Category Archives: hobbies

It’s a Disasterpiece!

I’m pleased to announce Disasterpiece Theatre, a new podcast in which I and my co-host Alex White come up with the worst idea for a movie that we think Hollywood might actually make. We pick a topic, like animal horror, or an actor, like Milla Jovovich, and each come up with a movie that we [...]

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“Happy Birthday, Robot!” is an Excellent Storytelling Game

If you like storytelling games, and especially if you have young children in your life, I cannot recommend Daniel Solis’s Happy Birthday, Robot! highly enough. Using dice and coins, up to five players collaboratively create a story about Robot’s birthday. The game serves as creativity fuel, helps you practice collaborative storytelling, and is a whole [...]

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Needs more yarn

Pretty much everyone who reads this blog knows that in the past year I’ve become rather crazy about crochet. It has pretty well consumed my free time. And I mean it when I say “consumed.” If I’m sitting, I have a hook, yarn, pattern or all three in my hands. My current tally in my [...]

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This is the Closest I’ll Come to a PAX East 2011 Post

All right, it’s been two weeks since PAX East and I might as well accept that I’m not going to do a proper post. Instead, I’ll summarize by saying that I had a great time and that it was wonderful to see a lot of the people in the interactive fiction community and have a [...]

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Growing up Crafty

There are lots of things I love about Eli and Liza. They are kind and funny and smart and, best of all, interested in making things.

It’s a bit late in the season, but both of the kids wanted a scarf to wear. So yesterday Liza and I purchased yarn (she picked out both hers and [...]

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Photo Shoot

I’m a bit obsessed right now with keeping my ravelry.com page updated with photos of the work I’ve done. This is my Granny Square Shrug I re-finished this weekend. (I finished it the first time over Thanksgiving but it was WAY too big.) So I had to take it apart and make it a bit [...]

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Today You Should Go Play FRACT

FRACT is a first-person adventure game, similar in gameplay to puzzle games like Myst, set in a strange, abstract world filled with TRON-like structures that are in part reified electronica sounds. I cannot tell you how in my wheelhouse this game is. Here, take a look at what the game looks and sounds like.

It’s a [...]

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What a Fiasco!

Fiasco bills itself as “A Game of Powerful Ambition & Poor Impulse Control”. It’s a one-shot role-playing game that helps three to five players tell a neo-noir story along the lines of the Coen Brothers’ movie Fargo, Jackie Brown, Bad Santa, and Out of Sight. It requires no game master, takes about three hours to [...]

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Chris Crawford’s Unflinching Look at His Life

Chris Crawford is a visionary game designer. He began his career at Atari and created some of the earliest computer-based wargames. He founded the Computer Game Developers’ Conference and The Journal of Computer Game Design. In 1985 released his best-known game, Balance of Power. In it, you played either the President of the US or [...]

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50 hats: Done!

And here are a few of my favorites:

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