About

I inspect buildings for the city for a living, which sounds duller than it is, most days it's a lot of reading blueprints against what somebody actually built and figuring out which one is lying. I've been doing it going on nine years now. Board games entered my life through a work holiday party rules dispute that somehow turned into a standing Wednesday night group, and I've been keeping a paper log of what got played and what got read ever since, because I don't trust an app to remember it for me.

I write up the board games and the books that earn a second look, and occasionally the ones that don't. My reading runs toward continental philosophy and critical theory as much as fiction, Foucault and Latour sit on the same shelf as Le Guin and Camus, and I think that shows in how I review, I'm more interested in how a thing is built than in whether it's comfortable. I won't rate anything I haven't finished, which has cost me a few deadlines I set for myself and saved me from a few bad takes. My wife Deb reads most of these before they go up and tells me when a paragraph is more for me than for anyone else.

Where I am: Erie, Pennsylvania

Started this mostly to keep my own paper log honest. Still doing that.

What's here

Book reviews, board game reviews, and whatever else I feel like writing about. No schedule, no affiliate links, nothing sponsored. I write about a book or a game when I've actually finished it and have something to say, which is why the dates on here are irregular.