Never Let Me Go
It’s difficult to review Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go without resorting to reviewers’ favorite candy phrases: heart-wrenching, melancholy, tragic, and the one that I always shudder at, tour de force. This is partly because of its deceit. For its first few chapters, it appears to be nothing more than a woman reminiscing about her […]
Weekly Expenditure Adventure: Week 2
Friday feels like a good day to record and analyze my expenditures from the past week, though perhaps I should wait until later in the day. Ah well. Here, I lay my soul (and wallet) bare: Saturday $74.50 Role-playing books and taxi rides at GenCon Sunday $77.73 Includes $50 for airport parking Monday $32.37 Groceries […]
Weekly Expenditure Adventure: Week 1
I’m trying to live within my means. This blog post is the first record of how much money I’m spending each week. I only started recording my purchases on Wednesday of last week, but even so, here are my purchases: Wednesday $40.00 Thursday $88.75 Friday $70.00 Saturday $74.50 Total $273.25 This is due mainly to […]
Humans Don’t Grow In The Dark
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about throughput. I think we all understand the concept: how much stuff can be forced through a particular channel at once. Humans have throughput limits, too. I currently have a stack of books teetering next to the leather chair in my studio. This stack has towered over 2 feet […]
The Perfect Light RPG? Dread.
Role-playing games exist in a problematic black hole. Existing role-players play RPGs, but the hobby isn’t attracting a lot of new players (though D&D 4th Edition appears to be changing that somewhat). So how to attract new players to the hobby? Well, last Sunday, I had the chance to run a game of Dread, and it was a revelatory experience. It might be the answer, or at least point the way towards the answer. Dread […]
FriendFeed Is Doomed, But It Always Was
I read with interest and some amusement the news items today about Facebook buying FriendFeed. Robert Scoble is convinced this is great news, and he got the impact absolutely right, though I think he’s still blind to one important point. What did he get right? Scoble wrote: 1. This is Facebook firing a shot at […]
Rorschach Hugging Pikachu – Otakon 2009 Pictures
I’m back from Otakon, the second-largest anime convention in the Western Hemisphere. Feels like the largest, partly because folks are packed into small spaces. Not a compliment. Here are the photos on Flickr. Represented: Silent Bob, Neo, Beetlejuice, Tiger from Kung-Fu Panda, Gambit, a Mind Flayer, several Gundams, Spider-Man, Billy Mays, Dr. Forrester, several Rorschachs, […]