Books of 2021

gordsellar0 Comments

thread#showTweet” data-screenname=”gordsellar” data-tweet=”1354383867315015683″>  thread#showTweet” data-screenname=”gordsellar” data-tweet=”1354383867315015683″>Loved the bizarre dark fantasy novella in the middle of this book—the historical narrative is pure gaaah. thread#showTweet” data-screenname=”gordsellar” data-tweet=”1354383867315015683″>I still feel the same. The beginning and end were fine, but that chunk in the middle is astonishingly creepy and strange and wonderful.  Book 2: Mouse Guard 3: The Black Axe by David Petersen Yes, I’m counting graphic novels, and this was a fun one, sort of a gritty flashback prologue telling the backstory of a mysterious character from earlier in the series. Can’t wait till my son digs into these in a few years…  …

Continue Reading

Back to Brewing (Kinda)

gordsellar0 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

MP Mini Delta Advance!

gordsellar0 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading

Review(s) of “Sojourn,” and Other Thoughts

gordsellar0 Comments

I was very gratified a few weeks ago to learn of Simon Scott’s comments about by story “Sojourn”, one of the stories from the 2020 collection  City of Han that he discussed in a review in Kyoto Journal. He begins this way: In this era of extreme global hypersensitivity to race and national narratives, it is arguably a high-risk proposition for a Western expat author in Asia to write about such things. Yet two of the authors represented in this volume of expat short stories from South Korea, Gord Sellar and Ron Bandun, fearlessly walk the ideological plank of their …

Continue Reading

The Adventures of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rogers

gordsellar0 Comments

I first read this book as a teenager: I think my mother found it among the remaindered books at a local bookstore and brought it home for me, as she had so many other books I fondly remember. It’s gonzo parody featuring a samurai cat named Miaowara Tomokato adventuring as he avenges the death of his master—accompanied, at times, by his homicidal little nephew Shiro.  The world of these books—it’s a series—is a patchwork jumble of pop/geek culture franchises and canonic works tossed it into a blender with Norse mythology and Japanese history, except with (a few) anthropomorphic cats. It …

Continue Reading

A**hole Island

gordsellar2 Comments

Hey, finally post that’s not about RPG stuff, huh?  I’m ending the first week of my month of writing time this year. This is the first time I’ve reallyt sat down and done some serious writing since 2018. I… just didn’t have it in me, somehow, in 2019, and throughout most of 2020 our son was home with us and my wife was recovering from a work-related injury for a chunk of the year, so … really, honestly, I guess I’d have to say it was some combination of there being no time and no energy.   This year, though: we worked …

Continue Reading

Running Sur une rive, au clair de lune for The Fall of Delta Green

gordsellar0 Comments

I recently posted about my impressions after running a multi-session one-shot with The Fall of Delta Green, and said I’d follow up with a post about the adventure itself. I used Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s Fall of Delta Green adventure On a Bank, by Moonlight. By the way, the original PDF of the adventure is available from the Pelgrane Press website, for free. Downloading it is probably helpful if you didn’t manage to snag a print copy back in 2018, like I happened to do. (Ah, man, remember Free RPG Day events?) Anyway, as I was saying, I ran this adventure, but …

Continue Reading

Running The Fall of Delta Green

gordsellar0 Comments

I recently ran a short multi-session (five or six sessions? I’m not sure) run of a Fall of Delta Green adventure for the Sunday night game group I play with. This writeup will discuss my impressions of the game itself, and my thoughts on the Gumshoe system more generally. I’ll follow it up with some notes on the adventure I ran, some resources for those who might want them, and also some thoughts on the spin I put on the game concept, since it was a bit unusual.  

Continue Reading

Grade Grubbing: An Update

gordsellar0 Comments

So, something I would have thought impossible happened, and I thought it would be worth noting for posterity: grade grubbing has dropped to almost zero in my classes.  There are a few reasons why this has happened.   1. The Kim Young Ran Law got passed. Hands down, this is the main thing that has helped. A few years ago, the Anti-Graft and -Corruption Law was passed. (It’s also referred to as the Kim Young Ran Law sometimes.) The effect among university administrators was immediate: they stopped being willing to accept even the smallest thank-you present from anyone: one guy helped …

Continue Reading

Streamlining the Workload, Part 2

gordsellar0 Comments

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 …

Continue Reading