malvasia bianca

I finished Spore quite some time ago, but I’ve been putting off blogging about it: it’s a hard game for me to wrap my brain around. Still, a month is long enough to procrastinate, so I suppose I should say something now. I’ll begin from the point of view of a traditional video game player […]

This probably deserves a full blog post, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to it, so: Brian Marick on communities of practice, communities of interest, and boundary objects. The examples just get funnier and funnier. Very interesting take on GlaDOS. I’d never heard of umami before, I’d always thought we only had […]

Our friend Scott came over last night, and we spent the evening playing Rock Band 2; Miranda was, unfortunately, away at an overnight field trip, so we didn’t have a full band, but we did at least throw drums into the RB2 mix for the first time. Lots of fun was had by all. Scott […]

Another quote from Latour’s Politics of Nature (pp. 208–209, emphasis in original): If we borrow Lévi-Strauss’s powerful definition and use the term “barbarians” to designate those who believe that they are being assailed by barbarians, conversely, we can call “civilized” those whose collective is surrounded by enemies*. In one case we have contamination by barbarianism, […]

I was amused by the synchronicity of my going straight from a discussion of YAGNI on the XP mailing list to reading the following in Politics of Nature (pp. 195–196; emphasis in original): As soon as we agree to differentiate the past from the future no longer through detachment but through reattachment, political ecology begins […]

I’d been playing Rock Band with Miranda (my daughter) since we got it, but Liesl (my wife) had been resisting. She was clearly somewhat interested in the game—she would sometimes get caught singing along in the background—but somehow we never managed to pull her in. But I kept asking; I tried not to be annoying […]

This is one of Miranda’s favorites, and a couple of her classmates have started coveting her leftovers; at the request of one of those classmates’ mothers, here it is. (It’s really easy, too!) From the excellent Elephant Walk Cookbook. The original recipe says that boneless sirloin is also acceptable, but I prefer flank. If you […]

The Vintage Game Club is returning from its holiday break; as its fourth game, we’ve chosen Beyond Good & Evil. This is the first game that we’ve chosen that I’ve actually played all the way through; I’m curious to see what the experience of replaying a game in company will be. I’m also curious about […]

I was just looking over at my shelf of games; here are the non-downloadable games I currently own for the Wii: Super Mario Galaxy Animal Crossing Boom Blox Endless Ocean Rayman Raving Rabbids Super Smash Bros No More Heroes Super Paper Mario Wii Sports Wii Play Zack & Wiki Metroid Prime 3 Zelda Super Monkey […]

One meme that’s been floating around in my twitter feed recently (and elsewhere, e.g. it got mentioned in the holiday Confab): there are a lot of us who like being part of a conversation about video games, who like talking with others about whatever game we’re just playing or just finished. But we don’t manage […]

Some experiences from my recent reading: My recent Christopher Alexander reading made me wonder: what are the centers in this blog? Am I nurturing them properly? Seth Godin’s Tribes got me thinking: I see other bloggers out there leading tribes, and I quite enjoy being part of one of them. To what extent, however, do […]

I learned about the game Achievement Unlocked from Ludus Novus, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a game that looks like a single-screen platformer, but is in fact all about unlocking achievements: rather than traditional platformer goals, your only goal is to unlock the 100 achievements in the game. And these […]