Yours portly is running on fumes, and it’s totally self-inflicted. I usually go to bed around 9:30 or 10 PM for a 5:45 AMish wakeup. Lately, I’ve been staying up until midnight while still dragging out of bed. It’s not because I’m losing myself in composing or writing (as today’s ultra-self-indulgent post demonstrates); it’s because I’ve been playing Old World.
Since moving to the new house, my commute is forty-five minutes one way. I teach lessons most days until about 5 PM, after which I spend about thirty minutes updating my budget, prepping for the next day, and catching up on all the e-mails and comments and such I’ve missed while in afternoon classes. By the time I get home, it’s already after 6 PM, even later if I have to get groceries. Then it’s whatever chores and such I need to knock out around the house.
But the bug of late-night gaming has hit hard with Old World. After everything is done and I’m finally unwinding for the night, it’s around 9 PM. That’s a dangerous time to start playing an immersive 4X strategy game, because what starts as “I’ll just play for an hour” turns into three hours. Sometimes “just one more turn” will morph into another thirty minutes of playing, as that “one” turns evolves into four or five (I’ve figured out that a turn in Old World, even in the midgame, takes about five minutes).
Any churchgoing Christian will understand that feeling that sometimes hits on Sunday mornings—even though you typically want to go to church, you just don’t want to that Sunday. The week is long and hard; the weekend is short (and usually full of the stuff you couldn’t get done during the week).
My brothers and I used to joke with our dad—a man who was borderline giddy as he’d wake us up for a marathon session of church (we were Pentecostal in the 1990s and early 2000s, so church was pretty much an all-day affair)—that we would “worship God in our own way” by staying home and playing Nintendo. Thank goodness he had a sense of humor and understood we were lampooning the milquetoast cultural “Christians” and New Age spiritualists who framed staying home and washing their cars as an act of piety.
But the struggle is real. I sincerely believe that Satan and his minions attack us the hardest right before church. Like most things, the justifications are reasonable: “I really need the rest”; “I have a crazy week ahead and need to get prepared for it.” Sometimes those things are legitimate concerns; more often, though, they’re just lame rationalizations, and we know it.
I’m preaching to myself here. I know from experience that missing one week of church makes it that much harder to return the following week; missing two weeks in a row or more is lethal to regular attendance. Due to our current living situation and Dr. Wife finishing up residency, we often find ourselves out of town on Sundays, but we try to attend one of our churches. Indeed, there have been times I’ve proposed staying home so we can “rest,” and she’ll insist we go to church. She’s a good woman.
Again, I understand there are exceptions. Some people—even here in the South—work on Sundays. People travel. Family events and the like sometimes interfere. Look, I’m not a Catholic—I don’t believe your salvation is contingent upon checking off the “I attended Mass so I’m good for another week” box. I do, however, believe that Scripture Instructs us to be part of a body of believers.
Going to church is beneficial spiritually first and foremost, but it’s also an opportunity to build Christian community. In an age of economic isolation and social atomization, folks are desperate to be part of something bigger than themselves. What’s bigger and better than the Bride of Christ?
Here in the South, there a sometimes more churches per square mile than people. I know other parts of the country are not so fortunate, but churches are not hard to find. Find a good one and start going!
It’s Tax Day in America, the day when the onslaught of Turbo Tax and H&R Block tax ads reach their fever pitch before the ad buys dwindle away in a desperate attempt to get late filers to pay their taxes. For months, taxes and tax-related services have carpet-bombed our mental faculties, demanding we make our annual sacrifices to the Imperium.
I did our taxes four times before finally giving up on a potentially large discount (read my tedious, subscriber-only post if you want to know the lurid details). No software could adequately handle our (admittedly unusual) tax situation, and the federal government rejected our filing three times before I finally [sur]rendered unto Caesar. I estimate that I spent about twenty hours on our taxes this year, time that could have been spent composing, napping, unpacking, writing, laughing with my wife, researching history, weeding, mowing, showering, cooking—anything more enjoyable and/or productive than convincing Uncle Sam that I did, indeed, teach a bunch of music lessons last year and played several Sundays at a Methodist Church for profit (financial, not spiritual).
I’m not alone. I’ve seen a number of notes on Substack and YouTube from writers and creators echoing a familiar refrain: “sorry, no article/video/podcast/interpretative dance tutorial this week, guys: I’m working on my taxes.” Sure, the world will keep spinning, and we need some taxes to pay for all those Tomahawk missiles and gender reassignment surgeries for federal inmates—God Forbid we fail to slice up the inmates’ genitalia—but the whole thing is a massive waste of valuable resources.
There’s a reason an entire industry exists around tax preparation—nobody wants to take the time to sit down and go through all that paperwork (except for me and my younger brother, apparently; he ended up handling taxes for not only his family, but for our parents and our elderly, widowed grandmother—God Bless him!). H&R Block will do your taxes for you! Even then, you’re paying a few hundred bucks to hand someone else your W-2s and 1099s and what not. You’re still answering all the same questions as just using the software yourself. Regardless, you want to spend time not doing taxes, so you shell out the cash. Some part-time rookie who needs extra cash from January through April looks over your stuff and slaps it together for you, and you get a “refund” (just pre-paid tax back) and feel good.
You shouldn’t! You gave the federal government a coerced, mandatory, interest-free loan for up to twelve months, and they’re letting you have some of that money back because you maybe loaned them a little too much. At least split the interest with us!
All of the above is, by now, familiar to every American, to the point that, like most evils (necessary or otherwise), we just grudgingly accept it and try to get through April without the IRS hassling us too much about digging up those shoebox receipts.
My friends, there is a better way. Or at least a way that would be more convenient for everyone, even if it means Billy Gigeconomy can’t get a few extra bucks doing your taxes for you. We must end the income tax—or alter it substantially.
The siren-song of Old World called heavily to yours portly, luring me with its addictive, “just-one-more-turn” gameplay to crash upon the rocks of sleep deprivation. It’s also drawn me away from artistic pursuits. My plan is to compose at least one, but preferably two, more tracks for Koi Dance, and then I’ll schedule it for a release. Given my recent acquisition of some Japanese Trapdoor Snails, I’m brainstorming a composition about these enigmatic, quiet pond dwellers.
That said, I haven’t composed anything since “Sturgeon,” so I’m featuring an “open mic” mic performance of sorts. The “mic” is my fading second generation iPhone SE; the “adventure” is singing a cappella in my bathroom; the “open[ness]” is my thick, meaty tongue “shalalalalalalalalalala-ing” the riff to The Smashing Pumpkins’ hit “1979”:
Well, yours portly is back at it today after a glorious Spring Break. It was busy, but the kind of busy I like—getting stuff done around the house and knocking out various errands without the drain of doing them after working all day. There’s still an immense amount of unpacking to do, but I can at least maneuver around my home office without sucking in my gut and performing pudgy pirouettes around boxes.
Writing, however, took a bit of a backseat to errands—and to Old World, the 4X strategy game that absorbed much of my waking hours in the waning days of break. I stayed up until nearly 2:30 AM Friday night/Saturday morning playing the game, and was reminded why I don’t do that anymore, as I was dragging the rest of the weekend. That said, I did finish my first campaign (still a tutorial, technically, but it was a complete playthrough without any gimmicks and with only minimal handholding from tutorial pop-ups), winning an “Ambition Victory” as Babylon. Granted, the difficulty was a couple of notches below the standard settings, which probably explains why I was able to focus on churning out generation after generation of philosopher-kings in a mostly peaceful playthrough. Still, I feel much more confident to tackle higher difficulties as I continue to learn the game.
Those self-indulgent updates out of the way, let’s get to the movie review! At the beginning of break, Dr. Wife and I saw the new A24 flick The Drama (2026), starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. I’d always thought that Zendaya was kind of a one-note actress, as her entire schtick was to gaze moodily into the camera with the same expression. The Drama disabused me of that notion (to be fair, though, that is how she played every other character I’ve seen her portray).
The film is billed as a romantic comedy, which is a bit misleading. The flick is comedic, but it’s black comedy. Dr. Wife and I found ourselves failing to suppress guffaws at some of the truly deadpan, downbeat, dark humor of the flick, which always makes for a good time.
Indeed, there’s apparently some Internet outrage (the worst kind of outrage) over this perceived bait-and-switch, as people go in expecting a film about a cute couple getting married and instead get a movie about a dark revelation threatening that marriage. Yes, that’s technically the plot of every romantic comedy—something unflattering comes out in the second act that precipitates in the male lead running to the airport before his girl flies off to The Big City—but it’s much darker and more psychological here—and realistic. The film asks, “what would you do if you found out something about your fiancée that is (potentially) deeply troubling just five days before your wedding?” It also asks us to consider which is worse: doing something that is mildly or moderately bad, or thinking about doing something truly despicable but not carrying it only due to external factors.
A sign that democracy does not reflect the will of the people is that few things are more popular than eliminating the income tax, but we still have it. It seems like it would be a political slam-dunk to get rid of this ridiculous form of taxation, but I guess too many tax attorneys and H&R Block seasonal workers would be out of a job. But, hey, we could enjoy Easter again!
This post contains a handful of Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP
Dr. Wife is visiting a friend this weekend, so I’m dog and koi duty. It’s a pretty easy duty, so I’ve been playing lots of video games.
It’s rare that I spend extended periods gaming. When I did have the free time to do so, my pattern was to play a game obsessively for about a week or two, then not touch it (or most other games) for months. It’s one reason it took me four years to beat the main quest in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (and because I snuck everywhere and spent most of the time exploring outside of the main quest). Every time exam week would roll around in college, I’d have several days of unlimited, unstructured time, during which I’d play for four-to-six hours at a stretch—then I’d barely touch the game until the next exam week.
It’s a testament to how easy college was that I was able to do that and still graduate magna cum laude (I was a mere three-thousandths of a point away from summa). I don’t think it’s that I was particularly smart; I just knew how to take notes and study, and my mind for historical minutiae is like a Venus fly trap, absorbing and dissolving the meaty goodness into a nutritious synthesis of knowledge.
But I digress—that gaming pattern has persisted well into adulthood. Now the time horizons are both more constricted and more expanded. If I’m way ahead of work and composing and writing, I might play a game a couple of hours at night before bed for one-week period, but sleep deprivation hits hard and fast at forty-one, and I soon mend my ways as my gaming sessions creep beyond 10 PM. On the other hand, the periods of fallow gaming time grow longer, where I might not touch any game (beyond a time-wasting phone puzzle game or the like) for months and months, other than an occasional round of Civilization VII with my boy Justin.
That’s all a long way of saying that—finally—conditions were ripe for an extended gaming session. Dr. Wife is living it up in Charleston; the Internet is installed in the new house; packing continues, but we’ve put a huge dent into it; and I’m on Spring Break. And way back in January I purchased the deep 4X game Old World.
Old World is from one of the guys who worked on Civilization IV, which is considered one of the best installments in the storied franchise (I agree). The game’s composer is Christopher Tin, the guy who wrote the Grammy-winning “Baba Yetu,” the title music from Civ IV:
“4X” stands for “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate”—the pattern that such games follow. Players start in a wreathed in darkness, and must explore it. As promising spots for new cities are found, players expand to them, exploiting the valuable resources of those locations in the process. Finally, players—either through direct conquest or some other means—must exterminate their opponents (or out-compete them) to achieve victory. Each “X” builds upon the one that came before. Explore well, expand well; expand well, exploit well; exploit well, and—well, you get the idea.
Old World follows that pattern, one familiar to legions of Civilization fans, but deepens the experience. Like my exam week Morrowind adventures, the timeframe of the game is shorter than Civ—it’s just the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, not the entire world from 4000 B.C. to the distant future—but the focus is deeper. Instead of an immortal leader, the game introduces mortal rulers and complex family dynamics, the likes of which Paradox Interactive games like Crusader Kings III feature prominently. Instead of all of your cities remaining loyal because you keep the “happiness” at or above zero, cities are ruled by different aristocratic families within your kingdom, with whom you must curry favor. Even your wife can get made at you, which has direct repercussions on the effectiveness of how you govern (“happy wife, happy life” is now gamified).
There’s way more to it than that, but just from playing through the tutorial—which I highly recommend to new players—I am hooked. I started a semi-guided “learn by playing” game (a sort of self-guided tutorial after the more on-the-rails, five-part tutorial) as Babylon last night around 9 PM; the next thing I knew it was 2 AM!
This installment of Phone it in Friday: YouTube Roundup is quite phoned-in, as all of today’s videos were in Wednesday’s post. But if you prefer to scroll through videos about Japanese Trapdoor Snails and koi ponds instead of reading, today’s post is for you!
Japanese Trapdoor Snails Arrive!
It’s hard to understate how excited I was to get these snails. Now that they’re here, I want more fish! Such is the nature of human endeavors—we always want more. There is always another fish to conquer.
Once again it’s tax season in the United States. I won’t bore you—again—with the details of our bizarre, nightmarish tax situation, but to suffice it to say that, at the time of writing, yours portly and his dear Dr. Wife are about $5500 poorer and Uncle Sam is probably paying for a federal inmates gender reassignment surgery. Next year will be much easier, but it’s always a pain.
I think what I resent most is that the federal government is now party to every economic exchange I make outside of purchasing a brownie from a sidewalk bake sale. Any money I earn gets reported. Indeed, I probably report more than I really need to, because I do take seriously Jesus’ instruction to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” I just wish Caesar was spending my money in the national interest, not in the niche interests of some special interest group or immigrant group that got here fifteen seconds ago.
But it is—for another year, at least—done. Now I’m free to enjoy Spring Break and to wait, watchful and eel-like, for next year.
Yesterday (Tuesday, 7 April 2026) was a big day for the pond. After noticing the water level falling, I purchased a Boogie Blue Plus Garden House Filter (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through this link, at no additional cost to you) and topped off the pond.
I also had a shipment of Japanese Trapdoor Snails from www.prettykoifish.com. I have been dying to add these massive mollusk beauties to our pond since I first learned about them. They are the cleaning crew of any pond, and as they settle in and become active, they’ll deep clean the water and the liner.
Right now, our pond water is very murky. That’s actually good for the koi—they prefer it to be murky—and is a sign of healthy biodiversity. The only downside is that we can’t see our fish unless they’re coming up to feed! It will take a few weeks, maybe months, but the Japanese Trapdoor Snails should start to hoover up lots of detritus.
