The Independent Sixth Reader
(Review. Elocution. We suck at this. Perhaps it’s time.) I discovered this book in a dusty used bookstore off a major highway. The place was crammed with thousands and thousands of used books in every imaginable category, and deep in the back recesses of the store lay the gold mine: a whole case of books each over 100 years old. I picked out The Independent Sixth Reader, an instructional book published in 1868. It’s the last book in a series […]
Normal Blogging
A little social media navel-gazing: I’m sick today, and in that frustrating middle on a bunch of projects. Not that I have the energy to work on them, but at least I can stare, bleary-eyed, at my list of Projects between bathroom runs. (And I do mean runs.) I have a 40-page setting guide that I’ll release when my season 3 of the Monsters of the Shattered World podcast gets out of the editing stage, but it looks like that won’t […]
The Surprising, Incredible Burt Wonderstone (review)
This movie genuinely surprised me. Besides the characters and story, this is a movie about stage magic. Its writers did a wise thing: they wrote a movie that’s primarily about a failing magician getting back into his game. It is secondarily a comedy. This brings with it certain drawbacks. But let me get to that in a minute. The film starts with two nerdy kids who […]
Suspense! (review)
Daniel Solis is a brilliant game designer. He built one of my favorite RPGs, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, a free-wheeling story-telling game of young wuxia pilgrims flying around a fantasy world, getting into trouble and helping others. Its primary mechanic is Go stones. He recently began demoing a new game called Suspense!, a […]
The Power and the Glory (book review)
The Power and the Glory is a difficult novel. It’s easy to read. Greene writes florid, powerful prose that pulled me into memorable situations. His characters are complex and multi-dimensional (meaning they often have multiple opposing beliefs and values). This is about people caught in difficult, desperate situations. People who have made mistakes, and pay for them. People who are people. They’re not trying to be […]
Pacific Rim (review)
I’m trying to write out my thoughts on Pacific Rim without simply restating Sam Keeper’s information-dense article “The Visual Intelligence of Pacific Rim” at Storming the Ivory Tower. So maybe you want to check that out. Worse, I’m about to make many over-generalizations about things about which I know more than the average American, but I’m far from an expert in. I saw Pacific Rim. (That’s not the generalization.) Friends […]