New Look

I spent the weekend, off-and-on, working on the theme for this site. I’m not completely happy with the result —  there are a few things I need to hammer out — but I feel like I’ve spruced up the place adequately to take down the Maintenance sign and let the site be open to the public again. While I was at it, I reorganized some of the material here. I’ve implemented redirects for pages I removed or combined, and they should be working–the pages I had up for every musical project available for download are now all on the Music …

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Cards Against Humanity

I’ve been talking about gaming as if I haven’t done any whatsoever in years, but the fact is, in fact I have done some…. just not RPG gaming. One of the games I recently got and tried out is the infamous Cards Against Humanity cardgame, which is available under a Creative Commons License here. (Though if you’re looking to print them up in Korea, see my warning below.) In any case, with a set of cards in hand, we tried out our first game with our neighbor Mark, and then his wife Jin when she got home from work. If …

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On Modernizing/Adapting Myths, James Bond as Odysseus, and On the Undead Archetype

Sometimes, when you’re teaching, you learn things. The other day, in my Greek Mythology and Biblical Narrative course, we had a discussion interesting enough that I feel like I learned a few interesting things. Figured I’d share: On Modernizing/Adapting Myths: In class, I was discussing the idea of archetypal figures with students in my mythology course, in the context of adapting ancient Greek mythology to a modern setting. We were specifically discussing their homework from a week before, which involved writting up synopses of their own for an imaginary adaptation of The Odyssey to a modern (post-1950) Korean setting. (They’d just …

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Talent Night, Part 4: The Dread Scenario

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

UPDATE (20 Feb 2022): I’ve very slightly revised this scenario and made it available on my itch.io page.  ORIGINAL POST (8 November 2012): I figured I’d share the scenario documents I prepared for Talent Night–the game scenario I’ve been discussing throughout this series of posts–just in case anyone else out there might want to try run the game and liked the idea of our setup. I’m also very interested in comments from anyone who knows the game, as far as feedback regarding scenario design is concerned. I’m happy to learn more or have missteps or goofs pointed out to me. …

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Talent Night, Part 3: What I Learned Hosting a Dread Game

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Note: this is the second third post in a series. In the previous post, I discussed my long, long hiatus from RPG gaming, why I chose the game Dread for my first game in a decade and a half, and a bit about the game mechanics. You might want to start there. Alright, so I learned a lot of things playing this game: some about Dread as a game system, some about character motivation, some (mostly re-learned, to be honest) about dealing with newbie players. And some stuff not related to any of those things. Some of these may be obvious …

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