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Archives for January, 2012

help send mattie to gdc!

I’m sure most of you are familiar with Mattie Brice—over the last half year or so, she’s seems to suddenly be in the middle of every conversation on Twitter, she writes regularly on her own blog, The Border House, Pop Matters, and Nightmare Mode, and her empire is continuing to expand with appearances in Kotaku […]

whipping girl

A friend of mine loaned me her copy of Whipping Girl, because she thought I would enjoy it and find it interesting; she was quite correct in that suspicion. I’m copying down some quotes here largely for my own future reference, but if y’all find something of interest in them, so much the better. (If […]

teaching games

In the January VGHVI Symposium, we discussed some of Roger’s thoughts on teaching. Which was a very interesting conversation, and I’d like to follow it up more. Unfortunately, I’m hampered for a couple of reasons: I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in […]

spacechem

I stopped playing SpaceChem two and a half months ago, but somehow other blog posts intervened, so I’m only writing about it now. Which I could use as an excuse for the complete lack of insight that I’m going to display, but the truth is: I don’t think I would have anything useful to say […]

polishing fragments

A while back, I mentioned that I’d written a little microblogging platform called ‘fragments’. At the time, it was a little unpolished; since then, I’ve cleaned up the code a bit (most importantly, separated the content from the guts of publishing, though presentation is probably more interwoven with the latter than would be ideal), enough […]

help me buy a tv!

Our current TV is really showing its age, so I’m planning to buy a TV next week; any advice, whether about specific models or attributes to look out for or good places to go for reviews or good places to buy them from? I imagine I’ll spend less than a thousand dollars on the TV, […]

fundamental differences with the blogs of the round table

I never participated in the Blogs of the Round Table back when Corvus was running it (at least I don’t think I did?), but I was quite happy to see that, with Corvus’s blessing, Critical Distance is relaunching that feature. So I thought I would take a swing at this month’s theme (provided by Corvus […]

my year of contingency and narrative

While reading Lifelode, the character who could see others’ possible futures really grabbed me. After I put down the book, though, I realized: that character didn’t grab me because that image particularly stood out in the context of the book, she grabbed me because of where my head has been recently. Because, looking back, I’ve […]

lifelode, among others

I’ve been a Jo Walton fan for a while—all of her books are quite good, and Tooth and Claw is rather wonderful book if you’re a fan of Victorian novels and dragons—but Lifelode got to me in a way that none of her previous novels did. It’s a fantasy novel, and makes contact with many […]

i would seem to be excessively sedated

During this week’s Rock Band practice, the song I spent the most time with was I Wanna Be Sedated. Like I Love Rock and Roll, it’s filled with simple power chord progressions, and after that earlier song, I thought I understood the basics of power chords reasonably well. Music with a lot of power chords […]