Back when I was traveling around the US in the summer of 2009, a number of people were talking about the TV series Dexter, but it took me until recently to check it out. If you don’t know the series, it’s basically about a “moral” psychopath who hunts down people essentially like himself. He follows a set of rules that determine who “deserves” to die and who doesn’t, or at least that’s how he operates in the first couple of seasons. I haven’t read the books by Jeff Lindsay (upon which the series is based) but I have seen about …
Month: January 2011
Rye Brewday: Wonmisan Kvass
Yesterday, I managed to bottle a couple of batches that I suppose couldn’t be more like night and day: a batch of Berliner Weisse (about 2-3% alcohol, a gorgeous blonde color, and somewhat sweetish sour — though less sour than I expected given how much of the sugar was converted to lactic acid) and a batch of dubbel (~7% alcohol, brownish-black in color, and very dry yet also flavorful). The dubbel went into 500ml bottles, and the Berliner Weisse (which would have been a perfect keg beer, if I had kegs) went into 1L bottles, including a number of plastic …
Why South Korea is Considering a Gaming Curfew
My friend Florence Chee, who does smart-people theory about communications, mentioned on her twitter feed that there’s buzz in the air again about South Korea’s slow, loping movement toward a gaming curfew. The article she linked notes that it’s not just “extreme cases” (of the same kind that were routinely used to demonize Dungeons & Dragons back in the 1980s — guys kills his mom for being scolded to stop playing and then kills himself, for example) that justify the move, but also the more moderate example of kids who simply play all night, and therefore can’t concentrate when they …
With Gods Like These…
I got the oddest comment on the last post I made. The content was unrelated to my post, but instructed readers to Google a few keywords leading straight to the comment-poster’s own blog, which was about… Er, well, I’ll let the email I just sent him speak for itself. Dear Mr. Hagedorn, Just curious what the connection is, in your head, between my review of a few recent movies — none of them theological in nature at all — and your inane theory that the real sin that got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden was… (drum roll)… anal …
The American, Tron, and the “new” Harry Potter
Well, I’ve seen a few movies in the last few weeks, went into all of them blind (because no, I still haven’t read the Harry Potter books) and there are two things I can say about those films. The first is that you can tell a lot about a movie by how badly Koreans took it. The American, a European film featuring George Clooney, has been getting some pretty negative reactions online in Korea. People are reporting things like a quarter of the audience getting up and walking out at some point in the film. Lots of people are complaining …
Mind Meld, and Mission Accomplished (in Draft)
Two things I’ve written. One you can read, one you can’t. Here’s the one you can: SF Signal’s Mind Meld for the week is about to-read piles, and I’m one of the people they invited to contribute/comment. See everyone’s to-read lists here. I should note that a number of the people who contributed are, in fact, in my extended to-read list. I’m just not getting more books for now till I’ve sorted what to do with the thousand or so I already have. The thing you can’t read, yet, is a ~5000 word story (it’s a few words short, but …
While I Work On Yet Another Broken Story…
… like the one I mentioned the other day, here are some not-broken stories for you to go and enjoy, one new and a few not-so-new, all by people I know personally and do crit with (or have done), but that’s not why I’m recommending them — I’m recommending them because they’re good: “As We Report to Gabriel” by Tina Connolly, in the current Fantasy Magazine — er, no, I can’t sum it up, so just go bask. “Superhero Girl” by Jessica Lee, in a Fantasy from about a year and a half ago. I don’t wanna spoil it but …
Another Broken Story
There are stories sometimes that feel perfect when you’ve finished them, but you discover they are not perfect. You may discover this on your own, reading over your handiwork the next day, or a week or a month later. Or it may be that a friend is needed to show you why you’re missing the big picture. (Even those authors who bash workshops and MFAs have people on their acknowledgement pages.) There are stories where you finish them, and you feel like they’re just absolutely right, and very little if anything will need changing. And then you show them to …
Symphony of Science
This is for you geeks out there who love Carl Sagan. (Found via a Youtube video somewhere on the blog of my crit groupmate/friend Chris Kammerud, whose blog I finally got around to trawling through for tasty links… of which there are a bunch, so it’s worth a visit; I guarantee that it will rather balance out the pretty negative view of Korea that seems to have accreted around my blog.)
Cooking with Pork
UPDATE (4 Jan 2010): Wow, color me embarrassed! Yeah, so… I actually wrote this on the afternoon of the 1st, and then schedule it for posting on the 2nd. Little did I know I would be food poisoned by the evening of the 1st, and spend the day of the 2nd in bed, with a fever, pain, and the worst digestive issues this side of hell. Ironically, it’s not any of the pork that made me sick, as far as I can tell, but some yogurt. That said, the chops (which never got marinated) have been put off till I …