Well, if you’re going to break a promise you may as well break it hard. This month started off with my purchasing half a dozen board games in a borderline frenzy of wild abandon. I bought Root, Wingspan (which hasn’t arrived yet), Spirit Island, The Estates, Quacks of Quedlingburg and Railroad Ink.
Speaking for the defense, there was a legitimate tax reason for this – I had misinterpreted some financial guidance with regards to tax and Meeple Like Us. It turns out that no, there isn’t a tax-free allowance for a business and all your profits (lol) get taxed at the same rate. I had been planning to send a big order for games at the end of 2019 to give myself new review material for 2020. The timing just didn’t work out once I realised that I would be paying essentially two annual EU contributions worth of tax more than I would have expected if I didn’t do it this month.
Oh yeah, that’s how I measure additional tax obligations now – in multiples of annual EU contributions. It makes everything so much worse. Thanks brain, I hate it! In the UK we get a breakdown of how our tax money was spent when you get our tax statement. The one below isn’t mine (it’s from a Telegraph article in 2014) but I’d be happy to pay for the EU contributions of a good few people if we could just call this nonsense off.
Speaking for the prosecution, it turns out that actually the filing we had to make was for last year and our financial position there was already a fixed point in time. I guess though it sorts out the tax issues for next year.
The best I can say is that it wasn’t me who broke the Depth Year pledge. It was Meeple Like Us. The games are sitting on the shelf, unopened, and will not be opened until the Depth Year restrictions are lifted. I guess that’s a lesson I learned this month – just because you’re on a quest for personal growth, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to The Government.
I’ve also given myself permission to spend some money at Tabletop Scotland in late August because I’ll be selling off a big pile of games anyway and I think it’s important to support local events like this. My intention there is to be ‘cost neutral’ at most. Not take advantage of the opportunity to buy everything I might want, but to sink some money into the Scottish gaming economy. Exhibitors take a risk on coming to a thing like this and I want to make sure I do my part in incentivising that. Any games I buy for Meeple Like Us will go on the ‘2020 shelf’ and won’t be opened or played until the end of the depth year.
I know this all sounds like cheating and rationalization but I personally feel okay with it and that’s what matters. This stuff isn’t for me, it’s for the hobby. I mean, when you really think about it, I’m basically a hero.
Yeah, you need to really think about it.
I’m feeling a lot better this month than I was at the end of last month – a number of you contacted me with messages of support and encouragement after the last depth year diary and I want to say thank you to everyone for that. I know it was a downer of a post, but it was an accurate reflection of how I was feeling. The external factors haven’t changed all that much over the course of the month but I’ve managed to get myself back in a better mental frame of mind. As Mrs Meeple asked when she read the post, ‘What happened to your belief in the Serenity Prayer?’. I’ve generally been very good at following that excellent guidance. For a while I guess I forgot the ‘wisdom to tell the difference’ and it made everything much harder to deal with. Brexit is still awful, the site is still performing weaker than I would like, but I’m focusing instead on things where I do have some power to make changes. I wouldn’t say that it’s serenity that’s driving me these days so much as ‘numb detachment’. That’s better than gnawing anxiety but I suspect that’s something I also need to work on over the coming months.
Unrelated I’m sure, I’ve also stopped watching the news. Except when Notre Dame was burning down. Even then I strictly rationed my exposure to the heartbreaking footage. I once spent an hour or so in there listening to the choirs practicing and it was one of the most calming experiences of my life. You could feel the centuries in the stones around you. I’m not at all religious, but in those moments I understood and even felt a pang of jealousy at those that are. It must be nice to have that connection in your life, but it’s just not in me to have that kind of faith. That doesn’t mean I can’t mourn when I see history in flames.
I have been watching a lot of a Youtube series called Sailing la Vagabonde this month. It instilled in me a desire to escape to the sea and live my life as a stateless seaman. I’ve always felt, in defiance of all evidence, that I’d make a great pirate. Since that’s not really a vocational choice that seems sensible, I’d be able to settle for a life on the ocean waves. But, and this is important, I have no idea how to sail a boat. I had a look on the Internet and found I could take lessons down at the Dundee marina but that counts as a new hobby and that’s not permitted during a depth year. I also think, again importantly, that drowning would also count as a violation of my depth year principles. There’s no reason to believe I’d be any good at sailing other than I’d really like to be good at sailing. I’d also really like to be good at playing guitar but anyone who has heard me will say ‘Not bad for someone that started learning this instrument today and also has a below zero amount of musical talent’.
I’ve been playing guitar for about thirty years.
Ah well. If I died as a result of a cross-Atlantic voyage there would be some comfort to come from people saying ‘At least he died doing what he loved – drowning and then being eaten by sharks’
Youtube has been a weird Depth Year complication though. I’ve started watching a few new channels, which sort of counts like ‘new media’ except not really because Youtube has a particular niche it fills in my life. I rarely if ever sit down to watch a Youtube video. I have them on in the background while I do other things, and I’m actually pretty much completely up to date with my various Youtube channels. I find myself sometimes with nothing to watch because I genuinely have seen everything, although perhaps only out of the corner of one eye. Media sometimes serves different purposes depending on how it’s used, and for Youtube it’s not something I actively consume. I think it’s fine.
Finally in terms of Depth I have finished my Discworld re-read. The last few books were melancholy, because I knew at the end of each book to know it’s the last time certain characters appear. I have only one book left to read, and it’s the last one – the Shepherd’s Crown. I’m not going to read it though.
For one thing, I didn’t actually enjoy it much – it was clearly published before it had been finished and it was in that respect an unworthy final novel even if some genuinely ‘terminal’ things did happen in the course of the story. I had kept it unread though for a long time because I always wanted to have a new Discworld novel I could read – to feel that the series still had things to tell me and would thus never truly be finished. It served a much better purpose for me in that sense than it did as an actual novel.
But maybe I’ve got a chance here – it could be an opportunity to keep a Discworld book I’ve only read once. Maybe it would be better the second time – some of them have gone up in my estimation over the course of this re-read. I could keep it for the promise that it’s a better book than I recall? That’s my current plan. If you’re interested, these are my ratings for the various books:
The average rating I give a Discworld book is 4.3 stars, which given there are 41 books argues for phenomenally consistent level of quality. There are dips and some books are certainly weaker than others, but none that ever fall into ‘bad’. The period between Moving Pictures and Hogfather is almost uniformly excellent. Some of the best writing of the series lives in here, but it’s clear at the point of Jingo that some characters had been too heavily used without enough downtime between them. Rincewind has never been a favourite character of mine it’s clear. I’ve always thought he was the least interesting thing in any of his books. I was glad that he eventually found his way into the distant secondary cast of Unseen University.
The best thing that Terry Pratchett did though was essentially ‘retire’ some characters as mainline. Granny Weatherwax was too powerful to be interesting for example. She is a phenomenal foil to Tiffany Aching who is an excellent Granny 2.0 and my favourite witch by far. Vimes came very close to Grannification and I thought his best books were the ones where we see him reflected in the stories of others. He’s great when seen from the perspective of how others experience his presence. Such as in Monstrous Regiment. Night Watch though is the best book in the entire series as far as I’m concerned, and again it’s notably how ‘off script’ we see Vimes being. The book is better because he doesn’t have all the accouterments of rank and privilege. Moist von Lipwig was a great invention of a character, and I’m firmly convinced it was Terry Pratchett’s plan for him to succeed Vetinari as Patrician. I would have loved to have read *those* books.
In terms of surprises, some books were a lot stronger than I remembered (Monstrous Regiment and Lords and Ladies). Some a good deal weaker (Unseen Academicals, Amazing Maurice). Carpe Jugulum was a book I recalled as being a 2.5 but was actually a lot better on a re-read. Monstrous Regiment in particular was a completely unexpected delight and I hadn’t realised that in any of my previous re-reads. I suspect I needed a bit of age and wisdom to really appreciate the poignancy of the story.
Overall though a great use of eighteen months worth of reading material and Terry Pratchett was a God Damned Treasure. My favourite author, and a man whose books very much changed my life for the better. In real, tangible ways. I would not have the life I have without him.
I’m really glad though they drove a steamroller over all of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished books. As much as I would love to pore over all his notes and thoughts, I think I prefer that (almost) all his works are clearly ‘completed’ in the form he wanted them to be. Burn all the letters and all that.
This month has been one of a wants, and also one of difficulties. I’m in the tricky position of having to avoid a lot of spoilers at the moment and they’re flying thick and fast over the Internet and in regular conversation. At what point did society decide that the socially acceptable period between ‘something being aired’ and ‘it’s okay to shout and post about this without caring’ was literally ‘the very second the thing starts’? Was there a vote? Can we reconsider this policy for those of us that maybe don’t want to live our lives according to the tyranny of inconsiderate chatter?
Seriously, I’ve had to mute so many words on Twitter than I am genuinely not seeing innocuous replies to posts now.
Anyway, while I don’t have a philosophical objection to watching the new Game of Thrones series it’s one of the shows that Mrs Meeple and I watch together. That imposes some severe timing constraints and difficulties, as does the fact I like to watch a few episodes at a time. Increasingly it feels like my own preferences for media don’t matter because some yahoo on the Internet gets to unilaterally decide when it’s been long enough for me to have my experience spoiled. Avengers: Endgame will have to wait until next year though. While I have watched every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie it’s not as if I’m sufficiently invested for it to be a thing I was particularly anticipating. It’s not a new Expanse book. It’s a movie series I find passingly entertaining and increasingly difficult to follow. It doesn’t pass the bar for enthusiasm that lets me make an exception. I guess that’s my life for the next seven months – browsing the Internet with my mouse pointer perpetually hovering over the ‘back’ button.
Netflix has a couple of new series in which I’m interested. One is Special, which seems like it might be massively important for the perspective of disability representation in media. The other is Bonding, because I am a dully predictable man and having an attractive young woman in leather crack a whip at me and give me a content warning was enough to earn my attention.
Crikey
I had just finished my binge-watching of QI and this is what I got presented with when I clicked back to the menu. I can tell you going from Sandy Toksvig to this was quite the tonal shift.
In terms of video games, I’m currently wishing I could get Baba is You – a puzzle game with an interesting quirk – and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. They’re both available on Switch and I think I’d enjoy them a lot but I’m already overloaded with games to play there. The Return of the Obra Dinn is one that I’ve been thinking about for a while but Eurogamer did one of their great Late to the Party episodes about it and it instantly leapt up my wish list. Luckily that one isn’t available on Switch and I’m happy to wait until it is. It’s by Lucas Pope, who did Papers Please and thus inspired a number of my academic papers. It looks right up my alley. It’s about forensically investigating the scene of a murder aboard an old-timey trading ship, and I love every bit of what I have seen. But yeah, it can wait.
I also saw Eurogamer do a video about a game called Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and it made me laugh so much I had tears in my eyes. I doubt I’ll remember it for long, but at the moment I really do fancy picking it up.
From my ever-changing wishlist that I’m compiling over the months I’m still very keen on Good Omens, Into the Spidervese and Captain Marvel. I’m less enthused about Derry Girls because honestly I had forgotten all about it until I looked back at last month’s post. Sex Education and Bird Box survive onto the ‘I’d like to check these out’ list for another month, although Bird Box is looking increasingly shaky.
As usual there will be more details on these in the Patreon roundup, but I kept on with Celeste and it is an amazing little game. I’ve been working my way through Super Mario Odyssey and it’s absolutely okay! And I made my way through three seasons of QI on Netflix and it will be quite some time before I want to hear another klaxon go off.
That’s it for this month! Thanks again to all of you for your support – you make these posts, and Meeple Like Us, possible!