19th Level

"Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic!" - "Turjan of Miir", the first story of  Mazirian the Magician (aka The Dying Earth ) Earlier this week the worlds of science fiction and fantasy lost one of its greats, Jack Vance. One of my favorite authors, Michael Chabon, in an article about him in the New York Times Magazine , referring to him as "the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve. If ‘The Last Castle’ or ‘The Dragon Masters’ had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he’s Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there’s this insurmountable barrier.”  Searching the web will reveal more about him than I could hope to capture in a single blog post. I came to his work relatively late, in my mid twenties shorty after moving to the Boston-area. But in a sense I'd been familiar since I beg

March and April were such good months for blogging, But not May... I remember when I was in college I used to think how great it'd be after graduation and all the free time I'd have. And truth to tell, the amount of free time I had prior to kids was pretty cool, though I did work at a computer start-up for a few years of that... May does tend to be a busy month in my family, with the school year approaching its end and both daughters being born in May. Plus I have a project at work nearing completion and have been working many, many late nights as a result of that. As one might imagine, gaming and blogging has been pushed to the backburner. There's been some fun stuff during all this time - two young ladies having their birthdays is a good time (though our eleven year old is now taller than her mom...) I've managed to start an ACKS game, something I'll certainly be blogging about as it progresses. Managed to make it to a pair of movies - Iron Man 3 and Star T