With a title like that, you might think I'm going to talk about how Karl Marx's economic and political theories apply to racial inequality. Nope. I'm going to talk about racism in the Marx Brothers movies. Recently, with much pandemic-induced free time on my hands, I re-watched all of the Marx Brothers films, in chronological order. They…
In reviewing The Last of Us Part II, I'm going to do my best to avoid spoiling both that game and The Last of Us. That's not easy, because the first issue I'll discuss is whether you can play The Last of Us Part II (tLoU2) without playing The Last of Us (tLoU) first. Strictly speaking, you…
As I played Detroit: Become Human, I was strongly reminded of two other games I've previously reviewed: Batman: The Telltale Series and Batman: The Enemy Within. They are all "choose your own adventure games": The emphasis is on the story. While there's some combat, it's all in the form of QTE's (see below). The story evolves as…
Right now, the PS4 game that everyone is talking about is The Last of Us, Part II. So I'm going to talk about GreedFall. GreedFall, published by the French game company Spiders, is a story-based role-playing game in the same vein as Bioware's Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises. The flow of GreedFall is the same: -…
At the time I'm writing this, the Watchmen HBO TV series is available on Hulu, and possibly other streaming platforms. That first sentence was for the web-link summary. Let's step back a bit. I stated in an 2009 blog post that I felt that Watchmen was the finest comic I ever read. Part of the reason I…
Today I had a new signal about my project to write a biography of Isaac Bonewits. From a post I made on Facebook: I was cleaning out old stuff from a bookshelf, and I found a pile of Isaac Bonewits' papers that I never got around to sending to the University of Santa Barbara. In an extra…
Whenever someone tells me, either personally or professionally, that they're getting a new computer, my first words are "What about backup?" I liked to think that I took my own advice and that I was well-protected against hard drive failure. This is the story of how I was wrong. Almost. The bold beginning Let's start with my…
It's been two weeks since the party. I said it then, and I'll say it again: It was the best party I ever hosted. I don't think I'll host a better one for the rest of my life. This is one of my longer blog posts. I want to get all the details down so that if…
I invite my friends (new and old, near and far) to my 60th birthday party. Date: Saturday, December 7, 2019 Time: 6PM - 11PM Location: This is a public blog post, so I'll send the address separately. It's the same place as my 40th and 50th birthday parties, and a few Yule celebrations. The event: A professionally-published…
For my 20th, 30th, 40th, and 50th birthday parties, I organized events centered on gaming. As you'll see if you click on the links in the first sentence, for my 40th and 50th I set up a LARP party. For my 60th birthday party, I'm going to take a simpler approach and host a murder mystery. This…