THINK blog Volume 2 Chapter 12

Happy Friday everybody, and a pinch and a punch for the first of the month. Though I am wary of running afoul of Lichess rules on content, and anyone who has not read the lichess page on blocking ads here ought to do so, I have been doing this long enough now to think it is probably OK* to tell my readers that every year on this day I listen to this track by Tangerine Dream, currently helping me compose the latest instalment of this blog**. And where better to extend a warm welcome to aetaris, the newest addition to the leaders of THINK.

For the uninitiated, Think is a lively, loose community association of people who play chess and do all sorts of other things, similar to a team but better. There's all sorts of tournaments, fora and fun things like lotteries and, of course, the Brainbox Challenge. We are getting close to a thousand members now, so please do come along and join us: it is going to be worth your time.

*because while I am recommending that people listen to this music I am not promoting it in the sense of helping someone to make money, and I am not making money from it myself in any way. Incidentally, at the time of writing to the best of my knowledge Chrome no longer supports Ublockorigin (boo! hiss!) but Edge does, meaning that you don't have to put up with annoying ads introducing this or any other youtube video, providing that you have a device that runs Edge.

**I find also that my problem-solving skills are enhanced by playing the right sort of music. That is not necessarily the same thing as music I like: for example, The Man Machine is probably my favourite Kraftwerk album but I find it entirely inappropriate for playing chess or even solving puzzles. Perhaps listening to it demands too much of my attention for me to be able to focus on my game. DJ sets work OK providing that it's not a set with one stand-out tune that I end up skipping to, or one that I find annoying and want to skip over, but rather the sort of set where each track builds on the one before and augments the one after. I stand to be corrected but I seem to recall the great JannLee used to listen to Armin van Buuren when training for Crazyhouse events.