Month: March 2025

They’re So Cute! …Why Are They Called “Doomlings”?

Because sometimes, the end of the world is adorable. Right? Right. It’s certainly the case in Doomlings, “a delightful card game for the end of the world”! Though, to be totally fair, the game only ends at the End of the World. It is, more accurately, about the possible courses of life on Earth! Or some unspecified, distant planet…

Doomlings is a game of populations and traits, like Evolution for amoebas. Perhaps your organism is eloquent, or warm-blooded! Each trait comes with its own bonuses and setbacks, even if they’re just opportunity costs, and make up the tapestry of a complex, hopefully well-adapted life form. Your options always stabilize per the scope of your Gene Pool, so the higher that value is, the more cards you have in hand! Your default is always playing one, but some cards have actions that let you play others, or End of the World bonuses per certain cards still in your hand.

The End of the World is, sadly, inevitable. How else would the game end? Rounds are tracked by Ages, starting with the Birth of Life and instituting different effects, some immediate and some lasting the whole Age. Eventually, you hit a Catastrophe! Catastrophes mark the ends of Eras, of which the game has three, and at the third Catastrophe, the world ends. The poor planet can only take so much. Between World’s End effects, traits’ face values, and any bonuses and modifiers, this one is very much anyone’s game right up to the end. Which is thematically on-brand! Doomlings offers a very cheerful, carefree apocalypse experience, with jokes aplenty and the doctrine that there is no secret perfect path in life. It’s sprawly and swingy and colorful in a way that brings me joy. And the fact that it’s cute sure doesn’t hurt!

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ALL The Holidays

As a youngling I discovered that there are holidays for everything, from food to awareness to that which is just plain silly. Of course, that was on a paper calendar, which quickly fell out of function, and I took to the internet to find something similar. What I found was Checkiday! Defaulting to the day-you’re-checking, Checkiday also lets you search by dates or keywords, and has a truly impressive range of holidays, from National Black Forest Cake Day, to Champion Crab Races Day (and I’m very curious about this one now), to International Day for Monuments and Sites. There’s always an “On This Day In History” link, too!

I have to remind myself occasionally that I can’t celebrate everything to my interest – not to overthink it – and in that light: it’s fun, it’s educational, and it brings to light things you may not realize how much you appreciate, until someone calls attention to it. Like pencils!

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When In Doubt, Seahorses and Dinosaurs

We were in West Palm Beach, Florida recently without a concrete plan for how to spend a day, so we went brochure fishing and found ourselves at Cox Science Center and Aquarium! It’s right next to Palm Beach Zoo, which I thought was pretty convenient, and it partners with a variety of food trucks on weekends so that there’s food. More importantly, it’s a neat little science museum!

First of all, dinosaurs. This is both the temporary exhibit currently on display and a theme of their outdoor space, where a handful of dinosaur chairs and things abound; the indoor, more involved version includes animatronics and a Mesozoic tour of Pangaea, mapping out dinosaurs by continent! This was especially cool to me, as it put eras and geography back in context in a way that growing up with Jurassic Park did not. Similarly, even for dinos where I knew which current-day continent they were found on, it hadn’t occurred to me that at the time that they existed we still had supercontinents, and so where those species were relative to each other was very different! It was just a hike from South America to Australia, once upon a time.

Outside, along with the dino walk, a number of physics-based exhibits, a splash pad, and a gem panning station! You were welcome to buy a bag of gemstones, shark teeth, or fossils, complete with mining substrate, and experience panning for yourself. Inside, some engineering-for-kids stuff that reminded me of the DuPage Children’s Museum here in Illinois, a meteorology exhibit, space rocks, logic puzzles, and, of course, the aquarium! I was especially excited about this bit, as it’s specifically focused on the Atlantic and Florida. Also, animals. I spent a lot of time here, taking photos and reading signage, of course, but also attending a number of activities! Including alligator petting. And feeding! Which were, notably, separate events. Turns out it’s also very entertaining to watch fish demolish a piece of lettuce!

If you’re ever in West Palm Beach, this is a great something to do that’s mostly inside, a little bit outside, and easily spanning multiple interests – we didn’t really get to the Planetarium schedule, and they have that too! There’s whole sections that are definitively aimed at kids, and as adults we wound up making most of a day of it.

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To Know Where You’re Going, Know Where You Are

This is old, old advice, right? The more you know about where you are and how you got there, the easier it is to find your way elsewhere! I’ve recently had cause to consider that in combination with the strange, fuzzy way that stress muddles your sense of time. ‘Yesterday passed in an hour, but this week’s been a year,’ right? And it got me thinking about ways that I anchor my concept of normal and of movement – now, then, later – against the fact that everything I experience is, has been, or will be “now.”

I take a lot of notes. I’ve mentioned this before, mostly in the context of “nebulously in the future,” as is the case with my recommendation lists and to-write work – both in many ways the predecessors to this post. As part of my ongoing character arc from “I can hold it all in my head!” to “why, actually?” I’ve expanded that concept to include the near future and the past! I’ve taken particular notice to the visibility of deadlines. Coupon expires next week? Add it to the calendar. Crucially, add it to a calendar that I already look at. Make travel plans by this date, submit Hugo nominations by then… On the subject of the Hugos, I’ve also taken to writing down eligible material as I encounter it! No more mad scramble for what all I’ve done in the past year and which of it is relevant.

Of course, there’s also the broader matter of things I’ve gotten done – a sentence that has soured in other contexts, and proven quite useful in this one, especially for the odd little things that don’t seem like Major Accomplishments. I keep a container of them now, on paper, with things like “real food,” “phone call,” and “found something I was looking for”! There’s one that just says “put my desk back!” – I honestly have no idea where the desk was or why, but I can infer it was important. I mean… exclamation point!

Point is, when I ask “what has happened recently?” and my concept of time betrays me, I have answers. When I ask “what do I need to actively be working on?” and “what do I have to look forward to?”, I have answers. And as the rest of the world shifts beneath us, the value of that can’t be discounted.

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