Remap Recommends, Volume XVI

Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month? 

Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends. 

It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been playing, reading, listening to, or watching.

Patrick Recommends: Horse Race

In my younger days, I liked hanging out at a bar for hours. Yeah, fine, part of the reason was to be irresponsible at an age when I could afford to, but it was a reason to sit around with a group of people for an extended period of time and talk. Even though my circle of friends are not board game people, I get the appeal. It's the same idea. It's a justification to be around people and pass the time.

In the past year or so, some friends introduced us to our new obsession: Horse Race. I've tried to find out the origins of this goofy and unpredictable dice game, but maybe your AI-garbled searches will produce better information than mine.

Here is the short pitch on Horse Race, though.

You have a board where a series of horses are moving forward on the board if you roll the number that matches the horse. The more unlikely the number combination, the fewer spots the horse has to move. Four of the horses each round are "scratched," determined by one person rolling four times. From there, you move around the table and have each person keep rolling until a horse crosses the finish line. Each time you roll a scratched horse, you have to pay into the pot. What you pay escalates based on the order in which it was scratched, i.e. a horse in the "four" spot means you have other pay up 4X.

(The full rules are here, but like many games of this type, you're like to and are encouraged to have house rules.)

It's completely random. There is no skill. It's also so goddamn fun. We've had nights stretch into the collective bedtime for the children of parents involved because, well, maybe if we just did one more round...? I lost all of my money last time around, and would happily head back into the horse breach to try and claw it all back.

(Usually, we play with nickels and dimes. Last time, we escalated to quarters.)

Rob Recommends: Vintage ASMR

I am just going to share an awesome thing that Carolyn Petit was posting about the other night: The Jake Hellbach Vintage ASMR Youtube channel. Carolyn described his work as being "staged and shot with care, and the vibe i often get from them is something like "could have been footage of a character in a '90s FMV game doing their thing."

Admittedly, I can be shaky on what is ASMR and what is not. I'd call his longer videos ambient or mood pieces, but the important thing is that in a landscape littered with lousy hacked-together scene renders, this guy is making unique short films with good photography and excellent prop design and selection. In fact, looking at his channel, it seems like he's a prop master as much as a photographer.

For instance, an early video of his is just five minutes of footage of a train compartment set where a man is writing something on a manual typewriter and jotting down notes. But off to his right, my eyes immediately locked onto an old pre-war Lucky Strike package, when the orange disc had become part of the brand design but before they moved to the white wrapper.