On Friends and Publish or Perish Boardgame
Thoughts on Friends
In this time, when having thousands of digital, social-media friends seems completely normal, it is sometimes difficult to have actual, real-life, close friends to do real-world like things together with. I am incredibly grateful to have such close friends in my life. It truly makes my life much happier to have a few friends with whom I can interact in real life, than having many to whom I only send online memes.
Publish or Perish Boardgame
See here. This is a boardgame I had the luck of playing with my friends the other day. It puts the players into the position of being an academic reasearcher that is constantly being forced to write new publications, most of which are completely bogus. Much to noone's surprise, the person who accumulates the most points from publishing the most papers wins the game. However, my favorite game mechanic has to be the ending defence, in which players must try to present a one minute coherent thematic research interest that led them to publish their papers, which of course in most cases have absolutely no common ground whatsoever. It requires a lot of bluffing, and perhaos even plagiarism, to create a good defense. I would defenitely recommend this game to other academics.