One of my favorite blogs on Tumblr is @herpsandbirds, which, as the name implies, features a variety of animals. They share pictures of the species, of course, along with some of the scientific information and fun facts! They’ll also ID photos for people. And they take requests, like this one for birds with long tails! It sits at that intersection of wholesome, educational, and aesthetic – see again the birds.
I was perusing the game library at a convention recently and happened to stumble upon Seikatsu, a gorgeous gardening game that makes excellent use of perspective!
All players share the same garden, enhancing the view from their color-coded pagodas by populating it with bird/flower combos, scoring points for matching adjacent birds as they do. Once the garden is full, they score again, this time for flowers! Flowers are scored in rows instead of clusters, still by type, and the rows are determined by the perspective of each player’s pagoda. I adore this mechanic – the use of shared space combined with directional scoring parameters? The dance of scoring points now and later for yourself, without also helping your opponents? Absolutely fascinating. And the koi of course can pair with anything.
Art reflects life, and so the living can learn through art. As a storyteller, I’m always delighted to see this premise explored! Enter Cinema Therapy, a YouTube channel featuring a therapist and a filmmaker as they analyze movies, both for moments of exceptional craft and for the real life lessons you can take away from them.
There’s a reason Pixar movies make people cry, so I’m especially fond of that series; it has a lot to say about family dynamics, as well as grief and, well… Inside Out, in all its emotional-awareness glory. They also focus episodes on heroes, villains, relationships… they even interview actors, like Karen Gillan! And though television demands a lot more viewing hours to research, they occasionally cover that, too! Specifically such icons as Firefly, and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
I always finish one of their videos with a deeper appreciation of the work, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, and of course I’ve learned a thing or seven about people, too! I’m perpetually delighted by how much knowledge I can gain just by loving stories.
It occurred to me abruptly that while I have referenced Mancala on this blog, I’ve never properly posted about it! And that seemed like a shame.
Like chess, Mancala is a long-time-played, all-strategy, two-player board game that comes in many forms. The set we were playing with used stones as the pieces, and had a wooden board with two rows of six circular indents, with an oval at each end. This version of mancala is fairly straightforward – each circle starts with the same amount of stones, and players take stones from their own side of the board, trying ultimately to score them in that side’s oval.
When a player takes stones from one of their circles, they’ll move counter-clockwise, dropping a stone in the next pit, then the next, and so forth, until they’ve placed them all. This includes their own oval, but skips over their opponent’s; all other opponents’ spaces are counted. If the last stone they place is in their scoring space, they take another turn; if not, their opponent goes. There’s also a special “capturing” mechanic, which I’ve seen two sets of rules for. In both, ending your turn in an empty circle lets you score all stones in the pit across from it, a space your opponent controls. What the rules disagree on is whether you also score the stone you just placed! This is a consequence of Mancala dating back to at least the 3rd century, gaining variance as it aged and spread geographically. This also means there are much more complicated variants I hope to someday try!
I suspect, however, that we’ll have the same problem with all forms of Mancala as we had with this one: Zuko was trying to help… by stealing the stones.
