The Novelist—developed and published by Kent Hudson/Orthogonal Games—is an interesting and only slightly flawed game. When I heard about it, it was characterized as kind of a take on The Shining—the Kubrick film, more than the King novel—in that it involves a novelist and his family in an isolated house shared by an invisible presence. There’s one big difference: the viewpoint character that you play in the game is the ghost. Well, sort of.
As our baby has grown a bit, his needs and demands have shifted, so I’m trying to ease off watching TV and focus on him more, but for the first couple of months I found myself casting about for something to do while burping and feeding him, since he didn’t really engage much and “Aww, cute!” is less effective when you’re dead tired. Since reading was tough with both hands full, I set about catching up on TV series I’d missed over the years. More recently, I finished Mad Men, which… well, I’ll save that for another post, but before that it was Deadwood. After …
Well, it’s 2016. I hope I read more this year than I did last. This list is a little incomplete: there’s some more game stuff I read, some of it in part and some in full. But it’s close enough to a list of all the books I finished, so I’ll go with this. My Library at LibraryThing It’s hard to pick standouts, because there were a lot of great books. Having so little time to read, I focused on things I felt I’d really enjoy. Still, if I were to recommend a few books, I guess I’d go with …
Ah, the things people on Quora ask sometimes: Read Gord Sellar's answer to How do you play Careless Whisper on sax? on Quora I haven’t been asked to do this often, to be honest. Once in a while someone will bring up Kenny G to me, and I’ll have to explain that Kenny G is sort of the M. Night Shyamalan of the saxophone world. (There’s a good bass solo—as in a fairly “metal” one, in fact—on the Kenny G Live album. We have now reached the limits of nice things I’m wiling to say about Kenny G and his …
Well, the reading’s been a bit slow. I had an intense semester, and Mrs. Jiwaku was in the last trimester of pregnancy… and then the baby came. All things considered, I guess I read a fair bit, but it doesn’t feel like a lot. Not as much as I usually read. Then again, it’s been a productive few months, and time with the baby is good. Anyway, here’s what I’ve read since September.
It’s not a big surprise I’m over a week late seeing the year off. It’s been that kind of a year, and I’m kind of glad to see 2015 go. Not that there weren’t wonderful moments, terrifying and vertigo-inducing and lovely and amazing. There definitely were, like this one almost exactly 76 days ago: And we all have a lot to be grateful for. As I write this, a few days behind schedule, our boy has been with us for 75 days, and just turned himself over, pushup style, for the first time in his life. (Mrs. Jiwaku called me excitedly …
My short story “Sunshine” just went live on the Cosmos website, and with an excellent illustration to boot: It’s a story I wrote last year during the MERS outbreak, and it’s about a grim as you can get with a title like that. I’ve posted some notes (on the genesis of the story, trivia, background notes, and more) as usual over on my Story Notes archive. You can see them here. Other Recent Publications: Besides that, a couple of my book reviews appeared in the December issue of the digital magazine Kyoto Journal, issue 84: “Thoughtful Juxtaposition.” (A review of Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, …
My short story “Sunshine” was published online by Cosmos on 5 January 2016. (And with a wonderful illustration, no less!) You can read it here. It deals with hermetically-sealed hospital demolitions in a world where antibiotic-resistant bacteria have gone out of control too many times to count, and is set in South Korea. “Sunshine” was inspired by two things: Peter Watts’ brush with flesh-eating bacteria (link very NSFW, and also NSFYSC (Not Safe For Your Stomach Contents)) the M.E.R.S. outbreak in Korea in 2015. The latter was the bigger inspiration, obviously. It was pretty terrifying for my wife and I (since she was pregnant at the time, and …