19th Level

Like a lot of gamers, I support a lot of Kickstarter projects. Most of the projects I've supported have come through though I've had a few busts. I was going to make this a Google+ post but it kept getting longer and longer until I realized I'd pretty much written a blog post. This is a bit of stream of consciousness, so don't consider it a detailed analysis. I'll get the bad news out first... Accepting I've lost my money on two Kickstarters. As far as percentages go it's not horrible - like I said, most projects I've funded have either delivered or at the very least stayed in communication - special credit to Autarch to pulling off Dwimmermount in the face of the author vanishing on them. The lost causes are Todor Minev's "Cthulhu and Zombie Mugs" (yeah, kinda goofy) and Jess Nevins' "The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes". The Encyclopedia is especially disappointing as I was in it for just digital delivery of i...

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. Opening line of Kindred I recently wrote about some of the controversy around an award being named after HP Lovecraft, given his creepy-even-for-its-time racist attitudes. There had been some suggestion of renaming the award for Octavia Butler. As I said there, I'm not certain of the wisdom of naming an award after anyone - everyone has some baggage. For example, Pulitzer was both a reformer and a sensationalist who pursued scandals; today he has a prestigious award named after him. That said, I realized I'd never read an Octavia Butler story. That seemed something most definitely worth remedying. The story I chose to read was Kindred , a novel I read both as an audiobook and via Kindle, bouncing back and forth between the two formats. The narration provided by Kim Staunton is very well done and made for a very engaging listen. The story is about a young African-American woman, Dana, living in 1976 California (which, a...

Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree, By caves where never sun has shone, By streams that never find the sea - The Hobbit 2014 was a very light year for this blog. The mood to write for public consumption wasn't particularly high. In fall of 2013 the charter school where my wife taught went out business, leaving the teachers unemployed and spreading the kids out into a variety of public and private schools. This made for some very stressful times at home, with my wife taking a variety of jobs to stretch out unemployment, at one point working two jobs. Life on the home front was stressful to say the least. I'm hoping 2015 is better. In August my wife accepted an offer for a full-time teaching position. It's a pretty rough commute for her, having us both up at 5 in the morning, leading to the interesting situation where on occasion we are asleep before the kiddies… However, the return of stability has been a good thing for our family, allowing for planning ...