Update 18

 Well, feel it is time for a general gaming update. The last two posts were more general sorts of musings. So I want to write something a bit more directly gaming related.

I have been to the go club three times now. I seem to have fallen naturally into an every other week pattern. This last Sunday I met someone who had been at IUB shortly before I had. I am a bit unclear if our time there overlapped or not. At that time there were two go clubs. One met in the student union on Friday nights. That club was essentially these two old guys Don and Paul who played each other every week and discussed local politics plus whoever else showed up. Unfortunately, I guess the guy I met this last Sunday had a bit of a negative experience with them in that he felt they were unwilling to play him. So he started another club just down the street at the Asian Culture Center. I remember that at one time I was going to that club because I have memories of hanging out with the Korean guy who manned the desk there. But I don't remember much about that club. I do have distinct memories of a small tournament at that club. I believe it was a knockout and there were about 10 people or so. I seem to remember that I got a bit lucky because the two strongest players got paired in an early round so I ended up playing the winner in the final so I was able to get second place. Most of my memories of go in Bloomington though have to do with the Friday night club. I certainly didn't feel that Don and Paul were unwilling to play me although they definitely felt that the main item of business was playing each other I guess. Anyways, it was an interesting stroll down memory lane. Anyways, this fellow gave me four stones and whipped me. So I guess that is a happy thing because I am in the middle of the ladder at this club so there are stronger players to aim for and weaker players to help. I also played a couple of games with Jackie and I feel I might have been a bit hard on him. He wanted to play even the first time so we did but he resigned. And then we played on four stones and again he resigned because I was way ahead. I know it can be tough to be on the receiving end of that. I tried to find some teaching moments to give him some knowledge but unsure how helpful I was. Hopefully we can play more.

 I have continued to play over pro games. I can't remember whether I posted about this or not but I finished playing over all the supplemental games in Invincible and have made some good progress going through the John Fairbairn book about the games of Shuei. I have enjoyed it as usual with his books. It is still this thing that in some ways playing over these games is comforting for me and can help to settle my nerves or make me feel better. But basically I am playing over them fairly rapidly although stopping to read the comments. So sometimes I feel a bit blah about it in the sense that it is not really deep study. I am for the most part not calculating variations or really considering alternate moves. I suppose you could say this is lazy but I just feel in some ways I would likely just get bogged down if I tried to analyze the games. And like I said, I do it partly as a comfort thing. That being said, I have read in several different places that playing over pro games without analyzing, just playing over the games fairly quickly, is good for your go. I do feel I have internalized some things from this practice. So at the end of the day it suits me to do it this way so I will continue.

Other than that I haven't really been taking go too seriously. I have been doing a few problems in a couple of apps on my phone but that has been kind of a mixed bag. I have been solving some but also sometimes just guessing which I feel strongly is the wrong way to approach problems. I feel that is the problem with doing problems on the computer or phone. The temptation is much stronger to just click and see what happens. When doing problems in a book, I find it much easier to be disciplined. But books also have issues. One is the question of where the answers are placed. Because in some of my books they are placed on the back side of the page with the problem but the paper is too thin so the answer shows through. This has been a major problem with a series of books by Lee Chang Ho (or at least with his name and picture on them). The problems are great problems and there are a lot of them. But the books are just too inconvenient to use because of this issue. For other books sometimes the answers are printed all together at the back of the book, but then it is inconvenient to look at the answers particularly because you want to avoid seeing the answers to other problems. So that can require negotiation. And even if the paper is thick enough for the answers to be on the next page, if you do nine problems per page it is still necessary to somehow record your answers to prevent forgetting whether you actually got the right answer or not and there is not really a convenient way to do that for go problems.

On the role-playing front, the Nerd Louisville session is tomorrow night. So I am looking forward to that. On my own, I have been exploring the original Delta Green book as well as Call of Cthulu 7th edition. I also got a copy of the Basic Roleplaying system because of my interest in universal systems like GURPS. I decided to dip my toe into having Claude (the AI program) run a solo Delta Green adventure for me. I was able to use the Call of Cthulu book to make a character but right now it just exists in the chat with Claude. I intend to fill out a character sheet that I printed off the other day and then I will try to take a photo and post that. I was really resistant to using AI for solo play but somehow I guess I just kind of came around on it. I can't really point to a major shift in my beliefs or anything. I guess I just wanted to see how well it could do it.

Other than that I haven't really been doing a whole lot on the games front. I have been reading an anthology of short stories called "The Weird" edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I am liking that a lot and I consider it background material for some of the role-playing stuff so it is "games-adjacent". But other than that not much. I brought a chess board and some chess books with me (most of my stuff is being shipped from Taiwan and won't arrive for awhile yet) and I have done some research about local chess clubs but for some reason haven't felt motivated to really pursue that. I also have kind of blown off Magic. I had planned to go to the Secrets of Strixhaven prerelease but I just didn't really feel like it when it was the day of. I have watched some Nick Button videos but haven't been playing either online or in person. I also brought my steam deck with me but just haven't really felt motivated to play video games, although sometimes I wish I had my desktop PC set up so I could play Age of Wonders 4. I did buy a book at Surface Noise detailing many different solitaire games played with regular playing cards but I have yet to actually try any of them.

So, overall gaming is continuing but for the most part it seems to be more of a simmer than a roiling boil.