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Showing posts from 2012

Top Ten Things From 2012

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Well. I wasn't planning to do much on the blog today, but we've had some train problems this morning, and frankly, right now it looks like we might be here for awhile. So... Here are my Top Ten Things From 2012! 10. WotC started releasing a new ruleset for D&D, and the playtest turned out to be really interesting. 9. The Avengers was a terrific movie. 8. Emma discovered the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. 7. I worked a TON of overtime, much of it right before Christmas. Yay overtime checks! 6. Hannah started singing lessons, sang publicly several times, and even recorded a couple of songs. 5. I started coaching triathlon This led to a little freelance writing gig. 4. I finished 3rd in my age group at the Milford Y-Tri. 3. I averaged under 8 minutes/mile at the Westport Minuteman 10K. 2. Sally won her age group in not one but two road races. 1. We took the kids to Washington, DC, and did most of the tour by bicycle. We even got to spend Memor

I Feel Like I've Learned a Few Things Today

This hasn't by any means been my favorite NFL football season of recent memory. Still, this is the last regular season weekend of the year, and so I feel like I have to watch this afternoon's games. After all, barring a miracle this afternoon this will be the last time we see the New York Giants play for the next 6 months. So. What have we learned? -- First, the Giants are great against defenses that suck. Against the Ravens? Terrible. But against the Eagles? Hey, pretty good day. -- Likewise, the Giants' offense is great when they have Chris Snee in the lineup. Without him know? Again, terrible. -- Along those same lines, counting on the Detroit Lions is a losing strategy. -- Lastly, why don't I think that the Houston Texans can never win a Superbowl? Because they just can't win the big game. Witness today's game against Indianapolis. If they're going to drop a game like this against the Colts, wait until they have to play Tom Brady and the Patriots up

Sunday Comics: Bronx Angel--Politics By Another Method (Page 11)

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Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method , Page 11 Click here to see this page at full size . Well.  This is the typical liberal critique of conservative voters--that conservative voters tend to vote for people who don't act in the best interests of their constituents.  That these same voters, the ones who actually rely on so many national-level federal programs, are nevertheless the first to jump to the defense of the "cut spending at any costs" crowd.  I don't particularly want to get into the rights and wrongs of that critique right now; my point is merely that it exists as a point-of-view, that it's the point-of-view of most of the liberal New Yorkers that I know.  At the time that I wrote this, it struck me that it was these same folks who were both voting for the War in Iraq and volunteering to fight it. The flip side of that, of course, is that Congress voted overwhelmingly to give President Gorge W. Bush authorization to conduct the war, and there

News & Notes (Saturday, 12/29/12)

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Today's news spot isn't gonna be actual news.  It's more like personal news--that is to say it's news about me. Last week I wrote a bit about wanting to restart my long-running D&D campaign, The Sellswords of Luskan .  Well, I actually took steps to do it.  The "new" game is called Revenge of the Sellswords of Luskan , and it's being hosted on the Myth-Weavers forum, which is where I personally go to play D&D Play-by-Post (PbP).  I've got four of five of my original Players back, but we haven't actually started the game yet because... I spent the last month writing a novella for my kids as one of their Christmas presents.  What's cool about that is that because I had a concrete deadline, i.e. Christmas, I had to really buckle down and work, forcing myself to stay exclusively on this one thing.  The good thing about that is that I actually managed to finish the rough draft on Christmas Eve morning, and then I finished my first re-

Friday Mad Science: Power, The Hunger Games, and the Big Lie

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In addition to all the nonsense normally associated with Christmastime,  I've  spent the last two weeks engrossed in the first two books of the  Hunger Games  trilogy.  My wife and I watched the movie a few weeks ago, and as I noted here at the time, I was a little underwhelmed.  But then my daughter  Hannah  finished reading the first two novels out of the  Harry Potter  series, and I started looking for something new for her to read because, bottom line, I don’t think a nine-year-old is quite ready to deal with some of the stuff that’s in the later half of the Potter books.  I tried lots of different books for her, but of the choices I gave, she was most interested in  The Hunger Games , probably because she’d heard of it on TV, but my wife asked me to screen the novels myself first before handing them over.  So… The Hunger Games  is a much better book than it was a movie.  Virtually all of the scenes in the book have been repeated in the movie, but the movie  doesn't  

Friday Hair Metal: Something to Believe In

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I love Poison.  Seen 'em twice in concert, and both times it was a blast.  Those guys have fun, even when life sucks.  I really admire that.

Christmas Time Is Here

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Hannah sang in a song from "It's a Charlie Brown Christmas" in the Christmas Pageant at our church,  This isn't the world's best recording--the sound didn't upload well to YouTube--but you can still hear her if you turn it up a bit. Maybe it's me, but I think Hannah has a gift.  'Course I'm a proud daddy, but still...

2012 Christmas Letter

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Dear Friends and Family, I hope this note finds you happy and in good health.  2012 was an exciting, happy, storm-filled year for our little family, but we survived and even thrived, and as we look forward to 2013, I can't help but feel that great things are right around the corner.  I hope that's true for you as well. For me, 2012 started normally enough.  I continued to work in the City as an engineer, signed up to coach the new triathlon club at the local YMCA, and ran a few races, and in May, Sally and I took the girls on vacation to Washington, DC.  We saw the Smithsonian and the National Gallery and a bunch of the monuments, and then we spent some time at my father’s grave at Arlington on Memorial Day.  And then things got interesting.  As the heat of summer hit the City, contract negotiations between my company and its labor union broke down, and I soon found running a crew of non-union contractors up in Westchester County in lieu of the company’s regular workforce.

Tim Tebow and the Jets

I've been amazed by all the talk in New York lately now that NY Jets QB Mark Sanchez has been benched, and one-time 3rd string QB Greg McElroy has been named the starter. Bottom line, what we've seen lately is a lot of sports writers losing their minds because they can't figure out why the Jets traded for Tim Tebow if the Jets didn't plan for him to play. Like it's really that hard to understand. Bottom line, the Jets had to pay Tebow four million dollars in salary.  Tebow, on the other hand, had sold something like fifteen million dollars worth of jerseys for the Jets as of the last time I looked. So. Why did the Jets trade for Tebow?  Because he made the team eleven million dollars. Look, it's alereadt been reported that it was Jets owner Woody Johnson who wanted Tebow and not coach Rex Ryan, and to tell the truth, I don't even think that that's a problem. Johnson is a businessman first and foremost. Where Ryan's first conce

Sunday Comics: Bronx Angel--Politics By Another Method (Page 10)

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Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method : Page 10. Click here to see the page at full size . Well, if the last section was one of my favorites, this next piece is probably the worst piece in the book.  Not only does it set up a pair of Straw Man arguments, it also bogs us down in a three-page classroom scene in the middle of what was becoming a tense piece about gang life in the Bronx.  As Randy Lander said from the comics review site The Fourth Rail , "People yelling at each other in a classroom might be realistic, but it's not the way to tell an exciting story in a comic book." On the flipside, this scene sets up the title of the book, and from a screenwriter's point of view, it's the piece that's going to set up whatever sense of closure exists when this story is over.  So I put it in as a kind of "stupid screenwriter's trick" in order to add in ideas I could turn around and reference later in the story.  If you think about it, you

Anniversary present

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Sally gave me a Nexus 7. This is my first post with it. Ten years!
Sever the ignorant doubt in your heart in your heart with the sword of self-knowledge.

Maneuvers and Expertise Dice in D&D Next (from the Ruleset released on 12/17/12)

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If you’re a fan of D&D, it’s hard for me to imagine that you will have missed the chance to sign up for the Playtest rules releases currently ongoing for the game’s forthcoming version,  D&D Next .  With that in mind, the point of this post isn’t to spill the beans about what’s in the new release—since that would be pointless given that the release itself is  free —the post is meant more to spark discussion amongst fans who have read through the rules—or who are at least familiar with what’s been going on.  I had some time this week and read through the newest ruleset, and for better or worse, these are my thoughts.  Your mileage may vary.  And if you have no idea what’s going on with D&D Next, then the rest of this post will almost certainly make no sense at all to you.  Stop reading now and come back tomorrow.  Hopefully that post will be better for you. With that said, the biggest change to the new ruleset seems to be that  Wizards of the Coast  (WotC) has gone

The Popcorn Elephant!

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I found it!

Friday Mad Science: All Triathlon, All The Time

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I'm trying really hard not get off on a four-page rant here.  It's almost Christmas, there's already plenty of really horrible crap going on in the world, and truth is, I don't want to contribute to it in any way.  I don't even want to pay attention to it.  But if I keep following the news as closely as I usually do, if I spend even a few minutes thinking or talking about any of the stuff that's going on, there's really no avoiding a long-winded diatribe that, frankly, you don't want to read, and I don't want to write.  I've started drafting this piece in my head enough times to know that there's no halfway about it, either.  It's all or nothing.  Once we start down the rabbit hole, there's no going back. So.  *deep breath* It's almost Christmas, and I have a nice house and a beautiful family.  Thank you, Lord, for the little blessings in life that, really, aren't so little. *** I met with  Amanda , my contac

Friday Hair Metal: It's the End of the World

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If you're wondering, the end actually occurs at the Solstice, which is at 11:11 am ET today.  It was a solar calendar, and that's why it ends on a solstice.

Molly Visits the Hospital

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Hannah took her favorite doll, Molly, to the Doll Hospital at the American Girl Doll Store in Manhattan yesterday, and as you can see from the picture below, Molly had to be admitted as an in-patient. Sadly, Molly lost an arm in a domestic incident earlier this year--you can see it if you look closely. The doctor's think they can save the arm, but it'll take surgery, and that's not quick. So it looks like Molly's gonna miss Christmas this year. That's Hannah with the Big Sad Face. Personally, I told Hannah that she ought to ask the doctors if they can replace Molly's arm with one that's bionic or mechanical. She didn't think that was funny.

Trip to Rockefeller Center

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Sadly, I couldn't go today. Still, at least they got some real New York pretzels.

Comics, TV, and the TMNT

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Movies are cool because you get to see amazing things up on a big, gigantic screen, and they pretty much always tell a complete story in a relatively short span of time.  TV is cool because it’s a lot like the movies, but you trade off the giant screen and super-high-end special effects for a longer storytelling format that enables the telling of more complex, more nuisance stories over a much longer period of time.  That’s great so long as you can handle the episodic nature of television. Comics are cool because they offer the best of both worlds.  You can tell the longest, most nuanced, most complex stories imaginable, and you can tell them with incomparably excellent special effects because the realism of those effects is limited only by the imagination and ability of the artist drawing the comics.  Added to that is the fact that comics are not only a visual medium, they are also literary, meaning that a comic, if it’s done right, can exist in two places at the same time—both o

Trial of the War Master: The Caravan

I haven't had time work on The Sorcerer's Tale this week, but we at least left at a decent stopping place last week.  If you haven't caught up, we're up to Chapter 2, so maybe this is the week that you get back up to speed.  God willing, The Sorcerer's Tale will be back next week--after I've had a little time off for Christmas. To fill some time this week, here's a story we ran in the first issue of Proletariat Comics ' old Horizon's magazine.  It's called Trial of the War Master .  Hopefully you'll like it. *** “In the chaos of the Elder Days, the myriad dark races warred upon each other and upon humanity.  The darkest of the peoples were the Fire Elves, slaves to Hephaestus the Unyielding, their wicked God of the Volcano.  They hunted the peoples of our world as food for the Fire… “To lead their armies and fight their battles, the houses of the wealth sought the strength of the powerful. These were the War Masters…” -  Marc