Avengers fanfic - recommended!

Phil Coulson's son is kidnapped from their front lawn, along with his stuffed tiger. The son's name is Calvin, if you don't recognize it then you still may enjoy it.

It's a short read, completely SFW, take you maybe 10 minutes to buzz through it.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/4173930

Self-powered regulator for Type 1 diabetes!

This is amazingly cool stuff.

Scientists have created a literal fuel cell to help control insulin production. It's an implant, sort of like a tea bag, about the size of a fingernail. If your body produces too much glucose, it permeates the fuel cell and it produces insulin! Your glucose level drops, it turns off!

It works in mice models, they hope to get money for human studies.

https://newatlas.com/medical/sugar-powered-implant-diabetes/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/03/30/0322237/sugar-powered-implant-successfully-manages-type-1-diabetes

Smart cars? Smarter car thieves.

Did you know that the latest in cars have built-in computer networks? It's called a CAN, a Controller Area Network. And thieves have figured out how to exploit it to steal cars!

It's a lot like IOT, the Internet Of Things. Even the headlights in a car can be intelligent devices, I don't want to think about how much those cost to replace! Anyway, thieves have figured out that if they can get access to the CAN, they can tell it to unlock the car, disable the anti-theft interlocks like engine immobilizers, and they are away!

The basic problem is the exact same problem that the Internet has. When the Internet was being developed back in the early days, the engineers trusted in the better angels of humankind, and didn't accept the fact that the world has a ridiculously large number of people who are shitgibbons and enjoy destroying nice things that everyone could enjoy. This resulted in a huge number of exploitable weaknesses in the original internet as every device that connected to it was trusted to be well-behaved and no malice behind it. It didn't take long for that assumption to be disproven and the engineers have been forever trying to make the Internet more secure.

Same problem with CANs. Every device in the car that plugs into it is trusted. No code-signing, no security certificates, so anything that connects to it has full access to the control computer, which probably doesn't have much in the way of security precautions built-in. Override or trick the computer, and you're in.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/06/can_injection_attack_car_theft

More on Settlers of Catan and Klaus Teuber

I knew Ars Technica would have a write-up on the passing of Klaus and how much Catan means around the world.

Monopoly is/was held as a pinnacle of board games. I hate it with a deep and abiding loathing reserved for things that I deeply and abidingly loathe. It is a horrible game. This article quotes a statistic that says the average Monopoly set is played ONE POINT FIVE TIMES. Now THAT is a truly horrible game! It isn't FUN because you're constantly getting screwed, people are eliminated one by one. It is a runaway winner game: once someone gets certain properties and has hotels on them, game over.

There are house rules that can slow this down, but the progression is largely going to be the same.

Catan, and other games like it, brought cooperation into competitive board games. And you can feel like you're in the running until the very end, so you have a reason to pay attention to what's going on. In the case of Catan, you are encouraged to cooperate and trade resources with others in order to complete your personal goals. The infamous "I have wood for sheep" became a part of gaming vernacular because of Catan, in this case, someone wanting to trade wood for needed sheep.

I didn't hate Monopoly when I was young, but I never liked it. It just wasn't fun. Now, this was back in the '60s and '70s, Euro Games hadn't really been invented yet and we were stuck with what we had. As I grew older and experienced a wider panoply of games, I saw the flaws for what they were: eliminating players/zero-sum, and runaway leaders. And now, I don't know of any games that I own that have these characteristics. When I get a game like Monopoly, or someone gives me a set, I harvest the money and the pawns and consider keeping the board, all for repurposing for game designs that I work on. It never gets played.

Last year my middle niece got married, and their registry asked for board games. I looked at that list and said 'Nope, no way. They're getting some QUALITY intro board games from me!' And among them, I gave them Carcasonne, a brilliant tile-laying game about building castles and towns in medieval France. Every game is completely different, you play to the end and it's a lot of fun. You score points every turn, which helps you feel like you're accomplishing something. My nieces, sister, and parents already had a lot of experience playing Quirkle, a color/shape tile-laying game, where, again, you score points every turn and there are a couple of twists that can really boost your score! AND you draw tiles from a bag, which is cool.

Now, Catan itself, I'm not a huge fan of. Perhaps if I played it more some of the deeper strategies would sink in and I'd do better at it. But it's a good enough game and I have a couple of copies including some expansions that I bought when game stores went out of business. But socially, an infinitely better game than Monopoly. Everyone participates, even when it's not your turn: while only the turning player can make trades, you might have extra sheep you can offer up and better your own position while helping someone else.

Even if I'm not a huge fan of it, Catan is a great game and well worth people's time. It is not hideously complex, and it's a fast game to learn and play, it typically finishes in about an hour. When was the last time you were able to play multiple games of Monopoly in an evening and enjoy it?

RIP, Klaus. Ya done good and made a huge number of people happy.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/klaus-teuber-made-catan-and-it-changed-the-worlds-expectations-for-board-games/

The comments on this Ars article are excellent and a recommended read. You really get a feeling for how many people his game touched.

And one last comment. While Klaus did a great job, he is just one of the great game designers out there. Reiner Knitzia is right up there with an insane number of games to his credit, as is Friedman Frisch with the great game Power Grid. Both win awards. There are far more out there than I'll ever be able to name.