Some discussion of types of superheroes and superpowers over at Stephanie Denise Brown’s LJ led to a pretty fascinating exchange in the comments section, finally (for me) culminating in a discussion of gaming with one of the original writers of what remains my most fondly-remembered RPG system, Wraith: The Oblivion. My Wraith books were, along with nearly all my other White Wolf RPG books, lost in shipment to my parents’ home when I left for Korea. It’s been eight years, but the loss still stings a little. I had almost everything that had come out in the Wraith line, as …
Month: March 2010
Cut, Cut, Cut, and Another Review of “Sarging Rasmussen”
Well, today is not a particularly interesting day: I spent much of it cutting text. (I’ll spend the rest of it on laundry, steaming my floors with my new steamer vacuum, probably watching the remaining two-thirds of the Bollywood film Krrish, maybe having a coffee with the espresso machine that arrived today to replaced my previous, broken machine, and avoiding seed fruit, nuts, brown rice, and beans–because I’ve have an upset digestive system for most of the time since I got back from Indonesia, and am going to go to the hospital Monday morning to undergo, yes, basically the same …
Spidey’s Eyes, The Greys, and The Fourth Kind
The other day, a few of my students were talking about that dreadful colostomy bag of a film, The Fourth Kind. Apparently some of them — including, most surprisingly, a science major, and by that I mean a student majoring in the hard sciences — had fallen for the fake “real footage.” We (gently, mind) had a little talk about a few things: The cultural concentration of alien-abduction reports, which suggests that they, like sightings of ttokaebi, are manifestations of culturally-determined imagination or delusion, rather than factors in the real world. (The fact that so few alien abduction accounts originate …
Brewer’s Glee
Well, I got a few things in the past week that are bound to lead to brewer’s glee — that state in which someone who makes beer at home finds himself gleefully laughing at all the wonderful things he’s going to be able to do. One was a shipment of goodies — some of them brewing related, some not — from Miss Jiwaku, especially including a bunch of Indonesia “gula” I left behind at her suggestion. “Gula” is sugar, but not the kind of thing one who’s grown up in whitebread Canada thinks of at the word. It’s unrefined stuff, …
Well, I Can See My Work Here Is Done…
Well, not quite, but I was feeling rather gratified to know someone out there has been listening to those lectures. After the speech contest orientation (for a contest which is mandatory for our junior-year English Language & Culture majors), one of my students approached me and asked, “Is it possible for me to use things we’ve discussed in our Understanding Popular Cultures class for my speech?” “Well… in what way do you mean?” I ask, wondering whether she means materials, concepts, or actual discussions on texts or films. “I want to talk about sexist and racist discourses in James Bond …