Isolation Report, Week #33

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Another two weeks gone in this seemingly endless pandemic, but of course it still doesn’t feel like we’re any closer to ... anything.  Honestly, even though the election will be done in another two weeks, it doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.  In the first place, two weeks these days can easily last two years, and, in the second place, the chances that we actually know who’s won on Election Night are so fucking slim that it doesn’t matter anyway.  I don’t give a shit: I’ve already voted.  It’s all waiting to see how it comes out in the wash for me at this point.

Today, I’ll give you thoughts on two things, one political, and one personal.  First, the political.

I’ve mostly been trying to ignore the whole Amy Coney Barrett thing: she’s going to get on the court no matter what happens in the hearings, so what’s the point in following them?  But I couldn’t help but hear about the moment where (Republican) John Cornyn asked her what she had been referring to during the hearing and she held up a blank notepad (to which Cornyn replied “impressive” ... because, you know, it takes a lot of effort to write nothing on a piece of paper).  This has been a source of many jokes, from both political camps: an unknown conservative described the blank page as a “list of Joe Biden’s accomplishments,” while comedian Kathy Griffin said it represented a “picture of his [Trump’s] brain scan.” What I haven’t heard anyone point out, though, is that a blank page is actually the perfect inspiration for Barrett’s “testimony”: it reminded her to keep her experssion entirely blank, her voice entirely neutral, and her statements entirely devoid of content.

And, honestly, it’s not even fair to pick on Barrett: any liberal judge in her position would do (as has done) the same.  Judges are full of opinions—it’s their fucking job description, for fuck’s sake—until you put them in front of Congress, and then all of a sudden they have no viewpoints on anything whatsoever.  There’s a metric shit-ton of “it wouldn’t be fair of me to talk about a case I might adjudicate one day” and “I have to keep an open mind until I hear the facts of such a case” and many other such empty platitudes.  So, if the point of Senate confirmation hearings is not to hear a judge’s opinions on the law, what the hell is the fucking point, anyway?

And we don’t have to stop there.  Over the past 4 years, we’ve seen and heard a whole fuck-ton of people “testifying” before Congress, and magically none of them remember any details about the stuff they’re supposed to be experts on, or the stuff they actually did themselves.  Sessions has appeared before Congress, and Dejoy has appeared before Congress, and Barr has appeared before Congress, and DeVos has appeared before Congress, and Mueller has appeared before Congress, and Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress, and can anyone name one single thing that has changed because of it?  It’s all pure theater at this point.

And then of course we have the debates ... it’s a fun little time where two people refuse to answer the questions they were actually asked or follow any of the “rules” set forth at the beginning.  At the end of the allotted time, you know absolutely nothing that you didn’t know going in, and all the “analysis” is centered around who flubbed a word or had a fucking fly on their head.  Let me be clear: the Democrats are not any better than the Republicans here.  I’ve often said that all answers in a debate—or even your average press conference—can be classified as one of 3 animals: a duck, a weasel, or a dead horse.  West Wing often gets accused of being “liberal porn,” but part of the reason it was so good was that even the Republicans on that show were better than the Democrats we have in real life.  Remember the episode in season 7 where Alan Alda’s character got his (Republican) campaign back on track by holding a press conference with the radical idea of just fucking answering all the reporters’ questions until they couldn’t think of any more?  When have you ever seen that done in real life?  Yeah, me neither.  And they wonder why we’d rather live in televsion land than in real life.

For the personal thing, I’ll let you know that this week I had my first, and quite possibly my only, colonoscopy.  I’ve told everyone I can think of that, if a doctor ever comes to me and says “you have to get another colonoscopy or you might die” I’m going to reply “let me think about it.” (And so I apologize if you’re one of the folks that had to hear that bon mot more than once.)  Now, if you don’t know what a colonoscopy is, it’s where they jam a camera on a tube up your ass and see how far they can get it up there, taking pictures and whatnot as they go.  Now that sounds horrifying, but the truth is that they knock you out completely for this whole thing, so you don’t actually feel anything.  You just go to sleep, and then you wake up, and you’re a bit bloated because you’ve had some extra air injected into your guts, but basically it’s like nothing happened.

So why do I say I’ll never do it again?  Well, those of you who’ve had this procedure before already know the answer: it’s the prep.  See, the day before, you can’t have any solid food.  Which is not great, but not terrible either.  I mean, you can still have water, and coffee or tea, and fruit juice.  I mean, no milk or cream in your coffee or tea, and no pulpy fruit juice, just clear stuff like apple or white grape, but that’s not bad.  And you can have chicken broth, which is not super filling, but better than nothing.  And you can have Jello and popsicles and sports drinks like Gatorade or VitaminWater, but certain colors are out (presumably because of the dyes): no red, no blue, no green, no purple.  Now, one of the (many) medical people I talked to in preparation for this preparation described this as “only leaving the crappy flavors.” But, as it happens, I love orange, as a flavor at least, so drinking orange Vitaminwater and “eating” orange Jello all day was just fine by me (orange popsicles, as it turns out, were not as yummy as my nostalgia had portrayed them).  So, still: not great, but not awful either.  Then there’s the medicine.

The first problem with the medicine is that someone decided that it was so disgusting that they needed to make it taste like fruit.  Unfortunately, this just makes it taste like disgusting fruit, which is still not great.  You have to mix it yourself, and then you have to drink it, slowly, but finish all 16 ounces within 30 minutes.  Slightly oxymoronic, but okay.  And you do this 3 times over the course of the day.  And the function of this medicine is to make you shit your guts out.  Because, you know: they don’t want any yucky stuff on their nice camera that they’re going to jam up your ass.  So they want you to get it all out.  All of it.  So, fine: spending more time on the toilet than not for roughly 7 hours is not my idea of a fun time, but, you know what?  We have technology for that now.  My kids spend 7 hours on the toilet all the time: you just need a phone or a tablet or what-have-you and you’re set.  But here’s the problem: after a while, you’re done.  There is literally nothing more to expel.  Except you’re still drinking this nasty-tasting shit, which somehow manages to come out exaclty as fast as it went in, and it’s all so violent and ... I dunno, repetitive.  And you know how you get when you have diarrhea for even just an hour and you start trying to raid your kids’ diaper ointment?  Yeah, multiply that by 7.  A fun time, it was not.

On the other hand, I now know that I do not have any polyps, cancerous or otherwise, that I do have diverticula, which are the breeding ground for diverticulitis, and I have some lovely pictures of the inside of my guts.  I thought about sharing them with you, but my family discouraged me.  They seemed to think you wouldn’t find them as fascinating as I do.  Ah, well: your loss.

In any event, my next virus isolation report will be from the far side of the election, so perhaps things will look better then.  But, given 2020 thus far, I shall not be holding my breath.

Saladosity, Part 16: Mexican

[This is the sixteenth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

(If you need a refresher about my salad-making lingo, go back and review our first salad.)

This is one of my all-time favorite salads.  It’s a little more of a pain to make, and I hadn’t made it in quite a while for that reason, but I returned to it recently and I fell in love all over again.  Admittedly I took a little shortcut this last time around, but I’ll point that out to you when we get there so that you can take it too, if you like.

The Protein

You have all sorts of options for protein here.  If you really want meat, your all-time best choice is whatever leftover taco meat you have from last night.  If you’re not prone to having any leftovers in that area, you might try taking a leftover chicken breast, dicing up part of it, applying a bit of taco seasoning (or chili powder, in a pinch), and heating it up for just a few seconds in the microwave.  If you’re really desperate and you simply must have meat, substitute canned chicken for the leftover chicken breast.

But you know what I’ve discovered?  It’s perfectly lovely without any meat at all.  Just use pistachios.  Now, you may say “but wait! pistachios aren’t Mexican!” No, in fact, pistachios are from the Middle East.  But they really do work here.  I don’t know that I can tell you why ... you’re just going to have to trust me on this one.  I will use leftover taco meat if it’s handy, and I’ve done the chicken thing a couple of times, but, honestly: pistachios are pretty damned good.  Sometimes better than meat.

Plus, you know, if you happen to subscribe to a vegetarian flavor of nutritional tribes, you don’t want the meat anyhow.  For paleo flavors, cashews are perfect.  I think the only reason to avoid the cashews would be if you’re allergic to them.  If so, first of all my condolences, but secondly, try the chicken.  It’s also a good call.

The Cheese

Obviously you want the shredded Mexican cheese blend that we talked about when we went shopping for meat and cheese.  If you’re being strict about the paleo and avoiding the dairy, you can omit the cheese and you won’t miss too much.  But I think it’s better with.

The Crunch

The go-to here would of course be crushed up tortilla chips.  But, whether Atkins or Whole30 or even Weight Watchers, corn chips are not considered an ideal choice for a healthy diet.  They’re grains, they’re carbs, and they add a decent chunk of calories.  So here’s where the plantain chips that we picked up when we went shopping for nuts come in.  Plantain chips are crappy for just eating straight out of the bag, but that should be considered a feature, not a bug.  What they’re great for is substituting:

• They make excellent “crackers”: have them with some cheese, or dip them in guacamole or hummus.
• They’re imperfect but surprisingly yummy nonetheless at playing the role of oats in granola.
• They’re not too shoddy at faking as potato chips, at least for culinary purposes.  Like on top of casseroles that called for crushed chips.
• They do a damned fine job as faux tortilla chips, if you crumble them up and put them on salads.

Just take a bag of plantain chips and beat it up a bit, then toss it into a zip-loc bag for maximum freshness.

The Dressing

What really gives this salad its kick is the guacamole dressing, and it is in fact the only salad where I’m going to recommend you use a “heavy” amount of dressing (which, remember, is defined as “more than you normally would”).  This dressing is so damn good, you’re just going to want a lot of it.

Now, the rough ingredients of the dressing are pretty basic: you need guacamole, sour cream, and some cilantro dressing.  The first two are pretty simple.

Remember that guacamole is one of the things we talked about when we went shopping for cold goods.  In our house, we’ve settled into a rhythm of buying those big boxes of Wholly Guacamole at Costco, tossing most of ’em into the freezer, and just rotating into the fridge as needed.  One container of that is the perfect amount for this dressing.  You could make guac fresh every time you wanted this salad ... but then you wouldn’t eat this salad that often, and that would be a shame.

Sour cream is sour cream.  One big spoonful should do it.  If you’re looking to avoid dairy, you could skip this part and it might be okay ... never tried it, personally.

The cilantro dressing is the only complicated part.  What I like to do when I’m feeling industrious is make my own.  Unlike having to make the guacamole part, this would something you do once a month or whatever, and then you just have it on hand every time.  I originally concocted my recipe (below) because my friendly neighborhood Trader Joe’s brand of cilantro dressing is heavy on the soybean oil, and I don’t like that.  Now, I’m going to be honest with you here: we’ve since discovered Primal, and they make a super yummy cilantro lime dressing—it’s not strictly Whole30 safe, but only because it contains (organic) honey, which ... c’mon: that’s a very small concession to make.  So use that if you don’t want to make your own.  But if you do want to try making it from scratch, just follow the directions below, and you won’t be disappointed.

Once you have the cilantro dressing, all you want to do is mix your guac and sour cream together in a bowl; it will be super-thick, so just drizzle in some cilantro dressing and stir, repeating until you get the consistency of a fairly thick dressing.  In my experience, if you get the consistency right, the taste will just automatically be perfect.

Cilantro Dressing

You’re going to need a food processor or blender for this one.  Pour in ⅓ of a cup of pepitas (those’re the roasted pumpkin seeds we bought when we went shopping for nuts), 2/3 of a cup of milk, ⅓ of a cup of oil (more on that in a sec), 2/4 of a cup of grated parmesan cheese, and ¼ of a cup of white wine vinegar.  (If you do it in the order I’ve suggested, and you do 2 ¼ cups for the parmesan instead of ½ cup, you’ll get by with only using 2 measuring cups and minimal mess.)

Which oil to use?  Well, use what you like, but I would try to avoid the “bad” oils like soybean, peanut, canola, or palm.  Avocado is amazing (that’s what Primal uses in theirs, for what it’s worth).  Grapeseed is also not bad.  I don’t think olive works well, taste-wise, but perhaps you feel differently.

Now add some chopped jalapeños.  I used to get them pre-chopped and canned from TJ’s, but then I started buying packages of fresh ones.  The fresh ones are more of pain, because you have to chop them yourself, and it is very easy to burn the crap out of yourself when learning to cut jalapeños, but eventually you get the hang of it, and one of those little packages of jalapeños is enough for 4 batches of this dressing (divie your choppped bits into 4 roughly equal piles, toss one in the blender, and freeze the other 3 for later).  But the canned is fine too.

Now you’re going to want to add about 5 cloves of garlic.  Feel free to substitute minced if you like; it’ll all end up that way in just a bit.

The last task of any complexity at all is to take a big bunch of cilantro (I typically use however much is in a Trader Joe’s pack of organic cilantro), separate out the stems, and toss the leaves in the blender.  We don’t need the stems for this recipe, but you can compost them, or perhaps you have an animal that might like them (our guinea pig always did).  Or, you know: just toss ’em.

Two heavy pinches of salt, 12 or so grinds of black pepper, and turn all that into a liquid.  Finally, remember that homemade mayo we made for our autumnal salad?  Make another batch, then immediately dump it into the blender.  This time, just pulse it a few times to mix it all together.  The resulting consistency should be a nice, viscous-but-not-thick liquid, which is perfect for some salads all on its own.  Also perfect for thinning out guacamole dressing while adding a whole bunch of flavor.

Mexican salad

Once again, you’re ready, and it’s just assembly.

• base veggies
• pistachios (or seasoned meat, if you prefer; slightly warm)
• crushed plantain chips
• shredded Mexican cheese
• guacamole dressing (heavy)

This one is a very hearty salad.  It’s got a nice crunch, but it’s really the smooth, creamy goodness of that guacamole dressing that makes it all come together.  For me, this is my entire meal, and I can’t get enough, so I typically make a huge one.  Try this once or twice and you will never look at a “taco salad” from a chain restaurant in the same way ever again.

Next time, we’ll get meaty.

Could have been Mark Twain ... or Confucius ...

I’m not feeling particularly well today, and it’s an off-week, so I think I’ll take the supposed advice of Voltaire (though Wikiquote refuses to confirm) and remain silent rather than to increase the quantity of bad blog posts.  He was ahead of his time, that Voltaire.  Or whoever actually said it.  Whatever they actually said.

Rotating Through the Gaming

[This is a post I wrote primarily for an audience of people who play TTRPGs in general, and D&D in particular.  Nearly three years ago now, I pondered starting separate blogs for my eclectic interests, but I never really did.  If I had, though, this would certainly be on the gaming blog.  So, if you’re not a gamer, you might want to give this one a pass.]

During the heyday of my old gaming group, there were always at least 3 or 4 of us who were willing to be GMs, but none of us who wanted to be the GM all the time.  For a while, we “solved” this apparent dilemma by just having one person GM until they got sick of it, then someone else would step up.  Everyone else would typically keep the same characters, even.  (The problem of what to do with the new GM’s old PC was, partially, what led to our policy on “GMPCs,” which will one day be its own blog post.)  But, eventually, we came up with a new idea: game rotation.

The idea was fairly simple: everyone who was willing to be a GM, and who had a good idea for a campaign, would go into the rotation, and we’d do a different campaign every week (we typically gamed once every week).  Being the nerds we were, we managed to complicate it a bit more than that by instituting a voting system.  Basically, at the end of each session, the GM for that session would say either “okay, that’s all I had prepared,” or they could say “I could go again, if you guys want to.” If they said the former, the next person in the rotation was up, the end.  If, however, they said the latter, then the other players would vote: were we actually interested in continuing this particular campaign for another week, or were we ready to move on?  Simple majority made the decision.  I would guess that maybe half the time that the GM indicated they were amenable to continuing, we voted to do so.  The other half, we would just move on, and that GM had a leg-up on their next turn at bat.  No one ever took offense, that I recall, for saying they could go on but being voted down to do so.  And I would guess that, over the nearly ten years we employed this system, the number of times we voted to play the same game a third week in a row could be counted in the fingers of one hand.

Short version: we switched campaigns a lot.

And I’ve been really excited to talk about this system for a while now, because there were a lot of great things about it.  Here are the primary reasons this was a fantastic system:

• No one ever got sick of being the GM: you were only doing it once a month or so.
• No one ever got sick of their characters: you were only playing that person once a month or so.  The rest of the time, you got be someone entirely different.
• Being exposed to different GMs with different styles is good for players, and in turn it makes them better GMs.
• It relieved a lot of the pressure for those who wanted to try being the GM for the first time.  You only had to worry about doing it for one week, and then, best case, you’d have 3 or 4 weeks to work up the courage to go again, and, worst case, you could say “man, I really didn’t like doing that!” and everyone had 3 or 4 other games to enjoy, so: no big deal.
• Assuming you were sticking with it, instead of having only a week to prepare some elaborate adventure, you basically had a month.  As we all got older and busier, this particular advantage cannot be overestimated.
• Since you did have the option of bowing out if things got too complex or too overwhelming, everyone felt more freedom to be experimental.  Try something new!  What the hell: worse come to worst, we can just toss out that campaign and you can come up with a better idea next time.
• Perhaps the best of all, we tried new things.  New settings for D&D, sure, but whole new systems.  We played Vampire (the Masquerade) and Mage (the Ascension), we played Star Wars (both the d6 and d20 versions), we played GURPS and Traveller and Call of Cthulhu.  We played weird shit, like the Wheel of Time RPG and In Nomine and homebrew shit we made up ourselves.  Because, again: why not try something new?  Could be fun for a while, you might discover a new love, and, as always, the worst case was we’d just fallback on our several other campaigns.

So it was an awesome system that we employed, as I say, for what I’m pretty sure was close to a decade.  But, you know, it wasn’t perfect.  There are a few downsides to this system:

• Even though you’re gaming every week, it’s often the case that it’s been a month since you played the character you’re picking up on any given night.  It’s sometimes hard to remember where you were in the story and sometimes even who your character actually is, especially for newer campaigns.
• Being experimental is awesome, but it does mean there are failed experiments.  I only got in a few sessions of my awesome gender-fluid Trinity character, only one of my Shadowrun character (who I can’t ever remember now), and none for my Hero or BESM characters.  I also don’t remember what I came up with for BESM, but my Hero character was a decently interesting Jekyll-and-Hyde type who I was kind of looking forward to.  (Hero is one of the few systems where that kind of character is actually buildable without jumping through a million hoops and bending a billion rules.)  Better that we tried and failed than never to have tried at all, I suppose, but they were bittersweet experiences, for sure.

These are all important considerations.  Still, I feel the good outweighed the bad, and I would definitely recommend this system to any gaming group looking to solve some of the same issues we had.  When I decided to make playing D&D with my kids a weekly thing—effectively replacing my old gaming group with one that I grew myself—I knew that I would have to institute game rotation again.  Primarily because being the sole GM in a serious, weekly game at this point in my life would probably kill me.  I already stress myself out constantly over how little time I have to do all the things I want to accomplish.  This should be a fun thing with my kids, not something that makes me feel like I’m failing to get shit done in my life.

Of course, my youngest 2 children aren’t ready to GM yet (okay, that’s what I thought ... originally).  So what we came up with was a system of 4 campaigns to rotate through:

• The Family Campaign, which I run, is our long-term, serious one where everyone has put the most work into their characters.  It’s the one where I spend the majority of my prep time.
• The Clown Campaign is another one I run, but this one we run straight “out of the book,” so to speak (that means that we use a pre-published adventure where most of the work is done for you).  For this one, we chose Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (which is, weirdly, neither about a dragon nor a heist), which is a fun, somewhat open but somewhat constrained, flexible adventure that I can have fun with at the same time that I don’t have to put too much effort into.  The campaign derives its name from the fact that the 3 characters are former clowns who came to Waterdeep with the circus and then wandered off to have other adventures.
• The Freak Campaign is being run by my eldest.  It’s also D&D, but it’s even less serious than the Clown Campaign: it’s specifically where a bunch of wacky characters (I play a unicorn, my middlest plays a nothic, and my youngest plays a homebrewed half-elf-half-changeling staff master) meet in Sigil and then get kidnapped by crazy lich who just wants to send them off on adventures while they watch, because they’re bored of having been alive for so long.  Our first mission was to raid a black dragon’s hoard (we started at 7th level for this one), and now we’re running through an updated version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
• The Lizard Campaign, also run by my eldest, is our primary non-D&D campaign.  It’s ostensibly a Shadowrun campaign (meaning it uses the standard Shadowrun setting), but we started out doing a Powered by the Apocalypse version called Sixth World.  Lately, the kid has been playing around with a homebrewed conversion to mostly-5e rules.  But, either way, it’s a very not-fantasy, cyberpunk-y sort of campaign where the 3 of us are all reptilian based mutant siblings: I play the oldest sibling, a crocodile man with some spirit powers, my middle child plays the middle sibiling, a chameleon ninja; and my youngest is the youngest, a lizard hacker.  Tone-wise, it’s somewhere slightly more serious than the Clown Campaign but less so than the Family Campaign.

Additionally, my youngest—remember, she’s still only 8 at the moment—has already jumped in to to try GMing, running a Dungeon World game (with my eldest as assistant GM) which we sometimes call the Red/Blue Campaign, due to its setting in a divided city where, on one side, everyone dresses in red, and, on the other ... well, you get the picture.  The city is ruled by a king and queen (one on each side), who have two twin daughters, tragically separated by their parents’ division.  I play a dhampir (that’s a half-vampire, for those unfamiliar with the term) and my middle child plays an otter-kin (that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like), and our goal seems to be to reunite the city.  Once we can figure out why it was spearated in the first place.  Did I mention that this kid is 8?  It’s a fairly complex plot, overall.  But she doesn’t always have the patience to be in charge.

My middle child has zero interest in being in charge of anything.

Now, we have a tendency to play these games 2 or 3 weeks in a row way more often than my old group did, but that’s partially due to my kids not having the stubbornness to stay up all night like we used to when I was young.  Many times after a few hours, they start to run out of steam, so we just call it and say “let’s play this again next week!” We’re about 2 months away from our one-year anniversary since we started this system, and this is what our rotation has worked out to so far:

• 12/11/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 12/18/19: Clown Campaign
• 12/26/19: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 1/8/20: Lizard Campaign
• 1/15/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 1/20/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/7/20: Clown Campaign
• 2/12/20: Lizard Campaign
• 2/19/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/22/20: Family Campaign (flashbackstories)
• 2/26/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/4/20: Family Campaign
• 3/13/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/18/20: Lizard Campaign
• 3/25/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/1/20: Clown Campaign
• 4/8/20: Family Campaign
• 4/15/20: Family Campaign
• 4/22/20: Family Campaign
• 4/29/20: Family Campaign (finish up), Freak Campaign (intro)
• 5/6/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/13/20: Freak Campaign
• 5/27/20: Clown Campaign
• 6/3/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 6/10/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/17/20: Freak Campaign
• 6/24/20: Family Campaign
• 7/1/20: Family Campaign
• 7/8/20: Family Campaign
• 7/15/20: Red/Blue Campaign
• 8/6/20: Family Campaign
• 8/26/20: Family Campaign
• 9/9/20: Family Campaign
• 9/16/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/23/20: Freak Campaign
• 9/30/20: Freak Campaign
• 10/7/20: Clown Campaign (proposed)

There have been a few weeks when we skipped roleplaying (often on those nights we would play other games, like Munchkin or Stuffed Fables or whatnot), and that one night where we played half a session of one campaign and then half a session of the next one, but overall we’re not doing too badly keeping to the schedule, if with a lot more contiguous runs than we used to have in my old group.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if people are keeping interested and not getting bored.  Which so far seems to be the case.

Maybe this is a system that your gaming group wants to explore, especially if you have a “one person GMs all the time” style group currently.  Give your GM a chance to shine as a player for a change!  Let your players experiment in the GM’s chair without the pressure of “this is what we’re doing now” looming over them.  Try out some new games as a change of pace.  Variety is the spice of life, so they say.  Why not extend that metaphor to your tabletop gaming?