Andrew Greeley

 Posted by (Visited 5742 times)  Reading
Nov 232005
 

I am not quite sure why I like the books by Andrew Greeley. Perhaps it is the vague memories of being raised Catholic, of knowing (with a third-grade child’s awareness) a parish where the priest would actually visit people’s homes, would teach catechism in the church basement, where First Communion was a big deal.
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A Sad Turn of Events…

 Posted by (Visited 6200 times)  Game talk
Nov 212005
 

If you’ve been looking for LegendMUD or the old version of the website, this may explain where it’s gone:

On the morning of 11/20, Legend experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic failure. The controller which manages all of the peripheral drives failed, taking it with the logic boards on the hard drives as well as the CD ROM drive. It was a shock as well to find that the off-machine/off-site backup procedures had also been silently failing.

Attempts at recovering the data have thus far been unsuccessful.

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Russian Laws, KGC questions

 Posted by (Visited 5093 times)  Game talk
Nov 212005
 

Did you know that the Laws of Online World Design have been translated into Russian? Courtesy of Dmitry Nozhnin.

I forgot that the KGC organizers also asked us to answer some interview questions so I’ve added that to the Interviews page.

What do you expect a revolutionary change or a paradigm shift in the global game industry in five years time? Also, what would be a hero or a driving force for that?

I think that we are experiencing that shift in the game industry today. Everyone is hitting the wall of rising costs and technical barriers, and the responses we are seeing are many. Sony and Microsoft are emphasizing online and microtransactions. Nintendo is moving towards new forms of control, to try to break out of the hardcore game market. The Serious Games movement in North America is gathering a lot of steam, with more attention than ever being paid to ways in which games can teach or train. The independent game movement is also a major new trend, moving the industry (finally) onto the Internet for real, embracing digital distribution chains and unique gameplay. Europe has become a hotbed of games scholarship, developing games studies into a true academic discipline. And Korea, of course, continues to demonstrate the cutting edge of a true gaming society, where the legal issues and cultural issues of mainstream gaming are confronted on a daily basis.

More at this link.

Snapshot by Linda Barnes

 Posted by (Visited 5333 times)  Reading
Nov 202005
 

I finished Snapshot by Linda Barnes last night. I gotta wonder, why is it that female detectives in Boston must all be seeing a shrink and involved with a guy connected to the mob…

That said, good as the last Sunny Randall book was, there’s something gritty about the Carlotta Carlyle mysteries by Barnes that seems to capture the vibe of a decaying Boston much better. There’s a surprising number of mentions of how often cars get stolen, for example — and my memory of Boston is of seeing bicycle rims everywhere, still chained to bike racks, while the rest of the bike is missing.

I first tried this series out because the detective plays steel guitar (and in fact, that was the name of one of the books in the series)…

You know, I also have to wonder how many people are a bit taken aback by how many series detective novels I consume. 🙂 Well, the next book on my vacation stack is an Andrew Greeley generational saga, so we’ll see how all the game geeks cope with that…!