Tag: Saigon

Killer Mini-Campaign

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I’ve posted before here about using RPGs as a learning tool with students. One of the things that’s important when you do this is to (a) choose a story structure that emphasizes communicative tasks: your students should have to talk a lot, whereas combat is something they want to avoid, or something that must be coordinated when it’s absolutely necessary. That is to say, pedagogically, it’s better for students to end up having to negotiate treaties or beg for their lives than it is to have them running around doing hack’n’slash adventuring, or dungeoneering of the type epitomized in the phrase, “kick in …

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Riots in Bình Dương

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So, I don’t know if it’s hit your radar if you’re living outside the country, but Vietnam’s been having some pretty serious civil unrest the last couple of days: in an industrial area called Bin Duong Bình Dương , rather near to Saigon, factories were attacked, looted, and set on fire. The international news coverage seems to have caught on in the last 24 hours, and I see in the articles a lot of attempts to clarify what triggered this outburst: Thousands of workers rampaged through an industrial area in southern Vietnam on Tuesday in what reportedly began as protests against China’s …

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Things I’ve Recently Learned in the Kitchen

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So, the last few days have been a whirlwind of cooking, and I’ve learned a few interesting things. Let’s see: 1. When you make pesto, grind the nuts first. Then add the leaves, then the cheese. Oil and butter come later, along with salt. Nuts first allows the leaves to be ground up dry, which gets you a better grind. (I didn’t make the pesto, Mrs. Jiwaku did. It turned out really good!) 2. With homemade pesto, substitutions are the name of the game. If you’re unable to use pine nuts–say, because your spouse is allergic to them–other nuts are …

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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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Out from the Sinews

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In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that. But among the things he discussed in the book was the neurobiology of break-ups, and why they are so difficult. I can’t quote the book, or even paraphrase it in any way I’d regard as trustworthy–my copy is somewhere in that other galaxy where I read it, in a box, floating …

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