Jasper Was Here

One of the most difficult parts of reading comes from burning yourself out. I keep track of all of the books I've read recently in a spreadsheet, where I break them down into columns based on the final rating I give them and color the squares according to the broad-stroke genres or settings I've categorized them under. During the month of October, I read 30 books. That's basically one book a day for the whole month, minus a Halloween cheat day. That was 7236 pages across them all. And then I burned out. In November, I only made it through 7 books. 1641 pages. 6 out of 7 were graphic novels, which are easier for me to get through, even through problems like "crippling migraines" and "brain fog". The last was an anthology, which is also pretty damn easy to dig through. So I'm easing the pace on myself for December. I'm taking my time and even reading more Juvenile-level fiction for my own entertainment. My current project is reading through all of ...

One of the things that are exceedingly common in Magic: The Gathering deck building communities is the idea of "deck archetypes" - like the Spellslinger deck or the Aristocrats deck. Some websites will elaborate more on different kinds of archetypes (like EDHREC's list of themes, which separates similar decks into different categories). Some archetypes center around similar play patterns, getting you into a familiar loop. Others focus on particular kinds of cards, such as generating Treasure Tokens or creating copies of things on the board. The purpose of a deck archetype is to make the struggle of building a deck and, in effect, summarizing what your deck does much easier. It's a whole lot faster to say "I have a Black-Red Aristocrats deck" than it does to explain in detail what an Aristocrats deck does: "Sacrificing things to a sacrifice outlet in order to gain some sort of advantage, often in the form of buffing creatures that have escaped the sacrif...