Despite writing frequently about roleplaying games and video games, I have been playing a lot of board games recently. In fact, I have played about a dozen board games over the past month ranging from casual party games like Scattergories to intense strategy games like Terra Mystica. I enjoy them all for different reasons, but […]
Growing up, I was a Star Wars fan. I watched Friends on TV in syndication, and I played StarCraft. However, the defining pop culture phenomena of my generation was Harry Potter. I first learned of Harry Potter in 5th grade roughly when the Prisoner of Azkaban was being released. I never purchased any of the […]
Despite having worked as a software engineer for over a decade and received a graduate degree in Computer Science, I had a serious gap in my knowledge: I didn’t actually know how computers worked. Of course, I exaggerate. I knew how logic gates and Boolean algebra worked. I knew that compilers were related to formal […]
These days, most news stories are either about COVID-19 or about the impact of the pandemic on something else. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything that hasn’t been impacted in some way. A few weeks ago, I read a story about how blood banks were running low. Presumably, usual donors were reluctant to […]
As this pandemic continues to stretch out (at least in the US), this new way of life is feeling more normal. Not only has the pandemic affected work life, errands, and socializing, it has also changed our hobbies, and I’m just starting to notice the new normal set in. Of course, four months is perhaps […]
I estimate that I have run between 200 and 300 sessions, and despite having spent over 1000 hours prepping and running games, I just finished a campaign for the first time. It took 7 years and 53 sessions, but I took players from level 1 to 18. They started out fighting zombies and ended fighting […]
If you’re familiar with Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, it’s probably having watched a reaction video like this. I’m not certain if he actually played this game for 12 hours: that seems a tad long (especially for how far he is), but I guess it’s possible. On the other extreme, the current record speedrun […]
I have been quite fortunate during this pandemic to have had my life relatively unaffected. My extended family and I have all stayed healthy. I can continue to work remotely. I also haven’t had a huge change in leisure activities being a homebody. Others have certainly experienced much tougher hardships, and my inconveniences are quite […]
I was quite serious about playing tuba in high school. Somewhere between video games, I actually practiced between a half-hour to an hour every day for almost four years. I can read both treble and bass clefs and various rhythms and time signatures. As part of my daily warmup routine, I played my major scales […]
I have written much about my relationship with video games. Over the past few years, I have found a few stand-outs such Bioshock Infinite, Braid, and the Mass Effect series. However, I have found it more and more difficult to just sit down and play a video game by myself. I tried to diagnose why. […]