Culture Corner: Romania - The Countryside

The following is the first of two posts capturing some of the photos my family took during our summer holiday in Romania in August this year. (Part II is here.) Despite spending 10 days and covering about 2,000 kms (1,250 miles) in country in a camper, there were many things we missed: castles, Brasov, and Bucharest among them. But we did meet many nice people and see many nice things. I've broken the content into two things we saw the most of (besides asphalt): the countryside and castles.

1. Romania's population is organized in a fashion I, as an American living in Poland, am unaccustomed to. Clumped in villages, towns and cities, there are very few homes outside these areas. There are minimal houses and buildings in the countryside, leaving the country feeling a little wild. Here is one of the villages: dense and quiet.

2. For those familiar with Romania, this is the region of the transalpina highway. Picturesque, it invited us out of the camper for several day hikes. This is myself and the kids on one of the hikes.

Review of Age of Darkness ed. by Christian Dunn

Entering the Warhammer universe of fiction I was skeptical about the quality of the franchise's fiction. Dan Abnett's Horus Rising gave me pause, and the handful of books I've read since have, generally speaking, not seen my doubts realized. But that didn't stop me from being skeptical entering my first anthology, Age of Darkness (2011). Where Warhammer novels can devolve into blaster porn, a series of short stories seems to shift that possibility almost to a guarantee. After all, doesn’t each story need a bit of action? And the next? And with +/-10 stories in an anthology, isn't that 10 spots of bolter blasting action in a row—a deluge of 400 pages? Let’s see…

They say the army is the only non-democratic organization in the West, and “Rule of Engagement” Graham McNeill puts the idea to the test through the primarch mastermind of Roboute Guilliman honing his Ultramarine’s battlefield command. Unfortunately, a story that can be read only once, it's also a story that fulfills my concerns about blaster porn and then some. The second story, "Liar's Due" by James Swallow, is a Horus Heresy version of a KGB operation on a backwater planet. Swallow could/should have spent more time on scenes depicting the human element of the story's morals, but it remains a decent spot of atypical space marine fiction with a nicely gray conclusion.

Review of Counterweight by Djuna

It's fair to say time has proven Bruce Sterling right; cyberpunk may be a recognized aesthetic, but the underlying themes—corporate power over political power, the separation of people into the tech haves and tech nots, the blurring of the lines between natural and augmented existence—are foundation stones of such fictions. Looking to add a touch of Arthur C. Clarke' The Fountains of Paradise to this scene is Counterweight by Djuna (2023).

A Korean corporate conglomerate called LK is building a space elevator on the fictional island of Patusan in southeast Asia. The elevator's counterweight already in orbit, workers are connecting it to Patusan via a spider line. But things are not going smoothly at LK. The CEO died under abnormal circumstances just a couple years ago and the company's intellectual property is under constant attack from competitors. Industrial counter-espoinage is thus a critical company department. Things kick off when a senior LK ecurity consultant named Mac witnesses a strange incident on Patusan in which a rival corp seems to have made an attempt to infiltrate LK. Particularly fishy is one of the people involved who seems a little too perfect. And so Mac decides to dig a little deeper into them. Events escalating until the elevator itself is involved (natch), Mac gets caught in a tangled web that touches everything in his life, corporate to personal.

Review of Prospero Burns by Dan Abnett

The events of A Thousand Sons shook the foundations of the Imperium. Secrets of the Emperor were revealed, a Primarch was killed, and vast amounts of loyalist and traitor forces clashed in the field at Isstvan V. A companion piece that both parallels the events of A Thousand Sons yet pushes ahead the HH storyline with its own designs, Prospero Burns by Dan Abnett (2011) offers yet another juicy chunk of multi-layered storytelling worthy to sit among the best the series has to offer.

Where the Horus Heresy series can sometimes feel like yet more space marines blasting away at yet more xenos species, Prospero Burns has a very different feel. Things begin on the ice planet Fenris where a representative of the Emperor has crash landed after being shot out of the skies by unknown forces. The local humans are primitive, however, and massive dangers lurk below the ice. Getting into a spot of trouble with a tribe, the man struggles to survive in the frigid environment. Things take a turn, however, when a seemingly magical warrior with incredible fighting skills drops from the heavens to rescue him. Taken aboard a starship, the man's life is never the same. More importantly, however, he learns that his crash landing on Fenris was never an accident. His role in the galaxy is yet to reveal itself.

Review of Ten Planets: Stories by Yuri Herrera

Like many things in life, pretentiousness is subjective. One person's annoyance at a pince nez is another's Saturday walk in the garden (with a cane, natch). And books are of course the same. What the fuck is Ulysses about? Why can't this Joyce guy just come out and say what he wants to say? In Joyce's case, and with many other such dense, difficult to penetrate writers, there is reason to push through the early fog, however. A course, a study, a conversation with a friend—there are ways of illuminating the previously unseen to make the work relatable. But with Yuri Herrera's collection Ten Planets (2023), no, it's just pretentious.

The reason Ten Planets is pretentious is because no lecture, journal article, or learned conversation is going to enlighten to any significant degree. It's pop art, art with pretensions of offering more but ultimately empty, or at least of minimal relevance. The surface might sometimes be flashy or edgy, but pick away the paint with a fingernail and it becomes lacquered egg cartons... or just a black rectangle. (Rothko, looking at you.)

The Prism: A Breakdown of Expandable Card Games

In a spare moment of time I was reviewing BGG's list of Top 100 expandable/customizable games, specifically looking at TCG-type games, games like Flesh and Blood, Magic: The Gathering, Android Netrunner, Pokemon, etc. The BGG algorithm does not exclude revised core sets, second editions, or alternate versions of games, which means the Top 100 is more like the Top 60. Of these ~60 games, it was a surprise to realize I had played a good number. This got me thinking: What are other ways of slicing and dicing such games beyond “the best” or “most popular”? What does the prism of expandable card games look like?

Before exploring the prism, a few quick notes. First, I am a gamer not a collector. I understand the secondary market has a strong grip on certain games, but I care most about the table top experience. What I don't care about are the various acronyms—TCG, UCG, CCG, LCG, etc. I use the term “expandable card game” as a means of encompassing that myriad of card-based games which release a base/core set of cards, then periodically release new cycles of cards which enhance and iterate on the base experience.  Fair enough? Third, there are too many such games for the average person to have played them all. I have played twenty five, which is a good number, but does not include some of the more well known games (e.g. Yu-Gi-Oh, Summoner Wars, and others). In other words this post is not a be-all end-all, just a conversation starter. And lastly, this is a living page. As I play more such games I will update it.  There are a couple dozen new expandable card games due for release in the next twelve months...

Here are the facets of the prism I chose to look at:

• Best Art

• The Crunchiest

• Most Overrated

• Most Underrated

• Least Deterministic

• Most Deterministic

• Most Customer-Friendly Business Model

• Complexity

Entry-Level

Mid-Level

Complex

• Most Unique

• Most Thematic vs. Most Abstract

• Best Multi-player

• Best Cooperative

Without further ado, on to the prism of expandable card games. We'll start with a banger of a facet.

Review of A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeill

Undoubtedly some clever person on the web, and now I guess AI, has boiled the Warhammer 40k fiction formula down to a minimum of variables, variables that echo and repeat. At least sometimes that is how 40k books can feel. A Thousand Sons by Graham McNeill (2010) begins this way, but slowly and steadily reveals itself to be one of the best Horus Heresy books published yet—anything but bolters on auto-fire.

As the title indicates, the novel centers on the Thousand Sons legion, led by the primarch Magnus the Red. Dabbling heavily in the arcane, Magnus has spent years studying and understanding magic, all the while building a massive library on his homeworld of Propero to collect the knowledge. Curiosity getting the cat, Magnus' work in the dark arts ultimately comes around to bite him, however. Changing the course of the Emperor and Horus' plans, and as a result history, Magnus finds himself in the most difficult of positions. Lose-lose, his decision truly has no good outcome. Nevertheless, he must decide.

Review of The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories by Jeffrey Ford

Diction as effortless as warm butter on toast. Imagination that covers the spectrum of color (perhaps with an emphasis on indigo?). And underlying substance that makes the reading experience worthwhile. Jeffrey Ford is one of the great living writers of American letters. While his novels are quality, there is an argument to be made that short fiction is where Ford's teeth are sharpest and bite deepest. Seeming to emerge from the womb fully fledged, even his debut collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories (2002), loses none of its luster in comparison to the dozens upon dozens of quality stories that came after. But for every good writer, it's always interesting to compare how they arrived on the scene to how they exist. Let's take a look at the first ten years of Ford's short fiction.

One of Ford's best stories of all time irrespective of this collection, things kick off with “Creation”. Fundamentally about the role of parents in their children's upbringing, Ford foregrounds a boy going to catechism and learning the Christian cosmology who. One day he decides to create his own man, of sticks. A tiny tear forming in the reader's eye in the final paragraph, the fact that it feeds into the story's other main themes flips it from maudlin to meaningful. From cosmology to Poe/Lovecraft/Ashton Smith, “Out of the Canyon” is set in the Old West and centers around an isolated well purported to have healing waters. Trouble is, some of the visitors end up the opposite of healed. Ford weaves a tale, but one which lacks drive to bring the story's potential to the surface (no pun intended).

Review of Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan

Given the deluge of culture the past decade or so, the longevity of success has been shortened. Where the names of well received books released in the mid-20th century still linger, successes in the past couple of decades have faded more quickly as each successive success is released. But do you remember Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven? Erin Swan still does, and she wants to be in dialogue and iterate upon it in Walk the Vanished Earth (2022).

Walk the Vanished Earth is a generational story kicked off by a pregnant, cognitively limited young woman named Bea emerging from the woods of rural Kansas in the 1970s. Selectively mute, she is cared for by the state who ultimately assists with the birth, a stunted boy Bea calls 'her giant'. The boy is named Paul, and he goes on to live in interesting times, aka the general collapse of world civilization after environmental catastrophe. Paul's head full of ideas how to overcome the catastrophe, he puts them into motion, starting with his own daughter. Her story, and the generations of her children carry the story forward in episodic fashion, telling what happens to the human race in the aftermath of disaster.

Cardboard Corner: Review of Not Alone

One of the families we play board games with recently said to me: “It's sometimes troublesome to find a game for our family. My son likes competitive games. Our daughter likes cooperative and my husband likes strategy oriented games. How to make them all happy?” I went to our shelf and picked off the game for them, Not Alone (2016). Heavy-heavy strategy? No, but definitely a barrel of monkeys in terms of mind games, guessing, double-guessing, and triple-guessing your opponent, leading to cheer-out-loud social moments.

Not Alone is an asymmetrical, one-versus-many game for two to seven players, but certainly best with four or more. The setting is an alien planet where a ship of humans has crashed landed. While the humans are crossing the planet to get to their rescue ship, an alien creature finds them and begins mind hunting. In the game, one player takes on the role of the alien. Their job is to hunt the humans and wear their minds and bodies down to the point they have been assimilated into the planet. Assimilate the humans before they get back to their ship, and the alien wins. The other players' job (the shipwrecked humans) is to get to the rescue ship. They need to work together to survive long enough. Do that, and the humans win. Competitive and cooperative, yes?