malvasia bianca

I don’t normally put spoiler warnings on this blog, but given how recently The Walking Dead came out, I’ll make an exception: spoilers below.   If I had to try to put a finger on what makes The Walking Dead so different from other narrative games I’ve played recently, it’s the way the game avoids […]

Christmas is almost upon us; a holiday that I am not very good at, and have, at best, mixed feelings about. So: time to dig into those feelings? It’s a religious holiday in origin; and certainly I would never say that Christians shouldn’t find Christmas to be deeply meaningful. In some circumstances, I would expect […]

Mushishi struck me right off the bat as an unusual manga series from a formal point of view; looking back, though, I’m not sure why I got that feeling quite as strongly as I did. Comparing it to the rest of my bookshelf, it is the case that most of the manga that I read […]

If you’re not already subscribed to it, I’d like to suggest that you might want to read my linkblog as well. My ground rules there are that I never post more than four links a day, that I generally try to find quotes when linking to articles, and that I generally don’t add much commentary […]

One thing I’ve been wondering recently: to what extent do I like the influence of Silicon Valley venture capital firms on the local startup culture? There are certain ways in which their influence is good, no question: it’s great that there’s money available for people to try new things, it’s great that it means that […]

On the Sunday before GDC this year, I spent the first half of the afternoon up at a chocolate festival, and the evening playing the Battlestar Galactica board game with some fellow GDC-attending friends. (Or at least they were friends before we started playing!) That left me with some free time in San Francisco in […]

For the last couple of weeks, my twitter feed has had a lot of chatter about Persona 4 Golden, enough so that I was thinking that I should maybe get a copy at some point. I don’t have a Vita yet, but I’m actually hearing enough buzz about that system that I’m not against getting […]

I never played Words with Friends, or Scrabulous before it, so Letterpress was my introduction to the genre of “asynchronous video games based on coming up with longer and/or more obscure words than your friends”. Which turns out to be a pleasant enough genre! Especially since my stock of long and obscure words is not […]

When I became a manager at Sun, they sent me to new manager training; they asked us to read a book called First, Break All the Rules which seemed to do a pretty good job of presenting a research-based approach towards management. One of the findings that the book presents is that, if you want […]

I have not been playing a lot of games recently. Part of this is that my weekend video game time is almost entirely taken up with Rock Band 3 and Rocksmith; part of it is that we’re watching more movies than we used to and we’re going through Deep Space 9 as well; part is […]

I frequently lament the lack of crepe stands in Downtown Mountain View, so I was pleased that a restaurant called “Crepevine” was setting up shop; when I noticed it had opened its doors today, I figured I’d go in and buy a crepe to eat on my way home. The restaurant looked pleasant enough once […]

One of my main sources of blog posts is following analogies: seeing where they’ll lead me, stretching them far past their breaking point in hopes that they’ll give me a different perspective on something that I’m thinking about. And today’s area in which to analogize is forms of social organization, or relationships more broadly. The […]