August 06, 2019
One TV show I finished watching recently is Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch in BBC's modern take on the famous detective. The music is fun to listen to, and the producers do a great job of developing Sherlock as a character, integrating him into the present-day (2010), and breaking down his thought process when he arrives at the most seemingly-ridiculous conclusions.
I also just finished House MD on Amazon Prime a couple of days ago. House MD stars Hugh Laurie as Gregory House, MD (House being a play on Holmes), a genius diagnostician and infectious disease specialist. I would have never known about it if not for the many YouTube clips that kept showing up in my Recommended Videos.
Next up on my watchlist is the show Bosch, an Amazon Original based on the book series by Michael Connolly. I have watched season 1 so far and found it interesting. It seems to be an Amazon Original thing to contain one plot arc per season (for example Jack Ryan) as compared to TV broadcast-style shows like The Office and House in which each episode is generally a separate entity.
My grandfather decided to give me his (unopened) chess set from a 1986 Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) conference he attended. The pieces are made of hot isostatically pressed Al2O3 (Aluminum III Oxide) and the board is made of glass. It's very different from the Spanish v Inca set I bought in Peru and the free travel set I won in a raffle at an elementary school chess tournament. The set is uniquely unique in that the tops of the pieces are shaped in the direction they move in. So, the Rook is a square, the bishop is two diagonal lines (basically the letter X), and the knight is 7/8ths of a cube (the top half then forms an L-shape). Ultimately, I don't know how practical the set is for everyday use (it's both esoteric and heavy), but it's a great conversation starter on our living room table and it's fun to use every so often.
Right now, I'm hovering around a 1500 rating on Chess.com. My two goals are to get better at recognizing tactics and playing out the different possible lines (ie mental calculations). I play mostly 3|0 blitz because it's easiest to fit in small amounts of time, but I want to start playing competitively over the board to get a more realistic sense of my chess abilities.
The other day I played a game of three-person bughouse. We set up three chessboards in a triangle, with each player playing the white pieces on one board and black pieces on the other. I've casually played Crazyhouse on Chess.com (but not competitively), and I've played Bughouse once at a chess tournament back in elementary school, but I've never played this variant before. The game was quite interesting, because I kept forgetting that trading pieces wouldn't let me put it back on the same board (it would be the wrong color). In addition, we were playing on three completely different chess sets - the travel set, the Inca set, and the Alcoa set.
The two friends with whom I played bughouse have also been making up their own chess variants recently. My favorite variant is a version called Promotion Chess. When you capture a non-pawn, your piece stays where it is, and your opponent's piece is demoted to the piece with the next-lowest value (if your Rook is captured, you have the option of making it a Knight or a Bishop).
This is a double-edged sword because if you capture a Knight or Bishop on the last rank, it becomes a pawn which your opponent can immediately promote to Queen. This game also becomes very fun when you have multiple bishops with the same parity.
When I get some free time, I would like to make this into a Python game that I can play against the computer (presumably using a modified version of Stockfish with varying difficulties).