Botez High Gloss Spanish Veneered Chess Board ($190 on sale) + Silver and Black Chess Pieces ($70).

It's a big wood chess board with Botez signature on one corner. The deluxe pieces are weighted and fit comfortably on the board. For some reason the silver pieces feel underweight -- i guess because they're not actually metal.

This board came out 3+ years ago and this after a long time in development as Alexandra tried out various manufacturers and materials.


Anna Cramling Edition Chess Set ($150)

Another wooden board though not a glossy coating like the Botez board. There is a stylized AC monogram. About half the area of the Botez board and although it comes with pieces they do feel a bit light. I guess the Botez set is more tournament size and piece weight and Anna's set is more personal.

It comes in a nice box with two compartments to hold the pieces which are also in cloth bags.

I remember people complaining about the price but Anna has the cheapest set of the three and it's quite nice. Good chess sets are not cheap.


Neochess x Nemo Special Edition Chess Set ($495)

Nemo took like a year designing the board (though not the pieces). It's a wood board and Chinese themed: red and black squares with two gold dragons + jade and black colored pieces. A little Neochess x Nemo logo on opposite sides of the board. The board is a bit bigger than Anna's and the squares go edge to edge (Anna's has a-h, 1-8 on two sides to help beginners); as such the squares are almost as big as the Botez board.

The pieces are as tall as the Botez ones with a slightly smaller base so they fit comfortably. You could use the Botez pieces on Nemo's board though the big pieces are a bit too large for the squares. Piece weight is very slightly less than Botez pieces.

The box has a styrofoam container so each piece is in its own nook.


Botez board is big and shiny and not really transportable. Suitable for setting up on a coffee table and leaving it out. Anna and Nemo have more portable sets especially since they each have a box, but still too big to fit in my backpacks -- maybe in a big hiking/camping backpack.

I like bigger and heavier pieces so I'd rank Anna's set at #3. I think I'd go with Nemo's set at #1 because it's carry-able while still having big pieces. So final rankings:

1. Nemo Chess Set
2. Botez Wood Chess Set (they also have a rubber flex pad board)
3. Anna Cramling Chess Set

The Last of the Sea Women (2024) [/] Documentary film about the haenyeo -- Korean women (used to be men but the work was too hard for them) living in Jeju island (and apparently Geoje island) who make their living free diving harvesting the coastal ocean floor. From a height of 30k in the 1960's there are about 4k now in Jeju and predominantly 60+ years old. We meet a couple of 30-something Geoje island haenyeo who have a YouTube channel promoting their livelihood and why it's beautiful. A big chunk is devoted to their fight to prevent Japan from releasing irradiated water from the Fukushima power plant that had a meltdown. Although the last is important I feel that was a lot of time not devoted to the haenyeo themselves and their ways. By the way I reviewed the K-drama Welcome to Samdal-ri which features haenyeos.

Mini Stopwatch - Minimal Timer (2025) [+] A free macOS menu bar stopwatch. Click and it starts, click and it stops, double click and it rests. There are a few more features if you upgrade to pro for $8 but what it has is all I need.

Stopwatch˚ (2024) [/] A free stopwatch app for iPhone/iPad. The default view has folders and multiple timers and annoyingly often has a rate me which I've done and still it comes up the next time. There's a second tab which is just one stopwatch in a UI very similar to Apple Clock's stopwatch tab. I think the only difference is Stopwatch wants you to confirm when you reset the timer. I only use the second tab and one stopwatch (I use Mini Stopwatch as a second stopwatch that runs on my Mac).

Rice-a-Roni Thai Curry Chicken [-] Rice + vermicelli. This one is red curry and a little sweet. Easy to make though I guess the flavor is a bit too subtle for me. And I'm not as much of a fan of sweet entrées. I guess I want a more spicy curry. Probably will skip in the future.

Eternity is an Apple TV romantic comedy set in the afterlife. At the age of 70-something Larry (Miles Teller) chokes on a pretzel and dies and ends up in the afterlife which turns out to be an underground train-station-slash-hotel. His AC (afterlife coordinator) Anna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) tells him that after you die you get to choose the Eternity you'll spend in. As such there are many worlds and many sales people trying to get newly dead to choose their right Eternity (a fair amount of humor comes from the various Eternities, like Jane Austen World or Smoker's World, and there are lots of posters that the camera pans by but are not otherwise noted).

Larry though wants to wait for his wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) so they can choose an Eternity together. He meets a bartender, Luke (Callum Turner), who is also waiting and that Larry can do the same by getting some sort of job in the afterlife. But later Anna finally convinces Larry to choose an Eternity and if Joan later shows up there then it's Fate. Just in time Joan shows up having died a decade-plus later (I guess time works different in the afterlife).

Great! Larry and Joan are reunited but complication when it turns out Luke is Joan's first husband, a dashing World War II soldier who died overseas. Larry on the other hand seems a bit like a schmuck who caught her on the rebound and from the glimpses we've seen so far maybe not the happiest of marriages. So now Joan has to choose who to live Eternity with (the guys flat out reject Joan's suggestion that all three could share an Eternity) and the next part is her going a date with each where Larry comes off second best.

Eventually Joan chooses Luke and they go off to their Eternity. (Oh I forgot to mention once you go into an Eternity you can't ever come back and if you do they catch you and you end up in Limbo forever.) Joan and Luke have a great time for a couple of weeks then Joan starts to miss Larry. I also forgot that they showed each Eternity has a museum where you can see your past as if watching a play. Joan starts going to the museum every day to relieve her life with Larry and we start to see he was actually a good guy and good to Joan.

Joan decides to come back to afterlife and find Larry even though she'll probably fail and end up in Limbo...

It's a small budget film ($12M which seems low considering the sets and effects) and a nice story. Elizabeth Olsen is good. Miles Teller can be suitably uncharming and charming. Callum Turner pulls off the clean-cut 1940's male. The ending is satisfying. Kind of like with Fly Me to the Moon the concept I wasn't sure of but it turned out well.

On the Grid: Life Behind the Scenes of Formula 1 is a book by Formula 1 reporter Luke Smith. It combines interviews done during 2023 along with his experiences probably in 2023 and 2024. There is a bit about Lewis Hamilton leaving his team at the end of the 2024 season (which ends in December) and going to Ferrari so that's as far as the book covers.

Chapters

1. Smoke and Mirrors - About testing cars and misleading the competition.
2. The Billionaire Boys' Club - About the drivers and how one goes from minor competitions all the way to F1 and how expensive it is (tens to low hundreds of thousands per year going up as kid drivers graduate from level to level) until you can get sponsors
3. Off the Grid - Anecdote of an F1 team member who left and started a business and how F1 teams helped during COVID-19
4. Champagne Problems - Monaco and how it's an uninteresting F1 race (because it's an old track with less passing) yet is so prestigious with the rich; also about the champagne used in F1 podium celebrations and how it was switched to some other alcoholic drink.
5. Our Deadly Passion, Our Terrible Joy - Recent deaths in F1 and how it has affected drivers
6. Track Runner - Designing race tracks with a closer look at COTA (the track near Austin, TX)
7. Fantastic Fans - Fans and podcasts
8. "Stick to Sports" - Women drivers in the various leagues under F1 with mention of F1 Academy the all-women league. Also women in the F1 workforce.
9. The Race for Change - Mostly about F1's work to reduce its carbon footprint, which predominantly comes from travel/shipping to 24 race locations around the world.
10. Checkered Flag - Hobbies of F1 drivers but also their love of racing.

The writing style is about daily newspaper level. Easy to read and not scholarly.

It started slow but I really liked the book as it shows a bunch of stuff that I don't see during an F1 race broadcast. Even though I'm new to F1 and have watched two races and not sure of all the rules this was still an interesting book -- it's not a book that you need to know F1 to appreciate.

Overall a good read and great to pair with watching F1 on Apple TV.

Babylon 5 s1 (1994) [/] I rewatched this on Tubi (important note, Tubi has the pilot The Gathering at the end of the season so watch that first). I remember this was very good tv CGI at the time, a bit revolutionary, but now it does look quite bad. The stories and acting are still fine. Season one builds up the universe and sets up things for future seasons and it's good that J. Michael Straczynski plotted it out so that any character could leave between seasons which happened when Commander Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O'Hare) had to leave for undisclosed reasons at the time but after his death Straczynski said it was because O'Hare was suffering from mental illness.

Melo Movie (2025) [-] South Korean drama/romance of ten hour-long episodes. Movie lover, bit-part actor, and later film critic Ko Gyeom (Choi Woo-shik) falls for film production crew and later movie director Kim Mu-bee (Park Bo-young; Oh My Ghost, 2015; Doom at Your Service, 2021) and relentlessly pursues her in a way that's quite annoying. They both/will have tragedies in their lives and part of their growth is coming to terms with those tragedies. It's actually kind of a depressing series as even the B-plot between Gyeom's friends -- composer Hong Si-jun (Lee Jun-young) and writer Son Ju-a (Jeon So-nee) -- is about their breakup, meeting again and working together seven years later, and Si-jun finally coming to terms that he and Ju-a are really over... Overall this is a rare K-drama miss.

Junkworld TD (2023) [/] Apple Arcade post-apocalyptic tower defense game. You have towers to place and upgrade. You have a hero with special powers. You have a limited number of minions to place (many maps have multiple routes and your hero can't cover everywhere). Nice graphics and gameplay. Played four levels. Kind of fairly typical for a TD game but a nice theme as so many other TD games are fantasy or less serious.

Project Superpowers Omnibus v1: Dawn of Heroes (2018) [/] Using a lot of Golden Age public domain heroes this series by Jim Krueger and Alex Ross explores a modern day world where all the WW2 heroes disappeared eventually letting the behind-the-scenes shadowy Supremacy essentially take over the world. Now the heroes have returned finding themselves changed and painted as terrorists as they try to free America which has become a rather Fascist state... Really good art. Interesting story. Way too many characters. Some of the more popular characters get their own Dynamite series or interact with the larger Dynamite properties.

Chief of War is a historical drama centering on the unification of Hawaii under King Kamehameha. Season one is on Apple TV and runs nine 45-minute episodes (three of the episodes seem longer but have about 10 minutes of documentary interviews with cast and crew).

Jason Momoa plays Ka'iana, former Chief of War of Maui, who is currently an outcast living on Kaua'i with his brothers Namake (Te Kohe Tuhaka) and Nāhi (Siua Ikaleʻo), and Ka'iana's his wife(?) Kupuohi (Te Ao o Hinepehinga) and her sister Heke (Mainei Kinimaka).

King Kahekili of Maui (Temuera Morrison) lures Ka'iana back to lead his army against O'ahu because they are planning on invading Maui. Unfortunately it was a deception, the O'ahuans are friendly and peaceful and it's a slaughter and their young king is executed leaving King Kahekili in control of two of the four kingdoms.

Once again Ka'iana flees. Due to mishap he gets separated from the rest and ends up rescuing Kaʻahumanu (Luciane Buchanan), a princess of Hawaiʻi. She ends up leaving for Hawaiʻi with Ka'iana's group while Ka'iana himself ends up on a passing merchant ship and spends over a year on this ship as it travels around the Pacific.

During that time Ka'iana learns Western ways and how to shoot a gun. With a shipment of guns he returns to Hawaiʻi and reunites with his group who are under the protection of Chief Kamehameha (Kaina Makua), ruler of one of the six districts of Hawaiʻi. Kamehameha's uncle recently took the throne but the old King granted Chief of War to Kamehameha which results in a power struggle. Kamehameha wants peace but King Keōua (Cliff Curtis) can't stand any competition to his rule.

There's some interaction with another white man merchant ship though this one more mercenary and ruthless than the one that took in Ka'iana. After a historical massacre perpetrated by the bad white men the last couple of episodes leads up to and covers the epic battle between King Keōua and Chief Kamehameha's armies in the Black Desert (volcanic fields) and the volcano erupts during the battle.

Oh, I forgot that Ka'iana also brings to Hawaiʻi his friend Tony (James Udom), a freed slave and good with guns. There's also John Young (Benjamin Hoetjes) from the first merchant ship who was accidentally left behind. In the year since he's been teaching English to Chief Kamehameha's people so by the time Ka'iana returns there's a fair amount of English. It's 100% native Hawaiian speech and after that still like 2/3rds Hawaiian speech which is pretty cool.

A lot of the cast are Hawaiians. A lot of filming in Hawaii including the Black Desert.

It's a pretty good series with lots of drama and action, and a lot of bloody action at that. Season one covers a lot but there's still King Kahekili for the next season and I guess it would go three seasons full run though at this point season two hasn't been greenlit. Still, season one has a satisfying arc to it and is worth watching whether or not there are further seasons.

RUN! is a fun simple card game from Haven Hurst Press. The concept is you and your friends running away from an angry bear and is usual in the saying, the slowest person gets eaten.

Each player starts with three cards, most of whom have a number (-2 to +7) but some are special (copy another card or steal a card or trade cards and so on). On your turn you can take the top card from either the draw pile or discard pile then you discard a card. At that point you can yell "Run!" and everyone else gets a final turn. Oh, if someone draws the bear card it's immediately a "Run!" situation.

Player with the lowest score loses a life and when you lose three lives you're out.

The rounds go fairly quick especially with more players I think: if your initial draw is fairly good just "Run!" since you're unlikely to die. With four players the second game took us about half an hour so it plays fast.

It's a simple enough game that my 10-year old nephew was competitive with adults and it's not a kids game so at least it's entertaining for a while to adults (and I suppose could make a great drinking game).

The Old Guard 2 (2025) [/] "Andy" Andromache (Charlize Theron) is back leading a team of immortal mercenaries. At the end of the last movie she had been turned mortal but that's kind of quickly restored but at least that plot device is the big motivation of the big villain Discord (Uma Thurman), the First Immortal? Also Discord brings back Andy's great love Qu`ynh (Veronica Ngô) who is resentful that Andy gave up searching for her 500 years ago... Has some good action scenes but ends in a cliffhanger with the story half done so I wouldn't recommend this movie until part 3 comes out, if it ever does.

Messi's World Cup: The Rise of a Legend (2024) [+] Documentary in four 45-minute parts. The main framework is Argentina's 2022 World Cup run with one episode mostly devoted to each of two group play games, the quarter finals game vs Netherlands, and the final vs France. Besides lots of interview footage with the players (during and afterwards) there is stuff Lionel Messi's origins, career, previous World Cup disappointments, and what he means to the Argentine people. I really liked the four featured games as the narration and editing is good to make them exciting.

Japanese Rural Life Adventure (2023) [/] Apple Arcade game. JRPG 8-bit graphics game where you go to an abandoned Japanese countryside home, fix it up and plant crops and maybe there are actual adventures. But it seems to be mostly doing routing things in a JRPG way. For example you get a quest to clean the bedroom, but you need materials and you go to the storehouse and find them, then walk back and do the cleaning task. Definitely its own relaxing vibe, if you can stand it.

Ming Tasty, Sunnyvale [/] Cheap Chinese food restaurant. We had one of the family meals, soup + 3 entrees with rice extra. That was enough food for four people and a kid and it came out to $60. Food is pretty average so that's good enough.

Reverse 4 You is a Thai romance drama running eight 40-minute episodes.

Older sister Jattawa (Mae Methakarn Anektanasuwan) is a college student with the power to pause or turn back time up to 10 minutes. Her younger sister Vivi (Manao Natnicha Polsombat) gets visions of the future but only as it relates to Jattawa.

Vivi tells Jattawa she will meet her great love but it turns out to be campus bully Four (Christine Gulasatree Michalsky) so it must be wrong especially since Jattawa has had a couple of bad run-ins with Four. But it turns out Four is actually attracted to Jattawa and Jattawa pays more attention she realizes Four is not as bad as she seems.

There are a couple of complications: Four's inheritance is threatened by her evil step mom and half brother who may not actually be her father's son, and later Jattawa dreams that Vivi will die but when she stops one another possible death pops up. But with eight episodes the complications are rather shallow and really so is the romance.

Overall entertaining but not engrossing.

Retro Goal+ is the Apple Arcade version of Retro Goal. Like for Retro Bowl you are a new coach put in charge of a struggling soccer team. In Retro Bowl you only have NFL-equivalent teams to choose from but here you can choose a country then a league then a specific city -- I assume all the cities are there but not the club names.

Your team is a representative best six players and players have Speed, Agility, Reflexes, Handling, and Condition. They also have Age, Morale, an optional Trait, Value, and XP Level. You can borrow players and I assume lend out players. I don't think there's a salary cap but you only have so much money though you're earning some after each game.

You can set up your formation and place your star players and choose the tactics (balance, all out defend, attack wing, etc.). You can change these settings in the middle of a game.

You have three facilities to improve: Stadium (bigger stadiums have bigger box office receipts ceiling), Training, Youth Academy. Up to two assistant coaches.

Gameplay during a game is key moments. A key moment starts where you have the ball. You can pass the ball and as soon as the pass starts you control the receiver. If the other team gets the ball you can switch control to the closest player and try to get the ball back. It's not quite frantic action -- speed slows down to a crawl when you're setting up a kick. If you lose control of the ball eventually the moment ends and the game goes to the next moment, so in general you're doing like half a dozen moments for a full game.

It's a flavorful and accessible version of soccer action plus management. Unfortunately unlike Retro Bowl there is no auto-play mode so you have to play out each game so a season can take a long time to play. For me I don't particularly want to play out each game so eventually this game is a pass for me.

Slow Horses s5 (2025) [/] Another season another pretty much self-contained scenario of this dark comedy domestic spy series (and the first episode starts out with a mass shooting event so it's pretty dark). I kind of like how the bad guys keep changing the game until finally Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) outsmarts them. The final shootout River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), and J.K. Cole (Tom Brooke) is pretty neat and shows off their characters fairly well.

Samba de Amigo: Party-To-Go (2023) [/] Apple Arcade rhythm-based music game. Kind of requires having your iPad on a stable surface so you can use both hands freely. As usual lots of combinations of moves and there are 40 songs and a story mode to give your gameplay more meaning. Seems ok but I'm very bad at these games so it's a pass.

My Talking Angela 2+ (2023) [/] Apple Arcade version which removes the in app purchases. Angela 2 is a female cat and all you seem to do is dress her and style her hair and face. There are some activities you can have her do (dancing, baking, martial arts according to the description) but I didn't get that far. It's a kid's game and I guess a companion to My Talking Tom which is more boy's focused.

The Greatest Adventure TPB (2018) [/] A 9-issue comic book story features the characters and worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs. A group of adventurers led by Tarzan chase after the bad guys to Pellucidar (hollow Earth), Mars, and Venus to stop him from assembling the ultimate weapon... Lots of characters and most may have a line or two. It's a suitably pulp-y story and quite bloody.

Shine on Me is a Chinese romance with light drama running 36 45-minute episodes.

In college Nie Xiguang (Zhao Jinmai) pines for fellow student Zhuang Xu (Lai Weiming) but backs off when she finds out Xiguang's roommate Ye Rong (Bai Bingke) is Xu's childhood friend and also pines for him. Due to a misunderstanding and not talking to each other Xu does like Xiguang and thinks she likes him but then she suddenly breaks it off inexplicable (to him) and disappears on an European vacation.

After graduation Nie Xiguang gets a job at a solar panel manufacturing company that her mom and dad own (they are divorced) and she starts at the bottom without revealing her parentage. Meanwhile new manager Lin Yusen (Song Weilong -- male lead in Find Yourself, 2020) arrives. Very handsome bachelor but starts picking on Xiguang criticizing her work and giving her extra work. But her uncomplaining toiling and suffering slowly changes his heart.

Later on there is this complicated back story of why Lin Yusen at first fell in love with Nie Xiguang at first sight, then later hated her after an accident that crippled his left hand and caused to leave neurosurgery. Once again it turns out to be a lot of sorrow going on for years because Lin Yusen never confronted Nie Xiguang to clear things up and that final secret is revealed in the last third of the series.

Zhuang Xu keeps reappearing, pining for Nie Xiguang, yet never actually talking to her to find out she's still single and once he makes his move it's too late as she's with Lin Yusen and she totally rips him apart because he never came forward when she was in trouble with Ye Rong and he never made his feelings clear to her when she did to him at least once.

There is no corresponding love rival that pines for Lin Yusen. There aren't really another other romantic subplots -- neither lead character has a strong best friend with their own subplots. I guess to make up for it Nie Xiguang parents and aunt and uncle have subplots mostly because her father is a bit of a dick and the father's current girlfriend and her daughter are minor villains though inexpertly used.

I guess the biggest problem with this series is that there is little drama. The obstacles are easily overcome and the bad guys are not very capable. Also other than the two leads everyone else's plots feel unfinished and rather brief. Another downside is that there are times with lots of monologuing where the series is promoting Chinese solar panels and solar industry as something that will be the best in the world if not now then soon. Propaganda that is a bit more jarring than usual.

On the positive side the two leads are amazingly photogenic and cute and the love story works fairly well. I quite enjoyed watching almost all the series (the last two episodes are bit wrapping up as they accomplish their last big goals, get married, and we see 5 and 15 years into the future which I guess is nice but the story has lost all momentum so those episodes seem to drag a bit).

I recommend this series and there are two or three other Zhao Jinmai romance series I think I'll watch.

Not a review of the rules but just the Mothership Deluxe Set physical components.

It's a sturdy box with embossed graphics and just big enough to fit all components. The underside product info is actually a separate sheet which unfortunately since it's sized to the bottom of the box doesn't quite fit inside the box.

Opening the box there is a little sheet advertising the Mothership Companion mobile app (character creator and dice roller, though also a subscription for Pro features), a heavy cardboard 3-pane landscape screen, a sheet of about 30 punch out counters (there are standup bases in the box), and a foldout double-sided map -- one side is a colony ship and the other is some sort of space contact tracker or space movement tracker.

Underneath those there are the various books flanked by two empty solid boxes with ribbon-attached flip tops (the boxes are attached to the main box so it is a deluxe treatment). Box A is a bit larger and can hold all the counters (the two monster counters are quite large). Box B is smaller and contains 5d10 and the stand up bases.

In the middle are the core books:

• Mothership: Player's Survival Guide (44 pages including cover) - PC book
• Mothership: Warden's Operation Manual (60 pages including cover) - GM book
• Mothership: Ship Breaker's Toolkit (44 pages including cover) - starships
• Mothership: Unconfirmed Contact Reports (56 pages including cover) - monsters

and adventure books:

• M1: Dead Planet (48 pages including cover) - PCs are trapped on a dead planet that is not so dead
• M2: A Pound of Flesh (52 pages including cover) - a detailed space station with three plots to run
• M3: Gradient Descent (64 pages including cover) - an abandoned android factory where the androids run amok
• M4: Another Bug Hunt (44 pages including cover) - four interconnected introductory scenarios

All books are digest size (about half normal sheet of paper). Printed on good quality paper with cardstock covers. The modules have a bit of spot color and the rulebooks are gray scale (though the monster book also has spot color).

Overall the boxed set is a premium production. I like that it has enough adventures to run for about a dozen sessions which makes this a self-contained campaign-in-a-box.

By the way, it's best to buy from Tuesday Night Games directly as you can get both physical box and PDFs for the same price as the physical box alone from a retail store.