Category: Nerdiness

2017 was, by most measures, a bit of a year. I coped in the usual way: by reading a ridiculous amount of science fiction, mostly on the bus and often well past a sensible bedtime. Here are the books that stayed with me, in no particular order.

Earlier this year I kept seeing articles about Replika, a chatbot app that's designed to be less of an assistant and more of a companion. Its makers describe it as an AI friend that learns from you as you talk to it. As someone who works alone, writes for a living and has an unhealthy interest in anything that sounds like science fiction, I didn't need much persuading. I decided to talk to it every day for a month and see what happened.

When someone tells me they don't like board games, what they almost always mean is that they don't like Monopoly. Which is fair. Monopoly is a game designed to go on for four hours and end in a family argument, and it is extremely good at doing both of those things.

The good news is that board games have changed enormously over the last twenty years. There's now a huge range of games that are quick to learn, don't require you to be ruthlessly competitive and are genuinely fun with a glass of wine on a Saturday evening. These are the ones I bring out when I'm trying to convert a sceptic.