This is a continuation of my earlier post about the Gamma Planet game setting I’m slowly thinking over and building, in the hope of running a game sometime in the future. If you’re not interested in tabletop RPG setting design, this is one you might prefer to skip.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a very difficult book to talk about. It’s a challenging book to read, too, but talking about it seems harder than reading it, to me. That’s usually a sign that there’s something worth thinking over, though I am struggling to find a way into discussing it. Certainly, a mere “reader reaction” of the type that one sees all over the internet seems insufficient, for the same reason it strikes one as ridiculous for someone to walk out of a hall where a piece by Mahler or Webern or Stravinsky has just …
At my goodbye party last week, we were talking about the future collapse of the TEFL industry when brute-force autotranslation gets good enough that most people will only study foreign languages the way that some people still do math by hand. (I mean without a calculator–that is, out of academic requirements, a sense of old-fashionedness, or rare personal impetus to do so.) I commented that I think now is a pretty good time to distance oneself from TEFL altogether, and certainly a good time to get out of depending on jobs where one is directly teaching English. (Unless one is …