2026-08-18
Terraforming Mars
Building an engine of corporations, cards, and parameters that slowly turns Mars green, and I read Red Mars right before playing this again, which was a genuinely strange way to experience both.
2026-07-30
A Wrinkle in Time
Rereading the book that made me weird about tesseracts as a kid, this time as an adult who's spent years reading actual physics-adjacent nonfiction. It held up better than I braced for, and differently than I remembered.
2026-07-17
A Door Into Ocean
An all-female, biologically engineered ocean society faces invasion by a violent, hierarchical planet next door, and answers with organized, deliberate nonviolence instead of a counter-army. Quietly one of the strangest, most patient books I've read this year.
2026-07-13
Race for the Galaxy
A tiny box holding one of the densest engine-building games I own, entirely icon-driven with almost no text on the cards, and a genuinely brutal first few plays before the fog lifts.
2026-07-12
Why Physical Books Still Win in This Apartment
Callum's been trying to get me onto an e-reader for two years, citing shelf space alone in a two-bedroom apartment where one room already doubles as the game closet. I keep buying paperbacks anyway, and I finally sat down to work out why.
2026-07-11
Why I Won't Play a Game Solo
Half my shelf ships with a solo mode now, an automa deck, a bot AI, a whole separate rulebook for playing against the box, and I own maybe four hundred hours of it I have never once opened. A small, probably contrarian case for leaving it there.
2026-06-16
What Ridgeline Books Will and Won't Take
A few blocks from the apartment is a used bookstore that's genuinely picky about what it accepts for trade, and getting to know its owner's exact taste over six years has taught me more about honest self-editing than I expected from a hobby errand.
2026-06-04
Dwellings of Eldervale
A worker placement and area control game dressed up in genuinely gorgeous horror-fantasy art, where the interesting decision is which of five overlapping ways to score you commit to. Plays great at two, which mattered a lot to me.
2026-05-30
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Dennett's case that minds get built the same way evolution builds everything else, by dumb, blind, cumulative tinkering, no architect required. Long, occasionally smug, and I underlined half of it anyway.
2026-05-29
The Secret of Our Success
Joseph Henrich's argument that culture, not raw brainpower, is the thing that actually made humans dangerous. I went in skeptical of the thesis and came out rearranging how I think about basically everything.