In March, as the coronavirus pandemic prompted the cancellation of nearly every activity besides sitting at home, one local hobby group I belong to was undeterred. Having prided ourselves for years on the reliability of our regular meetings, we continued to get together weekly, and even enjoyed a major increase in attendance. No, we’re not a bunch of covidiots flaunting public health recommendations. Our weekly discussion sessions just aren’t affected by something like a pandemic – or, for that matter, a power outage, hurricane, wildfire, tornado, earthquake, or zombie apocalypse.

As I explained in a post several years ago, I missed a long chunk of video gaming history, and never even owned a dedicated game console until 2013. Since then, though, ours has been a Nintendo household. The Wii U that served as our gateway to console gaming was never a great platform, but a few of the first-party games on it hinted at the Kyoto company’s potential for brilliance. Meanwhile, the other two console makers, Sony and Microsoft, both have histories of horrible antisocial behavior, so despite the Wii U’s limitations I was reluctant to switch brands.

For the past several years, I’ve been working my way through one of the longest, best selling, best written, and certainly funniest series of novels in the English language: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. To provide an idea of the scope of this project, I started at the beginning and just finished book 26, which means I only have 14 volumes to go in the main series. That doesn’t count several companion works that have been published on topics such as the geography, biology, and physics of Sir Terry’s richly imagined universe.

A couple of years ago, Netflix’s algorithm, no doubt inspired by our apparent enjoyment of “Stranger Things,” recommended a German drama series called “Dark.” It turned out to be a brilliant, compelling, tightly-written work of art that used the medium of a television series to its full potential. The third and final season, or “cycle” in the argot of the show, just dropped on Netflix this summer, so this is a perfect time to get into it.

It’s time once again to round up some Wesort news. For those just tuning in, this is a long-running arc on the blog, based on some of my earliest childhood experiences in boats. The first real post in the series is here, where my dad lays out the history of a small sailboat design called the Wesort, which I remember sailing aboard when I was very small. I’ve since posted a few more times about these nifty little boats, as you can see by looking at the tag.

For several years, my now-teenage daughter’s friends, and their parents, have found it quite amusing that her dad plays video games with her. It seems a lot of folks still have trouble expanding their image of a “gamer” to include a gray-haired guy with a wife, kid, mortgage and respectable career. A bit of probing, however, often reveals that these confused observers are, in fact, gamers themselves – they just don’t realize it.

Kicking off a new series here, this is my first book review. Those coming from my “Self-Care” post on the Turbid Plaque will already understand one reason why I’ve started doing this. Another reason, though, is that my perspective on the hellscape of the modern internet has changed and deepened in recent months. That’s a direct result of reading Jenny Odell’s thought-provoking book “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Last Spring, I faced an important purchasing decision: my seven-year-old desktop Mac Mini was reaching retirement age, and I needed to replace it. This was my main work computer, the latest in a succession of Apple products I’ve used for my job since I started as a science journalist over 20 years ago. Indeed, my relationship with the Cupertino company goes all the way back to the day my parents brought home a brand-new Apple II+ in 1980.

The back door of our garage was in rough shape when we bought the house ten years ago, and we’ve been procrastinating its repair for just as long. Ordinarily I’d just go to the lumber yard, pick up a pre-hung door in the appropriate style, and install it by lunchtime. However, this particular door is a non-standard size, narrow and short to clear the garage roofline. Inquiring at the lumber yard revealed that custom size pre-hung doors start at hundreds of dollars and go way up from there.

I wanted to log a couple more hours of flight time this week, but couldn’t decide what to do. Practicing the same maneuvers over and over gets old, and I didn’t have a specific place to go. Then I remembered what Boeing pilots did recently when they needed to test the engines on their new 787. Given a much smaller, slower, cheaper airplane and only a morning, I built a virus nearly 20 nautical miles across.

While clearing out some old files, I found a folder full of strange artifacts from the late 20th century: personal letters. Being just barely older than the Internet, my generation was the last to use this medium as a standard means of staying in touch. Even when I was in my 20s, long-distance phone rates were prohibitive and only serious computer geeks at major universities and government agencies had email. If you wanted to find out what a friend hundreds of miles away was up to, you picked up a pen and some paper and wrote to them.

Modern parents have a fraught relationship with video games. The popular view, at least among many parents I’ve talked to, is that these games are harmful and that we’re supposed to feel guilty about letting our children play them. High-profile violent titles like the Grand Theft Auto series feed this perception, even though those games are clearly identified as being for adults only. Not everyone subscribes to the “video games are a barely tolerable evil” view, though.