Going back through an old document from 2020 I found a cryptic reference to "6 by 6," and notes that reminded me that I had grand plans to publish recommendations. From my fragmented scrawlings I think had meant to have six stable categories that I would return to again and again, with six new recommendations but always the same types.
Since I've lately been wanting to force myself to focus on sharing positive things, I decided to revive this castaway blog feature, but I decided against locking myself into six fixed categories and instead just recommend six different kinds of things each month.
Paradoxically, despite my often esoteric tastes, I tend to imagine the things I seek out and enjoy are widely known, but I suspect that is less the case than I assume, still hopefully even for readers with wide-ranging and capacious tastes there will be something new to discover.
I've also realized that in my delay in composing this first installment, I've missed the perfect chance to have these 6x6 recommendations to be published on the sixth of each month, which I'll try to rectify in the future.
With all of that ado laid out and addressed, here then are six things immaterial & material that I recommend heartily... For February 2025 I've decided that they will be listed arbitrarily in reverse alphabetical order...
1. Wingspan: The Board Game (Digital)
Wingspan is a relaxing, award-winning strategy card game about birds for 1 to 5 players. Each bird you play extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your three habitats. Your goal is to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves.
You are bird enthusiasts—researchers, bird watchers, ornithologists, and collectors—seeking to discover and attract the best birds to your network of wildlife preserves. Each bird extends a chain of powerful combinations in one of your habitats. Each habitat focuses on a key aspect of the growth of your preserves.
In Wingspan up to 5 players compete to build up their nature preserves in a limited number of turns. Each beautiful bird that you add to your preserve makes you better at laying eggs, drawing cards, or gathering food. Many of the 170 unique birds have powers that echo real life: your hawks will hunt, your pelicans will fish, and your geese will form a flock.
Features:
- Relaxing strategy card game where your goal is to discover and attract the best birds.
- Single player and multiplayer modes for up to five players.
- Based on the award winning, competitive, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game.
- Hundreds of unique, animated birds with their real life sound recordings.
- Multiple ways to accumulate points with birds, bonus cards and end-of-round goals.
First a disclaimer, I love the physical version of Wingspan, so if you like physical games, consider this a recommendation for the original material version as well, but the electronic version by Monstercouch is what I'm recommending this month. The base android version is a steal at $9.99 and if you get all the expansions you're still probably spending less than if you bought a new hard copy.
It is an excellent implementation of the game, with both AI opponents, online play, pass and play and the automaton rules from the game. I play unreasonable amounts of the game, since playing it on my phone keeps me from doom-scrolling bluesky. Even though phone use before sleep isn't great, I find that playing a 15-20 minute game before I sleep helps me to relax and wind down or it functions as a great break from work.
The game itself is an engine builder, and even with just the base game the variety of birds provides plenty of replayability. The app is pretty intuitive and aside from the lovely bird art from the original game, the player icons and backgrounds added are lush and relaxing.
2. The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey
Perhaps a bit of a cheat since I just did a mini-review for my [a record of reading] series, but The Grand Dark is probably my favorite of Richard Kadrey's books and not as well known as his excellent Sandman Slim series.
The prose is rich and evocative, making the city of Proszawa feel visceral as you follow along with the adventures of Largo, drug addict, bike messenger and reluctant protagonist. For those nerds who enjoy Blades in the Dark, the setting and characters of the Grand Dark feel like they could be easily slipped into the game.
At turns dreamlike and gritty, uncanny and stark, the novel is what I expected Kafka's works to be like before I read them, which I mean as the highest compliment.
3. Pulp & Reckless by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
Since it's being developed as an Amazon TV show, I assume that everyone knows Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal, but if you don't you should rectify that immediately, but the rest of their corpus is well worth seeking out and the two titles I want to spotlight are Pulp and Reckless.
Pulp first—gun to my head, it might be my favorite stand-alone graphic novel. Part Western, part Noir, despite its short length it packs an immense punch. There is a flawed but heroic humanity to Max Winters that took my breath away the first time I read it. Whenever it crosses my mind, I find myself pulling it out and spend an hour re-reading it, enraptured.
If Pulp is Noir, Reckless is Neo-Noir. The series starts with the eponymous title and follows fixer/private eye Ethan Reckless. Blood-spattered and often heart-wrenching, the books often follow threads from earlier eras, like Hippie idealism gone putrid or secrets from the old Hollywood that can't be kept any longer. It often feels like the best Neo-Noir films, like the Fargo or Blood Simple, and each time a new volume is released I devour it and then re-read all the proceeding books.
4. Fire Draw Near
I got massively into Lankum in 2024, they ended up being my fourth most listened to band after Einstürzende Neubauten, The Legendary Pink Dots and Pig, and I was doing systematic re-listens to the extensive discographies of those three groups. I've been nosing around the edges of the folk tradition for a while, starting with digging into Shirley Collins after she was featured on Current 93's masterpiece album Black Ships Ate the Sky.
While trying to find as much Lankum as I could, I discovered that Ian Lynch had a podcast about the folk tradition called Fire Draw Near and I was delighted to find that it was not only a wonderful listen but a wealth of information for anyone trying to explore more of the folk tradition. Episodes are sometimes themed around a particular song or thread that Ian is finding between songs, but even when they're not the selection is fantastic. He's not afraid to leave behind what would be considered as 'traditional folk' to point out how that genre is connected to many others. Search for "Fire Draw Near" in the podcast player of your choice and enjoy.
5. Dicktown
People know John Hodman as the PC from Apple commercials and David Rees from his artisanal pencil sharpening, or John from his satirical writing and David from Get Your War On cartoon (which I read religiously while in college once I discovered in early 2002, and boy, do those early GYWO strips hit still).
In any case, in 2020 they created an adult cartoon called Dicktown for the anthology show Cake, with the second series of Dicktown released separately (and the first season available to stream seperately from Cake as well.) Following the adventures of John Hunchman, a former boy detective who still solves mysteries for teenagers with the less than able assistance of his now grown bully slash friend, Dicktown skewers nerds, small-town America, middle-aged Gen-Xers, boy detectives and millennial and gen z culture among many other targets. With only twenty twelve minute long episodes, you can binge Dicktown in a night or two.
You do need to have Hulu to watch it legally, unfortunately, but it's so good that if it were released on VHS or Betamax, I would buy a VCR or Betamax player just to have a physical copy. I think the peak episodes are The Mystery of the Mumbling Rapper, the Mystery of the Croquet Meltdown and all of the business with Dr. Marjorie Frost and her pterodactyl based philosophy.
6. Crock-Pot® Lunch Crock® Food Warmer
After several years of working fully remote, one of the worst things about having to go back into the office is going back to making lunch not in the comfort of my own home but in the inconsistent and often disgusting break room microwaves. As bourgeois as it is, having a mini-crock-pot that I can just plug in at my desk on the days when I'm stuck in the office is incredible. It's easy enough to just pack leftovers from dinner in it the night before and then have them heated evenly when I'm ready for lunch instead of dealing with the uneven heating of the bargain basement microwaves at work. Highly recommend to anyone who suffers the indignity of spending at least a day stuck in a cubicle.
No comments:
Post a Comment