So Begins 2024

image from here

Happy New Year! As is my custom, this post lays out goals for the year. The goals themselves are in italics, with explanation where needed in regular font.

Spiritual

Largely the same as years past. In a nutshell:

- Be disciplined in prayer. 

- Be intentional/consistent in meeting with others.

- Serve well in the various roles.

I have to find a way to have good prayer times when the home is noisy and distracting.

Meeting with others is important. Vulnerable, honest discussions with each other helps us grow, grants true fellowship, and points us to Christ. I did that a little in 2023 and want to do it more this year.

Serving well in various roles is principally with church, but also includes work responsibilities. And part of this is finite capacity: how we serve others must be done in a sustainable way, or we invariably crash.

Nutritional/Fitness

I am [still] fit fat. I work out a lot but eat poorly (and excessively). Continuing high amounts of activity, but improving nutrition, and lowering the weight (to 185 lbs) are the goals. 

- Get (and keep) weight under 185 lbs.

- Complete 240 workouts (run, bike, gym, hikes, etc.).

- Eat less overall, and more fruit/vegetables.

Reading

Reading lists are fun. I have a three-fold reading focus this year (outside of my numerical goal).

- Read 50 books.

- Continue chipping away at my American Reading List.

- Revisit King Arthur.

- Find good books on the science/study of humor.

I've done 50 books the last few years, and this should be easily reached.

My American Reading List is 200 books; I've read about 60 so far. I anticipate reading 10–15 more this year.

I focused on King Arthur 10 years ago, when we lived in England. In the final months of 2023, I was feeling strangely drawn back into that realm . . . there are a few notable Arthurian works I never read, and I want to tackle them this year.

Finally, I dabbled in humor last year, but didn't find much material. I will continue the search this year.

Stuff

I've documented my struggles with materialism several times on this blog. It's good to own less. 

- Minimize everything in the home.

- Buy less/budget better.

I get stressed with all the clutter around the house. I want to find a way to minimize it and keep it out of sight.

We did a lot of home improvement in 2023, which was hard on the budget. Need to save in 2024.

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The goals above are not earth-shaking . . . I should be able to hit all of these. To 2024!

The Year in Review

As is my custom, I find it helpful to reflect upon the good and the bad of 2023.  I start the year with goals; this post looks back at some of them and considers other factors we experienced this year.

Our year was defined by two factors:

- home improvement

- church involvement

As mentioned last year, our kitchen flooding (plus supply chain problems) meant we didn't get that fully fixed in 2022. Thankfully, we finished that project in March 2023. Then it was on to the basement, which we tackled this summer with a lot of help from friends. We rounded out the year fixing the porch, replacing the worn (and increasingly dangerous) wood with trex material. Let's hope next year sees less home projects; it was good, but exhausting.

For church involvement, my wife and I increased our responsibilities. She is on two teams handling various aspects of church matters; I became an elder, continued leading the men's ministry and a community group, and led a Sunday school in the fall. These efforts are 'joyful burdens,' and though they can be heavy, we pray that we can help.

On to goals:

Spiritual
My goals here:

- Be disciplined in prayer.
- Overcome two besetting sins.

Prayer was pretty consistent when in my routine, but easily dropped when 'out of sync' due to illness, vacation or other factors. I need to be better about keeping the first things first, even when the day is abnormal.

I did make some progress in besetting sins, so that was encouraging, but more progress is needed. 

Nutritional/Fitness

My goals here:

- Get (and keep) weight under 185 lbs.
- Complete 240 workouts (run, bike, gym, hikes, etc.).
- Eat more fruit/vegetables.

I didn't meet the weight goal, though I had dropped to 192 by early December, the holiday excesses have me now at 197 lbs. My goal remains 185 lbs, and I've learned that it can be achieved only by dieting: eating a lot less (generally around lunch), snacking less, and so on.

I was diagnosed with a partial tear in my shoulder and moderate/severe arthritis in my knee, which did minimize my running and affect my workout approaches.

I did complete 298 workouts (not counting PT sesssions or basement hours), which is satisfactory. I am still "fit fat," meaning I'm in decent shape and can do cardio and weights without problems. I just need to lose some pounds. Most workouts were runs, gym, bike rides, and yardwork. My gym workouts 'shot up' as I did them more frequently for shorter time periods. As with last year, I incorporated a healthy dose of ab/core focus into what is typically upper body-focused. Included 2022 totals for reference:

2022: 38 runs for 91 miles, 113 gym workouts, 68 bike rides for 1061 miles, 7 hikes for 30 miles, 43 mow/yardwork, 5 misc.

2023: 22 runs for 54 miles, 182 gym workouts, 58 bike rides for 623 miles, 15 hikes/walks for 55 miles, 21 mow/yardwork, 113 hours spent working on the basement.

My diet was marginally better but could still use improvement.

Reading
My goals here:

- Read 40 books.
- Focus on American authors/topics.
- Pick another topic and 'get smart' (i.e. read a few books) on it. Probably humor.

No problem here; I read 50 books, and kept my 'owned but unread' pile at a pleasant number (down to about a dozen until Christmas). My post here caps this year's book recommendations. I made an American Reading list (see the link in the prior sentence) and chipped away at that. I did attempt to find books on humor, but there is shockingly little out there. Overall, I'm satisfied.

House

My goal here:

- Finish the basement.

We did it! We actually did it. I spent August blogging about what it took; this summary post links to the others.

Language
My goal here:

- Continue studying Spanish.

I did Spanish until April, then switched to Latin for a month or two, then went back to German until November, when I quite DuoLingo altogether (I explain my frustration here).  They didn't send me statistics for the year, so I don't know how much time I put into it. Language is valuable, and I will seek another means of practicing in 2024.

Games
My goals here:

- Minimize clothing.
- Minimize game collection.

I did minimize clothing over the summer, which was helpful, but I've noticed it crept back up to the point where drawers are stuffed. Need to clean up again. 

For games, my time was focused on minimizing my Magic collection. I sold 10,000 cards from there and got a nice return. 

Conclusion
Looking across the six categories above, it was a pretty good year. The main thing that stands out as needing improvement are spiritual goals and the weight. Here's to a better 2024. "Never stop starting."

Thus Concludes 2023

Another reading year "in the books." This post recaps the year and presents what I consider the best of the bunch.

I read 50 books this year, totaling 13,067 pages—about 36 pages a day. My average rating was 90.7/100.

Of the 50 books, 0 were audiobooks, 1 was an eBook, and 15 were borrowed from the library or friends. By genre, I read 7 fantasy books, 9 on religion, 3 graphic novels, 16 literature, 4 history, 2 humor, and a smattering of others.

I formed a 200-book American Reading List (presented in three parts: here, here, here) and read 16 titles on those lists. I dabbled in humor (here and here), though I didn't study it as thoroughly as I intended. And I read down my 'owned but unread' pile, getting that down to about a dozen books (before Christmas swelled that back into the twenties).

Here are my top ten reads from this year:

J.L. Carr: A Month in the Country

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird

Michael Palin: Erebus

Peter Beagle: The Last Unicorn

Robert McKenzie: We the Fallen People

Anthony Doerr: All the Light We Cannot See

Dane Ortlund: Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners

Thomas Harris: The Silence of the Lambs

Brandon Sanderson: The Hero of Ages

K.A. Kitchen: On the Reliability of the Old Testament

On the whole, this was a good reading year. May 2024 bring further works of excellence. Happy reading!

Marvel Dice Throne

Today's review is of the 2022 release, Marvel Dice Throne. For 2–6 players, it takes 20–40 minutes.

Overview

Even friends fight sometimes. In Marvel Dice Throne, you are each a superhero determined to be the last one standing. Each of you starts with 50 health (in a 2-player game); reduce your opponent(s) to 0 to win.

In this game, each player has their own hero, complete with hero board (with attack an defense options based on the dice you roll), hero leaflet (with tokens you can add to your board, granting more abilities), deck of cards, and dice. You also have a combat point meter and life meter.

game setup for two players; image from here

At the start, each player sets their combat points (CPs) to 2 and draws 4 cards. On your turn, you have the following phases:

1. Upkeep phase

2. Income phase (gain a CP, draw a card)

3. Main phase 1 (spend CPs to play cards from your hand, or 'sell' [discard] one or more cards to gain that many CP)

4. Offensive roll phase (roll your 5 dice in up to 3 roll attempts. Then activate an offensive ability on your hero board based on the dice you rolled.)

5. Targeting roll phase (for multiplayer only)

6. Defensive roll phase (if you activated an attack, the defending player may have a defensive ability they can roll to activate)

7. Main phase 2 (exactly like main phase 1)

8. Discard phase (sell one or more cards to discard down to 6 cards)

For more details, see the rulebook here.

Players take turns until someone is reduced to 0 health.

Review

With a deck of cards, dice, hero board, and hero leaflet, this game seems complex and overwhelming at first, but it is surprisingly straightforward and easily grasped. There are a lot of options, but that gives the game meaningful decisions to complement the heavy luck component (from the dice and card draws). There are echoes of King of Tokyo here, with the yahtzee-style dice rolling and symbols that grant different effects. The defensive rolling phase is a nice feature, as it gives you the ability to minimize damage (or gain some other benefit). The game is superbly packaged, with each hero getting its own encapsulated tray with everything you need, making for easy setup and storage. Overall, it is a fun experience, and I look forward to trying out the different heroes. 

Rating: A

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

Blood Meridian follows 'the boy' through various terrors and hardships, mostly in the 1850s Mexico/American West. He falls in with a small gang of men who get paid to protect villages from Indians; they get paid based on the scalps they bring in. Sometimes the gang does scalp the intended targets; other times, they massacre innocent villages. They meander through this region committing various atrocities until the boy eventually finds his way to California and elsewhere, eking out a more honest living even as he remains among the scum and villainy. 

On style: this was my first Cormac McCarthy book. I didn't care for it much. It was unusual and hard to follow. He seldom uses any punctuation outside of periods and the occasional comma (dialogue, which is rare, isn't in quotes). Some chapters have breathtaking run-on sentences. Sometimes he switches to Spanish for a few sentences without translating. He rarely uses names (sometimes you learn of them only as a character is dying). It is mostly a series of declarative statements of events, though he does 'sidebar' into lengthy descriptions of weather and terrain. His vocabulary is impressive. I appreciate that he is a talented writer; I just didn't appreciate his style. 

On subject: McCarthy paints a poignant portrait of a terrible time. The desert is harsh and unyielding; its inhabitants the same. The violence is portrayed without regret or compassion; the nonchalance of the main characters reveals that they know nothing different. They just exist and go on. The point of the work appears to be stated near the end, where 'the judge,' a most intriguing character, tells the boy (now in his thirties) that life is "a solitary game, without opponent . . . you of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the empitness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not?" And looking around the room of a typical western saloon, he goes on as he picks a man at random, claiming that "his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all." McCarthy rightly diagnoses the human condition—for that I commend him—but he paints a picture without hope. 

Rating: C

Images in the Margins (Margot McIlwain Nishimura)

This "book is intended to evoke the rich and varied world of the Middle Ages as seen through the lens of manuscript illumination." This is a book of marginalia, "a modern term that refers to words or images in the margins of a page . . . [which were] especially common in English, French, and Italian manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries." In "the margins of illuminated manuscripts lie a world of inviting images equally at odds with the solemnity of their settings . . . you will find a surprisingly fresh array of the fantastic, the real, and the ridiculous among the images in the margins." You will find a mixture of sacred and profane surprising to modern readers—yet humans are no stranger to bizarre, hilarious, and often irreverent pictures. In just 75 pages, this book walks the reader through a brief history of marginalia, looking at topics, placement, and meaning (where known) of these delightfully weird images.

not in the book (image from here), but gives you an idea of what marginalia is

In 2015, I read the first book in this series: Beasts Factual & Fantastic. Like that volume, Images in the Margins is done well, intriguing, and too short. Personally, I enjoy absurd humor, and marginalia is right up my alley when done to that effect. I like the more serious depictions, too, and wonder what might have been behind the chosen scenes. Some are symbolic and instructive, others appear to be inside jokes, and still others may have been the modern equivalent of playfully poking fun at friends, society, or life in general; a visual satire, perhaps. Whatever the reason, there is a 'tale within a tale' in old manuscripts, and I enjoy studying such scenes whenever I come across them.

Rating: A-

Sentinels of the Multiverse

Today's review is of the 2011 release, Sentinels of the Multiverse. For 2–5 players, it takes 30–60 minutes.

Overview

You and your friends are superheroes, each with your deck of cards granting you special abilities (like high-damage moves) or features (like artifacts, equipment, etc.). You are cooperatively against a 'bot' villain (with his/her own deck), and play at a location (with its own deck, too). After all heroes, the villain, and location are chosen, decks are shuffled, players draw initial hands, and the game begins.

The game turns are straightforward:

- the villain goes first, playing the top card of the deck and doing its effects

- each hero goes in clockwise order, playing a card and using an ability

- the location goes, playing the top card of its deck and doing its effects

game in progress; image from here

Generally, the villain deck will put out artifacts or powerful cards that are effectively shields for the main bad guy. The goal is to destroy all the artifacts and the villain before all the heroes die. Heroes will play cards that do damage, enable more actions, or do other things. Can you all succeed in time?

Review

This is a nice game. There are lots of options for villains, heroes, and locations, enabling good replayability. The villain, hero, and location decks remind me of a more complex version of Marvel United. As there isn't any licensed property here, the heroes/villains are all 'knock-offs' with clear equivalents in mainstream culture. The art isn't great, and the cards can be wordy. Still, it's a solid offering, and a definitive edition of this game (released in 2022) might have improved the presentation. Overall, I like Marvel United better, but this is worth checking out.

Rating: B+