The Thirteenth Annual Mindless Diversions Unsolicited Shopping Guide

It’s time, once again, for everybody to come on board the Mindless Diversions Unsolicited Gift Guide train!

The nephews are now at the age where the gifts they ask for are gifts that aren’t intended to be played with immediately. I mean, 13 or 14 years ago, we got one nephew the Hammacher Schlemmer Compacting Garbage Truck (It wasn’t $100 back then, I tell you what… and we bought it at the bespoke pinky extended toy store). Given that we wrapped it in aluminum foil, we then ripped up the foil into a couple dozen pieces and made little marble-sized balls for him to put in the different trash cans. He then spent the rest of the visit emptying, filling, dumping, and recycling. He stopped only to say goodbye when forced to.

Now? He asks for stuff like “jogging pants”. Though, I’ll grant, he’s also asked for the “credit card Monopoly” and I’m pretty sure he means this one.

Which means that I have to get him that and try to find a game that is actually good. Maybe something like “Cartographers“. I already got the nephews One Night Werewolf and, if you ask me, that should be a must-have for freshman year at the dorm… but he’s looking for something with the fam.

Monopoly isn’t a good game for the family. Too much bad blood.

Play something that will have you thinking “next time, I’ll do *THIS*” rather than “man, so-and-so is a jerk” (or, heaven forbid, “ha ha, I was such a jerk!”).

Murali suggests Ticket to Ride. This is a fun little worker placement game that is fun despite being superficially “educational”. Be a railroad mogul and play against the other moguls on the board. Can you get from Helena to Saint Louis? Well, what about when someone else bogarts Helena to Omaha? Now you’ve got to pick between going through Denver and going through Duluth.

And if you want to practice between physical games, you can pick up Ticket to Ride on Steam and master your strategy so you’ll be able to kick the butts of your nephews next time.

I recommend overlapping routes. Get both Denver to Chicago and San Francisco to New York and clean up!

The big board game that I discovered this year is Lying Pirates (reviewed here). It turns Liar’s Dice into a game you can play with the family or a game for game night with the crew. Fun for people who like to bluff, fun for people who like to roll dice, fun for people who like math. A laugh riot and it’s over quickly enough that you’ll demand to play a second time immediately after finishing the first game.

Cosmic Encounters is a game that has been out since 1977 and it’s got approximately a jillion expansions and you can play dozens and dozens and dozens of games before you start seeing repeated combinations of races and powers. The game looks like it’s going to be slow and deliberate but, seriously, once someone starts stealing someone else’s planets, the game is on and it’s a race. It looks like it’s going to be complicated but you can explain it to someone new in about 5 minutes.

One thing that Maribou did for me in the last month was note that I was complaining about my absolute favorite hoodie becoming too old, too scratchy, too thin, and too non-comfy. She picked me up one of these Land’s End Serious Sweats Pullover Hoodies and, I gotta tell ya, I have a new absolute favorite hoodie. So if you have someone in your life who has started complaining about his or her favorite hoodie, get them one of these. They’ll be *THRILLED*. (Maribou asked if I wanted a second one in a different color since they were on sale and I said *YES*.)

Em Carpenter recommends these PajamaJeans “for the sensorily problematic person in your life”. Looks like a pair of jeans, feels like a pair of sweats.

She also recommends a subscription to Audible. Instead of catching up on a podcast, maybe catch up on your reading. Thousands of titles including best-sellers from decades ago to the latest and greatest originals that sound more like radio plays than books in their own right. Oooh, Brandon Sanderson!

I asked Maribou to give me some book recommendations for everybody and she gave me something for everybody on your list, including your boss.

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The Fireman, by Joe Hill
Moves along at a compelling clip, good characters and outright lyrical description as well as unabashed moral themes about love and joy and endurance which I always enjoy in a horror novel slash science fantasy plague novel. I have never regretted reading a Joe Hill book and that streak continues. Also highly recommend the audio; it is SO GOOD and reassuring to have scary stories read to one by Captain Janeway. The 22 hours flew by with clarity and delight.

Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, by Jamie Loftus
Raunchy, fascinating, open-hearted. I have loved every Jamie Loftus thing I have checked out and this travelogue/history of hot dogs is no exception.

Tell The Rest, by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Virtually unputdownable. And I cried happy tears at the end. Compelling characters and effective pacing. Also it shows rather than merely telling that friendship, love, compassion, are more important than respect for authority, which is a very good moral indeed.

Mindful of Race: Understanding and Transforming Habits of Harm, by Ruth King
Rich and wise. I’ll be keeping this one for a while longer yet.

Brazen, by Penelope Bagieu
This collection of short comix biographies was so fun to read and I found out more about several women I admire. I also found out about really cool women I hadn’t heard of before! Definitely going to read more by this author.

How to Astronaut, by Terry Virts
Really interesting and enjoyable short essays, mostly about pragmatic day to day details of life in space. It manages to nerd out without losing itself in the technical details, an impressive balance. The authorial voice is personable and easygoing.

Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher
A very satisfying and direct (but also slightly uncanny) retelling of Sleeping Beauty in which the fairy is doing her best, and has had a lot of time to reflect, and the princess is very wicked. I liked it a great deal.

A Middle-Earth Traveler: Sketches from Bag End to Mordor, by John Howe
Beautiful art, well-contextualized.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Full of passionate intensity and touching asides. Essence of distilled fanfic in the best possible way.

Virga and Bone: Essays from Dry Places, by Craig Childs
I do not particularly love the desert even after more than 20 years, but I am still intensely fascinated by it and I love reading about it. Craig Childs writes beautifully about it, and I love his love for desert.

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
There is so much of everything in this book, you could make about eight different novels out of its premises and yet they also do come together to make one vast story. And I was really attached to several of the characters. Many shocking and unpleasant things happen, and great tragedies, but also the overall vibe is exciting and adventurous.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
I sighed so happily when I finished this and hugged the book. It goes to some very dark places, but I found it so kind to the reader about what happens there.

The Chanur Saga (Pride of Chanur and sequels, the cheapest way to get them is in the two mass market paperback editions), by C.J. Cherryh
Alien trader cats in space with lots of other species they only kind of get along with, there’s a lot of interesting verbal conflict and some quite desperate station & space battles. Humans exist but are more puzzling and peripheral than anything else, the one human character is always viewed from the outside, and seen as fundamentally odd. I must’ve read this half a dozen times between ages fifteen and twenty. Glad it holds up to a reread. Amused and touched to see some of the imprints it made on my heart.

kids books
Batcat, by Meggie Ramm
I love this book SO MUCH. I want to keep it forever and hug it and squeeze it. Everything about it is is just how I would want it to be. What a fabulous fable.

Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith
I adored this comic-book modern retelling of Beowulf, took deep language glee in it, and will be passing it along to kids I know.

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Andrea Matranga has an *AMAZING* thread of the best Amazon buys from this year. Here’s only a small sprinkling:

These were my favorite Amazon US buys of 2023 (referral links). Not exactly a christmas list per se but some stuff can be gift.

— Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 (@andreamatranga) November 28, 2023

https://t.co/xEjsJUEJqK WiFI/USB microscope. Insects, electronic computers, splinters, flowers, the sky’s the limit. At which point get a telescope.

— Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 (@andreamatranga) November 28, 2023

https://t.co/ySPZuZSXZt This is a very sweet book, where every chapter is a different myth about constellations taken from a different world culture.

— Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 (@andreamatranga) December 4, 2023

https://t.co/4sUoTKA2nZ Convenient night lights with very gentle adjustments level from basically dark to quite bright, and they turn on and off automatically when the lights go out.

— Andrea Matranga 🇺🇦🌻 (@andreamatranga) December 4, 2023

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Our own Trumwill gives his Christmas recommendations:

This is the universal remote to end all universal remotes, at least since Logitech left the universal remote business. It controls every brand of TV out there, but they all do that. Where the Sofabaton excels is its compatibility with a very wide range of devices such as Roku, FireTV, and so on (including HDMI switches), and how it makes it easy to connect to all of them on the same device and move between them in an easy and intuitive manner. The smartphone app makes setting it up easy as well as programming individual buttons.

If you want a good sunrise clock that you can set up with your smartphone, this one is a winner. We have about four in our house with one for every room. The ability to program them with the smartphone and the fact that tey work with Alexa and Google Home make it incredibly useful. I love this clock so much I got their robot vacuum cleaner, which I would recommend but they seem to no longer offer. Robot vacuum cleaners with apps are something I would recommend to give as a gift, though I have no brand name to endorse.

These are the best travel mugs out there. It seems ridiculous to pay between $15-20 for a travel mug, but you can throw these things across a room and they won’t spill, and they do a fantastic job of keeping your coffee warm. The use design (where the latches and buttons are) are surprisingly intuitive. This is something it never occurred to me would matter until I used a product as well-engineered as this one.

I purchased this believing that it was an Anker-brand and a bit angry at myself that I didn’t look closer. It’s dressed exactly like Anker, but is off-brand. That said, it has worked as well as any Anker I’ve ever owned at a fraction of the price. The list price is almost $30 but I’ve never seen it not on sale for closer to or usually below $20. The top charger can charge of laptops, the middle charger can power up phones really fast, and the bottom one is also a fast charger but not as fast as the others.

Speaking of Anker…

Anker is the benchmark of quality when it comes to chargers and accessories. They are definitely pricey, but if you know someone that is always complaining that their travel charger doesn’t work right and you want something that’s at a good price point for the brand, this is a winner. The ports work almost exactly as the above, because this is what the above was impersonating.

If you want good cables to go with the chargers, etguuds have been pretty reliable at a good price point.

These are some of the best earpieces around and they’re usually $25 or less on sale. The alien eyes are gimmicky but the earpieces are solid. The microphone is inconsistent when it comes to making phone calls, though.

If you want something that’s good for making calls, let me recommend: these are good and reliable at a super low price.

Now, if you’re looking for something less conspicuous that you can even sleep in, these are aces. It’s common with these sleeping earpieces for them to fall out of the ear (performance may vary by ear size, I suppose), but these stay in and are comfortable if you want to be listening to something as you sleep.

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And I will repeat what I said last year:

Of course, the reason for the holidays has little (if anything) to do with giving (or getting) presents but it’s always nice to give a loved one a gift that says “hey, I was thinking about you.”

And with that in mind… hey. I’ve been thinking about you. From us and ours to you and yours, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, Non-Denominational Generic Good Wishes, Happy Hanukkah, Good Festivus, Joyous Kwanzaa, and, of course, Merry Christmas.

I hope that you found something above that you’d want to give to a loved one. In addition to all of the above, I still recommend everything we recommended in Unsolicited Shopping Guides of the past and we want you (yes, you!) to put your recommendations in comments. The gifts that you’d most want to give your loved ones and the gifts that you’d most want to receive? We want to hear about them because you never know who is currently pulling their hair out looking for the perfect gift that you (yes, you!) already know all about.

We want to hear from you!

So… what are you giving?