TV: Disney's One Saturday Morning

I'm old enough to remember when Disney was content to put their cartoons on broadcast television the old-fashioned way, with commercials and all. Most famous was Disney's 2-hour Saturday morning cartoon block, One Saturday Morning:

A lot of the shows were duds, of course, but some were as clever and well-animated as anything out there in the late '90s/early '00s. The big ones were Disney's Doug (famously poached from Nickelodeon), Recess, and Pepper Ann, which pitted imaginative school-aged children against the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Streaming is great and all, but there was something special about having an appointed time each week when a kid could grab a bowl of cereal, plop down in front of the TV, and just be entertained for awhile without worrying about math tests or school bullies.

Miscellany: Love Letter

I've been looking up travel friendly games for a fall road trip, and one title that keeps coming up is Love Letter, designed by Seiji Kanai. It's a light deduction card game for 2-4 players with a whole lot of random chance built in:

At the start of a turn, a player draws a card and decides whether to play that card, or the one already in their hand. The cards all have special abilities, like looking at other player's cards or eliminating players outright based on various conditions. The easiest way to victory is by being the last player standing, though you can also win simply by having the highest value card after all the cards are drawn.

Love Letter is impressive mainly because of how much strategy it mines from 16 cards, all of which have pluses and minuses. For example, the "Princess" is the highest value card for scoring purposes, but it's downright dangerous to its holder. The game is small enough to be carried in a pocket and perfect for travel. Of course, there are now a bajillion different versions of Love Letter, some of which introduce small tweaks to the rules, but I recommend trying the vanilla game first.

Links: Blogroll updates

As time goes by, blogs come and go, sometimes quietly so.

I'm sad to say that Shamus Young, creator of the gamewriting blog Twenty Sided, passed away in June.  While I'm removing his blog from the blogroll, it's no reflection on the quality of the content there - years and years (and several books') worth of advice, much of it focused on the unique craft of video game writing.

I'm also taking off Hell in a Handbasket - this gun and self-defense blog has been dormant for a year now, but I always hoped James would start posting again. Regrettably, now the link is dead and the posts are all down.

I'm adding GAT Daily to the blogroll - it's a group blog with a mix of interesting posts and gun industry news.  While it looks like they sometimes post sponsored content without marking it as such (this post on the P365 Proforce, for example), on the whole it's a decent stop on your daily gun reads.