Well, it’s February, and so far I’ve only made three batches of beer this holiday. However, I’m about to start brewing a lot more, and that means I need to empty out my fermenters and sort out my kegs.
Read more →For those who who are still occasionally (or often?) reading this blog, a few questions/observations: In the last 48 hours or so, I’ve remodeled the site extensively, with a lovely new theme by Presswork. I think the site looks a lot better now than it has in years — at least, on my Ubuntu...
Read more →In the course of overhauling this site, I ran across an old character sheet I’d done up for what I’d be like if I were a character in the game Wraith: The Oblivion, which was my favorite RPG game back in the old days. Which sounds both dorky and gloomy, since most characters in...
Read more →Has everyone seen this? They’re not paying tons, but I like the concept — an anthology of speculative fiction about fungi. As a SF-writing homebrewer, you just know I’ve written something up for that….
Read more →Bryan Kay’s article, “South Korea’s Racism Debate,” amuses me mostly because I don’t think there’s really all that much of a debate going on at all. When Miss Jiwaku has tried, with some of her Korean friends and acquaintances, to talk about the issue, she’s had a pretty disappointing success rate: when trying to...
Read more →I am currently on the verge of despairing with regards to getting my post categorization tidied up. I was using a mass editor plugin and somehow — I suspect because of the plugin, but it may have been something else I did — I discovered that a vast number of my posts prior to...
Read more →The first 120 or so pages of Shutting Out the Sun (2006) are fascinating, and indeed, Zielenziger’s portrayal of a number of Japanese hikikomori (shut-ins), their families, and those working the help bring them back out into the public world, manages to be very thoughtful and compassionate, and even, at times, moving. Later chapters are...
Read more →Pardon the mess, all: some of the links around here are not going to work so well for the next few days, until I finish tidying up my template stuff around here. The good news is, I love my new template (courtesy of PressWork) and I think it makes my blog much more readable...
Read more →While many expatriates have been great writers, in my experience, expatriates sometimes don’t do such a great job writing about the expatriate experience — with Graham Greene being a notable exception. They inevitably tend towards the same kind of thing that one sees in the expatriate blogosphere — the clever theorizing, the ranting, the...
Read more →T.E.D. Klein is one of those writers whose disappearance baffles many lovers of weird fiction. After his celebrated novel The Ceremonies (which I have not yet read) and his collection of novellas titled Dark Gods, he seemed to go mostly off the radar, and to stay there (unless one was reading the right magazines,...
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