Saturday was designated Skills Day. The plan had been for the Basics — the beginner-level class — to be taken in hand and run through a compressed version of the first six months of training while the rest of us — Intermediate and Advanced students — got to choose from a casual smorgasbord of specials… Continue reading Sword Camp 2008: Skills, Day One
Sword Camp 2008: And So, It Begins…
OK, so imagine you could go on vacation with a bunch of your best friends, all of whom are either (a) science fiction fans, (b) software geeks, (c) advanced martial artists, or (d) usually, some combination of the above. Now imagine that you get to spend a solid week with these people learning stuff like… Continue reading Sword Camp 2008: And So, It Begins…
On the road in Michigan
Blogging (and my responses to comments) will be light for the next two weeks. I’m on the road in Michigan, attending a week-long swordfighting intensive that starts tomorrow, then I’ll be at the World Boardgaming Championships for a week after that.
Generative models and programming talent
What, if anything, is the essential and unique talent of good programmers?
What D&D character am I?
Most what-kind-of-X-are-you quizzes are superficial jokes. I just found one that seems better constructed than the average, and as an old-time D&D fan I couldn’t resist it. Here’s the paste from my results, with a link: I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard (7th Level) Ability Scores: Strength-14 Dexterity-10 Constitution-16 Intelligence-15 Wisdom-14 Charisma-15 Alignment:Neutral Good… Continue reading What D&D character am I?
A Brief History of Firearms Policy Fraud
The Heller vs. D.C. ruling affirming that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms was a major civil-rights victory building on 15 years of constitutional scholarship. Accordingly, we owe a great deal of thanks to principled and dedicated legal academics including Don Kates, Dave Kopel, and the blogosphere’s own InstaPundit (aka Glenn… Continue reading A Brief History of Firearms Policy Fraud
Slang for the Galaxy
It’s no news to any serious strategy gamer that Race For The Galaxy has rapidly become one of the most popular and frequently played designs of recent years. My gaming group plays it often enough that we’ve developed our own slang terms for certain frequently-occurring tactics and situations. In the hope that other players may… Continue reading Slang for the Galaxy
Deism and the Founding Fathers
There is a belief abroad in many conservative circles that the U.S. is “a Christian nation”. This belief is found in perhaps its most extreme form in the Mormon doctrine that the Constitution of the United States is a divinely inspired document. Less extreme versions hold that Christian piety was an shaping influence on the… Continue reading Deism and the Founding Fathers
Patriotism And Its Pathologies
Once upon a time, patriotism was a fairly simple thing. It was tribal identification writ large, an emotional attachment to a people and their land. In most of the world, where patriotism exists at all it’s still like this — tribal patriotism, blood-and-soil emotionalism. A different kind of patriotism emerged from the American and French… Continue reading Patriotism And Its Pathologies
Author of “The Genocides” commits suicide
Thomas Disch committed suicide on July 4th. I wouldn’t bother writing about this, except that offing himself was a perfect correspondence to what he tried to do to science fiction (the art form with which he was most associated).
SPAT: How to Save the Music Industry
I think I know how to save the music business. There’s a dead-simple business model that will funnel money to talent, work with the Internet’s capability for zero-cost distribution rather than fighting it, and allow the record companies a role without “intellectual property” protection or DRM. I call it SPAT for short. This can have… Continue reading SPAT: How to Save the Music Industry
Inconvenient facts
Comes word from Iraq that the Maliki government has just shipped to Canada 550 tons of yellowcake uranium that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled. One wonders what the anti-war left thinks Hussein had been planning to do with it. Make cupcakes, perhaps?
Dangerous Sons
Some time back I blogged on Hotness in Hollywood. In it I gave Angeline Jolie props for making a game effort at acting in a a movie with a script so execrable that her best effort was doomed, the original Tomb Raider movie. I also praised Liv Tyler playing Arwen, who became my personal all-time… Continue reading Dangerous Sons
Apologies to recent commenters
Due to a fat-finger error on my part, the comments for several posts back were deleted a few minutes ago. Apologies to all commenters; those threads were of rather high quality and I’m sorry to lose them.
Channeling InstaPundit
Che’ Shirts, Fake Rebels, Acting Class Helped Free Betancourt All I can say is “Heh”.
Five Myths of New Media, Revisited
A reader suggested that I should take a look at an article I wrote back in 1997, Five Myths of New Media, and consider how those predictions panned out. Good idea, here goes…
Converging curves
The newspaper industry’s death spiral is accelerating. The “increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts.” In related news, the average age of TV viewers has reached 50 and is still rising. The networks are losing their audience.
From a small town in Pennsylvania
A reader asks asks: “Just what about Obama is so damned elitist?” I realize I’m a bit late to the party, but a bit of unpacking of the now-infamous “bitter and clinging” quote should serve to explain this nicely.
Why Barack Obama sets off my “Never Again!” alarms
OK, I’ll admit it: six months ago I was very near buying into the whole Obama thing. That was when he was in his post-racial phase — before Jeremiah Wright, back when voting for Obama seemed like a way of putting an end to the unhealthy obsessiveness about race that disfigures liberal politics.
Male-bashing kills children
Listen. This news story (which I meant to blog about two years ago) is the sound of cultural suicide happening… A bricklayer who passed a toddler walking alone in a village shortly before her fatal fall into a pond said yesterday he did not stop to help in case people thought he was trying to… Continue reading Male-bashing kills children