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Otakon 2010
Just like last year, I went to Otakon, but didn’t pay to get in. Perhaps next year. So, like last year, I mostly photographed people under the the awning of the convention center. Unlike last year, I asked lots of people if I could photograph them. It paid off as I was able to get lots…
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Holy Video Game, Batman!
Sometimes jokes can be very misleading to outsiders. For a few months after hearing jokes about how gamey it was that Joker’s henchmen lost track of Batman as soon as he went up onto a gargoyle I didn’t have any inclination to play the game. It just seemed like it would be too jarring to…
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Suspension of Disbelief Broken
A few days ago, I saw the heavy boots story on digg and shared it with Dan. To quickly sum up, in case the web page dissapears into the great bit bucket in the sky, a physics major was told by his philosophy TA that the astronauts on the moon didn’t float away because they…
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Blog Review: I bring nothing to the table
First mentioned in this post , Dan’s been blogging on this server for just over a year. So how has the blog come along in these 13 months? Very well, I’d say. By the Google search results metric, Dan is doing very well. He’s been driving the bulk of our Google search related traffic with…
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Merry Christmas!
This was one of the best Christmas celebrations either in spite of or because it was so simple. I got some really great gifts including: Final Fantasy 6: Grand Finale – this CD has some AWESOME symphonic recordings of the best songs of FF6 Fantastic Plastic Machine: Les Plus – a great remix CD of…
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FF VIII
Started playing Final Fantasy 8 once I finished up 7. I’ve played for about 3 hours and have already found the obligatory Wedge, Biggs, and Cid. In case you’ve never played the Final Fantasy Series, ever since 4 (I think – but definitely 6) there have always been some characters named Biggs, Wedge, and Cid.…
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Whatever you do….don’t use wikipedia….
…unless you have a LOT of time on your hands. Wikipedia, by being internet-based takes advantage of cross-referencing in a way that was NEVER possible with traditional encyclopedias. Even new multimedia encyclopedias like Encarta don’t take advantage of it like Wikipedia does. Almost every word in an article is a reference to something else. For…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 112, September 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 112, September 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Even though AI has been a constant subject in science fiction for nearly 100 years now, it’s interesting reading the two AI-related stories in the 2023, the year of ChatGPT. Although ChatGPT is still far away from general AI,…
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My Reading Life in 2023
By the end of 2023 I had 3049 ebooks and magazines (a change of 256 – pretty even with last year). Of those, 2434 were unread. Some chunk of those – maybe as much as ¼ were giveaways like Raspberry Pi Magazine, HackSpace Magazine, and Tor.com book club freebies. I stopped getting the monthly free…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 111, August 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 111, August 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars This issue was one in which I enjoyed all of the stories very much. Science Fiction One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit (Dominica Phetteplace) – a dystopian story taking place “20 Minutes in the Future” that seems to me…
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Others are also excited about Obojima Tales
I’ve been backing a few different D&D 5e adventures on kickstarter, but the one I’m most excited about getting fulfillment on is Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass. It’s so freakin’ beautiful that I had to hold myself back from getting the package that came with everything. But I’m not the only one excited bout…
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Miscellanea: D&D, Disney, and French Browser Proposals
This post contains my thoughts on a few stories I’ve been saving up that don’t merit a post on their own. D&D Romance Just a day after posting about my kids getting into D&D, I came across this article on Tor.com about The Golden Age of D&D Romance. I had no idea it was a…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 107, April 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 107, April 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars SCIENCE FICTIONThe Archronology of Love (Caroline M. Yoachim) – This short story involves an interesting idea where an alien race has created a VR history, but to make an analogy with archeology, when you view part of the history,…
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Review: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England
The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was part of the kickstarter that funded this book I did not immediately jump into this book (Sanderson’s Secret Project #2) because it was not a Cosmere book. (The Cosmere being the equivalent of the MCU for…