Talent Night, Part 2: How the Game Played Out (NSFW)

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Note: this is the second 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. So… we played our first session of Dread on Sunday night. I hosted a Dread game session with Miss Jiwaku, and our friends Nick, Katrina, and Ian. (Information about who played which character withheld to protect the preciously twisted minds among us, ha…) The scenario was one of mine, …

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Talent Night, Part 1: In Which I Pick Up RPG Gaming After Years Away

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Talent Night: My First Time Running a Game of Dread

Well, it seems like a month of returns: I picked up my saxophones for the first time in a long time, just out of curiosity regarding their condition. (I’ve not played them since 2005, and, well, it shows in the condition of the horns.) I also decided to try get and run an RPG game for an evening, and see if I enjoyed it. I’d long resisted the idea of trying out a role-playing game because they’re kind of a time-sink, or they used to be back when I last was an avid player. That was back in 1998–fifteen years …

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Gobble-Gobble

Yeah, for you Errol Morris fans, that’s a double-gobble: Well, here are some links for you to gobble down, and think about later: I’m a little dubious about the idea we’ll have enough energy to fuel anything as expansive as what is discussed in this video featuring a talk by Jesse Schell (a Carnegie Mellon University Professor), but I do imagine we will be going about receiving points for all kinds of daily activities, and in fact I’ve been thinking about shifting a couple of my courses to an XP-based grading system next semester. I think this notion is likely to work its way …

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Yeasts and Gaming and Why I Wish There Was 30 Hours in the Day

Well, there are things that are new, but I’m trying to stem the tide of crap and use my blog to talk about things either neat and shiny, or interesting and cool, or personal-but-not-complainy. So anyway, let’s see. Coming home to find the Bavarian Weizen I’m got brewing is cool. It’s pretty encouraging because it’s actually bubbling like crazy now. It took about 40 hours to start up, but now it’s going well.I’ll probably try to pitch a second wheat beer, same approximate grist but slightly different hopping, onto the yeast cake and build it up a little more, when …

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Online Gaming Kills Baby (A Korean Media Fairytale)

UPDATE: I’ve added an addendum to this article. The link is, appropriately, at the end. ORIGINAL POST: Here’s something on the ongoing theme of gaming, since I’ve been writing about that. A few weeks ago, my friend Marc Laidlaw (who barely blogs, but here you go), who is not only a speculative fiction writer but also a game designer over at Valve, sent me a link reporting the case of a child who starved to death in Korea while its parents were raising a virtual baby in an online game. The article (and most of the others I’ve seen on …

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Starcraft Animation!

Aha, I half-remembered this when I was writing about the Starcraft Pansori recently. Here it is! (Apologies to those who don’t have enough Korean to follow, but song’s essentially a cheerful little countdown of how four Zerglings get whittled down to one little fella during the trek home after being left behind enemy lines. For those of you too young to remember the 1998 game Starcraft, I hate you. (And yes, some people are still playing that game over here. That blows my mind too.)

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