Getting Back on Track, I Hope

It’s no secret that for the past few years, I’ve been in a fallow period when it comes to my fiction writing. Hell, reading too, though I feel like I’m finally turning a corner with that. But the writing, well… I haven’t really turned that corner, and it’s pretty frustrating to me. In the past, I found that when I struggled to write something new, I could always remain productive by revising older work, but I’ve found that isn’t working for me at the moment.  It’s not that I’ve written nothing:

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Dreaming

Despite what I’d heard from friends, sleeping with an APAP machine (like a CPAP machine) has not really brought on a welter of nocturnal weirdness: most nights when I sleep, I may dream but I don’t recall much, if anything. I’d say the frequency for my remembering dreams has risen from maybe once a year to maybe once every three months or so.  Last night was a little different, though. 

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Lunar New Year 2024

Happy Lunar New Year! Above is some ddeok guk I made for the holiday, because I felt that maybe we should have some Korean food this Lunar New Year holiday. My wife was so happy with it she had seconds and thirds! And I had to tinker to make a decent vegetarian version of the meal, so that was flattering! Trailing behind the whole new year hustle as I do—often I’m teaching a winter class from late December to mid-January, and it doesn’t feel like a new year starts until that’s done—I tend to count new years off the Lunar …

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Back to Brewing (Kinda)

Years ago, I was an avid homebrewer. Then I moved someplace hot, where it wasn’t really practical to brew, and when we moved back to Korea, one thing after another prevented me getting back to it. (At first, it was just money and having a new kid; then it was the shoddy electrical system in our apartment, and the fact I was focusing on writing and parenting.) But finally I am brewing again… and, unsurprisingly, part of the motivation is my son: I proposed a trade to my friend, whose kids had outgrown their LEGOS—a batch of beer for the …

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MP Mini Delta Advance!

So, I got my wife a MonoPrice Mini Delta 3D printer years ago, when she expressed an interest in learning to do 3D printing. Turned out she wasn’t so interested after a while, so I figured I’d try put the thing to use. However, I was pretty daunted by the problems with the original firmware, and with the explanations of how to do bed leveling and get quality prints out of it. I did print off some low poly dinosaurs for our son, and game pieces for a friend. Here are a few of the things I printed: far from …

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Streamlining the Workload, Part 2

So, here’s a Part 2 I never expected to post.  Last time, I wrote about streamlining some of the “paperwork” (or, really, data wrangling) for dealing with attendance tracking, grading, and so on. Experience tells me that not everything there works: for example, I couldn’t find a way to include the Student Numbers students input into their Zoom registrations in my attendance records. (Sigh.)  Still, a lot of what I discussed there did help. Generating attendance records goes much more quickly when you know how to use a Pivot Table, and when you’ve given strict instructions for how people should …

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Streamlining the Workload

One focus of my work at my day job this semester has been to make working online a little more manageable. I thought I’d share some of the tools I use to do this, as well as to have them here in case I need them later.  The past few semesters, a series of policy changes have made it hard to make things manageable, or to scale labour in a reasonable way. The administrators I deal with don’t really seem willing or able to recognize that online teaching can involve more time spent on stuff that we wouldn’t have to …

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What To Say?

A friend recently asked how I’m doing, and I thought I might post something here, since I so rarely update this site. However, this is one of those questions it’s hard to answer.  Do I…  … go with how I pulled a muscle in my back the other day, and it hurt to breathe for about 24 hours, but now it’s slowly getting better? … talk about how I’m busily mashing together chunks of the Gumshoe ruleset and a hacked version of the Forged in the Dark system to run modern supernatural techno-/spy-thrillers? … delve into how, despite the exhaustion …

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Cathulhu

Last Saturday I attended a “mini-con” in Seoul and had a great time. I got to play in two games, one of which I’ll discuss briefly today—in part because the other, I’ve been playing elsewhere as well, and would like to sum up my experiences with it in terms of both sessions. (And the other playthrough is currently awaiting its concluding session.)  The game I’m discussing today is Sixtystone Press’s Cathulhu, by Ingo Ahrens, Adam Crossingham and Daniel Harms. It’s a BRP-derived game, featuring a percentile, roll-under system and a hilarious set of skills as well as special “tricks” that …

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Reading the Numenera (Core Rulebook) by Monte Cook

I know I’m pretty late to the party, but I’m trying to take notes as I read different RPG books, in part to sort of collect my thoughts about them. Numenera‘s already got a new (backwards-compatible) edition, so I’m really behind the curve, but I’m behind the curve on everything these days, and if I let that stop me, I’d never post anything here. So, here are my thoughts on the Numenera core rulebook, loaned to me long ago by my amazingly patient friend Justin Howe. 

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