Blurt!Sben

Tonight’s kitchen victory: bibimbap.

Oct. 23, 2021, 8:35pm

The trees have been especially lovely this fall.

Oct. 22, 2021, 7:16pm

Finished reading Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, one of those niche books I sometimes read about the history of role-playing games. This one focuses on TSR from before its inception to the ouster of Gary Gygax. It was mostly just sad: The two principal figures (Gygax and Dave Arneson) come across as bitter, insecure, and emotionally-stunted grudge-holders; the story is fascinating (with much more detail than I’d known before), but their animosity left me with a bad taste in my mouth long before the end of the book.

Oct. 22, 2021, 7:39am (edited)

The dude and his friends came in last place in trivia night.

Oct. 19, 2021, 8:40pm

Finished rereading The Fortune of War by Patrick O’Brian, book 6 of the Aubrey/Maturin series. As foreshadowed in the previous book, the backdrop is the War of 1812. This one shines a spotlight on Maturin’s spycraft: It played an important role in the previous books, esp. H.M.S. Surprise, but Maturin is uncharacteristically the more active character for much of the novel.

Oct. 19, 2021, 9:08am (edited)

Finished reading Where the Wild Coffee Grows by Jeff Koehler, about coffee and its origin in the Ethiopian highlands. Well-written and -structured, it covers (among other things) history, economics, biology, sociology, and climate change, but somehow isn’t too long. I’ll be thinking about this book for a while.

Oct. 15, 2021, 11:50pm

The dude wore his full marching band uniform for the first time tonight, including kilt and sporran. He dug it.

Oct. 15, 2021, 10:40pm

My day off: walked to Northgate, caught light rail to Capitol Hill (12 minutes station to station), walked Pike and Pine, got espresso and lunch and a haircut, walked Broadway, got a decaf espresso, caught light rail back to Northgate, walked home: almost ten miles.

Oct. 15, 2021, 4:21pm

Walked to Carkeek Park and back, something more than ten miles. It was a great day for walking, cool with just a couple brief sprinkles.

Oct. 9, 2021, 10:34pm

Finished rereading King of Sartar by Greg Stafford. It’s something of an anthropological study of Stafford’s RPG setting Glorantha, which inevitably reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. But while the vast majority of game designers aren’t Greg Stafford, it’s also true that Stafford wasn’t Le Guin. I enjoyed the book, but can only recommend it to a vanishingly-small slice of readers.

Oct. 8, 2021, 1:31pm (edited)

Current earworm: “Something About You” by Level 42.

Oct. 8, 2021, 7:47am

Turned on the new heat pump for the season sometime last week, maybe September 29 or so.

Oct. 4, 2021, 12:28pm

Finished reading The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer, the third book of the series.

This was a faster, more intense, I think better book than the first two, which (aside from the faster part) is saying something. I don’t know if it’s due to my growing familiarity with the baroque setting, the improvement of the author’s craft, rigorous editing on the part of her and her editor, or the plot itself.

Very much looking forward to the fourth and final book, which will be published later this month.

Oct. 1, 2021, 8:34pm

The carport gutter got clogged, so it pulled away from the carport, so Greg helped Meghan and me jury-rig a fix. Then I cleared the clog, and the rush of water from the downspout overwhelmed the rain barrel and spilled onto my legs and feet.

Sep. 27, 2021, 1:53pm

Greg and kids came over, and the dude and I played Magic with them in the carport.

Sep. 27, 2021, 1:51pm (edited)