Ken Newquist It’s fall — students are back on campus at the college where I work, the Pennsylvania air is starting to turn cooler and crisper, and StarGirl is getting ready to start preschool. Preschool … wow. StarGirl’s gone from being this tiny little baby that I spent hours walking with in order to sooth her crying … Read more
Running play-by-post role-playing games online is a kind of hell. Be it by blog, forum, e-mail, or some sort of real-time hookup, sustaining a game can be near impossible. While I have no hard data on this, my guess would be that only 1 in 10 online games succeed, and that’s probably wildly optimistic. The … Read more
As part of our home improvement project, I convinced my wife to turn our large interior foyer wall into a three-print gallery of sorts. The idea is that we’d put literary/magazine inspired prints there, which fits with the theme of our first floor (you can see the large wall-covering bookshelf in the library when you … Read more
In the two weeks since my last fitness post I’ve started to see some improvement as measured by the gym scale: I now weigh 218 lbs., down from 224 on August 30. I’m approaching the eagerly anticipated “36 Waist” threshold. This isn’t quite the monster milestone it may seem; my 38 jeans were always a … Read more
I’ve been lost in a blizzard of paint for the last four days as I spent almost every waking moment either scraping, spackling or painting our home library. The weekend before had seen Sue and I attacking the living room, and now after two weekends of solid work, the rooms are 90% done — all … Read more
My friends and I ran our first playtest of the combat system in Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition. It was a productive test, and we learned a lot about the game’s mechanics … and how to design a more effective heroes. Here’s what we learned in the first go round, featuring four battle-suited, Power Level … Read more
My trusty, usually dependable 512 MB iPod Shuffle died a slow, tortuous death this weekend. It ended a year-long run of iPod-augmented home-impovement and exercise, and I’m exceedingly sad to see it go.
What killed it? I’m not sure — one day it was working just fine, the next it continued to play its store of MP3s, but could no longer connect or draw power via USB. I tried it on several machines, including my G4 PowerBook, G4 Power Mac and even my Windows XP desktop machine, but none could see the device, nor would it draw power. Resetting the Shuffle had no effect, nor did leaving it sit for 24 hours.
The “Virtual Card for You” e-mail hoax has mutated yet again, promising hard drive devastation in a slightly different form: that of an Olypmic torch that “burns” your hard drive. While it earns bonus points for imagry, “Invitation” remains just as false as its predecessors. Here’s the text of the email: Date Captured: 8/17/2006 Be … Read more
I’ve pulled together all of my fatherhood posts from the time Jordan was born until now, and grouped them into a category called, simply enough “Geek Dad”. These posts have proven popular over the years, and they’ve been languishing in obscurity since the redesign. Now they’re back and easy to find — just go to … Read more
Douglas Adams died at the gym. If geeks ever needed an excuse to avoid the gym, the death of the grandmaster of science fiction humor would do wonderfully. But geeks have never needed any excuses to avoid the gym, having come up with dozens on their own.
After all, we’re not athletes. It’s not that we don’t love games. We’ll play anything — card games, board games, role-playing games, war games even live-action role-playing games — as long as it doesn’t require some sort of physical activity on an actual turf playing field. The reasons for this are legion, though for me personally it’s a combination of bad habits picked up in high school (where a nerd in the gym was a ripe target for ridicule), laziness (after all, I used to go biking every morning when I was a teenager) and a sincere desire to do something more intellectually compelling (in this, I am not alone).