My highest-rated games

After my last post, on my lowest-reated games, it was easy to predict that I'd write this follow-up post on my favorite games. My life-time favorite video games are Ultima III: Exodus and The Prisoner, both on the Apple II. But those games were definitely of their time (the early 80s); even though there are remakes and…

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My lowest-rated games

After working for a few days on my review of Divinity Original Sin II, it occurred to me that I've written lots of video-game "semi-reviews'. I call them "semi-reviews" because I generally review a game long after it's been released. My opinion of the game becomes almost irrelevant. Then again, given the size and nature of my…

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Divinity Original Sin II

TL;DR: I did not like this game. Get ready for a negative review, with lots of pictures. Context If you've read any post in this blog for the past year, you know that I've developed a fascination for Baldur's Gate 3. I've gushed over the quality of its story, and praised the design decisions made by the…

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Acorn Garden is off sabbatical

It may be foolish, but I'm open to resume teaching Wicca again. Why foolish? Honestly, I don't think there are many students out there anymore who are interested in what I choose to teach. The Gardnerian Tradition in which I was trained involves scholarship, structure, an aspiration to excellence. Sure, dancing naked in the woods is still…

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I lost one of my heroes

In an earlier blog post about opening up a trunk of old games, I extolled the virtues of The Empire of the Petal Throne, a world setting devised by M. A. R. Barker. Less than a half-hour ago as I write this, I was reading the introduction to Playing at the World, 2E, Volume 1: The Invention…

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Four years of Klingon

wejvatlh javmaH vagh vI' cha' vagh'logh boq'egh loS; chen wa'San loSvatlh javmaH wa' = 365.25 times 4 equals 1461. qaStaHvIS tlhIngan Hol vIHaDtaH loS DIS. = I have studied Klingon for four years. To be specific, I have a streak on Duolingo that's four years long. I forced my way through it solely so I could make…

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Now you too can have fun with BG3 face recognition!

Yes, you! And you don't even need a copy of Baldur's Gate 3 to do it. It starts with this article that was published in Ars Technica. The article describes how a software engineer set up a public test of Google's AI photo interpretation. I strongly suggest you read the article, then head over to They See…

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An idle thought about ads

Today I watched the series finale of Superman & Lois. As a life-long Superman fan, I thought the series was decent enough and wrapped up well. I was mostly watching it because it was the last gasp of the Arrowverse, a set of TV series on the CW network that harked back to my aforementioned DC-comic fan…

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Using BG3 to understand Mac OS face recognition

In a post in my BG3 series, I observed that, for reasons detailed in that post, I'd taken over five thousand screenshots from Baldur's Gate 3. Through a rather tedious process, those images were transferred to my Photos Library on Mac OS. Let's set aside the question of whether that number of photos was excessive. What I…

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