Life In 19x19

At the weekly GoGoD Executive Lunch (Japanese Sashimi Bento and Chinese Kungpo Chicken in a Korean restaurant, believe it or not), T Mark and I discussed today, 19 Apr 2013, the present state of Lack of Life in 19x19. The upshot was to call time on the Coffee Break column. Since there are also real-life intrusions to consider, we ended up deciding that our time can be more fruitfully or enjoyably spent than in presenting games for a dwindling and mostly unresponsive audience. It's a shame because a major motivation in starting the column was to try to breathe some vibrancy into the forum.

If we may be allowed to remind you of our original "manifesto", it said: We do not intend this to become a Q&A exercise for us, but we do hope that others will discuss the games offered and so share their experience with others. If possible, we each plan to work in shifts of a week on and a week off, but if real life intrudes plans may change and gaps may occur. Naturally, plans may also change if members prefer to spend their coffee breaks differently.

As you can see by backtracking for yourselves, we did get questions, we did not get much discussion, real life did intrude, and an increasing number of people do seem to want to spend their coffee breaks elsewhere.

Thank you to those who did contribute. We are not disappearing, from either the forum or go, but we would like to know where all the action is now.

John and TMark, thanks for all the posts. I appreciated them even if I didn't have a lot of time for discussion.

oren wrote:John and TMark, thanks for all the posts. I appreciated them even if I didn't have a lot of time for discussion.

Ditto.

Great fun while it lasted. Thanks for all seventy-five of the games. We shall always wonder what big things were planned for the coming week!

Thanks a lot!

My reasons for not discussing but sometimes quietly “liking” are:

- I still feel too weak for most Go discussions.
- More severe: My new job is eating me up. I must be happy to still have barely enough time to carry on my weekly School Go Workshop with 14-17 kids.

THANKS, John, THANKS, TMark, for generously sharing some of your treasures!


Greetings, Tom

I have to agree with Bonobo. I feel that most of the games are too far over my head for me to contribute much aside from 'oh, cool seki' even with a lot of analysis, let alone 5-10 minutes worth in looking over the game.

That said, I did like seeing the games and am sorry to see them end. Thanks for posting them for as long as you did.

Thank you a lot for sharing these marvels!

I enjoyed them in spite of staying silent.


I think that one reason why it didn't spark a lot of comments is simply, that once a day was too frequent. It would take me too much time to look seriously at a pro game per day (whenever I do that it takes at least 20min of time). It would have been more convenient for me to discuss a professional game during a week rather than a day. I was highly impressed by your dedication and the amount of work you put into these coffee break games. I especially liked the week about Shusai, which made lots of my prejudices disappear. And I'm glad these games and your comments will continue to stay here as a reference.

I thank you as well. I enjoyed looking at the games that were uploaded!

John, I think you may have overestimated the ability of many of us to contribute much in the way of discussion to the delightful presentations that you and TMark have made. For many of us, your stories were scratches on the surface of a rather blank slate. I also agree with bayu, that considering your phenomenal rate of presentation it was already quite a bit more than a coffee break for most of us to read the story and look at the game. Shame on you for offering us so much!

daal wrote:John, I think you may have overestimated the ability of many of us to contribute much in the way of discussion ...

Same here. I was waiting for some 4D+ players to make comments.


EDIT: Also, you had the misfortune to do it during a time when there have been some connection problems.

It was going pretty well, there was a stretch where I was really looking forward to the next coffee break which is an aprapoe title, but then a week of handicap games turned into multiple weeks of handicapped games, and that pretty much kills it for me. I try to be polite about such topics and not comment, since so many people really enjoy talking about handicap games.

Joaz Banbeck wrote:EDIT: Also, you had the misfortune to do it during a time when there have been some connection problems.

This is mostly it for me (though maybe I'm not smart enough to discuss either )

I'm having less and less "coffee break" time at work to read or participate, and it seems every weekend when I have more time, I keep getting "connection timeout" errors on any multi-page thread (>20 posts, even though I've now lowered my page size to 30 posts per page), so I can't even catch up.

Thanks for the series. I greatly enjoyed it.

bayu wrote:..once a day was too frequent.

This, combined with not being strong enough to comment, is why I didn't participate. By the time I could understand a game a new one would be posted anyway, so why bother.

jdl wrote:

bayu wrote:..once a day was too frequent.

This, combined with not being strong enough to comment, is why I didn't participate. By the time I could understand a game a new one would be posted anyway, so why bother.

Indeed, sometimes I would have to catch up and look at multiple games at a time, made it harder to even know what to say about any one of them. Perhaps a "Monday Morning Coffee Break" would have given us a chance (=