NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour ends each week's show with What's Making Us Happy This Week. I like that. So I've decided to give that a try from time to time. Here's what's making me happy this week.
- Oneplus One: My new phone. I won't be activating it until my wife gets her new iPhone, but it's a beautiful piece of hardware that runs CyanogenMod as the stock OS.
- Adam Warrock: Earlier in the week, while listening to MC Frontalot's Question Bedtime, I took note of an artist called Adam Warrock and decided to give his stuff a listen. Fortunately, it's freely available on his website. Adam raps about The Avengers, Harry Potter, Kill Bill, Parks & Rec, Mass Effect 3, Dr. Who, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Bastion and Transistor, Magic: The Gathering, The X-Men, Game of Thrones, and even The Golden Girls. I enjoy the Bastion album and the Browncoats Mixtape, but the West Coast Avengers doesn't really do it for me. Ima keep listening.
- Exercise: Both physical and mental. Since I'm now officially old, I've been trying to jog, and... wait, don't laugh. Stop laughing! Yes, I'm going running. Shut up. I've built up extremely gradually. I started in the spring going maybe once a week, and last week I think I went 4-5 times. My furthest run was about 1.5 miles. Then, on Sunday, I went with a friend who pushed me, and we did 3.7 miles. I'm just now recovering.
The mental exercise is the N-Back, which I learned about from the book Smarter. It's an intelligence-building test backed by real research. None of this Nintendo Kawashima BS. The N-Back is insanely hard by design. The goal isn't to do perfectly, but rather to continually challenge yourself. You can try it here.
- Sentinels of the Multiverse: My current favorite board game. Technically, card game. It's a cooperative superhero game in which 3-5 players each play a superhero, which is basically a deck of cards. You try to defeat a villain, who's another deck of cards. And you do it in an environment, which is another deck of cards. But with 15 heroes, 13 villains, and 8 environments, there's a lot of replayability here. It has a bit of the appeal of Street Fighter for me in that the various characters play very differently. Also, some of the appeal of D&D in that your party of heroes will want various roles filled to maximize effectiveness.
- Minecraft: I'm back to playing Minecraft, and I'm really digging the 1.8 “Bountiful” update.
- Birthday: Also, tomorrow is my birthday.