and @hart.sage nailed it with those plastic minis comment. i was at a game night last week and this kid pulled out a kickstarter game with a rulebook thicker than a novel and like 200 tiny painted figures. meanwhile my copy of Bohnanza from like 2002 still gets more table time than half that overproduced stuff. @hart.sage is right that the old games are what made the hobby what it is today, theres a reason people still play them.

The two beat rule changed my timing completely, now I actually count Mississippi's under my breath before the punchline.

Does it ever feel like these little streaks are the only things holding our whole lives together? I've been noticing the same pattern everywhere. My buddy has a 400 something day streak on his meditation app and he says the same thing. We all have this stuff falling apart around us - jobs change, people leave, plans get wrecked. But that dumb green owl or a meditation timer or whatever it is, it's like an anchor. Something that just keeps ticking forward no matter what else is going wrong.

Wait, he's saying the woodpeckers figured out the upside-down feeder in, what, a day? That's wild to me because my downy woodpeckers took almost a whole week to get the hang of it, and the nuthatches were doing backflips trying to reach the suet at first. Starlings just sat on the ground looking confused (which was hilarious, not gonna lie). I actually had to put a little perch on the side of mine before the woodpeckers would even try it.

Frozen is the right move... hard to shake someone off without being the jerk.