Twenty Fifteen

The year is almost over, but it's not going out peacefully as floods inundate parts of Great Britain. In one of the scariest wet seasons on record - oh, of course it's not climate change, of course, it's just that someone ate an orange in the wrong place somewhere - whole towns have been submerged, in the wake of yet another of the hottest years on record. Obviously, nothing is going on here at all. People will probably admit climate change once there are only five people left, two of whom have to keep running away from the giant mutant crabs that evolved out of all the pollution.

However, let's not get too topical here, as partisan ideologies continue to repeatedly decimate the country. There are other things to talk about. Twenty fifteen wasn't an altogether bad year. In board games, for example, it was one of the best years on record. Just today, I was listening to the Dice Tower's top ten board game roundups and there are some fantastic sounding games lurking out there, one of the most interesting being based around and titled 'Shakespeare'. Would you like to put on a hit play? Well, this is the game to do it in. Alternatively, if you prefer the idea of playing/managing future baseball, with added features like cyborgs, then try 'Baseball Highlights 2045', or you could build the architecture of old New York tetris-style in 'New York 1901'. You might even indulge in 'Above And Beyond', which I can't even adequately outline from the description yet. Something about farmers, building towns in caverns under their lands? Apparently, it was a great year for games.

It was a pretty good year for the Quirky Muffin too, as it became ever more popular with mindless Internet robots. and deranged cybernetic squirrels in Sweden. At least it never felt as if we were going to run out of material, and the pointless extemporaneous posts on 'nothing at all' came back into play, both of which are very reassuring things. Some time in the future, I'll either fall into the next dimension or this will become too much work, but for now it works in a minimalist kind of way. Looking back, the only alarming aspect is the absence of very many book reviews, which will be rectified, and probably with a vengeance if I get that project in Poland and spend two years being utterly confused outside of my own rooms. You can expect many book reviews in that circumstance! It's hard to know what went wrong with the book reading, apart from the fact that my poor, tired, enduring brain doesn't have so much energy for all the many things I would like to do any more and a couple of short story collections really blocked things up. The brain needs more vegetables, and a nice quiet time in a well-lit room. More book reviews would be nice.

Twenty fifteen was a very rough year, but now it's almost over. Let's hope that twenty sixteen sees a nicer and fairer society emerge from this mess, and with many fewer floods! Oh, and if we can have lots more interesting-sounding board games, that would be nice too.

O.