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🤡  He Talks in Maths, He Buzzes Like a Fridge... The Crime:  The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions The Guilty Party: Andrew Hacker Overview: An Oxford Emeritus Professor expounds on the idea that American schools are over-emphasizing mathematics and argues his point with some of the most questionable logic I've ever read in a real book. Why I Hate It... I have a degree in mathematics, I work with technology, and I use math routinely in my job, so when I picked up Andrew Hacker’s anti-STEM manifesto, I expected to hate it. So I was actually surprised to find the overview section compelling. Hacker’s thesis is that STEM is over-emphasized in American education and that this does more net harm than good to students. I disagree, but I like to be challenged, and I was on board with this book for the first ten pages or so. I was eager to see his arguments. Unfortunately for his cause, Hacker puts on an exhibition in fallacious logic, questionable reasoning, and outright dishonest...

🤡 The Tears of a Clown... The Crime: Joker The Guilty Party: Todd Phillips Overview: Phillips leans heavily on the visual language of Martin Scorsese to tell a gritty urban origin story that's dumb and has nothing worthwhile to say but somehow managed to resonate with emotionally-stunted man-babies so we will literally never hear the end of it. Why I Hate It... Over the course of this year's blog series we're going to see a mix of things that are objectively bad and other things that just bothered me personally, and I'm going to do my best to spread the love around in that regard. So with that in mind... Joker  is a bad movie and you're a bad person for liking it. Joker  tells the story of Arthur Fleck, a failure of a comedian and a clown who's suffering from some sort of mental illness and dealing with an ailing mother. Over the course of the movie he becomes a murderer, and then a folk hero, and then kills a talk show host on live TV and is ultimately arreste...

🎲 We Rollin' On Twenties... Hey, everybody. Geekway Mini 2023 was this weekend, so here's a run-down of everything I played! Tiletum Super crunchy Euro point-salad game that blends dice drafting with contract fulfillment and a few other odds-and-ends (in the point-salad tradition). You're traveling around Europe in Ye Olde Times building and populating houses, working on Cathedrals, attending fairs, and trying to stay in the good graces of the Crown. I normally don't like point-salad games that much, but I enjoyed this one reasonably well, mostly because it didn't overstay its welcome. It had a lot  of bits and set up for a game that's ultimately not that complex, so I don't know how strongly I can recommend it. Northgard: Uncharted Lands 4x deck-builder with a Carcassonne -style tile-placement board setup. Viking clans are exploring the land, gathering food, lumber, and lore. Fight over land, construct buildings, recruit more armies, and close out territor...

🚰 A Friend Who'll Tease Is Better... The Crime: Purity The Guilty Party: Jonathan Franzen Overview: Ostensibly a re-imagining of Great Expectations , Purity  tells the story of Purity "Pip" Tyler, only instead of actually telling that story it kind of wanders around that story for 700 overwrought pages. Why I Hate It... I don't know who the target audience for this one is, but it sure ain't me. There are so many levels on which this book just didn't work. Where to start. Let's start with character. Purity  doesn't have characters. It has named assemblages that were hastily constructed at the literary quirk factory. I never found myself sympathizing with them or caring about their journeys, and it's a good thing too, because so much of those journeys happens off-camera. With the exception of Andreas. We get to see all of his oddities up close and personal, that is until he is dismissed away as being mentally ill. The protagonist, Purity, goes from ...

👩 Flames on the side of my face... Welcome to 2023. For this year's blog series I'm going to be doing something a little different. For the last few years I've chronicled different things that I love: movies, albums, board games, video games. For this year, I'm going to be focused on things that I didn't love, but had a very visceral reaction to nonetheless. This year's blog series is devoted to my favorite hate-reads, hate-watches, maybe even a hate-listen or a hate-play or two. Regardless of form, these are bits of media that I consumed either anticipating that I would not like them or that I consumed expecting to like and then... doing the opposite of that. This is not as bleak as it sounds, I swear. I love bad things. I enjoy looking at something that I don't like that everyone else seems to and trying to figure out why I reacted differently. I enjoy looking at things that were universally panned to try to understand where they fell apart. I willingly e...