Brent
I finally get BattleTech
I remember standing in a hobby store with my older brother. He was probably there to buy more Car Wars material. I had been wandering the dusty aisles, past ziplock bags of dice and rules printed on dot-matrix printers. I reached up to a shelf and pulled down a book covered with giant robots. It was a BattleTech manual. (I think it was one of the early, unauthorized Robotech supplements, thus proving that anime […]
Going APE: Guy Kawasaki’s advice for self-publishing
APE is not a book for anyone. This is a book for anyone who wants to self-publish a book in the modern era of electronic publishing and Kindles. Its author, entrepreneur and investor Guy Kawasaki, writes with a comfortable clarity that must grow out of many years of writing and public speaking. His prose […]
Hok the Mighty
Many fantasy books are set in a fantastical past, like Conan‘s Hyborian Age: a time of magic and high adventure before recorded history. What if someone wrote a novel using fantasy adventure tropes–a powerful hero fighting wild creatures, spanning different environments–and set it in the actual historical period before recorded history? Now imagine it was written by a Pulitzer-nominated author who beat out William Faulkner for a literary award. Manly Wade […]
Holy Flying Circus!
Back when Monty Python released their film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the public reacted with shock. Based on the trailer, the film appeared to make fun of religion, and it seemed to make fun of Jesus. The former was true, and the latter not. But how to explain that to the public? The Pythons were asked to go on a talk show. That talk show episode became a milestone in the public appreciation of comedy and satire. You can watch […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Qwirkle Cubes
Qwirkle Cubes combines Scrabble with dice. The game comes with 90 six-sided dice. You draw a “hand” of six dice, which you roll immediately upon drawing. The first player places a set of dice in the middle of the game to form the “grid.” Play then proceeds in turns, with players adding dice to the grid, getting points for each die added of the same color in a row or column, and additional points for completing a row with […]
Make Something Every Week: Ray Harryhausen Tribute Video
I resolved at the beginning of this month to try something new for the next 3 months: I will read twice as many books as movies I watch. I will spend at most 30 free minutes on the computer each weekday evening. This time includes email, social networks, YouTube, and general surfing, but not time spent writing or otherwise making things. I will spend at most 90 free minutes on the computer each weekend day. I will […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Thurn and Taxis
Thurn and Taxis is a Euro board game that’s somewhat like Ticket to Ride. In addition to building routes, players also explicitly dominate regions. Your options are determined through a deck of cards, each representing a region on the board. Each turn, you can play a card to add a route in the region specified on the card. As your routes grow, you can score them, and as your routes connect cities, you can score […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Alhambra
Alhambra is a territory purchase game: you collect cards representing different kinds of money, then use that money to buy square pieces of a garden. You get points based on how many pieces of your garden you can fit together (each piece has some walled borders, and you must join sections appropriately), and the types […]
Rubber (movie review)
Rubber evokes the mood of a Coen Brothers film: a killer, out for revenge, drifts into a small town. Who will survive? Can anybody stop him? The film perfectly captures the tone of this genre. There’s just one twist. No, there are two: one is the film’s aggressively postmodern approach. The second is the killer’s specific form. It’s a rubber car tire. Literally, a tire rolls into town on its own […]