Category: Weblogs
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Emotionless Bad Guys
Yesterday I was reading a James Lileks blog post about the legendary 1956 Roger Corman sci-fi movie It Conquered the World. If you haven't seen it, you probably should — because effects, locations, and extras were expensive, Corman reduced an alien invasion of Earth to a character piece, focusing on Lee Van Cleef (of all…
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Thoughts On The Dreaded Backstory
David McGrogan writes interesting roleplaying games, and he had some interesting thoughts about fictional characters in his most recent 'blog post. You can read it here. If you're lazy and want me to just tell you what it says, his main point is that the urge to bolt a backstory onto archetypical characters (like James…
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Huh?
Can anyone explain why my Thursday post apologizing for missing a week of posting got more than 600 hits? That's about ten times more than anything since my gripe about Marty McFly's dad.
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Still Bunk After All These Years
So here's an article from Quillette about "social constructionism" — in particular how postmodernists have applied the concept to the sciences, and how bad an idea it is. I was amused to see that one of the examples cited in the piece is Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's book Laboratory Life, because that book was…
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It’s Not Christmas Without NORAD
Every year at this time I link to my favorite Christmas Web site: the Official NORAD Santa Tracker page. If you don't understand why this site is the sweetest, goofiest, and yet also the greatest embodiment of the Christmas spirit, you have the soul of a Krampus. And Krampus is not welcome in this airspace.…
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Blogs I Read
Since I have twice this year had spikes in my blog traffic due to other people mentioning it on their blogs or on Twitter, I think it's time to do the same with my own mighty horde of followers. Here are the blogs I regularly read — with some important exceptions. I'm leaving off purely political…
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Game Mechanics (Part 2): Why They Don’t Matter
In my last post on the subject, I wrote about how important it is for game mechanics to replicate the reality of whatever the game is about. And then I left on a cliffhanger by saying that isn't actually true. It's not true because games depend on the players. A game is not a novel or…
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MidAmeriCon II, Day 4!
Sunday was a light day for me, and for everyone else as the con wound down. Lots of people standing in hotel lobbies having conversations while holding suitcases. My only event on the 21st was a panel on "How To Start A Writing Group" which went extremely well. I was the moderator, and my panelists…
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MidAmeriCon II, Day 3!
Saturday was a light-schedule day for me. I had a swim and a reasonably-priced breakfast at the Silver Spoon Diner across the street from my hotel, then went to the convention center to do a reading. I read two stories, "Parsifal (Prix Fixe)" which ran originally in F&SF, and "A Right Jolly Old . .…
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My Other Hat
I wear two hats, professionally. One of them is a propellor beanie, and is my Science Fiction Hat (if you win a Hugo award, you get to wear double propellors on your beanie). The other hat is my Game Design Hat (which probably looks like this). I wore my Science Fiction Hat when I wrote the…
The Cambias Digression 