Old School Mtg

The other week I got to sling physical OS Magic for the first time in almost exactly a year. Sure, there's been a few one-on-one games with e.g. Hardy since last August, but any kind of group gathering had been sorely lacking. But suddenly local hero Thomas Nilsen wanted to entertain a slow Thursday evening, and the whole pandemic thing appeared to be on the back burner. So he turned on the bat signal and invited some local nerds to his place for OS cube drafting. Thomas's Cube is a sweet one. I've played a handful different non-proxy OS cubes (belonging to e.g. Berlin , Brorsan , Oldschool-Viktor , and Kalle), but Thomas's is probably the most oldschool of them all. Fully black bordered, with only A/B The Gathering and the four horsemen (i.e. Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends and The Dark). So no fancy new-fangled Fallen Empires with their complicated copyright line and expertly saturated dot-gain. We're Year One oldschool here; August 1993 to August 1994. A few...

There's a famous writing technique called the iceberg theory. It states that the writer should only describe surface elements of a story while avoiding explicit discussion on any underlying themes. Context and character motivations could be skipped altogether; it's up to the reader to fill in the blanks.  The technique was conceived by Ernest Hemingway in the early 1920s. He theorized that he could omit any part of a story - even the ending - and the omitted part would strengthen the story as a whole.   Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface. And a lot of readers picked up on his ideas. I read a review recently where some literary scholar argued it would be easier to name contemporary fiction writers that weren't influence by Hemingway than to name those who were. And, I mean, formalizing the idea of having the reader create the context of a story is brilliant. Among the most popular examples of the technique we have Hemingway...

Last week, I was in Sweden. It was the first time in almost a year and a half. Even though my parents in Gothenburg technically only live a handful hours drive from my new home in Oslo, that border has been something fierce since the pandemic started. When I crossed it last weekend to get home to Norway, I first had to talk to the border patrol, then the police, and then the military, before I was eventually shipped to medical professionals in something resembling hazmat suits for covid testing. This was after I'd shown documentation that more than three weeks had passed since my first shot, and that I had officially reported and signed re-entry to my current home country. The drive that normally takes a bit over three hours clocked in at seven hours blank this time. And that's when traveling between countries that are considered "green" by the government, and I was born in one of them and have residence in the other. Every now and then it feels like someone activated...