As promised, a few more books I’ve torn through during my holidays: Book #22: War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches edited by Kevin J. Anderson. I admit it. After seeing the horrendous Spielberg film, I wanted to reread the original novel, but of course, my HG Wells omnibus was in my apartment in Korea. However, I was pleased to dig out this anthology, to which I hadn’t given a single thought in years, and dug into it. After the first story, it was a done deal: I knew I was bringing the anthology back to Korea with me. Now, not …
Month: July 2005
Not SUCH A Geek After All
Not if being well-read counts as geekhood. I’m frankly unsurprised but now I want to go read three novels a day. Anyway: Interested Reader You have a Geek Lore rating of 67% Your knowledge of the speculative fiction field, while far from encyclopedic, is still solidly above average. You probably have a healthy interest in the field rather than a driving obsession; either that, or your memory’s just not what it’s cracked up to be… My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Geek Lore Link: The …
A Sorry Moment
There’s a musician out there, somewhere, who I used to have a little more respect for. I quite like some of his older, harder-to-get recordings, and I was researching online how I could get a copy of one when, of course, I found his website. Now, what do you think it was that made me lose respect for him? Was it shameless self-promotion? Nah, there wasn’t too much of that, considering he makes his living playing music. Was it rants about other musicians? No, because he was generally pretty nice in everything he said and his criticisms were more general …
Korean MMORPG Culture: A Lecture By Leo Sang-Min Whang
When I was plunking around for a link to Cory Doctorow’s wonderful story “Anda’s Game”, I found (on this page) an interesting link to the State of Play 2 conference and a very interesting talk by professor Leo Sang-Min Whang about the Korea-specific experience of gaming in MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). His area of focus in study is comparing East Asian countries in gaming Some of the interesting points he raised include: Unlike with young people Japan (and, Whang suggests, in other parts of Asia), cosplay (public displays performed by individuals who are dressed up as video-game …
Making a Leak
Dan asked this week’s Friday 5 question: With the recent unveiling of famed Watergate source “Deep Throat”, a great mysterious chapter of journalism has been closed. However, you now have the chance to leak some incredible secrets to a young, new reporter. What would those five secrets be, and what would your code name be for each of them? Well, since I don’t know any really big secrets, I shall have to make all of this up. Wink. Monsanto’s Plot Against The World Food Supply. Do you have any idea what they’re doing to the world food supply? You need …