Fascination Place

Fifty-Five

Picture of the author on his fifty-fifth birthday

A ‘double-digit birthday’, as a friend of mine called it in his birthday wishes today. Also I guess once upon a time a number often associated with retirement, or at least with being old, as it seemed like AARP memberships once really started being pushed at age 55. (I’ve been received mail from them for several years.) In fact I’m still kickin’ at my job, and planning to stay until at least the modern retirement age of 65. Then we’ll see.

Martin Luther King Jr. day was yesterday, so Debbi took it off and we took the dog to Byxbee Park for a morning hike, and then took down our outdoor Christmas lights. Then we went to Sundance the Steakhouse for dinner, which is where I like to go every year.

Today I slept in, and then spent the morning playing Outer Wilds on our Nintendo Switch. This is very much my sort of game, going around collecting information to solve a mystery, and the story seems very rich. I just scratched the surface in the little time I played. I have a feeling I can look forward to crashing into things quite a bit, though. The game controls on the Switch are pretty awkward, and it would be nice if they had a Mac version, but oh well.

Then I met my friend Chad for lunch at the Park Station Hashery, before making a trip to Recycle Bookstore. (I didn’t find anything today.) I went for a walk to close my exercise goal and almost catch up on this week’s podcasts, and then I watched an author event with John Scalzi sponsored by my local library before we made dinner.

All my birthdays are pretty low key these days. I don’t think we’ve really “done anything” for them since going to Disneyland in 2020. But that’s fine. Once you’ve had enough birthdays you appreciate the quiet ones. We’ll see if I feel similarly in another 20 or 30 years.

Picture of a smiling black doggo — Domino enjoyed his hike!

Marvel Snap

Marvel Snap is on online “collectible” “card” game which was publicly released in late 2022. I signed up for it – maybe even a little before that when it was still in beta, I don’t remember – and played it for a month or two in the fall of 2022 because I was looking for a new casual game on iOS. But after a little while I got bored with it and stopped playing.

Then this past September I was feeling pretty unhappy with last year’s Magic the Gathering sets (basically, I’ve hated the limited formats for most of them, and especially loathed Wilds of Eldraine, the set which was out at the time) and decided to give it another try, and I’ve been playing it regularly since.

As a casual and simple game it has a surprising amount of depth. I don’t really care about the character skins that the cards have, so it’s the gameplay which has held my attention. Enough that I decided to write an entry about it.

Collecting

The game is a “collectible” “card” game in that the game pieces are virtual cards, and you acquire them by consistent play. You can’t trade with other players, and for the most part you have little control over how you acquire cards. The game has a “collection level” system which you move up as you play, and over the first 500 levels you acquire every card in the first two “pools” of cards. Thereafter you gradually acquire cards from the later pools (3, 4 and 5). Effectively, this means everyone gets a base set of cards after a couple of months of play, and then players randomly acquire new cards to unlock new deck archetypes.

There are a couple other ways to acquire cards: Certain cards become randomly available for purchase through certain means in the store, and every “season” (month) a new “pass” is released with a new card which you can purchase. I’ve been buying the season pass for the last few months at $10 each and have been pretty happy with it.

Each card had a ladder of rarities which you can increase as you get “boosters” and credits. These rarities just make the card look different, which has no in-game value, but increasing the rarity moves you up the collection level track. You get boosters by playing, and you get credits by achieving daily and mastery pass goals, and you also get boosters and credits by moving up the level track.

So it’s a pretty clever gamified system, and for me the motivation is to acquire new cards to unlock new decks and experience, so I keep playing. A pretty nifty feedback system. I’m sure there are people who spend real money to unlock

Gameplay

A game consists of 3 zones, and each player may have up to 4 cards in each zone. The player with the most power in each zone at the end of the game wins that zone, and you have to win 2 of the 3 zones to win the game. (If you tie for numbers of zones won, then the player with the highest total power wins.)

The game lasts 6 turns, and each turn a player gets an amount of energy equal to the turn number, losing any unspent energy each turn. Each card has an energy cost, a power number, and may have special abilities.

Each player constructs a deck of 12 unique cards from the cards they own. They start the game with 3 cards, and draw 1 card each turn. And each turn they can play as many cards they have in hand as they have energy.

One thing that took me a while to realize is that this means you’ll draw 9 of the 12 cards in your deck during the game, so well-constructed decks have a fairly consistent experience, varying mainly in the order they draw cards in, and which 3 cards they don’t draw.

I’ve also noticed that some players don’t seem to think about having to win only 2 of the 3 zones and work to win all 3 of them, whereas I’m happy to punt on a zone in order to win the other 2.

The game keeps things simple by limiting your options to basically only which cards you play. If a card has an effect which could choose from among several different things – for example, discard a card, destroy a card, affect a card in some other way – the game makes the choice randomly. There are a few combos which can result in a number of effects happening in sequence, and when this happens the game will “fast forward” to the end of the sequence. I don’t think the game has any truly infinite combos, which must be an interesting design tightrope to walk.

Oh, one more thing: Each zone has a randomly-chosen effect which are revealed over the course of the first 3 turns, from left to right. There are a lot of zone effects, so every game is a little different, and some of them are very different. Some decks can be completely hosed by a particular set of zones, while others do well with them. Those are unusual, though: Most decks are competitive with most zones, but the games play out differently. And it feels great to win a game with a set of zones that your deck handles poorly.

I haven’t yet figured the optimal strategy for playing cards while some zones are still unknown. Early on I would play in the leftmost zone – revealed on turn 1 – with my first card, but these days I tend to play in the rightmost zone unless a revealed zone makes it clear I should play something there. Sometimes this hoses me, other times it benefits me, but on balance it’s felt like the right thing. I imagine whole articles have been written about how to do this.

Other Stuff

Each season has a separate ranking track based on “cubes”, which are acquired by winning games, and lost by losing games. Each game starts at 1 cube, and either player can “snap” at any time to double the number of cubes won, up to a maximum of 8. These get you some additional rewards, but mean you have to be snapping cleverly to win more cubes than you lose. This is frankly one of the less exciting parts of the game for me.

I’m not really sure how matchmaking works in Marvel Snap. I suspect they try to match you up roughly based on your collection level and maybe the season rank. I find I don’t often match up against decks which are clearly better than mine, but I also find that I tend to get up to 85 cubes and then stall out (the max reward is at 100 cubes). This probably means I’m missing out on some marginal value in my snapping, but I’ve seen people say they get up to max cubes in just a few days, so maybe not.

But the fact that I can keep moving up in collection level matters a lot more to me than getting stalled on cubes.

(It seems like optimally people would retreat when clearly behind with little chance of catching up and snap when clearly ahead with little evident chance of losing, and so most games would end up at 1-2 cubes. and advancement would be slow. In practice, this doesn’t happen, which is interesting. I often win 8-cube games where I felt ahead for a long time, and I sometimes lose 8-cube games because my opponent had stuff I hadn’t imagined which caught them up. I suspect there are built-in factors which stoke the variance, but also that there are aspects of this part of the game I haven’t figured out yet. I also suspect that some players just snap early because they like to play for higher stakes – the equivalent of a live straddle in poker – and that many people like to play out the game because you get more boosters for longer games. I dunno.)

As I said, there are also various challenges – daily ones for everyone, and extra ones for people with the season pass – which you can accomplish to get more credits. These are usually pretty easy to achieve – I’m not sure I’ve ever not achieved one with a few games of play per day.

Decks

Deck building is a pretty interesting part of the game. There are of course loads of web sites out there with decks you can build – if you have those cards. If you don’t, then you often look for a deck where you have 8-10 of the cards, and then figure out what to fill in around them. The new card with each season pass is fun because you can try to build some new decks around them.

I’m going to present a few of my decks without going into them in great depths; you can easily go online to see what the cards do if you care.

When I started playing I decided what I wanted to do was maximize the number of cards I could play, so I built a deck called “Micronauts” which looked like this:

These are all tier 1 and 2 cards, and it performed really well for me. Basically these cards are all good-rate cards which put a lot of power on the board for their cost, and I could almost always play all of them by the end of the game. So if you’re new to the game, consider going this one a try. I’ve evolved the deck over time – primarily based around Squirrel Girl, Ka-Zar (which gives all 1-cost cards +1 power) and Jessica Jones – and it’s still pretty competitive. I bring it out whenever there’s a daily challenge where it wants me to win a zone with 4 cards.

I think my favorite deck came with the season pass for Ms. Marvel a few months ago. She is already an efficient card (5 power for 4 energy), but she gives adjacent cones 5 power if the cards in each zone have different costs. I looked at a few decks out there and then came up with this one:

I’m not sure I’ve actually changed this deck since I built it, and it wins a lot. Besides the basic synergies in the deck, I stumbled into a couple of cards – Armor and Cosmo – which absolutely hose a few popular decks in the metagame. There are few warmer feelings than dropping Armor – which prevents all cards in a zone from being destroyed – in a zone where a deck which wants to destroy its own cards has already played 2 or 3 cards.

This deck strongly prefers to play cards in the middle zone. I feel it could use a little more tuning, and perhaps someday I’ll acquire a new card which is an obvious replacement for one of the ones in it today.

My current favorite deck is this High Evolutionary deck. The gimmick of the High Evolutionary is he gives certain cards special abilities, but the nature of those abilities is that they give you a bonus for not using all your energy, and they give you a bonus if you decrease the power of your opponent’s cards.

I don’t own a few cards commonly played in this deck, but I’m very happy with the cards I put in instead. Psylocke grants extra energy which can either ramp out cards or assist in the “not use all energy” bonuses. Scorpion and Hazmat both decrease power of opponents’ cards, making Abomination cheaper. Magik adds a 7th turn to the game, so you can play more stuff. And Iron Lad gets the ability of the top card in your deck, in addition to being very efficient, and synergies with most of the deck. It’s been a very consistent deck for me over the last week.

I have several other decks I play, but those have been my go-to decks so far.

In Conclusion

So I’ve been playing Marvel Snap almost every day for the last 4+ months, and frankly I’m kind of surprised it’s held my attention for this long. A single game takes just a few minutes, so I’m not investing a huge amount of time in it, and overall I’ve been winning at a pretty good clip, which always feels good.

So if you enjoy turn-based card strategy games like this, and either enjoy to can tolerate the play-to-acquire gamified system, then Marvel Snap may be for you. I don’t know if I’ll still be playing it at the end of the year, but if Magic sets continue to have sucky limited environments, then I just might.

Goodbye New Yorker, Again

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with The New Yorker, and two years after I resubscribed to it, I’m letting it lapse again. My last issue is the January 1 & 8 one, with this cover by Bianca Bagnarelli:

Cover to the Jan 1 & 8, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.

As always, it gets harder to keep up with a weekly periodical over time, especially one as in-depth as The New Yorker. I feel like the magazine spends more time these days covering celebrities and world events and less time talking about the quirkier, more obscure areas of the nation and the world. I get plenty of exposure to Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and the war in Ukraine from other sources.

But this issue – which I haven’t quite finished – does go out on a high note with an article on Hollywood screenwriter and script doctor Scott Frank.

Of course, I have plenty of other things to read: A large to-read stack of books in the house, my weekly haul of comic books (and a moderate stack of graphic novels I haven’t cracked), and plenty of material on-line. That’s what magazines and newspapers have to compete with in the Internet era.

If the magazine continues, I’ll probably re-up in another 5 or 10 years, and maybe it will have evolved again. Time will tell.

Maintenance Year

This year feels like it’s been a big maintenance year, which isn’t a bad thing, and I feel like we got a lot of stuff done in that space this year.

A maintenance year doesn’t sound very exciting, but the biggest piece of maintenance was in fact quite exciting: Finishing the almost-2-year-long renovation of our vacation home on the east coast. We were fortunate to have a fantastic contractor who worked closely with us from a continent away to get it done, and it turned out amazing. We made 3 trips back there this year. First, in May to get things ready. Second, our big trip in July with friends, which started off with a 2-day delay and then was a lot of fun but was ridiculously busy, especially for me. And then again in September, just the two of us, which started off with a hurricane but ended up being a nice and mostly-relaxing trip.

We’re very glad to have it done, and are looking at spending time there regularly over the next few years. The cross-country fight is a bit of an oof, but we’ll figure it out.

In late summer I wrote that August was all by itself a month of maintenance, replacing our dishwasher, getting a major service on my car, and deep-cleaning the bathrooms and doing a bunch of yard work.

Fall is when the yard work ramps up anyway, as the sycamore tree in front of our house keeps me busy raking for a couple of months. The December storms knocked down almost all of its leaves so I think I finished a little early this year.

Early in the year we had some sections of our fence fall over, and we had them repaired (which mainly involved replacing the rotting posts), and then this fall we had them out again to replace several other posts. I feel like we get this done more often than I’d like, so maybe we should investigate getting treated lumber which won’t rot in the ground at some point.

In November I had another car repair, as my car – a 2015 VW Eos convertible – had been leaking in the rain, and it turns out it needed some drainage holes cleaned out. It was a little cheaper than estimated, and the rains we’ve gotten in the past month have shown that it worked, as it hasn’t leaked again. I am a little concerned that my discontinued-model car will be more expensive and difficult to maintain as time goes on – for more than just its age – so it might not last too many more years. We’ll see. (Long-time readers may recall that my previous car lasted 16 years, and the car before that I had for 9 even though it was 3 years old when I got it.)

We also had people out to clean the gutters and windows, which they really needed. We should probably do the gutters at least every other year, if not more. Once again, the storms this month validated the decision to do this.

In December we had an electrician come in to fix a bunch of lights in the kitchen. We have recessed lights all over the house, but while most of them are screw-in halogen flood lights (which I’ve been replacing with LED floods as they burn out), the six in the kitchen we push-in fluorescent lights, and the last two that died had the bases of the bulbs disintegrate when I tried to replace them. Apparently this is a common problem, so we got the whole fixtures replaced with built-in LED lights which will last 50,000 hours, probably meaning 20 years or more, which seems pretty good. We also got a pendant light over the island fixed, as well as an under-cabinet light. (And we might replace the fluorescent under-cabinet lights with LEDs at some point, as I replace those bulbs more often than any others in the house.)

I spent part of the holiday break cleaning up stuff in our study, tossing quite a few things, and I also have a couple of boxes of books to try to sell to the one remaining used book store in the area. I even made enough space on the shelves to empty one of the two remaining boxes from our move 12 years ago.

This year I struggled with plantar fasciitis and a strained achilles tendon, resulting in my taking most of September off from running. The fasciitis was by far the most annoying of the two, but it seems to have gone away this winter, which suspects that I need to find better summer footwear. The strained achilles has been naggingly annoying but no more than that. It’s gotten better too, but isn’t 100%. All part of being overweight and getting older, I guess.

I read about a book every other week this year, which may not sound like much but I maxed out at a little more than a book a week back in the 90s, and these days I read a lot more stuff than novels and comics. I’m still plugging my way through Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series as my before-bed reading, and will probably be ready to write a second entry about it soon. I decided to find alternate places to record my reading other than GoodReads (an Amazon site), so you can find me at The Storygraph and the SFBA Bookwyrm instance, if you care.

I’ve also continued to listen to lots of podcasts, at the rate of something like an hour and a half a day, mostly driving to and from work or going out walking or running. I keep up-to-date on many podcasts, but I have a large backlog where I am almost up to the end of 2020. Sheesh!

One thing that’s been receding in my life is Magic the Gathering. I mostly play limited Magic – draft and sealed – rather than constructed, and frankly this has been the worst year for limited Magic that I can recall. 4 of the 5 drafts formats were ridiculously fast, and the other was also pretty fast, which I find pretty tedious because it’s so easy to fall behind and so hard to catch up if you do. Moreover, I think fast formats reward people who are good at drafting and deckbuilding, and I think my strength is in playing the games, while my drafting is mediocre and my deckbuilding is weak. I lost games at a 75% clip during Wilds of Eldraine, and was miserable doing so; it’s my least-favorite draft format ever. So I think I’m going to step back from it for a while, and when new sets come out wait to see if the consensus is that the format is fast. If it is, then I’ll probably skip it.

Instead, back in September I picked up Marvel Snap again. It’s a short-game format collectible card game on iOS which didn’t hold my interest for long when I tried it in late 2022, but has been just what I needed as I stepped back from Magic. It’s probably worthy of its own post at some point, but it’s been making me happy. It probably helps that I’ve won at a pretty good rate, and with a few decks I built myself (though I’m certainly not too proud to netdeck).

I’ve basically stepped back entirely from Twitter/X (often styled derogatorily as ‘Xitter’, which I like the pronounce with the ‘X’ as an ‘Sh’) and its legion of fascists and white supremacists, starting with the chief Muskrat. I mostly post on Mastodon, and sometimes on Bluesky, though Bluesky feels like Twitter of 2012 in its technology so it’s hard to get too excited about posting there. Hopefully 2024 will see it ramping up its development efforts significantly.

On the home front, we’ve been continuing to integrate Domino into our lives. Debbi got his DNA tested and he’s primarily a pit bull mix, which I could see once I looked at several styles of pit bulls. He’s particularly got the pit bull torso, but he has his own unique features such as his curly tail and his helicopter ears.

Domino and the cats still don’t get along, especially D and Jackson (who is starting to look like an older cat as he just turned 11). He’s doing better with Simon and Edison, but we still keep them separated. I sometimes joke that the circle in our household is that Debbi wants to hang out with the dog, the dog wants to hang out with me (because he thinks I play harder, I think), I want to hang out with the cats, and the cats want to hang out with not-the-dog (though I think if he were chill around them then they’d be okay with him, especially Simon). This means that Debbi and I spend more time in separate rooms than we used to, which isn’t great, but it’s working so far.

So it’s been a pretty busy year, and I feel like we accomplished a lot, even if it wasn’t the most exciting year ever. But with the 2024 elections coming up, I am definitely feeling like I don’t want to live in interesting times!

Farewell, Hobee’s Mountain View

Hobee’s is a NorCal breakfast institution. There are other good breakfast places around, but Hobee’s has the double threat of also having good lunches, and that’s before you get into their yummy coffee cake.

Hobee’s was founded in Mountain View in 1974 in a former Dairy Belle burger joint. And it turns out the first location is in walking distance of my house! I started going there when I moved to Mountain View in 2001, but before that I’d been to the Palo Alto and the now-defunct Cupertino locations. Hobee’s emphasized meals made from natural and often California-sourced ingredients, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t have a deep fryer.

In 2015 the original owners sold the chain to a pair of employees. For some chains this might have been the beginning of the end, but it seemed to breathe new life into the Mountain View location: New lights, new physical menus, and some nice changes to the menu contents, my favorite being the addition of buttermilk pancakes, as I’d never been a fan of the whole wheat ones. Late in the pandemic they set up tents and outdoor seating in the parking lot and they were the first restaurant we started going to regularly once we got vaccinated.

Sadly, all good things come to an end, and we learned a little over a week ago that yesterday would be the end for Hobee’s Mountain View. They wanted to make some upgrades to their space, but the landlords were unwilling to do what they wanted. The mall they’re in is old, decrepit, and half empty, so none of this really surprised me. (I’m more surprised that there’s a new massage parlor in it, as it seems the end is not far off. Then again, the Sunnyvale mall for my comics store used to be seemed to be in that state a decade ago, and it’s still shambling along. I guess there’s just enough demand for these aging and presumably low-rent retail spaces.)

We made two trips to the place last week, for breakfast on Monday (when the coffee cake was especially good), and for lunch on Wednesday. I took some indoor photos, but as they have people in them, I’m not going to share them here. They’ll make for some nice memories, though.

Hopefully they’ll be able to find a new space in Mountain View, though it’s very unlikely it will be as convenient to us as their old one was. Meanwhile, I guess we’ll be driving to the Palo Alto location in the future. And boy has it been a long time since I’ve been there.

The exterior of Hobee's restaurant Mountain View

The Marvels

I don’t think I can provide a more succinct review of The Marvels than what I posted on Mastodon after we came out of the theater yesterday:

#TheMarvels was 1000% better than I’d expected.

If you enjoy Marvel movies, you should go see it. And if, like me, you were a big fan of #CaptainMarvel and are, like I was, worried that it’s not the sequel you wanted, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

This was a really fun film. When I first heard it announced I was disappointed because I had wanted a sequel to Captain Marvel (one of my top three films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) which explained what she’d been up to for the 23 years between that film and her return in Avengers: Endgame. But with two other characters sharing top billing, and therefore clearly taking place in the “present” of the MCU (which I suspect is about 2025 right now, though I forget what made me think that, other than that Endgame concluded in 2023 and it’s clearly been at least a couple of years since then), it seems doubtful that we’d get that.

In fact the film gave me everything I’d hoped for, and while it was a lighter film than Captain Marvel, it had plenty of serious moments, and while I could (and will) quibble with some parts of the story, overall it worked for me. I would say it’s on about the same level as the first Avengers film.

The film has been performing poorly at the box office, which I suspect is due to a confluence of factors: The post-Endgame MCU seems to be considered pretty disappointing, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in particular was panned and did poorly, and The Marvels looks like another team-up crossover film – which it is, but also isn’t, and it in particular doesn’t play into the ongoing “Multiverse Saga” story arc the series is working through, but is just a straight-up continuation of the stories of its main characters. Which for most of these films is what I want. Indeed, when they do a big crossover story in what should be a story focusing on its main characters, that’s when you get garbage like Captain America: Civil War.

All of which is a long-winded way to say: Unless you just don’t like these characters, don’t let any of that dissuade you from seeing The Marvels. It’s a fun film with good action scenes, some broad humor, and plenty of character development.

(And if you hate it because you find the dialogue to be stilted or contrived, well, then I assume you hated the first Avengers film for the same reason, because it was way worse on that count.)

Spoilery thoughts after the cut:

13 Days of Halloween

Aaron’s Mahnke’s Grim & Mild is either a true cottage industry or one of the biggest names in independent podcasting, depending on who you ask – maybe they’re both! I listen to a bunch of their shows, and have tried a few others; they’re not all for me, but some of them one.

One of their projects since 2020 has been 13 Days of Halloween, which starts each year on October 19 and releases an episode a day through Halloween. I started listening in 2021 and went back to listen to the 2020 series after last year’s. This year’s series was the most ambitious – and longest – yet.

The basic framework is that the main character is thrust into an unusual environment, often with a guide of some sort, and they listen to the spookystories of the people they encounter along the way. The first season, “Hawthorne Manor”, in which the listener is guided by a caretaker (played by Keegan-Michael Key) who is searching for something in the manor, is a pure distillation of this form, in which the ongoing narrative is little more than a simple framing sequence.

The second season, “The Sea”, is about a woman who wakes up on the beach of a mysterious town and is guided by another woman through the town in a journey of discovery. (The credits on the web site do a poor job of explaining who plays who, but the two main characters are played by Kathy Najimy and Bethany Anne Lind.)

The third season, “Devil’s Night”, concerns a boy, Max (Carter Rockwood), who gets lost on Halloween night in his rural town (it’s implied this takes place in the first half of the 20th century) and is aided by a mysterious figure (Clancy Brown) as he tries to get back home through the surreal landscape.

This season, “Penance”, is about Sayuri (Natalie Morales), a young woman who is abducted and locked up in the Pendleton Rehabilitation Center without being told why. She makes friends, adjusts to life in the combination prison/institution, and over the course of many months tries to figure out how to escape.

This season breaks with the strict format of the first three seasons: Some episodes have more than one story from other characters, some have none, and some Sayuri is directly involved in. She has both higher stakes personally, and more agency, than protagonists in the previous seasons. Her personality reminded me a lot of Mallory in Greater Boston, if Mallory were placed in a scenario where she had little control over her day-to-day life. The season does have more implied violence and gore than past seasons, as far as I can recall.

Overall it was a really successful season, though I imagine the ending might be a bit divisive. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, it almost feels like it it wasn’t quite finished, but for a spooky Halloween tale maybe that was the point. It did leave me a little confused about the title of the season, though, as it’s not clear to me who was doing penance for what.

I’m not sure how they’ll top this one next year. Though I hope this is about where the length of the episodes peak; this was a lot to keep up with on a daily basis. (I’m still playing catch-up with my other regular podcasts that release episodes over the past two weeks!)

Anyway, if you are looking for some creepy, haunting tales around this time of year, keep this one in mind in the future.

Halloween 2023

Halloween seemed a little quieter this year. I didn’t write about last year (though I did write about the season in Boston a week earlier), but I thought that things were basically back to pre-pandemic levels for trick-or-treaters. Our street is pretty nuts when it comes to the flocks of kids, and even in 2020 we got about 50 kids, before the COVID vaccines were available.

We set up our usual little Halloween light display earlier in October. Walking around the neighborhood there were a lot fewer houses with lights up than in past years. I’m sure people were more motivated to put the effort in during lockdown, but really there were very few this year.

We usually buy at least 4 big bags of candy from Target or Costco each year, and this year Debbi bought a couple more than that. Then we set up our large folding table in the driveway to hand out candy. This way people aren’t constantly coming to the door, which is important because it would be constant at the peak of the evening, and neither the cats nor the dog get freaked out. (Domino spent the evening in the guest room, where I think he was mostly bored. The cats took turns looking out the front window.)

One of our neighbors came to sit with us to hand out his own candy, and a few other neighbors set up in their driveways, and sometimes we’d wander among each other to say hi.

The first couple of young kids came by between 5 and 6, and the numbers gradually ramped up until about 7:15 when it remained a pretty steady stream until 9 pm. In past years there would usually be one or two waves where there would be a crowd almost as far as the eye could see, but this year I think we maybe ended up with 10 or 12 people at once as its peak. We let people pick their own two pieces of candy off the table, which was funny because some kids would think very seriously about it, and some would pointedly take the not-chocolate ones. And then there was a girl who just said, “Whoppers are awesome!”

In the end we guess we had about 300 people pick up candy, and it turns out we overbought by maybe a third of that, so we have a bunch left over. New neighbors never believe us when we say how many people come through our street, so almost everyone else runs out before the night is over. But by 9:15 everyone’s just about done. We suspect that our street gets a lot of people because it ends at a major road and one of the houses on that corner puts up a huge Halloween display which attracts people from out of the neighborhood. Plus we have two elementary schools and a middle school nearby. But even just the next block over they get maybe half as many kids as we do.

Inflatable costumes seemed popular this year, including someone in an 8-foot-tall Garfield outfit. And while last year Wednesday Addams was the popular character (we saw a couple last night too), this year it was Spider-Man, presumably because of Across the Spider-Verse having been out over the summer.

We wound down with a late dinner and a little playtime for the dog. By bedtime there was no one walking the street that we could see. And this morning decorations were already coming down.

I’ll wrap up with one of the neighborhood houses which does put on a big display. It’s a little freaky to walk past it before 8 in the morning and have a spider jump out at you:

Halloween decorations at a house with two animatronic werewolves, a witch, spiders, and a 12-foot-tall pumpkinhead.

RIP Tim Wakefield

Tim Wakefield, my favorite Red Sox player, passed away this past Sunday from brain cancer. He was 57.

(Yes, it’s a bit unnerving to realize he was only 3 years older than me.)

I became a fan of his when he came to the Red Sox in 1995 and had two-third of a Cy Young caliber campaign. (Having him on my fantasy baseball team that year didn’t hurt.) He’d come up with the Pittsburgh Pirates and thrown almost 100 brilliant innings in 1992, but couldn’t repeat it in 1993, and got sent down and then released. A knuckleball pitcher, he relied on a pitch which was notoriously hard to control. Go read up on how baseball pitches work, and then read how knuckleball pitches work, and frankly it’s almost hard to believe any pitcher manages to throw strikes with them with any regularity.

It’s easy to love the great sluggers like Albert Pujols (and I do love Albert Pujols), but I also love the quirky players who bring something unusual to the game. Ichiro Suzuki’s unbelievable ability to make contact. Mike Boddicker’s ridiculous curveball. And Tim Wakefield having an almost 20-year career in the Majors throwing a knuckleball.

One of my enduring baseball memories was attending the Red Sox/Twins game on July 24, 1995. This is the only time I recall attending a game at Fenway where I sat in the bleachers. Wakefield started the game and gave up a triple to Chuck Knoblauch. He then struck out the next two batters, while Knoblauch danced around third base. Finally, while facing the next batter, he looked over at Knoblauch and cocked his head towards home plate, saying “If you’re going to go, then go.” Knoblauch went, and Wakefield threw him out on the steal attempt. Presumably on the knuckleball, since he rarely threw anything else, although he did occasionally throw a “fast” ball which was probably slower than most pitchers’ breaking balls.

The other memorable moment was in a game I didn’t watch, since I refuse to watch Yankees playoff games, and none more so than the 2004 ALCS. In game 3, the Yankees were tee’ing off of Red Sox pitching, to the tune of 10 runs in 3-1/3 innings. While the Sox were not completely out of it, Wakefield came in and threw 3-1/3 innings himself, giving up another 5 runs but likely helping save the rest of the pitching staff for the team’s historic comeback over the next 4 games.

Wakefield supposedly had a team-friendly contract which got renewed every year until the end of his career. I haven’t been able to find details of this deal, so maybe I imagined it, but as a very durable mid-rotation starter and long reliever, he probably appreciated the job security and he objectively made plenty of money while being able to stay with the Red Sox for the rest of his career. Sometimes it’s not all about the money. And he did win 2 championships with them.

Although he never got the attention of David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, or other star players, Tim Wakefield was an ever-present part of the Red Sox for a really, really long time, baffling pitchers (and catchers) with his ridiculous stuff.

Thanks for everything, Tim.

Everyday Monsters

There are a couple of webcomics artists I’ve been enjoying tremendously, though both of them update only sporadically, presumably because this is a hobby for them and they both have lives which take most of their time. They have a common theme of what I’ve been calling “everyday monsters”, as they primarily feature nonhuman (or formerly human) beings in dark fantasy environments, but emphasizing the everyday lives and concerns of those beings

Both of them (coincidentally?) primarily post on Instagram and Twitter. Both of them post anonymously and have very little Internet presence beyond these sites as far as I can tell.

Pocketss (Instagram, Twitter) has “i like to draw fantasy nonsense” as their Twitter profile description. Their work has a running theme of people (or whatever) caring for other people. For example this strip about a swamp dweller who sees a passer-by carrying a lantern on a stock. Or this one about goblins looking out for each other.

There’s also a cute running story – starting here – about a witch who invites a harpy to a girls’ night party, throwing the harpy into confusion and anxiety. Poor harpy!

My favorite one, though, is this one about a vampire (?) who orders her thralls to leave her alone so she can… well, go see for yourself.

Vampire: "Begone, thralls! Leave me to my evil and sexy affairs..."

Pocketss also has a Patreon which I just signed up for.

Saint Monster (Instagram, Twitter) has “Monsters need love too” as their Twitter description. Ironically their work features far more actual humans than that of Pocketss, and a few more recurring characters. For example the halfling apprentice witch, who later appears here. Or the trio of human, elf (?) and goblin (?) travellers, who appear here, here, and have their best moment so far here.

But the strip that maybe best sums up their work is this one about a researcher who runs into a Sphinx.

Sphinx: If you wish to pass you must first answer my riddle, And should you fail, you will not leave here alive.

Researcher: I have studied the enigmas of Alatosh and Zanzibar's thousand mysteries. Ask your riddle, Sphinx.

Their Twitter account has some fan art and a few other pieces by them besides the full strips which are also on Instagram. No Patreon, though.

I love both of these artists and hope they both get to a place where they can produce work more regularly.