Month: February 2023

Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber

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This entry is part 5 of 23 in the series 2023 Reads

As always, I’m posting a little after finishing the book in question. In this case, just a day after. Incidentally, the volume I’m reading from is the one I used in the header, the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition of The First Book of Lankhmar, but I’m counting it as four separate “books” because, hey, humor me. I have a kid, I’m slow and it makes me feel a bit better about my limited reading progress! (And that is how these collections were originally published.) I’ve been reading all the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books in slow motion, it seems. I …

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Sandman Omnibus Volume 1 by Neil Gaiman (et. al)

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This entry is part 3 of 23 in the series 2023 Reads

I’m continuing with posting about the books I’ve read. The tag has changed to #booksread2023, but not much has changed: the posts get published with some lag—though I’m trying to shorten the lag a little, too. This time, I’m discussing the first half of the Sandman series. I should count that as multiple graphic novels, but, eh, whatever.  

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A Lovely Discussion of a Lovely Story

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This entry is part 73 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

I’m late catching up—it’s been one of those weeks—but on the radio a few days ago, Paul Matthews (@ajosshi) discussed our translation of Bae Myung-hoon’s lovely short story “The Peppers of Green Scallion,” which originally appeared in Clarkesworld a few years ago.  Listening to Paul read from and discuss the story was a delight for both of us, and he definitely hit on a lot of the things that made us love the story and want to translate it in the first place.   You can check out a recording of the discussion over on Arirang’s Check it Out podcast. (Or …

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O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen (1994)

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Today, I heard for the first time Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium (1994), and was amazed by it. I’m not a religious person at all, but sacred music is such a massive part of the history of music—Western music, yes, but really all music across cultures—that it’s just one of those things you can’t get away from, if you care about traditional music forms at all. For European classical music, especially, the role of sacred music is huge: a vast amount of the earliest written music was church music, and even into the 19th century you find composers writing masses. Hell, …

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Budding Game Designer (Battle Time! and an Elemental Magic-Themed Tsuro Remix)

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It seems like our son is getting into designing games. This isn’t so surprising: he loves playing games and anytime we introduce him to one, he gets right into it. IT was only a matter of time before he started hacking, modifying, and trying to build his own.  In fact, the other day he actually sat down and spontaneously designed his first unique game:   The other day, he spontaneously sat on the couch and, without a word about it to anyone, he designed a game—and I mean he designed it almost completely, from start to finish! Unsurprisingly, at least …

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