I like worker placement. I wouldn’t call myself an expert in it, but I’ve probably played Caylus more than any other board game, and while I do lose a lot, I like to think that I “get” worker placement. I also like auctions, being a computer scientist who’s studied them a little, and I like pretty things, being a person, so when Max and Wayne from Oxford On Board started piling hexagons and meeples onto the table and explaining the rules of Keyflower, I knew I was onto something.
I’ve had a blog on and off since I was 16, and this incarnation of it (shrieking.net) has existed since 2002 in some form or other. Between 2007 and 2008 it was most frequently used, as my public travel diary. In 2013 Posterous closed its doors after being bought by Twitter, leaving me blogless for a while. Now, in 2014, I am writing again.
It’s hard to know what a blog is “supposed” to be these days. A big part of me feels like the blog, as a concept, is dead, and most people writing them these days are basically writing self-published magazines. That’s cool, I don’t mind that at all - in fact, I read many, on and off. I get most of my good recipes from bloggers. The problem is, I have a hard time being that focused. The online diary - the weB LOG, remember - has moved to Tumblr, where it has become a forum for reposting cool stuff you find on the internet. I don’t have a problem with that, but that’s not me either.
Hello, I’m Mac. I’m 36. I live in Oxfordshire with my wife and daughter. I’ve been blogging for about 20 years in total, with shrieking.net occupying 13 years of those, and I’m working to get the archives back online, when I have time. Over those years, I’ve completed a degree in computer science and traveled around the world. It’s been alright.
I have too many hobbies and I don’t writing about any one topic non-stop, so this blog is about everything, but mainly video games and board games, because I do those most. I also write fiction, so that’ll be in there a bit too. I like cooking but rarely have something to say about it.
Soon! Soon. It has been a long time since I’ve had anything to write on the internet, but I thought I’d try to get back to it. I’ll put the archives up, too. Hooray.
Beginnings are hard to catch. I couldn’t tell you how this all began: perhaps it was when I was sick of university and wanted to get away, perhaps it was when I decied to go to Australia, perhaps it was when I cancelled that trip and got a tattoo, perhaps it was when I booked my tickets, perhaps it was when I got on the plane. But endings? Endings are definite. It’s always easy to work out where something ends. The journey ends here, just where it began, and the world seems so much bigger, and I feel so much smaller, and my brain feels lost and damaged and full of useless anecdotes where my degree used to be. I couldn’t tell you the finer points of web service programming these days, but I do know the average annual rain fall in London and I can compare it to the amount we had in one day out in Franz Josef, when I was out hiking on a glacier in the middle of a rainforest. I don’t know much about agents any more, but I sure as hell know what sun stroke feels like, because I got it, drinking Fiji bitter on the roof of a boat somewhere in the middle of the Yasawa islands. Endings are not sad times, they’re just changing times. Endings are everywhere. One good thing about them is that you can almost guarantee that where an ending is found, there’s a beginning lurking just around the corner. Of course, it’s hard to track it down, because beginnings are hard to define. A lot of things are just beginning in my life, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.