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.

Ditto.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

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

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

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.

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If something sank it might be a treasure. And 2kyu advice is not necessarily Dan repertoire..

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!

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Patience, grasshopper.

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.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

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.

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.

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Occupy Babel!

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 (=

Yes, yes, yes, what jdl and Mef wrote.

I hope you both, John and TMark, keep reading this thread. It would be so sad if you guys just thought your contributions were being underappreciated.

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I agree that the L19 forum seems to be slowing down lately . as to your question of where all the action is now. I have found that both the http://www.advancedstudyroom.com/ASR/ and the newer http://studygroupkyu.org/ have been fairly active communities that are trying to grow.

This.

I look forward to the point in my life at which I am sufficiently strong (or my coffee breaks are sufficiently long) for this kind of idea to be useful.

Good luck with real life

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North Lecale

Although I am fairly new to this forum, I must say that your resources and information have been a wonderful event to look forward to and even though I had followed pretty much every post of yours (even backtracked), I feel like a few others on here and I feel like that with my current skill and knowledge, my part of the discussion didn't serve much of a purpose. This is the way I like to spend my coffee breaks when I'm not reading some of the Go books I picked up because part of my studying this amazing game is going through quite a bit of pro games.

I hope that you guys return soon and that all is well on your end. My love and respect to you guys.

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