Month: November 2012

The Book of Cthulhu II

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Argh! I don’t know how my original post back in September didn’t get posted, but anyway: back in September, my Lovecraftan-Dreamlands-inversion story “Of Melei, of Ulthar” was reprinted in The Book of Cthulhu II edited by Ross Lockhart of Night Shade Books. It’s pretty flattering to have my story requested for reprint at all, let alone alongside some of the authors whose work is also among those pages… Not bad for a story I couldn’t finish in time to submit to the anthology it was requested for, if I say so myself. And, by a strange twist of fate, I’m currently …

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On Le Sacre, Oedipus Rex, and Igor Stravinsky

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This week, I had the students who are studying Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology and Biblical Narrative check out a couple of works by Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (the ballet) Oedipus Rex (the opera-oratorio) For Oedipus, we watched the one-hour DVD of the Seiji Ozawa production (the one with Jessye Norman) in class; for the other, I had them check out The Rite on  Youtube — it’s one of the productions in which the performers did they best to reenact Nijinsky’s original choreography, and they also attempted to resurrect — as faithfully as possible — the original costumes …

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A Bizarre Underground Industry, or, When Good Restaurants Go Bad

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So, I’ve long wondered why, outside of Seoul, so many good restaurants were able to stay running for so long while in the big city, it seems like good places almost always either shut down or drop precipitously in quality within a year or two. Now I think I know why. Now, I’m not a food blogger, and I don’t know if they’ve discussed this publicly. If they have, I’d be curious to see a link. One of the reasons I don’t really read food blogs is because they mostly just review restaurants, or talk about the politics of marketing …

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The Value of a Good-Looking Site

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Brutal Rice Website Screenshot

So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time that our film production website got a makeover. I’d slapped the original site together in the heat of the moment, when we uploaded our first web short to Youtube, knowing that we needed some kind of a link on which to hang our online signboard. It was finished in about 24 hours, that first version of the site, using a clunky-but-passable template, and it served as a place to put data. But we have a lot of projects brewing now, and it can’t hurt to have a snappy website, …

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Hoptastic Brewday: Wonmisan Castle Black Wildling IPA (With Rowan Chadwick)

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My friend Rowan flew back in to Korea sometime on Friday; by Saturday afternoon, he was brewing again already. Now that’s dedication! I invited him over to help me brew up my next beer, a “black IPA” (which may or may not end up being black) I’ve named Castle Black Wildling IPA in honor of a certain TV series Miss Jiwaku and I love. (Neither of us has read the books, though I’m sure we both will eventually.) In any case, I had a few concepts in mind for this beer: Brew up a Black IPA (also known as a …

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