragement. Those were very valuable and I hope to see more :)

Greetings from the far away city of Lima, Peru!
I loved this part: "Only losers don't comment their code, and comments will be used extensively"
Thank you so much for putting this comprehensive collection of highly important data structures, i'm already recommending this to two of my developers, which I hope i'll induce into my Lisp addiction.
--Flavio Egoavil

And here's another one:

Massively impressive book you've written! I've been a Lisp programmer for a long time and truly appreciate the work put in here. Making Lisp accessible for more people in relation to practical algorithms is very hard to do. But you truly made it. You'll definitely end up in the gallery of great and modern Lisp contributions like "Land of Lisp" and "Let Over Lambda". Totally agree with your path to focus on practical algorithmic thinking with Lisp and not messing it up with macros, oop and other advanced concepts.
--Lars Hård

Thanks guys, it's really appreciated!

If you feel the same or you've liked the book in some respect and have found it useful, please, continue to share news about it: that definitely helps attract more readers. And my main goal is to make it as widely read as possible...

So Martin Scorsese said that the Marvel movies are “not cinema” and the internet kind of blew up because it is inherently polarizing, and the possibility that Scorsese is both one of our most talented living directors and also wrong about this particular subject is not particularly fun discourse for a lot of people on […]

This is the Call for Nominations for the 2019 Theszie Awards (the rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards). To nominate candidates for all categories, you may use this form. Nominations are due by January 5, 2019. Finally, to see previous years’ results, click here for 2018, click here for 2017, here for 2016, here for 2015, here for 2014, […]

A convocation of the Lover Triad of United States Grand Lodge will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, August 14-16 2020. Registration for the convocation is now open. See this site for more information.

The Convocation of Lovers scheduled for August 2020 in Cleveland has been indefinitely postponed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Those with hotel reservations for this event should cancel them. There should be no cancellation fee charged if you made a reservation at the Courtyard Cleveland Westlake using the conference reservation link.