This was a fairly standard Ruy Lopez opening, though he did fianchetto his dark-squared bishop onto g7. I thought this was a bad move. (Note: I have not run this game through an analysis engine, since I did not actually write down the move list, so my analysis might be complete horse hockey.) In addition to weakening his king's position, it trapped his bishop forever behind the e5 pawn, which was not going to go anywhere. My move at this picture was Bishop c1-g5, pinning his knight to his queen and clearing out my back rank so I could move my rooks freely.

At this point I had begun to prepare for a kingside attack. My b3 Bishop is targeted right at f7, my Queen was moved to d2 to both connect my rooks as well as possibly set up Queen d2-h6. I had already traded my dark squared bishop for the knight on f6 as soon as his Queen moved to e8 (unpinning that knight), removing its protection from the highly vulnerable h7 pawn (a consequence of his early move of the pawn from g7-g6). The move I just made before this picture was Knight c3-d5. In addition to attacking his Bishop on f6, it threatens d5-c7, which will dual threaten Queen and Rook, letting me win the exchange of Knight for Rook. His only move hwere is Bishop f6-d1, which protects c7. However, that's not only deactivates his Bishop (when he already weakened his kingside pawns to activate it), that bishop is then blocking his back rank, immobilizing the rook on a8. That would mean he would have only one active piece (knight on c6), whereas both my knights, my bishop, and my queen are all active, with my rooks having a clear path on the back rank to move where they please.

Unfortunately, he didn't see my threat of Knight d5-c7 (or decided that was less bad than deactivating the bishop) and put his Bishop on e7. I took his pawn and then his rook on a8 in exchange for the Knight. Not only was I ahead in material, I still had three active pieces to his two. More importantly, my pieces were all aimed at the kingside and his had no good way to swing over.

After that, I put my Queen on h6, launching the attack. He moved his knight to d4, attacking both my knight and bishop which were supporting my Queen's attack. After some calculation, I traded Knights. I figured I could quickly mobilize my f1 Rook to support the attack (faster than he could bring his pieces over to defend, anyway. Part of his problem was that his b7 bishop could not counterattack  because of my e4 pawn.

Because I traded knights, I was then able to push my pawn to f4, giving my rook room to go to f3 (preparing for rook to h3, supporting the queen). He tried to dislodge my bishop by pushing his pawn to a5, but it was too late for that. His king was trapped by his rook, his queen and light-squared bishop were on the wrong side of the board, and his weak kingside pawn structure (remember that bad fianchetto?) finally was his undoing. I only needed Rook to h3 and Queen takes h7 to win, and it would take him too many moves to give his king an escape path. My b3 Bishop also pinned his pawn to f7, preventing the possible defense of pawn f7-f6, rook f8-f7 (guarding the h7 space my queen was about to take).

He moved Rook f8-g8, I put my rook on h3, and he resigned.

It was a decent game, and we were about evenly matched in skill, which is a super-rare thing to happen for two strangers deciding to play outside of a tournament. Most of all, it felt great to reactivate the chess muscles in my brain.  It's been too long. I'd love to do tournaments again, but I can't spend a whole weekend playing chess anymore. Too many other things I want to do.

After that, I played a few games of Star Realms and then tried to learn Kana Gawa with someone else. The rulebook is very bad, and by the time we understood how the game was supposed to flow, we had lost interest. I retreated to relax for a bit.

In the evening, I played 2-player and 3-player sessions of "The Game", followed by a 4-player Letter Tycoon (I think that was the name.)

It's fine. The patent bonuses felt like easily-missed bookkeeping (especially if you're thinking about your own next turn when others play cards). The first player has a distinct advantage. Even though all players get the same number of turns, the first player can earn points from a patent bought on the last turn. The last player cannot. It ended up making the difference between first and second place players in our game.

Finally, we did a 4-player game of Wizard. I was doing very well early, including making a bid of 6 on round 10. But in the later rounds I kept missing by one in either direction and got overtaken right at the end. Great game. Haven't played it in 9 months, which is a shame.

Finally, it's hard not to be struck by the politics of Star Trek. The villain's goal is to disrupt the Federation because he does not feel humans should be working together with aliens. Uhura claims that we gain strength by uniting with others. The villain (a human who has been disfigured over the years by surviving through killing non-humans) retorts "Unity is not your strength, it’s your weakness."

At first I thought it was a funny coincidence how a Star Trek movie coming out right after the political conventions in the United States had a message that so well aligned with the arguments between the nominees. But then, of course it would, and should. Star Trek was birthed in the idea of people coming together to build something greater than themselves. It was no accident that the original crew had a Russian man, a Japanese man, and an African-American woman. World War II was still firmly in the everyday consciousness, the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba, and the civil rights movement was in full swing.

Star Trek established a future where we didn't survive through conquering our rivals. It wasn't about winner and losers (ahem), but about partners. This film returns to that ethos. The villain is revealed to be a human who has come to believe that the only way to be strong is by attacking others. He is defeated not just by a lone action hero punching him in the face. The crew works together, coordinates their actions, and sacrifices themselves for each other.

Star Trek: Beyond is about people who pick each other up instead of stepping on the weak. Who lend a hand to outsiders even after they've been betrayed in the past. Who don't see others as nothing but marks to be exploited for personal gain. Who see success not in terms of what happens to oneself, but how everyone comes out together.

Kirk begins the movie wondering why he's out there in space when there's nothing in it for him and wanting a way out. He ends it turning down a personal promotion; committed to being part of a team whose mission is to serve others.

What's surprising isn't the politics of this Star Trek movie. What's surprising is that even after 50 years our country is still having the same fight. With just a new coat of paint on the villain's face.

Today I had to assemble some furniture and the Mets game on my Tivo was finished before I was, so I resorted to watching Jurassic World as I finished.

Let's assume that you were forced to divide the characters in Jurassic World into two camps, Good vs. Evil, based on how "good" they became by the end of the movie.

Now let's examine the major decisions in the movie, whether they were smart or dumb, and who is responsible.

• ​Going to the Island
  Dumb: This isn't a reboot. As the movie makes clear, the events of Jurassic Park actually happened and people know all about it.
  Responsibility: The parents. The parents send their kids off to a death island to be taken care of by someone they haven't seen in seven(!) years. This would be criminally negligent even if there weren't vicious monsters on the island. (Note to self: vicious and viscous mean very different things.)  The mother even jokes about the danger. These kids need a foster family.
  
  
• Genetically Engineering a Supersaur
  Dumb: You're literally devising a creature to be able to efficiently kill people dumb enough to go to your theme park.
  Responsibility: Foreign guy. You might want to make an argument that Asian Scientist is at fault here, but as he correctly states, if he hadn't created what was asked for, someone else (probably less talented and careful) would have. "Not Actually" Wong also points out that every dinosaur in the park is an abomination of genetic engineering. That was a central plot point in the original film, every single dinosaur in that park has been gene spliced in dangerous and unpredictable ways.
  
  So all of this falls so squarely at the feet of Foreign guy that he ALMOST gets (rightly) moved into the evil column. However, the film's internal logic makes it clear he is supposed to be seen as well-intentioned good guy. Howso? First, he tells Lady in Charge to take a walk on the beach and not be uptight and number-focused, which is her entire character arc! He also recognizes the dinosaurs as living things with emotions, which is a key component of Indiana Pratt's character's good-guy status. Finally, he sacrifices himself in an attempt to save people's lives. So, it's clear the film considers Foreign Rich Man to be a good guy, even if we don't.
  
  
• Housing MISSINGNO Rex Without Knowing Its Abilities
  Dumb: How can you build a cage when you have no idea what will be kept inside?
  Responsibility: High-Heels McGee. She explicitly tells Starlord that she accepted a dinosaur made of unknown genetic components and builds a pen for it. This is so remarkably stupid I seriously don't understand how someone whose character is defined by obsessive analytics would agree to it. What if the D-1000 sprouted goddamn wings and flew out?! What if this was secretly another Fantastic Four reboot and the Fantasticsaurus Rex streched it's legs to be 100 feet long and just stepped over the fence?
  
  Jurassic Shirt Guy, the audience stand-in character, even points all of this out in advance. Which means the movie is fully aware that its protagonists are idiots.
  
  All of that is hypothetical, but the film's actual events turn on this. Frankenstein's Monster gets out specifically because of one ability that it had that they didn't know about (the stolen Klingon Cloaking Device) and one ability it didn't have but tricked the Scooby Gang into thinking it did (gold medaling in the high jump).
  
  
• Going in the Pen Before the Tracker Was Used
  Dumb: If it did get out, why bother going in? If it didn't get out, why bother going in?
  Responsibility: Burt Macklin. He was super-careful about going into the pen full of raptors that he had trained and only did so because there was an unmistakable and immediate death about to happen. Why would he not wait five measly minutes for the Dino-GPS information before entering a pen of a creature he knew was specifically bred to be terrifying?
  
  
• Not Returning to Safety; Going Through a Broken Gate
  Dumb: If you're in a zoo more dangerous then Cincinnatti's Gorilla Enclosure and you ignore instructions to return to safety and go past a broken gate with warning signs, you deserve to learn what the other side of digestion feels like.
  Responsibility: Chip and Dale.
  
  
• Using Rubber Bullets and Not Evacuating the Island
  Dumb: As we've already established, it's a beast with unknown genetics. You have zero idea if tazing it will bring it down or just make it's hair stand on end.
  Responsibility: Carly Fiorina and Ravi Shankar. He verbally nixes lethal measures based on "how much we have invested" and she refuses to evacuate because "we'll never reopen again". To be clear, for me, these decisions irrevocably make these characters the real monsters. However, in the movie's logic, they're considered good guys instead of facing charges at the Hague.
  
  
• Using Raptors to Kill the Cloverfield Monster
  Smart: This is the first smart idea that anyone has. Everything up to that point has shown that humans are incapable of overcoming nature. This is clearly the best shot at stopping it and later proves to be right.
  Responsibility: Gomer "I am in a world of shit" Pyle. This is the first major decision by a clearly evil character. Military-Industrial-Complex man is a common archetypal villain and this one is no different. Yet this first "evil" decision is also the first smart decision made by any character. Unfortunately...
  
  
• Not Using Raptors
  Dumb: For the inverse reasons as the above.
  Responsibility: Harley Raptorson. For some reason, our supposed hero decides that more people should die because of his dumb earlier decision instead of him doing the one thing that might actually work. An hour later, he finally goes full Mowgli and rides a motorcycle through a dense jungle without a helmet. Smart guy.
  
  
• An Amateur Flying a Helicopter into a Combat Situation
  Dumb: You can barely fly a helicopter under supervision with calm conditions, but then you decide you should pilot the space shuttle while the Death Star is coming into orbit.
  Responsible: Helicopter McChopperface. His stupid "bravery" ends up unleashing the pterodactyls and getting dozens of people eaten and unseen hundreds of people trampled to death Jon Snow style in the ensuing panic. The worst part is that the movie uses this as the final move in his turn from greedy evil to misguided good.
  
  
• Relocating the embryos and GTFO the Island
  Smart: The island is in chaos and the last thing needed is to lose control of baby monsters. The smart move is to take them to a controlled environment ASAP.
  Responsible: The Law and Order Duo. This "evil" act is even a good thing for the people they would leave behind on the island. Those people would not be helped by dozens of new hungry baby dinosaurs hatching in the insecure park.
  
  

By the way, I am not saying these are plot holes. I am just taking characters' decisions at face value and seeing what that says about those characters.

So, what does this analysis reveal? Every dumb decision that endangered lives was made by a "good" character. Every smart decision that saved lives was made by an "evil" character. According to this movie: Good is dumb.

Up until the ending this felt like a normally bad Hollywood cash-in sequel. I was ready to completely forget about the movie. But then the denouement convinced me there's something deeper to this movie. It inspired me to actually think about what I saw and write this article.

Brief recap: to defeat Ghostface Killah Rex, Gwen Stacy releases a T-Rex, which (along with the velociraptors) was the big bad of the original movie. She guides it into a fight with the new monster via handheld flare (directly referencing a tactic used in the original movie). Together, the T-Rex and the Raptors kill the new kid on the block.

This convinced me that the film's makers hated this whole film and were trying to subliminally let the audience in on that secret. Howso?

The control room guy who wears the Jurassic Park t-shirt is clearly an audience stand-in, specifically audience members who fondly remember the original movie enough to spend hundreds on a t-shirt for it. He spends the whole of act 1 loudly complaining that breeding new fake dinosaurs is dumb, because the dinosaurs in the original movie were awesome enough. Lady Macbeth mocks him in front of everyone. At first I thought this was the filmmakers making preemptive fun of critics.

When all else fails and the protagonists are about to finally get the chewing they so richly deserve, Sansa Stark turns to the man she previously looked down on, who again represents people that think the original film is way better than this one. She needs him to open the T-Rex pen, because everyone else has fled. This is the filmmakers saying "We recognize we can't possibly succeed without you, even though you will be our harshest critics. Please stick around to save us from our own stupidity in making this movie."

Finally, the T-Rex and Raptors win. This is the filmmakers admitting that the original movies monsters were superior to this new bullshit. Adding in 20 years of technology failed to improve on the original. Which is of course a metaphor for this sequel. The new CGI is inferior to what we had before and the new characters are incompetent ninnies who need a guardian of the past film to save them.

Am I reading too much into that ending? In case you think otherwise, I am not someone who cares that much about this movie. I don't hate it. I am not one of those die-hard fans of the original film. I was barely paying attention by the time this one was over. Which is why I'm so confident that this was meant as a blaring admission of failure by the filmmakers. I wasn't looking for any such thing. It was just there for all to see.

Do you agree? Am I a lunatic? Is analyzing a movie a full year after it was released a tremendous waste of time?

It's been a few game months since I did a recap. The reason for this was that there was nothing terribly interesting to write about. Sure, the game added new stuff. But it was in a predictable manner.

​10 Month n: make managing the zombies harder.
​20 Month n+1: give a new tool to manage the zombies.
​Goto 10

10: Make 1/4 of the cards in the deck worthless
​20: Add equipment stickers that make them kinda useful if you're lucky.
10: Make zombies untreatable​.
20: Add Quarantines.
​10: Make zombies appear faster via player deck.
​20: Add roadblocks.

​It all added up to a pile of who cares. Worse, it made every game take longer and longer. A half hour would be spent opening doors and explaining the new stuff. And, Pandemic continued being Pandemic, where our victory was determined by nothing so much as the shuffle of the two decks. I seriously considered pulling the plug without completing all 12 months.

July finally changed things. It added a new mechanic, searching, which made you want to go into zombie cities and take actions to search for a Virologist, then an Immunologist the next month. These appear to be pieces tied to wrapping up the story at year's end. But more importantly, the game was no longer "spin the plates until you get 5 of a color". There was now an objective to pursue that felt genuinely different than all other mechanics.

​I immediately used the soldier for the first time, Master Chief, and went searching for the Virologist. In a later game, I got to use the Virologist I found, Dr. Quinn, to go smack around zombies. It felt like I was playing a parallel game to my companions, which was good. For the first time this didn't feel like playing Pandemic with elaborate window dressing.

​Don't get me wrong, in the end, Pandemic still Pandemic'd us by being all about the deck shuffles. But even with multiple losses, we still completed both searches. This gave us a technical loss, but some upside outcome, which is something missing up until now. Before, it was all just win or lose. Yes, if you lose things get a little easier next time, but the shuffle of the decks are so overwhelming in determining victory that it doesn't really matter.

​It also felt nice to Nuke a city. We took out Mumbai, which had already collapsed, because it was key in several chain outbreaks that cost us a couple of games. It was cathartic to rip up that damn infection card that seemed to always find its way to the top of the pile.

​For the first time in awhile, I'm looking forward to next month and not just going through the motions.

Most of you have received credit card offers in the mail. They follow a pretty standard format. The envelope is covered in credit card and bank logos. Plastic window. Fake credit card included so when you pick up the envelope you instinctively think it must be a replacement card, forcing you to open it and see their pitch.

​Of course, real replacement cards are never sent in this manner. Every replacement card I've ever gotten has been in a plain white envelope with a simple PO Box or other innocuous return address in the upper-left-hand corner. This is not done to save money, but to avoid alerting potential thieves of who the sender is.

​This provides an interesting dichotomy. Fake credit cards loudly blare their provenance while real ones cloak themselves in anonymity.

​Not too long ago a card of mine had to be replaced because charges were made at various locations in Florida. I found the plain white envelope in my mail with the slight card-shaped bulge and quickly opened it to activate the new card.

It was credit-card spam, along with the prerequisite fake card.

​The spammers had adopted to the expectations of consumers who had grown too smart to be taken in by the logo'd spam. They were now adopting anonymity because consumer expectations of what an important piece of mail looks like had changed. ​We saw this proceed at a much faster pace with email spam, though there spammers have to get past both the user's mental filters and algorithmic ones.

​Today I got another plain white envelope. Happy to have finally received the replacement card, I opened it... to find another fake card. This one didn't even bother to have fake numbers printed. The front just had the bank logo, the chip, and my name. I went to toss the whole of it into the trash.

​At the last moment, I stopped when I noticed that there seemed to be a shadow moving in the card's "art". I inspected it closely and realized that this was the genuine card replacement. While I knew about the new chip system (and already have debit cards with it), this had several major unheralded differences which had thrown me for a loop.

​All information other than the bank logo and my name were missing from the front. No number, no date, no credit card logo to be found. The back of the card had all of it, along with the magnetic strip, hologram, and a signature panel repositioned to make room for all of the information now added on the back.

​In addition, the numbers were now just printed on instead of embossed. Or debossed. I'm not going to look up which is which. Regardless, the perfect flatness of the card was disconcerting. Even now, it looks fake to me without the raised numbers. Like something they'd put in a child's playset. Looking at the rest of the contents of the envelope, there was nothing outlining these changes. The chip was mentioned, but nothing else.

​From a purely functional standpoint, the raised numbers are wholly unnecessary. No store is going to whip out an imprint device to make carbon copies to process a purchase. Well, maybe Sears, if they're still around. Or some hipster vintage t-shirt pop-up store in Brooklyn. But no store I would go to.

​But this is a failure in expectations management. I've been trained for a decade on what a debit/credit card looks like. They changed it without warning. When combined with spammers' increasingly sophisticated techniques, the new card design failed to identify itself as a credit card and almost ended up in the trash because of it.

​It's bad product management when the spammers are managing consumer expectations better than my bank.

United States currency has undergone many redesigns in my lifetime in the name of security, which was the reason that credit cards are changing. Yet, I have never once almost thrown away a twenty because I thought it was fake. Why not?

​I remember when the Treasury revealed the first redesign with colored backgrounds. I remember the jokes about Monopoly money. But the release of those bills came and went without much of a hitch. This was because they properly managed expectations.

​The new money didn't just show up one day in ATMs. If it had, I guarantee you people would be storming the teller windows demanding real money. Instead, the Treasury had widely publicized the changes months in advance. Everyone knew what was coming. Even if they thought the changes looked dumb, they also knew exactly what those dumb changes looked like.

With apologies to M1, credit and debit cards are the new currency. You can't change how it looks without warning people in advance. The chip addition was relatively well-managed. Consumers and businesses were told many times both directly from the issuers and via mass media what the chips looked like and how they worked.

​For this flat-card redesign, the bank is at a bit of a disadvantage because it isn't a national change. The Today show isn't going to do a segment on it. However, the bank could had sent direct notices to its customers about what to expect the way they had with the chip. In this case, not even the envelope containing the new card explained the flat design! That's just poor expectations management.