Happy Chanukah to all you fellow Jews out there! And merry Christmas to those who celebrate! And happy NOT HAVING TO WORK/GETTING OVERTIME PAY DAY (!!!) to everyone else! And also happy first anniversary to Kevin and Davina! Mazal tov, guys! Things are still a bit rough for my family…
Hey all, As you may have gathered from the title, I’m not posting a blog entry today. On Friday evening, my aunt passed away after a long battle with cancer. I will be spending my time this week with my family in Ottawa, where shiva will take place at my…
This blog entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. (That pretty much means you can copy it, re-post it, link to it, change it, do whatever, as long as you point out that the original came from here/me and you don’t make money off it. Why?…
One of my very favourite short stories is “A Study In Emerald”, by Neil Gaiman, which speculates on what might happen if the famous Victorian detective, Sherlock Holmes, had lived in the same universe as the famous Victorian horror-demonic-god-creature, Cthulhu. I’m not such a big fan of Lovecraft myself, but,…
Whenever I play any game in the Legend of Zelda series, I find myself getting a lot jumpier. Like, I’ll keep thinking I’m seeing things out of the corners of my eyes, or, when I go to bed at night, I can’t shake the feeling that something might be right…
We seem to have a strong intuition that part of what makes us human is our ability to die. Witness the countless stories in which the villains’ goal is to live forever, or in which a character demonstrates his or her essential humanity by giving up the opportunity to do…
I try to post blogs only about works that make me feel something strongly, whether that something is outrage or admiration, melancholy or joy. Today, I’ve decided to go with “joy”. And that means… math!
After last week’s big old long post about criticism, I figured I’d like to get back in the not-tl;dr-post game. But what to write about? Then I remembered: c’est l’Hallowe’en! Everyone knows that Hallowe’en is a time to dress up, get candy, and have fun. There’s no greater moral to…
What is constructive criticism, and where does it overstep the boundary between “criticism” and “attack”? I’m interested because of this. Let me first make clear that I don’t care one way or the other about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. I read the first book, didn’t like it at all, and…
I love a murder mystery, no matter how cheesy the plot, how stock the characters, or how many times strangers with guilty pasts naively accept a mysterious invitation to an isolated manor house and then decide to split up and search the place when it becomes clear that one of…