a-ha’s “The Living Daylights” came up on a playlist just now, and it made me want to play Axis and Allies. I received the game the same Christmas my brother received a CD of James Bond music, and the two will always be associated in my mind.

When I was a teenager, I would sometimes spend a weekend setting up Axis and Allies and then playing the better part of a whole game against myself. I got pretty good at opening moves this way, and I kind of wish I had the time to do this again once.

Venmo’s insistence that transactions be accompanied by notes makes me wonder what they’re doing with that data. For several months now, I’ve insisted on replacing any helpful indication with random characters.

Now seems like a particular good time to bring up my perennial pet peeve that people treat the terms “UFOs” and “aliens” as synonyms when the whole point of the former is to reserve judgment about the latter.

There’s a great John Finnemore sketch that involves a ridiculous number of nested stories, and I’m thinking of it as I approach the end of Frankenstein (a novel in the form of letters sent by a man recounting conversations with Frankenstein, who quotes other letters, etc.).