19th Level

"Who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." -George Orwell, 1984 1984  is on my list of favorite books. It's possibly my all-time favorite. If you've not read it, it's hard for a summary to do it justice. I'm not sure of the original source of this, but I've heard many times online people state that North Korea is a country that could be described as someone reading 1984  and deciding that's the perfect model for their country. Every year or so I read 1984  again. And every reading I appreciate it again, in different ways. Sometimes I take notice of how well constructed the novel is. Sometimes I notice how astute some political observation is. Sometimes I'm amazed how well he imagined the future. One of the ideas behind the novel is the control of the past. Big Brother, the near-mythical leader of Oceania, is never wrong. If some news story in the past shows him to have been in error, it i...

One of the advantages of being in grad school part time, from a gaming perspective, is it is awfully good at keeping me laser-focused on whatever game we are currently playing. Of course it does so by keeping me so busy that there's little time for anything else. For those keeping track at home, I'm enrolled at Brandeis University for my Master's Degree in Strategic Analytics. I'm learning all about data science, data mining, big data, predictive analytics, etc.  Right now I'm between semesters, with the next semester starting up next week (and running for ten weeks). With Port Henry having at least a skeleton (with a lot more mapping than required, but maps are a hobby) I've had a little bit of time to do a bit more noodling around in reading and thinking gaming thoughts. Reading I've done a little variety in my reading. As my previous class ended, I reread the audiobooks of The Passage and The Twelve  by Justin Cronin, in preparation for t...

I'm not planning any major New Year's Resolution to read more - I tend to get a bunch of reading done over the course of your typical year and I'm hoping 2016 will be like that as well. I get a lot of reading done via unabridged audiobooks, either while commuting or while going for walks. What I'm planning on trying this year is making use of Goodreads to track what I'm reading. Hopefully I can figure out a way to link reviews there to this blog. As I dusted off my Goodreads account I noticed I put a number of books as five out of five stars which was probably a tad overly enthusiastic and I tweaked my ratings. What I might try doing is delaying rating/reviewing a book until a week or two has passed to give a chance for me to reflect on it. Of course that might also make me less likely to do the review at all, so we'll see. It did give me an idea to consider what my "all-time favorite" books are. Giving an absolute favorite book is clearly imposs...

This post has spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens . Please scroll past this lovely picture of Jar Jar Binks in order to proceed further. All Bettie's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop.  She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.  -  Sandman: 24 Hours by Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg, and Malcolm Jones III The Big Bad to end all Big Bads has been brought to a crushing end at the hands of The Hero, his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits and his trademark BFS. The Negative Space Wedgie that was threatening all of creation has been un-wedgied, the Sealed Evil in a Can has been safely disposed of, all the plot threads that were left hanging have been wrapped up nice and neat and everybody lives Happily Ever After.  And then the sequel happens.  - tvtropes.org, Happy Ending Override One of the criticisms I've heard raised against Star Wars: The Force Awak...

Shortly after I graduated from college R. Talsorian published their fantasy steampunk RPG,  Castle Falkenstein. Having missed out on Space: 1889  when it first came out this was my first steampunk RPG, though I had been exposed to the genre by Gibson and Sterling's novel The Difference Engine (a novel which, though I though I found the setting compelling, I did not particularly care for - must reread some day). Jules Verne was one of the authors in the inspirational reading section of Castle Falkenstein.  Heck, the game also made him into France's scientific advisor, having him responsible for their massive Verne Cannons  which formed a sort of nuclear deterrent.  With that in mind, one Sunday afternoon I was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore my new girlfriend (now my wife of nearly 16 years!).  On a whim I decided to pick up a Jules Verne novel. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . That night I started reading it, never having read any of his works b...

I'd first heard of Dune  when I was in middle school. There was some magazine distributed at our school which described the book and the upcoming movie - I believe this was in 1983 - I do remember it was a while until the movie finally came out. I also remember it was one of those movies I wanted to see in the theaters but never managed to. My parents got me a movie tie-in novelization (same text as the classic novel but with a cover from the film) but I never managed to get too deep into it. Several years later, during my sophomore year of college at UConn, I was looking for a new book to read at the co-op. At the time my taste in fiction wasn't too spectacular, being dominated by Star Trek novels and the novels TSR put out. Still enjoyed Stephen King, though he was unfairly in the ghetto of "genre writers". Wanting something different, I decided to splurge on a new copy of Dune , my original copy some sixty miles away at my parents' house. This time it truly...

I made my first attempt at reading H.P. Lovecraft in the summer of 1989, between high school and college. I was taking a pre-calculus class that summer to allow me to start my engineering studies at the University of Connecticut with that prerequisite met. It was an awfully boring class as I'd taken non-AP pre-calculus and calculus in high school (though regretfully didn't do well enough to test out of it). Summer classes were rather long and had an intermission. I usually brought along a book to read during break in case I wanted to be alone. One of the authors I brought along was H.P. Lovecraft. The first few stories I read didn't grab me too much. I wasn't much into Lovecraft's evocative descriptions at the time, wanting more to get to the point. Then one afternoon I came upon the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth . That was the story that got me hooked. For those unfamiliar with the work (and as usual I will stay clear of  big spoilers as much as possible)...

For most people my age (I'm 40) and older, their gateway drug into fantasy was  the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. I was a little bit different, for me it was C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. When I was in kindergarten my family was in the process of moving from upstate New York to Connecticut. During the transitional period my father spent his time in Connecticut while my mother and I lived with my grandparents in Brooklyn, New York. My mother and grandfather often took me to the Brooklyn Public Library - I think it was the Sheepshead Bay Branch but I could be mistaken. I remember always being drawn the collection of Narnia books they had - I seem to recall they had them on their own special display - though at the time they were a little above my reading level, though I was an early reader. During that same period and before I got around to reading the Narnia books (which definitely did happen) another geek milestone occurred - the release of Star Wars (Just Star Wars. No...