| Birthday wishes |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|07:12 am] |
Happy birthday to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) juliebata!
Congratulations on still being older than me. :) |
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| Sobering news |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|10:15 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Home | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  depressed | ] |
So Duke Seifried stopped by the store today. For those of you who don't know, Duke has been a leading light in the gaming industry for decades -- at least since the 1960s; probably earlier. His caravan of people running the MOST visually engaging miniature games I've ever seen is a regular attraction at many of the larger regional gaming conventions. He's more known as a guy who runs games at cons than as a writer or designer, though he's done those things too, and with some success.
Anyway, in the context of mentioning his terminal lung disease, he said these approximate words to me: "I gave the eulogy for Gary (Gygax) last year, I gave the eulogy for Dave (Arneson) this year, and now I've got two years left. We're all gone now."
Yeah.
B. |
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| Don't say I never do anything for ya |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|05:54 pm] |
Green Ronin Publishing is having a sale this weekend! Enter SWAGDAY during checkout in the Green Ronin Online Store to get 10% off your order. Limit 1 per customer, please. Offer expires July 12, 2009 -- that's THIS Sunday -- so HURRY!
B. |
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| New review posted |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|06:16 pm] |
My most recent review, of Fantasy Flight Games' Aye, Dark Overlord, is now available for your perusal over at Flames Rising. Click here to read it.
B. |
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| New review posted |
[Jun. 18th, 2009|08:12 am] |
A new review of mine, covering Privateer Press Miniatures, just went live over at FLamesrising.com. Here's a link. |
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| Surprise! |
[May. 6th, 2009|12:17 pm] |
I neglected to mention a couple of weeks ago that the first book I've contributed to that actually has my name on the cover is now out. All-In, an adventure anthology in the Wild Cards setting for the Mutants and Masterminds RPG, is now available. I'm immensely proud of my part in this book, particularly with how great the accompanying art for my piece turned out. Now as long as the adventure itself doesn't suck, I'll be REALLY pleased!
All-In is available from your favorite local game store, or direct from Green Ronin Publishing at this link. |
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| Review link |
[May. 6th, 2009|10:36 am] |
My latest review, of Ken Hite and Andy Hopp's "Where the Deep Ones Are" just went up this morning at Flamesrising.com. Here's a link:
http://www.flamesrising.com/where-the-deep-ones-are-review/
A tribute to Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are", "Deep Ones" blends the format and style of "Wild Things" with the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Fun stuff.
B. |
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| Fasting and meat |
[May. 4th, 2009|08:45 pm] |
I decided today was a meat-free day.
It started with me having to fast for 12 hours for a blood test. After I got home, I had a big glass of orange juice and went back to bed -- not enough sleep over the weekend. When I woke up, I wasn't particularly hungry, and on a whim decided to try not eating meat for a day. To be honest, I've done this before and it isn't actually difficult for me. At worst, I dive into the Boca stuff and I trick myself into thinking I'm eating a burger or a chicken patty, and it works great because they're really tasty and full of protein. Some people I know can't go one meal without meat, much less one day (I do live in Wisconsin, you know.)
Why did I do this? I admire vegetarians. I like eating meat, and am unlikely to give it up entirely, but considering the fact that we're closing in on six billion people here on planet Earth, it makes more sense to promote a diet that is more sustainable. You can feed many more people on the grain a cow would eat (or by using the acreage to plant food crops rather than feed corn) than by eating the cow itself, and eventually this will be a stark, terrifying reality. Vegetarians have a variety of reasons for not eating meat, and some are more militant about it than others, but in the end they've made a choice to live in a way that is better for all of us, and I respect that immensely.
SO today I ate a mixed veggie salad for lunch (with cheese, of course - Wisconsin, remember?), a waffle, a clementine and some string cheese for dinner, and my snacks included rice cakes (Quaker makes flavored rice cakes that are VERY tasty; Quakes is the brand name) and a soda.
Do I feel morally superior? No. Human beings have eaten animals for thousands of years, and the food chain is what it is out of evolutionary necessity. I hold no animosity towards responsible hunters who eat -- or allow others to eat -- what they kill. The time will come, however -- and perhaps sooner rather than later -- when we have to choose carefully the best way for us to survive. We're driving a lot of animals close to extinction; seafood is first on the list as wild stocks of shrimp, lobster, crab and seas bass, among other critters, have dwindled to the point where they are disappearing from restaurants and stores alike.
Poultry (and by extension, eggs) as a small farm enterprise are sustainable. Pigs are also somewhat sustainable in this way. But cows take up too much space and eat too much to be truly viable in the long-term, and whole countries worth of rainforest - forest that generates precious oxygen - are being cleared to make room for more beef cattle pastures. Factory farms are dreadfully worrisome entities to me, and while they are more efficient at bringing us cheap food, they don't excel at bringing us excellent quality or disease-free food, and that's something a small farmer can cover better. The bottom line is, we're all going to be paying more for food in the years ahead, and it may be a good thing to start prioritizing what you need and thinking about how to get as much as possible of it locally.
My brother Mike tried to give me this kind of information years ago, and while some of it sunk in, I didn't feel any real need to act on it then. I've been thinking a lot more about what I eat ever since I started working for Green Ronin - I have iamnikchick especially to thank for this, but also roninevil. Thanks, guys, for raising my awareness. |
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| Up and at 'em! |
[May. 3rd, 2009|09:46 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  chipper | ] |
replyhazy and I got ourselves up early (for a Sunday) and went out to the Pheasant Branch Nature Conservancy for a spot of birdwatching. It's warbler migration time, and these incredibly-colorful birds aren't too colorful when they pass through again in the autumn, so we had to act soon. We racked up a respectable if not remarkable overall list:
Baltimore Oriole
Belted Kingfisher
Palm Warbler
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Orange-Crowned Warbler
Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher
Black-Capped Chickadee
Goldfinch
Cardinal
American Robin
Common Crow
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Red-Bellied Woodpecker
White Breasted Nuthatch
Mallard
Starling
Blue Jay
We both came home with sore backs and stiff necks from looking straight up for long periods at tiny little birds in the tops of trees. Still, it was good to get out and do some birding; I don't get out as often as I'd like any more, and this helps remind me how much I enjoy seeing all the bright colors and oddball behaviors of the birds. The lack of variety of warblers was a bit disappointing; replyhazy would liked to have seen a Redstart and I'd wished for a Chestnut-Sided Warbler, but neither of us got our wish today. Everything is finally greening up around here, and soon (possibly within days!) the leaves will be too thick for optimum warbler-watching. |
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| A new first |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|10:25 pm] |
I conducted my first-ever interview (as the interviewer) and it's up now over at Armchairgeneral.com:
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/legions-in-plastic-warlord-games-interview.htm
The review is only okay; it was done by email and for some reason I couldn't email my subjects directly so it passed through another person first. Makes follow-up kinda of difficult. Still it was interesting and a value experience to have gained, I think.
B. |
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| Fabulous news! |
[Mar. 30th, 2009|12:10 pm] |
My brother-in-law, who happens to be an electrician, generously came out to replace what we thought was a faulty bathroom lightswitch. Turns out it's far more serious than that.
Apparently, the chimps who built our condo development used (big surprise) the cheapest materials to be found in a random Pakistani junkyard. The result: we now need to replace our entire electrical service panel ASAP. The individual breaker circuits are literally melting and corroding the breakers below them in a delightful daisy-chain of suck.
Well, there's another $1K we had other uses for. Ketchup sandwiches all around!
B. |
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| Book list of 2009 |
[Mar. 21st, 2009|06:07 pm] |
After spending too long trying to slog through an anthology that literally sucked the joy out of reading for me, I've finally conceded defeat and set it aside in favor of something new.
Book #1 for 2009: Storm Front (Jim Butcher)
 Storm Front by Jim Butcher
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
I enjoyed the television series based on Jim Butcher's work, so I thought I'd give the novels themselves a shot. This is the first novel in the series, and as such it lays a great deal of groundwork for establishing characters, setting and major themes.
Overall, I enjoyed it: Buthcer is an engaging writer, and his characters come to life through minimal but effective description and well-written dialog. He writes scenes with magical effects well, making them both believable and powerful scenes. My only problem is the nature of Harry Dresden himself; he is an outcast within the wizardly world, mistrusted by the White Council (the wizards' governing body) because once he used magic to kill very early in his career. He was essentially cleared of charges as the death was in self-defense, but whenever anything supernatural happens, Harry gets blamed for it -- not only by the White Council but also by the more mundane authorities -- and has to prove his innocence. If this is the same trope Butcher uses in every one of the Dresden novels, it'll get old in a big hurry. Still, I liked this one well enough to read another, so we'll see where this particular rabbit-hole leads.
View all my reviews.
Anyone else out there read this one and have thoughts on it?
Take care!
B. |
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| New post up |
[Mar. 10th, 2009|03:06 pm] |
I just put up a new post on my blog about comics, Watchmen, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Check it out here
B. |
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| New review up, now with SOUND! |
[Feb. 24th, 2009|10:55 am] |
replyhazy and I co-wrote a review of the film treatment of H.P. Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu; the review was just posted over at Flamesrising.com, and if you click on the link for it on the review's page, you can hear the first paragraph read aloud.
http://www.flamesrising.com/cthulhu-goes-to-the-movies/
It's only one paragraph, and the reader utterly mangles the pronunciation of "Cthulhu" (but frankly, who doesn't?) but other than that, it was way cool.
B. |
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| Call for help |
[Feb. 19th, 2009|02:56 pm] |
Some friends of mine, Matt McElroy and Monica Valentinelli, have a very sweet cat with bad UT problems, involving crystals and a split urethra. He's in pain as you might expect, and not healing well; being not Made of Money, M&M could use a little help keeping the poor guy going and medicated. If you have a spare $5 or $10 or more, please consider checking out their Fundables page:
http://tinyurl.com/cgg3x5
If you're a fan of their web site, Flamesrisiing.com (and who isn't?), you could also visit their Cafe Press store and pick up some branded merchandise:
http://www.cafepress.com/flamesrising
And if you were thinking of buying any RPG-type material via PDF, they have a portal on their site that can help you with that:
http://flamesrising.rpgnow.com/
Thanks for anything you can do to help them out.
B. |
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| The four magic words of Spring |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|11:48 am] |
"Pitchers and catchers report."
I'm curious to see how the Brewers fare this year. Having lost their two best pitchers to free agency, it may be another couple of years before they're back in the playoffs in any capacity. Or, they may overachieve and be right back there this year. Stranger things have happened.
I have several essays in my head about baseball; drugs, fandom and "is baseball still relevant in the 21st Century?" among them, but that will have to wait until later, and probably they'll be too involved to post here directly, but a link will be available once I'm ready to go.
B. |
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