My latest column: Salad Days
My latest boardgame review is about a game that is fast becoming a favorite: Mage Knight.

I enjoy anime, and now and again I’ll binge-watch a bunch on Netflix. I’ve noticed that a lot of anime seems to share some similar themes, which is why I wrote this generic anime theme song:

“You have a special magic power,
And other people have one too…
They try to kill you but you manage to defeat them,
Because they’re not as cool as youuuuuuu…
You have a special magic power,
You have a special magic power,
Love is hiding in the shadows.”

So yeah, that’s like, 50% of anime. And then another 30% is just light relationship silliness. But the remaining 20% has some fascinating and lovely stuff. I recently finished watching Attack On Titan, which although it certainly lacks for closure, is a compelling story with an abnormal theme and kept me on my toes. I think my favorite anime of late has been Death Note — I actually first read a volume of the manga, and found it so intriguing that I immediately went and watched the whole run of the anime on Netflix.

Starting a new monthly comedy open mic tomorrow night at our local coffee house; hopefully it goes well.

I spent a few hours late thisafternoon shoveling out our driveway from the blizzard. As this is a shared driveway with our neighbors, it gave me time to reflect how much I hate their decorations.

The most obvious example is Christmas decorations. Those of you who know me are aware that my appreciation of Christmas decorations to begin with is roughly halfway between Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch. Our neighbors had giant inflatable nonsense (which couldn’t just be inflated and left there, but needed to have the frequently-running extra-loud inflator running half the time), as well as extra-blinky epilepsy-inducing lights which kept making me think the cops were outside our house (which, in our neighborhood, is not uncommon). Those decorations were up for the entire month of December.

But the decorations I hated most today were the three shovels standing in their front yard, which remained purely decorative as I shoveled the entirety of the driveway for the second time this week.