Daredevil: Born Again (Various)

Karen Page, Daredevil's ex-girlfriend, is a junkie. Desperate for cash, she sells his true identity. That makes its way to the Kingpin, who proceeds to make Matt Murdock's life a living hell. As Matt hits the lowest point of his life, he must decide who he is and where his hope lies.

Acclaimed write Frank Miller and artist Brian Mazzucchelli (who also collaborated on Batman) produce another winner here. Originally published in 1986, it is gritty and raw. The art conveys the emotional depth of the characters well. The story is solid, revolving around identity and what you do when everything (career, home, friends) are taken from you. And the message is on point. Recommended.

Rating: A

The Gender Revolution (Patricia Weerakoon)

In The Gender Revolution, doctor and sex therapist Patricia Weerakoon offers what she calls a "biblical, biological, and compassionate response" to transgender ideology. She presents biblical background, scientific findings, and insights from the latest research on the topic. Select highlights follow.

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There are four distinct elements that are often conflated when discussing the emotionally-charged topic of transgender ideology. The four elements:

• Biological sex: male or female, discerned objectively and determined at fertilization/conception.
• Gendered behaviours or expressions: particular ways we do things or how we express ourselves; “masculine or feminine ways of acting, thinking, and responding,” often based on society's expectations. These “can be observed through the social sciences.”
• Sexual orientation: an internal feeling concerning whom you desire romantically or sexually. “Can be measured in the laboratory based on sexual arousal patterns and be evaluated by observation and interviews.”
• Gender identity: which gender you feel. “Determine solely by internalized feelings and desires. It is subjective and self-declared, and cannot be measured.”

She proceeds to discuss each “from scientific, psychological, sociological and theological viewpoints” after an overview of biblical concepts on the topic (through a creation/fall/redemption lens). This includes biology (looking at the process by which humans develop, to include brain formation, from birth through puberty), orientation (what is right and wrong biblically and why), gendered behaviour (and how we have a measure of freedom here, as the Bible does call out broad differences while leaving out precise details—and often challenging society's stereotypes), and gender identity (with current trends, studies, and challenges in this space).

She notes that today’s transgender ideology deviates from history and science by placing the fourth (rather than the first) aspect listed above as the foundation for all others. The movement has at its heart “the assertion that subjective feelings are more important than objective reality.” It thus flips the root with the branches, then demands everything conform to the subjective root. The problem? From her viewpoint: “The truth is we simply can’t ignore fundamental realities of our biology and expect positive outcomes for society.” And so she opposes “transgender ideology not out of hatred, but out of love. . . and it’s precisely because we love them that we long to see them find lasting solutions that acknowledge reality, rather than deny it.”

What does that look like? We need compassion and care, not censure, responding in truth and love. We must be prepared to love and accept all, providing a real community with the listening, empathy, and truth we all need as we walk together through the varied challenges of life.
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Overall, this is a solid book on a divisive topic. Perhaps no area today is more polarizing in society (I hesitate even to write reviews of books on the matter). Weerakoon provides a medical, scientific, biblical, and compassionate look at this topic. She seeks truth and love.

My only ding against this work is that it gets repetitive; it could have been more concisely presented. That aside, recommended.

Rating: A-

The Battle of Five Armies

Today's review is of the 2014 release, The Battle of Five Armies. For 2 players, it takes 90-240 minutes.

Overview

Based on the climactic battle in The Hobbit, The Battle of Five Armies pits the Free Peoples (elves, men, and dwarves) against the Shadow Forces (orcs, wargs, and goblins). Each side may have one or more generals to aid in the fight, as well as powerful animal friends (eagles and bats). The Shadow's numbers are overwhelming, yet hope remains, and if fate is on their side, the Free Peoples just might prevail. . . 

- The Free Peoples win if 1) the Fate track marker reaches 15, 2) Bolg (the lone enemy general) is killed, or 3) Beorn enters play and the Shadow has fewer than 6 Victory Points.

- The Shadow wins if 1) at the end of a turn if they have 10+ Victory Points or 2) immediately if they have 10+ Victory Points and control the front gate.

After an extensive setup (see below picture), play begins.

A grossly simplified turn consists of six phases:

1. Recovery: each player recovers his Action Dice and draws two cards (one from the Event deck and one from the appropriate Story deck)
2. Generals' Activation: The Free Peoples player chooses 1-3 Generals in play and places one Activation token on each. They then place the same number of leadership tokens on the game board.
3. Fate: The Shadow player draws fate tiles (one at a time, up to the number of Generals with activation tokens), stopping when they choose to apply the most recently drawn tile and advance the fate marker accordingly.
4. Shadow Leadership: The Shadow player places leadership tokens + great bats = number of Shadow pool dice.
5. Action Round: Both players roll Action Dice then alternate using them (choosing one to activate one of its abilities). The Action Dice sides and their possibile abilities:
• Army: move armies, attack, or play an Army event/story card
• Muster: recruit armies, rally (heal), or play a Muster event/story card
• Character: move armies, attack, move characters, or play a Character event/story card
• Event: draw cards or play an event/story card of any type
• Lidless Eye (Shadow only): recruit goblins, attack with goblins, or move with goblins
• Will of the West (Free Peoples only): wild (use as any other Action die)
6. End of Turn: Check victory conditions and remove leadership tokens, eagles, and great bats from the board.

If a player chooses to attack (during the Action Round), combat consists of several steps, which I will not cover here. See the official rules and player aid for more.

my game in progress

Turns continue until one side meets a victory condition.

Review

This is one of the more complex games I own, and I don't get to play things like this often due time and energy constraints (the game took us 3.5 hours). That said, this game is done well. 

- The components and rules are many, but the rulebook is concise and mostly helpful (I did need to leverage AI for some questions). 

- The game flows well enough once you get a few turns in; you'll spend almost all your time in phase 5 resolving Action Dice and performing combat. 

- Combat is somewhat complex but also interesting; I enjoyed the damage placement/removal and card selection aspects of that step. 

- There are plenty of meaningful decisions.

- The dice rolls and fate/story/event cards add good chance elements.

- The game has natural tension built in with the fate track; it is a race (albeit a slow one).

- They do a good job representing the famous battle.

The Action Dice can lock you into certain courses of action; some turns I was quite limited. This is somewhat offset by the options you have with each die face. And the combat dice, like any game of this nature, can be infuriatingly against you (I had flashbacks to Risk).

Overall, I enjoyed this one and look forward to playing it again. It won't see our table often due to the time required, but it is a keeper.

Rating: A-

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Carl Trueman)

In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Professor Carl Trueman looks at "how we got here"—how today's society has at its root a radically different notion of selfhood. His ultimate task is “to demonstrate how many of the ideas now informing both the conscious thinking and the instinctive intuitions of Western men and women have deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy that helps explain why society thinks and behaves the way it does.” An outline follows.

Part 1: Basic Concepts

Trueman starts with basic concepts that he will use for exploring history, focusing on the ideas of three modern philosophers (Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre). Collectively, these three made several observations, including:

• We’ve moved from a mimetic to poietic view of the world—from viewing “the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it” to seeing “the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.”
• Culture historically “directs the individual outward,” to “something that is given and learned” and “we learn who we are by learning how to conform ourselves to the purposes of the larger community to which we belong.” But now it is more the opposite; “outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual and her sense of inner well-being.”
• From the first two points, emotivism follows, which “presents preferences as if they were truth claims.” An emotivist is “one who (mistakenly) grants his own personal preferences the status of universal moral imperatives.” (And others rejecting them is framed as irrational or bigoted.)
• And if it really is all about us, we will reject what has come before, resulting in “a basic repudiation of history as a source of authority and wisdom.”

Part 2: Psychologizing of the Self
Here Trueman evaluates important developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a key thinker here. Rousseau said “all I need to do, as I have done up until now, is to look inside myself.” He argued the following:

• Human nature is corrupted by society; we are innately good
• “One who is truly free is the one who is free to be himself.” Our access to truth and our true identity is inward.
• Key to ethics is empathy/pity; aesthetics is key to morality
• Culture, society, age and experience are corrupt; the young and natural things are better.
• Since society corrupts, studying it “becomes the history of the corruption and oppression of human nature”

How did such ideas get into the mainstream? Through artists, those "unacknowledged legislators." Romanticism (including Wordsworth, Shelley, and others) embraced these ideas. And it included a sexual turn: to them, happiness is the foundation of morality “so the liberating of love is a moral and political imperative.” “Unnatural constraints on love effectively prevent human beings from being truly human.”

Another aspect is a change in how we viewed human nature. Formerly it was viewed as something that was fixed and authoritative; here there was a shift to view it as something we can shape and determine. Three men shaped how we view human nature: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin.

• Nietzsche recognized and called the bluff of the Enlightenment. If you do away with God, you “destroy the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends.” We abolish God—and thus become him. Thus we are “suspicious of any claims to absolute moral truth.” He also felt “personal satisfaction, the basic element of the therapeutic ideal,” is “what it means to truly live.” We live for the here and now and can create ourselves.
• Marx “saw the vital connection between social and economic conditions and the constitution of the world.” He provides a foundation with his dialectical materialism and a critical spirit: “the suspicion that metaphysical claims are not as innocent or as morally neutral as the may appear.” And he makes all human activity political.
• Darwin dealt a blow “to those systems that granted special essential status and significance to humanity.” Per him, humans are not significant nor intended for some higher end. 

Thanks to these three, we have deep suspicion of traditional authority. We live for the present. We are about self-creation. And history is about oppression.

Part 3: Sexualizing of Psychology and Politicizing of Sex

Here Trueman looks at how ideas from the aforementioned thinkers started trending towards the sexual. The first focus is Sigmund Freud, who “made plausible the idea that humans, from infancy onward, are at core sexual beings. It is our sexual desires that are ultimately decisive for who we are.” His thoughts are taken by Marxist thinkers like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse and mixed with politics.

With Freud, sex moved from an activity to fundamental to identity. He argued that “the goal of human existence was to be happy" and put “sex and sexual expression at the center of human existence.” Earlier thinkers put the focus on feelings and happiness; Freud said happiness is sexual pleasure. He also extended sexuality to infancy and argued civilization is produce of sexual repression.

Marx and Freud were brought together by the Frankfurt School (Erich Fromm and others, most notably Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse).

Reich argued that the traditional family is unit of oppression, and with Freudian influence, the family represses sexual instincts. His book The Sexual Revolution (1936) talks about importance of sexual identity for political struggle, and included his belief that the state had the right to intervene in family because family represses through policing of sexual codes. 

The story so far:

• Rousseau: identity is psychological
• Freud: psychology/identity is sexual
• Mesh these with Marx: identity is political

Marcuse saw the result: “to transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically . . .” 

Another important thinker is Simone de Beauvoir (1949): she separated gender and sex. “The latter is biological, while the former is psychological.” She argued “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” And that society coerces people into conformity. She saw biology as a form of tyranny: “The body is something to be overcome.” This furthers aforementioned thoughts on human nature. If that is not something inherent/given but something we determine, “why should we tie gender identity to an objective physiological basis?”

Part 4: How Modern Self has Triumphed

Here Trueman looks at how our modern culture has been transformed by these ideas. Examples:

• Education has moved from transformation to affirmation of self.
• We understand selfhood in psychological and sexual terms.
• We must be true to ourselves—our inner feelings. These are to be trusted above society, culture, history, and family. 
• Any attempts by authorities (from family to culture) to stymie our inner feelings is oppressive; victimhood is a key virtue.
• If it is all about feelings, then no other authority can be used in argument. Anecdotes and personal experience/feelings win the day.
• There is noting in history or elders worth learning; these are oppressive. Self rules the day.
• Our teleology shifts from future-focused to present happiness. It's all about the therapeutic and making me feel good now.

Where to from here? The current state is unstable; what if what makes me happy conflicts with what makes you happy? If there are no commonly accepted premises, arguing about who is right becomes impossible; we resort to accusations. “Once oppression becomes primarily psychological, it also becomes somewhat arbitrary and subjective.” The future is murky.

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This book has profoundly important insights into who we are today as a society and how we got here. It gets repetitive but is highly worthwhile.

Rating: A

Hive Pocket

Today's review is of the 2010 release, Hive Pocket. For two players, it takes 20 minutes.

Overview

Hive Pocket is similar to chess, but where there is no board to start (it is created over time as pieces are placed). You and your opponent each have 13 hex pieces. Each piece has a bug; each bug (queen bee, ant, beetle, mosquito, ladybug, grasshopper, or spider) has different movement abilities. Surround your opponent's queen (before they do so to yours) and you win!

The first player places a piece onto the table, starting the game. The other player places a piece (which much touch one of the sides of the first piece). Then, players take turns. On your turn, you either place or move one of your pieces.

- place: you must place a piece adjacent to one of your own pieces (it cannot touch an opponent's piece after the first turn); you must also place your queen within the first four turns of the game.

- move: you must move a piece in accordance with the movement rules associated with its printed bug. Those are outlined in the rules.

game in progress; image from here

Review

Like chess, there is all choice and no chance involved in Hive Pocket. You learn the piece's movement abilities and must carefully plot your moves (and counter your opponent's) to win. Some will love that; I appreciated the mechanics and strategic depth, but don't care for games with no chance elements. It makes it all about skill (which, for me, is a notable disadvantage). So this is a good game, but not one I would play often due to personal tastes (aside: I explore the game theory of chance and choice in this post). Recommended for the chess player in your life who would enjoy a twist on a classic.

Rating: B

Mindbug: First Contact

Today's review is of the 2022 release, Mindbug: First Contact. For two players, it takes 15-25 minutes.

Overview

In Mindbug, you will play and attack with bizarre and hilarious creatures. Your opponent will do the same . . . but beware! Each player has two mindbug cards that can be used during the game to take control of opponent's creatures . . . so what you play and when matters greatly. 

Mindbug is simple to set up and play. Each player starts with three life, two mindbug cards (on the table), and a deck of 10 creature cards (dealt from a common deck). Each player draws five of their cards and play begins. 

On your turn, you either play a single card or attack with a single creature.

- play a single card: you choose and play a creature from your hand. Each creature has a power, name, and may have unique abilities. Whenever you play a card, your opponent may choose to use one of their mindbug cards (turning it facedown to indicate use) to take control of it . . . so plan carefully.

- attack with a single creature: you choose a creature you control and attack with it. Your opponent may choose to block. If they do, the creature with higher power wins (and loser is discarded). If they do not, they lose one life.

It is just that simple! Play continues until one player's life is at zero or one player cannot do either of the above actions on their turn.

You can see pictures of the game and download the rules on the boardgamegeek site.

Review

This game is light, fast, fun, and features a pleasing mix of chance and choice (luck and strategy). The mindbug cards plus other abilities on the creature cards results in a lot of strategic depth—but there are times you simply won't be able to win based on the cards you've been dealt (or choices made earlier in the game). The cards themselves are amusing, delivering a light-hearted experience. Recommended.

Rating: B+

The Practice of the Presence of God (Brother Lawrence)

Brother Lawrence was a monk living near Paris in the seventeenth century. This book captures some of his conversations, letters, and maxims, largely focused on practicing God's presence. The basic point of the book is that we should be continually talking with God throughout our day, always aware of his presence and delighting in it through constant discourse.

"The most holy and necessary practice in our spiritual life is the presence of God. That means finding constant pleasure in His divine company, speakin humbly and lovingly with Him in all seasons, at every moment, without limiting the conversation in any way."

- "In order to know God, we must think about Him often. Once we get to know Him, we will think about Him even more often, because where our treasure is, there also is our heart!"

- "There is no sweeter manner of living in the world than continuous communion with God."

- "We are often content with too little. God has infinite treasures to give us, he ways. Why should we be satisfied with a brief moment of worship?"

- We need to keep Him in mind always. In chores great and small, "we should offer our work to Him before we begin and thank Him afterward for the privilege of having done it for His sake."

- "Even suffering will be easier when we are with Him, but without Him, even the greatest pleasures will be joyless."

This is a short and simple book with a powerful and humbling reminder. I first read this in college and have tried to practice it since; I agree with the brother that it is profoundly important and helpful.

Rating: A