6/22/15 This weekend we watched Inside Out, the latest full-length feature from Pixar studios. And it was fine. Riley is an 11-year-old girl undergoing the stresses of moving from Minnesota to San Francisco. In her head, five emotional managers, with Joy as their informal leader, more-or-less take turns at the controls in Riley’s mind, simultaneously […]
About a month ago, I listened to the first volume of the Great Lectures treatment of Bach and the high baroque. I say “the first volume†because the second still hasn’t returned to the library. As a fan of Bach, I expected some interesting anecdotes about Bach himself, which I got, but didn’t expect any […]
The internet revolution is hitting RPGs hard, and hugely for the better. Self-publishing and pdfs and search engines bypass the costs of physical printing and let everyone who wants to get a toe in the waters do so. Of course, there’s a lot of half-baked ideas floating around out there now, but that’s where search […]
The kids were rotten today in class. Not positively confrontational or destructive or any of the various infractions that can earn a trip to the principal’s office. They aren’t stupid enough for that! No, they were just entirely uncooperative, unwilling to do anything at all. Individuals might answer questions, or work very, very briefly on […]
I had to buy an onion yesterday. An overpriced Kings onion because Kings is two blocks away and I needed it before the sinigang boiled over. And on the way home, I found myself remembering a passage from Humans. Humans got rather far afield from its satire of the earnest Ghomes as it went off […]
On the subject of e-sports and League of Legends, I have to take a moment to vent a pet peeve concerning LoL casters. It comes in two parts. First, part of their job is to drum up the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding a game. The game itself doesn’t always cooperate. Sometimes both teams lapse into […]
When Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before Congress back in the beginning of March, it was widely recognized as a snub against President Obama, an embrace of the Republican party, a gesture to Israeli hardliners of strengthened military ties, and, perhaps most significantly, an attempt to shackle Republican leadership to perpetual and limitless military support for Israel. […]
Over the course of my journaling hiatus, Eileene’s sister managed to hook us both into watching League of Legends as a spectator sport. LoL is, at heart, a capture-the-base game. Five-man teams choose characters with different strengths and weaknesses, and attempt to destroy the enemy base before their own is destroyed. There’s a lot more […]
Yesterday I wrote that Vetinari is one of the two characters from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series I consider my favorites. It’s also the only fictional character who fits into a recurrent daydream of mine. I like to imagine an hour with some historical notable, a chance to gauge his reaction to news of the future. […]
Farewell, Terry Pratchett. Pushing Steam is his final book, discounting the somewhat ghoulish practice of co-authoring from his notes, as others have done with Tolkien and Asimov. I found it very sad. Not so much because of its explicit content, but as an expression of the approaching end of Pratchett’s life and literary career. Things […]