Ken Newquist We had our last full Game Day before GenCon yesterday, featuring the concluding chapter of the Khelez-Mar dwarven campaign. We’ve also been scrambling to do last minute preparations for GenCon and pounding away on transfering data from our campaign web site to the new wiki. Thieves in the Night The culprits behind the earthquake that … Read more
The summer reading list is going well. Since I finalized the list in Radio Active #51, I’ve finished Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, and Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds. The fiction pile is growing surprisingly short, with only Jim Butcher’s Storm Front and John Scalzi’s The … Read more
Steve Eley of Escape Pod lays down his Ten Laws of Twitter. #1 is probably the best: RESPECT. Every message consumes people’s time. Don’t twitter what you wouldn’t be happy to spend 10 seconds of your own life reading. But they’re all worth reading, and are applicable to more than just Twitter — Facebook wall … Read more
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack’s production. It’s so huge that a single review won’t do … Read more
I missed out on gaming last week, which makes me overly eager to throw some dice tonight. We’ll eschewing our normal role-playing campaigns in favor of a a round of the most excellent board game Arkham Horror, this time with the very cool-looking expansion, The King in Yellow. We have one, maybe two role-playing sessions … Read more
Where do Rainbows End? Find out in Episode #53 as I review Vernor Vinge’s near-future science fiction thriller in which a 75-year-old man awakens to find his Alzheimer’s cured, his body rejuvenated to that of a teenager … and the world transformed almost beyond belief. I also talk about what I’m reading (Pushing Ice, Harry … Read more
Reason has posted a good article discussing the merits of New York City Department of Education Ronald G. Fryer’s plan to give kids monetary bonuses for both taking and scoring well on academic tests. Some have praised the plan as providing much needed incentives to poor students; others slam it as corrupting the noble nature … Read more
It’s been a crazy summer, with a major project that threatens to consume all my working hours, and myriad home improvement headaches around the house that have been eating at my free time (thus the lack of posts around here last week). The good news is that unlike a similar crush back in the spring, … Read more
Hell, that’s not even the word. I can’t use the word I really want to use to describe the incident in which two brainless twits reproduced and then left their helpless children to fend for themselves while they got lost in in an online fantasy game for a few hundred hours. Because you see, this … Read more
Game Day was pretty much a wash yesterday, with everyone except for Evil Genius and I unable to attend. That made for a downer of a game day, but we pressed on, deciding to work on our campaign’s ongoing project: the GriffWiki. Our gaming group’s been campaigning in the World of Greyhawk since 1996, and … Read more