About this blog

Welcome to my little corner of the internet.

So what's this blog all about? It's my attempt to create a blog of things that are of interest to me and, hopefully, to some others. I've tried my hands at a hardcore political blog and while I'm a political junkie, wading into various culture wars as a primary focus got to be a bit on the painful side. I'm also a huge gaming, science fiction, and fantasy geek.

So how to tie this all together? Well, looking at the title there's an obvious reference to Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying game - "I'm a 19th level elven wizard with +5 against orcs so don't mess with me!" Needless to say this blog will spend a fair amount of time discussing tabletop gaming.

Then getting a little too clever by half we've got a reference to Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Without going into spoilers, that number takes on a significance in that series of novels. I was introduced to Stephen King's writing back in the long ago period of my being in high school back in the 80s. A friend of mine lent me her copy of King's first Dark Tower novel The Gunslinger and I was totally hooked. I also plan on spending some time discussing fantasy and science fiction literature, film, television, etc.

I've also some other interests that I'm going to cover on this blog - hopefully they can be made to somehow fit together. As a software engineer and techie I'm going to be covering technological topics - I work for a big company and I work in storage virtualization but I think that's way too techie - rather I'll be talking about the side of technology that I think will be of interest to other people besides me - how it impacts our lives, the gadgets we like to use, the human cost of those gadgets, what we gain and what we lose. This is something I think will fit in well with the other topics of interest. I now do most of my reading on a Kindle Fire or on my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Heck most of my gaming collection is in the form of PDFs - I'm trying to get rid of the clutter of books in my house! I read comic books now using the Comixology Android App. We're big users of streaming video in our household.

Finally, I am going to talk about real-world issues. Politics will be a biggie, though I'll also be talking about human rights issues, religion, etc. as well. With that in mind it's best you know a little bit about me. Once a Libertarian-leaning Republican I've drifted into being an unapologetic Liberal Democrat. I'd never particularly cared for the social battles of the Republican party, taking a live and let live approach. That part of me has not changed, but on economic matters I have definitely grown to favor a larger role of government in our lives. I'm also a Catholic, albeit what most would consider a cafeteria one. I've grown used to that label. To understand where I am in the cafeteria, I'm a huge believer in the church's social justice stances including what is referred to as advocating a preferential option for the poor. On the other hand, when it comes to "pelvic issues" I am not in agreement with the doctrines of the church. I support same-sex marriage equality. I'm ok with contraception. And I think there's a lot of people high up in the hierarchy of the church who belong in prison for enabling the molestation of children by the clergy.

If the other areas of my blog sound way interesting but the social aspects do not I will not be offended in the least if you choose to ignore those issues.On the other hand, I tend to respect people who are well-informed and passionate, even if they disagree with me. We all are of different backgrounds and our life experiences take us different places and leave us with different opinions. Therefore it would be shocking to me if everyone held the same views as me.


With all this in mind, one thing I've learned about blogging is some degree of predictability is a good thing. Therefore I'm considering something of a schedule to the way I'll be posting. What I'm going to be shooting for to start is an average of four posts per week on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Saturday schedule.

  • Monday - gaming-related topics
  • Wednesday - science-fiction/fantasy topics
  • Friday - techie topics
  • Saturday - social topics
This is certainly subject to change and the blog may certainly evolve in directions I've not anticipated.

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