Simpson's Paradox

Merge Coffee is a cute lite merging game with a coffeeshop theme, from CulinarySchools.org. This is a low-pressure match and merging game, with a calm coffee shop feeling.

In  Merge Coffee, players have a 7X7 grid on which to place coffee beans, cups of coffee, fancy drinks and pastries. The goal is just to match and merge identical items to upgrade them into higher-level creations. Light roast beans become darker roast beans etc.

Placement is key to a high score, as chaining multiple merges leads to bonus points, and  to that satisfying board-clearing. But some items are specials that lead to items appearing all over the board, so there’s no stress about perfect placement. Bags of coffee beans create random beans in random spots, a coffeemaker creates drinks, and a toaster oven creates bakery treats.

Coffee items have little level numbers associated with the cute coffeeshop art, but players need to place them on the board to see the level number. So there’s an overall theme of light roasts become dark roasts, and coffee drinks merging to become fancier coffee drinks, but on my first playthough, it wasn’t immediately intuitive which items merged into which new ones. This added to the unlock fun, but it took me a few plays to  get good chains going.

On the side of the grid are 3 customers, waiting for their coffee orders. I was worried this wouldn’t be a chill game, when I saw a mechanic focused on customers waiting for their coffee shop orders. I was looking for a chill game, and I don’t find time-management restaurant sims relaxing at all!  Angry customers are not relaxing! But the customers in Coffee Merge won’t turn red and storm out if you take too long to fix their drinks. They’re relaxed and calm too, in this chill little game, so making their lattes and cappuccinos is really about getting more points.

With every successful merge, you’re rewarded with a higher score, and as the game goes on, you can unlock more elaborate drinks and treats. Coffee Merge has fun coffee aesthetics, with enough placement choices to make it interesting and stress-free.

CulinarySchools.org also has other cute food-themed games, like BBQ Roast that I played and reviewed a few months ago, Candy Fiesta, a match-3 I posted about on my book blog, and a cute candy version of 2048. (I also played and reviewed 2048, and the evil Fibonacci version, a while ago)

I have to warn you that James Goodhand’s new novel The Day Tripper has a pretty rough start. At the beginning, manic pixie dream med student Holly is just too perfect to take seriously and her man-child boyfriend Alex isn’t particularly pleasant or relatable either. What I’m saying is, read this one on a delayed train so you have no choice but to power through the rough start, because it’s worth the slog later on.

The morning after a perfect date with Holly and an awful barfight, 19-year-old Alex wakes up, and it’s 15 years later. Each day, he pops into and out of time, waking up at a different point in his life. This is still recognizably his life, he has the same features and same possessions, but his adult life is clearly a wreck. This could have been a bit stronger if Alex had been a more developed character in the beginning, I felt more curiosity than concern for him as he wakes up in a sad bedsit, in a terrible marriage, in prison, homeless in his car, etc. Each morning, Alex discovers another depressing aspect of his future life, and even though the details are quite sketchy at first, it becomes depressingly clear that he brought this on himself.

Teen Alex loves a night a out, but aging Alex is a fullblown alcoholic. When he finds himself in different times, sometimes he wakes up almost entirely focused on getting his next drink. Sometimes Alex knows he should call Holly, change his job, tidy his apartment, but he’s just gonna have one drink first… which quickly becomes another… The author expresses the path of least resistance so well, which works here on a scifi level as the timestream rejects changes, and on a moving and relatable level for any reader who’s tried to change their life.

There aren’t a lot of characters in this novel, instead most of the story comes from seeing the same characters on different paths, at different times.  There’s a scene when Alex is in the hospital with covid, made all the more dramatic because he’s popped in from a pre-pandemic point and has no idea what’s happening, and he recognizes Holly as a masked doctor. This Holly remembers him as an old boyfriend, not a tragic love or a horrible ex, and it’s enough for Alex to see she’s alive in this timeline.  We also see a young boy, Jazz, and all the ways his life could unfold in different timelines.

There’s eventually kind of a vague explanation of the rules, but like the best timey-wimey novels, the author doesn’t waste a lot of story time on explanation. The focus is on Alex, his growth and his choices within his ability.  Alex is eventually able to unlock the sources of his trauma, but there’s no easy time-travel reset here, he doesn’t have the ability to delete the awful events in his life, just to find a way to carry them.

Some first-novel wobbles, but overall, worth reading.  Pairs well with Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, for using time travel to get just a little more good time with a beloved, aging parent, and Mark Laurence’s Limited Wish for time-travel around marrying the right girl and Cambridge.

She’s Everything. He’s Just Doug. – The Atlantic

Three decades after Hillary Rodham agonized over taking her husband’s name, absolutely no one seems to care that Kamala Harris isn’t an Emhoff. Underneath all the sound and fury, an idea that was once considered radical has slipped into silent acceptance.

I love this part of the article because I didn’t change my name when I got married… I kept my last name from my father, Doug.

Current me, bringing news of the future to myself in, say, the mid ’90s: I have terrible news for you, Past Self. When you get older, you’ll lose some detail vision.

Past me, a sweet summer child: Oh no! Am I going to be blind? Am I going to need even bigger glasses?

Future news: Nah, it’s fine, they’re making thinner lenses all the time. Plus progressives will come out so by the time you need bifocals, you won’t even have a line across your eyes. You’ll be able to read just fine, but you won’t be able to count the fingers in a group photo.

Past me: That’s fine. Why would anyone care about counting–

Future news: As you get older, there will be more and more self-checkouts where you swipe your card yourself to pay.

Past me: That doesn’t sound so bad…

Future news: Each brand is just slightly different and they’re always a solid, dark color so none of your tricks will work, and it’ll be hard to see exactly where and which angle to swipe your card, so every time you try to pay, it takes you just a little bit longer than everyone else, and a cashier sighs at you.

Past me: That’s really annoying.

Future news: And in the future, AI art exists so whenever you see literally any image, you can never tell if the details are a bit hard to make out, just like the details on literally every thing in the real world, or if the entire thing’s fake. The entire internet is AI fakeout images now, and there’s no way to tell. Ever.

What if someday I made a cool indie game, that would be amazing! What if then I finished it and released it, and then I had a game out in the world? What if I did it again and I had multiple games finished and for sale? What if I somehow had a big enough place to store and organize the stock of all my games? What if I had enough local shows to need banners and tablecloths and business cards? And what if I had enough mail orders to need packing and mailing supplies? And what if I got enough sales on Amazon to need special Bezos barcode stickers?

What if I spent my whole freaking day organizing boxes of game stuff and putting things them in other boxes…

It’s a typical day at school, where I’m observing a junior teacher and helping her with her ESL lesson plans. I’m giving her some suggestions, some conversation prompts, some easily-modified printables for activities, and other general resources that I happened to have in my GDrive.

“Your activities are so interactive!” she said, “They’re like games for English!”

“That’s probably because I design card games when I’m not teaching.”

When we bought a fixer-upper,  we knew it would require work, and so it was kind of funny when one day in the fall, the closet collapsed and all my clothes fell down. I  packed up everything that I wasn’t actively wearing. Just for a few weeks, you know, until we put up new shelves. But see, the closet looked like a wreck after the shelf was pulled out of the wall, so I took down all the weird bits of shelf, spackled over the holes and repainted the closet. It was boring and stupid.

Then I measured the closet and worked out what size closet bar would fit in a weird trapezoidal closet. I thought my husband would be able to do it, I kind of thought this was a gender-linked ability. When every other guy I know was taught how to use studfinders (step one, point it at yourself and say “got one!” step two, laugh hysterically, step three, hang up shelves), my husband must have cut class that day. So we tried to hire someone and there was another delay and another delay and this whole thing is getting too stupid and boring.

On the subject of boring and stupid, the windows are scheduled for repair too, but for additional boring reasons, that’s delayed too! So if I don’t want to freeze like a Dickensian orphan this winter, I needed to do something about the icy cold drafts. So we bought some kind of plastic that you stick over the windows to seal them. You stick it on and then tape it and then seal it with heat from a hairdryer.

So, ok, I do OWN a hairdryer, but remember how everything that’s non-essential is in an unlabeled, temporary box since I don’t have a closet now? And I CAN blow dry my hair, but I also can sleep 20 more minutes, so right into the unlabeled nonessential boxes it went. In my defense, when I shoved it in a box somewhere, I didn’t know that one could fix windows with a hairdryer.

Anyway, this is all so boring and stupid, but I sealed up the windows really well. It’s perfectly sealed, no leaks or drafts at all. I did a second layer, too, just to be absolutely sure, and I’m so proud of myself.

I enjoyed being warm for a good 48 hours before our dishwasher started smoking, with a terrible smell of burned plastic, and all my windows are perfectly sealed shut.

Found this in the Little Free Library by the beach near us.

Harold: That’s perfect for you!

Me: Yeah! Wait… how do you know that? Do you know this Roman mystery series*? Do you know what a Vestal is?

Harold: I mean, I know what ancient columns look like.

*I’m a dedicated SPQR and Marcus Corvinus fan, but have only read a couple Gordianus books.

What You Are Looking for is in the Library, by Michiko Aoyama, and translated by Alison Watts, is a book of sweet and gentle interlocking short stories around a library where the reading recommendations are always just what each reader needed to find. This book has the overall vibe of the gentle healing of Before The Coffee Gets Cold, but with a magical realism hint, instead of full-on time-travel fiction. It has all the quiet warmth and gentle realizations of a good Maeve Binchy novel, too.

The basic Hatori Community House offers everyday resources like computer classes and meeting rooms for locals. The librarian, Sayuri Komachi, gives personal reading recommendations and a charming felted bonus gift to patrons. These readers might think they’re just looking for a regular how-to book about playing Go or building a website, but these special recommended books have a little bit extra, opening new perspectives for the readers.

Each story is about a person feeling disappointed in their life. We first meet a twentysomething retail worker, who’s proud of making it to a job “in fashion” in the big city, but also wonders if the repetitive, lonely work is all there is for her. When she visits the library to learn more about computers and maybe improve her career prospects, she also checks out an old favorite children’s book, which starts to unlocks new ideas, new perspectives, and new habits for her. It’s a charming and gentle transformation, without any insta-makeover or too-easy conclusions.

So I read What You Are Looking for is in the Library at exactly the right time for me (but honestly, aren’t we always learning to better cope with setbacks?) and as I was reading, I could sort of feel that this book is about to be big. It’s very easy to read, with a warm, gentle atmosphere in each short story. The stories have positive resolutions, but not overwhelmingly so, so there’s a wonderfully relatable feeling, as if the same kind of hopeful, warm perspective is just a book away for all of us.

Another visitor to the library has a private dream of opening an antique store, and being surrounded by beautiful treasures all day, but fears leaving his stable, unexciting job for a completely new venture. An unemployed and lonely young man faces the deeply relatable situation of being creative and skilled enough to get into art school, but not skilled enough to land the great jobs his classmates got after graduation.  New mother Natsumi has lost her career path and her free time when her daughter was born, and she tries to make sense of being the default parent for a thousand tiny concerns, and finding her once-meaningful work on the mommytrack. And after these stories of work and identity, a newly retired man wonders what his life and identity will be without his career at the center.

Without too much of a spoiler, I have to say that I loved one character’s path to a new career. In fiction, we often find a great new job opportunity, and the deadline to apply is almost here! Then the character takes the risks and goes for it and of course they get it, right? So I particularly liked that even with the magical realism of the library, our character didn’t automatically get the first job she applied to.

What You Are Looking for is in the Library is short and spare, with more implied than shown directly to readers. With these short, interconnected stories, the book introduces us to complicated and relatable characters, and shows them struggling to find contentment and fulfillment. There is also a theme of being kind to others, of being a good friend or a loving parent or child. This is a warm and encouraging book for any reader.