Tag: PERSONAL

What I’ve Been Up To Since Getting Back

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Here’s what I’ve been doing lately:  Reading Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. I brought a copy with me to Canada, thinking I would have time to read on the plane, and here and there during the trip. Turns out traveling with a kid eats into one’s reading time severely. My copy (the Penguin edition of Robin Buss’s translation) of  is about 1200 pages long, and I only hit about page 150 by the end of the trip. (I’m just past 300 pages now, though, and briskly making my way beyond that. Working on edits for a novella we’ve translated. …

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Returns and Recoveries

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So, I was in Canada with our son for about ten days from the end of July until early August. A lot happened, and it was nice to see my sisters and their families, who gave us a warm welcome, as well as my friend Ian (who drove up to Vancouver to see us). It was also nice to properly give our son a little experience of Canada. We did a lot of things: aside from family time, which was most of our time in Saskatoon,  we visited the Forestry Farm and did some shopping in Saskatoon, played mini-golf and …

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Getting Back on Track, I Hope

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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

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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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What To Say?

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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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Easy to Run? – RPGaDay 2017, Day 22

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August is RPGaDay month. Yep, a month solid of RPG-related posts, answering these questions: Today’s question is this: Which RPG is the easiest for you to run? That really depends on what we mean by “easiest,” doesn’t it? If we mean “least difficult to implement the rules in play”: Early editions of D&D, or the modern variants and retroclones based on them. Long experience has hardwired a lot of stuff into my head, and the aesthetic of the game is similarly settled. These days, for me, LotFP is the system I use for that.  If we mean “easiest to get …

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Location, Location, Relocation…

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So, one thing that surprised people was our seemingly sudden move back to Korea. Not just because people were surprised that we moved so suddenly, but also because we chose to come back to Korea specifically. Like any major decision in life, it’s a complex mix of things, some of which I won’t talk about here, but I thought I’d say a little about it anyway. For one thing, life on tourist visas with short-term health insurance policies (I can only get six months at a time these days) was growing increasingly untenable. (My health’s fine, I’ve actually lost plenty of weight and …

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My Favorite Painting?

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A former student emailed me, asking–among other things–for advice about things to enjoy during her upcoming visit to Montréal. One of the things I suggested was to visit the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, and I couldn’t help but mention my favorite painting there, which, unsurprisingly, is of a teacher. Here it is: I know, hopelessly old-fashioned of me. I like more modern artists too, believe me! Kandinsky! Dali! Escher! Er… look, among my bundle of posters–now in storage in a warehouse someplace in Koream waiting to be shipped to me eventually–are at least a few prints much more avant-garde and …

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My Secret?

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Got a funny tweet this morning: @GordSellar Just received your memoir from @HonestTea. #location pic.twitter.com/kGxqOYeVKS — Derek Brown (@derekbrown) September 6, 2013 Ha, funnily enough, I submitted this a long, long time ago, and forgot all about it. But for all that, the principle seems to hold. In the past couple of weeks, since relocating to our new apartment, I’ve: started exercising regularly (that is, swimming daily, and tracking it on Fitocracy, because gamification = motivation boost; I’ll be adding a regimen of bodyweight exercises next week, too), drafted close to 10% of the novel I’m working on (I should …

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