While we’re at it, I have a new word for you: ideenbefreit. This is an adjective with the literal meaning “liberated from all ideas” which I use when I want to let people know that I have zero ideas on how to proceed or what to do… like when I really do not know what move to make next in Oath… 
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Like last night when I dreamt I was playing Kemet but couldn’t remember any of the rules so was taking an eternity on my first turn.
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Kudos to Pfister for character development 
I like the statement he did regard the Mombasa retheme.
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Just came across this gem:
(From Road and Track, April 1982. Astute readers will notice that the company had been in receivership since February.)
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Ahh, let’s advertise alcohol with cars… Gotta love the 80s
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Aha, a meme thing.
Call of Cthulhu party, players’ first game:
Call of Cthulhu party, players’ second game:
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I also read the Atlantic article mentioned… it is weird to read about “boutique board games” … they aren’t wrong in what they write still always feels weird to read about something where I clearly know more than the author…
But I am pleased that Mombasa and Puerto Rico get new editions. I am a little surprised about the latter. I had heard rumors about Mombasa before.
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I did a thing…
I played 3 games of Spirit Island and loved it, so I gave it a 10 score (I only have 3 10s, the other two being Everdell and Gloomhaven). Yesterday evening, when I went to log my last game on BGG, it gone from 12 to 11…
(Yay!)
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I have a friend who is a lecturer of Toxicology in the Veterinary Faculty I studied in, and he loses it when we say el PCR instead of la PCR…
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Can you explain the difference, for someone who is completely ignorant of Spanish grammar?
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Some words are female in Spanish, and some are male. Mostly depending on their ending, but there are exceptions.
The PCR test would be male, as the word test in Spanish is male (no change during translation), but the main word used for test in Spanish is also a “prueba”, which is female.
So basically, a stickler for the rules, he thinks it should be female. To avoid anglicised Spanish. So we do it to annoy him, very tongue in cheek
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Other languages have gendered nouns… is the moon male or female? In German it is male while the sun is female. In French it is the other way round (and I bet Spanish is the same as French and Italian, too). So our modern debates aren’t just about pronouns… they are so much more fun. How do you write out the description of a profession when the basic noun for let’s say “software developer” is inherently male?
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Moon is female in Spanish, yes. Funny that, in German the Moon is male, as in Lithuanian. Their Sun is female, which is the opposite for us…
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Language families. French, Spanish and Italian all derive from ancient Latin (romanische Sprache) whereas German is a different tree (in German which we translate to “deutsch” these languages are called “germanische Sprache” because of the Germanische Stämme like the Teutonen (Hansa Teutonica anyone?) who resisted the ancient Romans on this side of the Rhine and eventually led to the “Fall of Rome”. Where I live the Romans did have a foothold (Roman baths in Baden Baden for example or an ancient fountain below the school-yard of my secondary school), pottery production near my partner’s parents old home. There is even a Roman borderwall like the Hadrian’s Wall called “Limes” not far from here.
PS: derive is too strong… but they all have strong influences from Latin I would say.
PPS: ancient Icelandic is quite close to German btw
PPPS: Cologne and Trier are Roman founded cities further north
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I think Mythology has something to do as well. Helios was male in Greco-Roman Mythology, while in the North of Europe tended to be a female deity. And the opposite with regards to the Moon. Still, Luna sounds very feminine to me, and through Latin it has gone through to English as lunar.
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I’ve just been doing some light Googling of “why doesn’t English have gendered nouns?” Of course, the answer is “it’s complicated”. It seems like Old English did have them, but they got “lost” somewhere between the 11th and 13th centuries… 
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You have a few leftovers in heir and heiress… but really these days those gendered nouns cause nothing but (additional) trouble plus they just make the language more complicated to learn.
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Also the whole Ships are female thing….
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I always thought that was weird…
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“Poetess” was still occasionally used when I was young, but it seems to be gone from common parlance now. “Actress” is going, and I think no great loss. “Heiress” seems to be deprecatory when it is used. Professionals seem to be moving from “she” to “it” for ships.
One of the Russian words for “businessman” is the imported бизнесме́н [biznesmyen], so of course the feminine is бизнесме́нка [biznesmyenka].
Why don’t we just ask the moon its sex? I dunno, nobody goes for the practical solution.
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