A February Wrapup: What's New in the Short Month?

Ian Irvine March 8, 2025

Not much, to answer the question posed in the title. February is largely a blur to me, as between catching up on work from my trip in January and preparing for my trip the first week of March, I was left precious little time for things other than work. There were a few highlights worth discussing, however.

The first is related to one of the standard sections of my blog: what did I read this month? The answer is somewhat disappointing compared to last month's showing, though it totals almost as many pages. In February, I read exactly one book to completion: Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. For those of you who haven't heard of it, House of Leaves is possibly the most insane book I've ever read, and I mean that in several ways. Non-spoiler review: A fantastic horror book that is unlike anything else, so far as I know. The horror is both entirely human and definitionally inhuman, many characters are unique and interesting (though others are two-dimensional in a way that can only be purposeful), and the story is so engaging that —despite the discomfort you will feel and the actual difficulty the book imposes on you in continuing to read it — you will feel like you can't stop. All the more so if you are anything like me, and you set about trying to figure out what it might mean. Something I had to do, as I was reading this for a book club, an idea apparently so absurd that it got one of my friends laughed at in a bar by an English teacher. She may or may not be right.

Personally, I feel as if it is a good thing that I have a book club to discuss this with, or at the very least some friends who are also obligated to read it. Less so now, since I have been away from the book for about two weeks and haven't thought very much of it in that time, but when I was reading it and sitting with it every day the book possessed me in a way no other book has. I have done more research to discuss this book than I did for several graded papers in college, and I have a comparative literature degree. So much of the book requires you to ask whether or not it is even true, and if it is true then what does it mean, and if isn't true then who's lying to you and what would that mean instead, and the book is so convoluted that it seems any theory of everything you may be able to propose pokes itself full of theories by the second or third section of the book you try to apply it to. I am having a grand old time reading this book, though it has also made me immensely uncomfortable and even afraid at times, as any good horror should. But then again, I've never read a horror book that looked like this before. I may write further thoughts on the book on this blog, but they would need their own section. I also would recommend this book to anyone who likes to read and likes to think, with the warning that trigger warnings abound. Off the top of my head: Murder, Rape, Gun Violence, Death of a Child, Death of a Dog, Child Abuse, Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. I'm sure there are more that I'm not thinking of, not to mention several explicit sex scenes. All of this is to say I guess that I would recommend you read it, but not if you're a child or have any trauma related to mental illness.

Moving on from that, I did have a little fun this month. I went up to a friend's home on a little lake near Green Bay and spent the weekend drinking, snowmobiling, and playing card games. I discovered two excellent new games that scratched very different itches but have both moved their way onto my To Buy list, should I ever find room for them.

The first is Farms Race, which the friend introducing it to us described as being like "Catan meets Risk with nukes" which is really a fairly apt description. You play as one of four factions of (mutated?) farm animals who are rising up against the humans to become the new dominant species. The options are Chickens, Sheep, Cows, and Pigs. The only difference is the shape of your little guys on the board, so it's really just an aesthetic choice. In addition to this, you get a mutator at the start, so you may have Flying Pigs who can reposition more freely, Zombie Cows who return when they die, or Radioactive Chickens who take no damage from being nuked. And you will be nuked in this game, at least in the group I played with. It turns out that MAD doesn't function so well when one guy at the table gets to cross the M out. All in all, it was a really fun game that takes about an hour to play. Some of the mutators seem much more powerful than others, so you may need a house rule or two for balance, but I also only played twice so there may be insane strategies I haven't seen yet.

The other game we played was Sagrada, a game which, aesthetically, feels like it was created just for me. Presumably named for the cathedral in Spain, in Sagrada you create stained glass windows out of dice that you pull from a shared pool following a snake-draft format. The art is as beautiful as you would hope, and while it's pretty easy at first, the game becomes an increasingly complex logic puzzle as you go on, as you try to balance the restrictions that the rules and your already placed dice create with those that you need to follow to score the most points. Overall, one of the most unique games I have played, though it may be improved by a timer since some people can take too long thinking about their dice. This would make it a markedly less casual experience however.

Anyway, I'm sure another thing or three ocurred this month that I'm forgetting but that was the big stuff anyway. February was a more low-key month as, among other things, I was preparing for my trip to Ireland the first week of March. Expect more on that soon!

To wrap up, here are my top songs this month:

Two from Silly Wizard, but who can blame me? They're an old favorite of mine (back to age 6 or so) and, though Scottish not Irish, put me in the mindset for the trip to come. Colter Wall I'd never heard of before he popped up in my recommended thanks to my country-heavy listening last month. Turns out he's actually touring in my city pretty soon, but his ticket prices indicate he's a bit more popular than I'd anticipated, so we'll see if I go. Wishing you all the best!

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