50 Games in 50 Weeks: Catego
Catego is an abstract dice game in which several players (about 2 to 5) each roll dice, and slowly fill in a scorecard, jockeying for position. The scorecard looks like this: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Player 1 Player 2 Player 3 Player 4 Every turn, each player rolls two six-sided dice, adds them, and places that result […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Freemarket
As part of RyvenCon, the online gaming con, I played a quick game of Freemarket. Freemarket’s a fascinating system and world, which I honestly had trouble wrapping my brain around. That’s not a complaint or a suggestion that either system or world are deficient; they’re just sufficiently unusual for me to feel lost on mechanics and their consequences. Freemarket is set on a space station, in a post-capital society of plenty. Everyone has enough food and clothing. Matter printers […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: #1, Hive
Years ago, I designed a territory-building game, one in which players lay down territory cards, then spawn monsters on them in an attempt to capture another players’ castle. Never went anywhere; turns out that game design is hard. But as I sat down with a co-worker to play Hive over lunch last week, memories of my territory-building game floated to my mind. This had a similar concept, beautifully realized as a chess-like pure strategy […]
The Iron Man Anime: Comic Book Silliness
I’m two episodes into the recent Iron Man anime, and I’m having trouble. The story builds slowly, so I’m reserving judgment there. My main problems with the show are two-fold: There are only two major characters: Tony and the nervous female reporter Nanami. Pepper has only appeared once to my memory, and that was on a video phone call. That is one of the interesting elements of the show: Tony is […]
Suburban Self-Sufficiency: The Backyard Homestead
I may be moving soon. My new job at NASA (squeeee!) requires a minimum 75-minute commute twice daily, usually in heavy traffic. While I’m okay with the drive itself–having grown up in this area, I have to be–I’m losing too much time. Even with audio books, three hours a day on the road is too much. So I’ve been looking at houses near Goddard. One is a small house […]
Swingers
Swingers has heart. It’s clear that its main strengths lie in its script and its actors. The rest of the film fades away in comparison. Much like, say, The Big Lebowski. The script contains more memorable lines and sequences than the vast majority of films, and it does so at the expense of a strong, driving story. This is not a complaint; Swingers is about a man caught in an awkward time in his life. It’s […]
The Big Adventures of Barry Ween
A recommendation from the three guys at iFanboy means a lot to me. They know how to review and recommend a comic book. So on a whim, and after a stratospherically high recommendation from Ron, I bought The Big Book of Barry Ween. It’s an independent comic about a boy genius and the adventures he goes on. Thankfully, hilarity really does ensue. Cliched set up; hilarious execution. Judd Winick’s writing is consistently funny and his […]
Taxi Driver is a Superhero Movie
Here’s the plot of a movie: A regular guy grows increasingly frustrated by the crime and evil that surrounds him on the streets of New York. So he gains the power to fight back, then sees a young girl in trouble and saves her from the men who’ve kidnapped and drugged her for money. That’s the plot of Taxi Driver. Three things intrigued me most while watching this film for the first time last week: 1) I thought […]
David Foster Wallace: Maddening Genius
I recently finished reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a collection of his magazine essays. Wallace himself is a recently-deceased literary darling, author of Infinite Jest and a number of short pieces. And now I have a problem. Wallace was a writer of rare genius, thoroughly engaging the reader with energetic prose that was often both familiar and bizarre, a conversational patter riddled with invented words. […]
A Fanboy of iFanboy
I first stumbled on iFanboy when I bought my Roku a few months back. I was skimming through Revision3’s offerings, saw a show on American comics, and watched an episode. I found a show that combines intelligence, experience, and passion. These guys know their comics, they know how to talk about comics in a way that’s helpful for any reader, and they know the limits of their knowledge. They understand that passion can be a highly […]