WTF-Beta

These are my people!

I am not. A lot of board games are historical simulations or based on historical events. There is, for example, a fantastic game called Twilight Struggle which has two players squaring off as the USSR and the USA during the Cold War. I don’t love social deduction games so Secret Hitler isn’t my thing, but the way the theme is enacted isn’t as morbid as you may be thinking. Here is the description of the board game Secret Hitler:

Secret Hitler is a dramatic game of political intrigue and betrayal set in 1930s Germany. Each player is randomly and secretly assigned to be a liberal or a fascist, and one player is Secret Hitler. The fascists coordinate to sow distrust and install their cold-blooded leader; the liberals must find and stop the Secret Hitler before it's too late. The liberal team always has a majority.

At the beginning of the game, players close their eyes, and the fascists reveal themselves to one another. Secret Hitler keeps his eyes closed, but puts his thumb up so the fascists can see who he is. The fascists learn who Hitler is, but Hitler doesn't know who his fellow fascists are, and the liberals don't know who anyone is.

Each round, players elect a President and a Chancellor who will work together to enact a law from a random deck. If the government passes a fascist law, players must try to figure out if they were betrayed or simply unlucky. Secret Hitler also features government powers that come into play as fascism advances. The fascists will use those powers to create chaos unless liberals can pull the nation back from the brink of war.

The objective of the liberal team is to pass five liberal policies or assassinate Secret Hitler. The objective of the fascist team is to pass six fascist policies or elect Secret Hitler chancellor after three fascist policies have passed.

It’s a legit board game that is actually pretty popular!

Just finished the last season of The Bear. I was disappointed in Season 4 but Season 5 (the last) was brilliant.

I’m headed to Italy in a week. Hopeful that the heat wave ends by then. We seem to only travel in Europe during heat waves. Last year it was 37C in Bucharest while we were there.

That sounds so cool, Shiro! I have a great picture book called Magic Ramen: The Story of Momofuku Ando. It’s a favourite of mine and kids love it.

I have used ChatGPT for unit planning. It is very good at combining two grades together into a coherent plan that addresses both of the curriculum expectations. Gemini and CoPilot were both terrible at this. I have enough curriculum knowledge that I could recognize what it was doing well and give correcting prompts to fix some things. There was no fixing how terribly it botched Indigenous themes in our social studies curriculum - after trying a number of times I gave up and just removed that section from what it gave me and inserted my own section in its place. One thing I did like was I took the ultimate plan and then fed it back into Gemini and CoPilot, asking them to analyze the plan for curriculum coverage and point out weaknesses and any expectations that were missed. These analysis were remarkably similar to my own.

I also use ChatGPT sometimes in my personal life. For example, I need to alter a dress but the construction is unusual and, while I had an approach in mind, I wanted to see if there was another way that might work better. I gave detailed information about how the dress was constructed, explained my problem, and asked for an alteration plan. I was surprised at how well it did at coming up with a workable plan (that was different from the one I had come up with). When I asked some clarifying questions, it did a surprisingly good job of giving me a more detailed set of instructions for one part of the plan. When I asked what it thought about my original plan, it approved it as a simpler fix but cautioned me on one part of the plan based on the fabric the dress is made of. It provided an alternative technique that is common amongst high end dress makers, but one I haven’t used since theatre school so had forgotten about. I am not sure how it would have done with a less skilled prompt. I know the terminology and am well trained in this area - I think that makes a big difference in the quality of the results.

Like others, I have really conflicted feelings about it. I find it useful at times, but am also appalled by the trust people put into it and the number of terrible AI flyers local businesses generate.

@Bernard said:

@dolmansaxlil Happy belated birthday greetings! Many happy returns of the day!

Have you continued quilting? (I haven't made a new top in a few years, but this summer I'll be hand quilting an applique top I made two years ago.)

I haven’t quilted in a couple years. I went in a bit of a kick making my own clothing but haven’t been doing a lot of sewing otherwise. I will come back to it at some point!

@Big_Al said:

Happy birthday, Dol. Have you found any new board games you'd recommend?

Big Al

Ha! That’s a loaded question! My recent favourites include Come Sail Away!, which is about accommodating passengers on an early 1900s passenger ship and Flip Pick Towers, where you are building a new castle for Welsh royalty. Today we played a new game called Pirates of the High Teas which is ridiculously punny. There really is a game for any mood!

Awww thanks folks!!!

A half century goes a lot quicker than one would think, doesn’t it?

I have seen it countless times. I am turning 50 (tomorrow!) so it started playing on tv when I was the absolute perfect age. It’s aged (relatively) well compared to others from the same time.

@Mary-Anna said:

Re: the album vs. single question, only for reading fiction

I'm not sure there has ever been a hugely popular reading analog to the album. Anthologies of short stories by a number of authors have always been, and they still are, published, but not as a significant portion of the market. Collections by a single author have been, and are still, published, although this generally true only for authors who are very popular in novel form, and their short story collections do not sell anything close to the volume that their novels do.

I think the pulp era may have been the only times that short stories were a significant portion of many authors' incomes. Come to think of it, people like Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Poe published frequently in magazines, so that probably extends back to the 1800s and ends around the time of WWII. Even then, I feel sure that it was only due to the popularity of magazines.

Even Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time, received the bulk of her income in her early years from short stories and serializations of her novels in the pulps. They paid very well. Actually, magazine rates aren't a lot different now than they were then, which means their real value is a small fraction of what it was a century ago.

My husband loves short stories but they’ve never been my favourite. However, some of my most memorable reading experiences have been short stories by Stephen King. In fact, I absolutely loved when he published The Green Mile originally. It was in “chapbook” form, inspired by Charles Dickens. They were released one a month, IIRC, and I looked forward to each one.

As much as I loved that experience and others I have had with short story collections, as MaryAnna said, I generally don’t get short story collections even when written by authors I love. Short stories do seem to fall into two camps (at least from what I’ve noticed). Highly literary authors (Margaret Atwood, for example, has a number of books that are her collected short stories), and genre authors. Sci fi and fantasy collections of short stories are published all the time, and I actually will read the stories by my favourite authors! But I don’t know why I am less inclined to do so with, for example, realistic fiction.

I’ll drift back to wtg’s invitation to weigh in on younger learners. Just for reference, my most recent teaching experience is with grade 1/2 (so 6-7 year olds). Attention spans have definitely been impacted in these young kids. Their brains literally crave fast paced changes. They are fall less able to sustain their attention to a complex task for a period of time. This is something that has been studied in young children over the past few years, so I’m relying on more than anecdotal evidence when I say this. Generally my kiddos do have shorter attention spans and much less tolerance for boredom than children I taught a decade ago. And yes, I blame smartphones/tablets. I think the kiddos sitting in front of me this year are likely the worst I have seen. Remember, they were born in 2018-2019. So many of them were more likely to have screen babysitters as their families juggled working from home while they were still toddlers. This literally “rewires” their brains. Anecdotally, I am able to lengthen their attention span and tolerance for sustained work over the course of the school year - and I believe I’m getting many children to levels similar to those I would have seen a decade ago. However, I have a handful of students who just shut down when given any difficult focused task. And the kids who shut down are also, unsurprisingly, the ones who talk the most about video games. And they are also the most likely to talk about playing wildly inappropriate games like Grand Theft Auto.

I’m not in the “video games are universally awful” camp. I fact, I do believe that they are an incredibly rich art form. I’m also not completely anti-device in the classroom. However, I do think that the current nature of media is changing children’s brains in a way that makes sustained, focused thinking much more difficult. AI certainly isn’t going to help with that trend as they get older.

The radio station of my teen years, 89x, was reformatted as a country station when I lived in Toronto. But last year they reformatted (re-reformatted?) it to be the alternative station of my youth - with an afternoon DJ who is my age. I actually listen to it sometimes when I drive, after not listening to radio for twenty years!

@ShiroKuro said:

@Steve-Miller When I was a kid my Italian grandma has a kitchen in her basement (in addition to the main kitchen). She had these huge tables down there, we used all the surfaces when it was time to make pasta or bread. Whenever I was there, I "helped" but most certainly not in any way that was useful!

Anyway, I always associate a second kitchen with that.

There is a large Portuguese population here and my best friend growing up was a Portuguese immigrant so I spent a lot of time with her and her family. Every Portuguese house had a second kitchen in the basement!

I just saw a relevant clip from Tip Toe, which is airing on Channel 4 in the UK, but isn’t available here. I can’t wait to watch it when it is.

I’m so sorry to hear this.

4/10. AI is terrifying.

This would be so fantastic. An abandoned well is what cause the explosion that destroyed the downtown area of my hometown a few years ago.

@daniel So I have an Instagram account dedicated to board games. Occasionally small board game companies send me games to play with the understanding that I’ll play the games and post about them. Because modern board games are a fairly niche hobby, it only takes a few thousand followers to become enough of an “influencer” for companies to partner with you. Larger accounts (many still under 10k followers but some of the super popular board gamers influencers that I follow have over 100k followers on instagram ) will be paid to make content about games, sometimes for social media or for Kickstarter campaigns. They get invited to try games before they are released and get lots of free product. And these folks definitely influence purchasing decisions amongst fellow board gamers so they are a huge part of a game company’s marketing budget. Every hobby has their own group of influencers. In niche hobbies they may only have a few thousand followers. But in areas like makeup and fashion they may have millions of views on TikTok. It’s a really bizarre landscape. There is a woman, I believe in China, who shows each product for 1-3 seconds before moving on to the next one. She’s a big deal - though I don’t really get why. But companies pay her to show their product, just for a moment.