Hoh-leeeeee crap! We just got the log from last night’s RPG. Wait. Let me back up. Ella, running our ongoing M&M “Tethered†campaign is taking a lengthy vacation. So Jude’s taking a sabbatical from gaming as well to ease his busy schedule, and Jen is running a three-session D&D game to keep the rest of […]
The story of George de Hevesy’s (Hevesy György) buried treasure sounds faintly familiar; I think I’ve heard it before. But clearly it isn’t repeated often enough to be common knowledge, and so the story bears repeating. Earlier I’ve written of the heroic self-smuggling of European scientists out of Europe before and from beneath the advancing […]
Class was very unpleasant today, due to the heat—a whopping 99°, the morning news predicted. School closed early because some school buildings get dangerously hot in the afternoon sun, but I still had my morning classes, and they were exhausting, for both me and the kids. Hard to pay attention to sums of infinite series, […]
Had a laugh-out-loud moment last night, watching Eileene play L.A. Noire-with-an-“e.†Its protagonist, Detective Phelps, shares with Sgt. Friday a straight-as-an-arrow personality that’s stiffly awkward most of the time and occasionally rises to neurotic. Okay, I get the idea that he’s a straight cop in a dirty city, that he actually pursues evidence instead of […]
I don’t know whether anyone is actually playing Unknown Armies any more. I think the fan base was always comprised mostly of guys who bought the books and like to imagine playing someday, rather than actual players, but there was a time when the list featured rules questions and ideas for new material: plots, archetypes, […]
Dave wants to run a campaign titled “Bastards,†for the PCs will be bastards in more than one sense: cut off from (what they consider) their rightful respective inheritances, and willing to sink to extreme and contemptible methods to secure them again. If we can really stick to our resolve, it should stretch our boundaries, […]
So Sarah Palin coughed up another gob of the ignorance and inarticulacy for which she is infamous, roughly suggesting that Paul Revere ran ringing a bell at the British troops to warn them that they wouldn’t take our guns, so there. Insofar as her half-formed sentences have meaning at all, they were false and foolish. […]
Mike Birbiglia tells a very funny story about his encounter with a bear. The tale meanders a bit, drifting at one point to a claim that, if Birbiglia were a fish, he’d want to leap from the water too, and grow arms and become human, “which is what happened, over time.†To which he adds, […]
Some punk struck with his graffiti last night. What he wrote on the school walls isn’t important, just a thoughtless series of words; it was the gesture of graffiti that translates as “fuck you.†The spelling, however, was particularly poor, even for thoughtless graffiti, which made me wonder which bothered the faculty more: the gesture […]
Eileene’s been playing L.A. Noire, and I’ve been watching. Watching is the ideal way to enjoy it. The production values are high; the celebrated facial simulation, in particular, may not live up to the hype, but it is very good. A promise of things to come. The strategic interface, seamlessly fitting into the setting as […]