PicoBlog

I love setting goals for myself every year — it’s one of the ways I try to make sure I don’t just play the same few games over and over — and that I don’t subject friends and family to new games every time we play. (I still do that. Thank you all for your patience.) One of the — ahem — loftier goals I’ve set for myself is just finishing its fourth full year, and I’m starting to think I might have made it a bit too ambitious to actually get completed: I want to play 2,020 plays of cooperative games in the 2020s.

Most of the readers to this substack will know most of their Christian denominations. There are the Protestants of a gazillion varieties, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Greek/Eastern Orthodox, but there are also the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Now I know the term “Oriental” has now passed from scholarly use, but this is the term that they used to designate themselves. But who are these Oriental Orthodox Churches? Upgrade to Paid Thanks to my dear friend Elke Speliopoulos, below is a list of six things you probably did not know about Oriental Orthodox Churches.

Here are six interesting facts about the Byzantine Empire: 1. The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire that survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 410 AD (sacking by Alaric II) and 476 AD (German king Odoacer deposed the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in Italy, Romulus Augustulus) and lasted until 1453 AD, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. 2. The Byzantines did not call themselves “Byzantines,” they referred to themselves as “Romans.

I was truly honored to be invited to share a guest essay in Elizabeth Gilbert’s new Substack, “Letters From Love.” In her intro, Gilbert writes, “I wanted to bring some healthy masculine energy into our community this week, to balance out all the amazing feminine energy and love that is happening here!” As a guy who grew up with two sisters and tries to teach his son how important it is for men to be comfortable with vulnerability, I wanted to bring my most authentic self to Liz’s “Letters From Love” (you can read and watch my letter here).

The prices at our local Manhattan groceries stores have been outrageous lately. Just today, the cost of one pound of butter at Westside market was $18.99. That's almost five bucks a stick and over 50 cents a pat. By contrast, now the farmers market feels like a real steal. The other day I got a massive bunch of kale (equivalent to 4 bunches at Westside) for 4 dollars. I was making it rain kale chips all week.

With the Red Wings finally getting to the “we need to win some damn games” part of their rebuild, there’s been a lot of discussion about how good this team is, notably their top defenseman Moritz Seider. I’m not exactly sure why, but it did spark some interesting discussions about his role, the workload he takes on and how to account for that when analyzing his play. Friends of the newsletterDom Luszczyszyn and Prashanth Iyer wrote about this over the past month.

Last week a publication I sometimes write for contacted me, asking if I’d be up for reviewing the new Skrillex album, Quest for Fire. (It hadn’t yet been announced that a second new Skrillex LP, Don’t Get Too Close, would be released literally one day after the first.) I declined the offer. As someone who’s been involved in dance and electronic music since the late ’90s, I’m supposed to hate Skrillex.

There's a key distinction that's haunted Skull and Bones for much of its development: are you the boat or a person on the boat? The marketing for the Ubisoft survival crafting sim has always made it look like you're the latter: an unnamed pirate bootstrapping themselves up through the ranks of ruffians and scallywags in the 17th century Indian Ocean. Trailers highlight crews, personal stories, and show lots of familiar third-person action-RPG stuff like disembarking at a port in search of intrigue and adventure.

Reader, if you love movies as much as I do, you probably get into lots of silly debates with your friends. Well, today’s newsletter was inspired by one such conversation. Years ago, a friend of mine had a real vendetta against Boyhood. Now, I won’t name any names.* But he sure had lots of negative things to say about Boyhood (a film that I happen to love), including a series of complaints about the pacing, writing, performances, etc.