Life in Good Measure

CW: Weight issues, alcohol consumption
Outline: Beers, Books, Boardgames, Bike Rides, Weight

The boyfriend of one of my best friends calls me “The Logger.”

Not “The Blogger”: “The Logger.”

He knows I log my beers, log my boardgames, log my books, log my rides, log my weight. (He should see our work logs, where I’ve kept timesheets since 2012 so I can conduct time-usage analysis on myself.)

Why do I log so many things?

My Beers

I log my beers because I like trying new beers, and I drink enough different beers that I can’t remember what I thought of Funky Buddha Sweet Potato Casserole, for instance, without looking it up in Untappd (4.3, my least favorite of the above tasters but still enjoyable).

Conversation during my annual physical last year…

Doctor: How much do you drink?
Me: 352 beers in 2024, according to my app! [thinking this wasn’t many]
Doctor: That’s way too many. That’s like one a day. It’s become a habit. Try drinking every other day.
Me: Won’t that just be a new habit?
Doctor: Try drinking less.

Thanks to my Untappd app, I know the longest I went between beers was 32 days (I did Dry January). Despite that, I did not succeed in my goal of drinking on 182.5 days, but I did drink fewer: 212 days (297 beers across that, so 1.4 beers when I did drink). Fully a quarter of the drinks (25%) came on Saturday nights, while only 6% were on Thursdays.

This year I’m once again focusing on non-alcoholic beers in January but come August I’ll be enjoying pumpkin beers.

My Books

I log my books. I’ve written elsewhere about how I went from an avid reader to just reading social media, and how I got back into reading physical books: Regaining the Book Reading Habit.

I resolved to read 24 books in 2025 and read 48 (oops?!), completing my reading of the past 15 years of Hugo-Award Winners.

I started listening to the Clarkesworld podcast in May then switched to the print edition in July (6 of those 48 “books” I read last year are its magazines, but given the word count these are like anthologies; the January 2026 issue had a word count of 56,000 words). You can read stories from back issues for free.

I read all of The Murderbot Diaries and re-read the first book, All Systems Red, after watching the new TV series.

Oh, and I read a new-to-me translation of Gilgamesh, by Stephen Mitchell, which ended up being one of my favorite books I read last year.

My other 5-star reviews were for All Systems Red, James, Some Desperate Glory, Star Trek: Lower Decks―Warp Your Own Way, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

My Boardgames

I tracked my 2025 boardgame plays using BoardGameGeek.com and the BG Stats app (which synchronizes with BGG). It’s no surprise that The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game was my most-played game, getting to the table on 10 different occasions to play 77 hands in total. Twilight Struggle: Red Sea is tense and delightful. It was a gift for my youngest for Christmas 2024; my gift to him for Christmas 2025 was Turing Machine, which he also loves and which we got to the table 10 times before the end of the year.

I was also delighted to get in two plays of Milton Bradley’s Dark Tower for the first time since 2013 (as BGG reminds me). Unlike 2024, when I played lots of railroad games, I only got Ticket to Ride: San Francisco to the table.

The h-index of 6 in the above chart means there were 6 games I played at least 6 times. The stat I care about that is not shown is how many days I played: 79 days out of the year, better than my goal of at least once a week.

On the mobile game front, I mainly played Steam: Rails to Riches and Solitaire Square.

On the RPG front in 2025, I GMed 4 sessions of the beta for what became Apocalypse World 3 and ran 18 planets for Planet of the Week (maybe 27 sessions? something I don’t log!). Always a GM, never a player. Another resolution for 2026: to play not just GM.

My Bike Rides

One of the reasons I resolved to read fewer books is to carve out more time for exercise, as one of my 2025 resolutions was to bike more. I log my rides to see how I’m progressing.

When I first started, I’d find a 4-mile bike ride exhausting. I only biked 16 miles in January. These days, I bike 10 miles a day six days out of the week, if I’m not traveling. Well, that’s what I tell myself: the data tells me I biked four days out of the week for the second half of 2025.

My longest ride last year—to a nearby state park—was 22 miles, which is more than I rode each month back in Q1.

My Weight

They say exercise doesn’t really help with weight loss, but I managed to lose 16 pounds over the course of the year.

I log my weight through a delightful scale that talks to my phone through Bluetooth: the 60beat BLUE bathroom scale I bought for $25 for a 2015 New Year’s resolution. I’ve only had to change its batteries twice in all that time. Sadly, the manufacturer has gone out of business, and I expect the smartphone app to eventually stop working, so I back up the results every month. (This isn’t technically an Internet of Things device, but it’s close, and points to the problems when manufacturers go out of business or stop supporting connected devices.)

The best thing that ever happened to my weight was COVID lockdowns, because apparently restaurant food is very bad for you.

My Stats

So, yes, I’m a logger, and a blogger, and as a blogger I value those other loggers. My “top X” reviews are so often based on loggers that last year I did a survey to better understand who these people are. The key takeaway is that the most voluminous reviewers are a very small subset of people. You can read more: Who Rates and Reviews Books, Movies, Games, and Beer Anyway? And I did a more anecdotal analysis of how IMDB ratings change over time: IMDB Ratings Over Time.

As Socrates never said, “the unmeasured life is not liveable.”

Image credit: Unsplash+