I've been on a roll of indie games recently. Trauma was the latest one, which I mentioned two entries ago. Since then I've played a few more, each in a fairly different genre.

The first is Frozen Synapse, a game which bills itself as futuristic turn-based strategy, but can also be described as chess with guns, and without the squares. The rules ( Read more... )

I'm sitting at the bus stop on the way to work. Last night it was cold enough in my condo to make me shiver. Today is the first day of the season that I have my winter jacket on. On the fellow bus commuters around me, there is a similar sentiment of heavier clothing ( Read more... )

When I saw the trailer of Gears of War, maybe five years ago, I recall the darkness, the rubble all about, and the flashes of a single man's weapon against a monster twenty times his size. In the background played "Mad World", by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules. It was a haunting and memorable thirty seconds, a piece of art in additional to an ( Read more... )

This past weekend, I attended Ken and Mabel's son's baptism ( Read more... )

I was watching the Daily Show for a bit yesterday. Jon Stewart had on his show the Republican governor of Indiana, and they were talking about the general Republican philosophy, which is that if you get rid of government, the wealthy will have more money to make more jobs. Except it seems like that hasn't happened--that when you give the rich ( Read more... )

Last weekend was the beginning of the end of summer. The sky was a dark grey cotton blanket, punctuated by the first rain in a few months. Out on the balcony, I picked as many tomatoes as I could, and rescued the ones that had been driven to the ground by falling water. I stayed inside, moving my furniture to clear the area in front of the ( Read more... )

On my way to the bus I saw a homeless looking man, hurrying his dog around a pole so that it would tie his leash into a knot. I can only imagine the dog's excited thoughts--"Now we're playing the around-the-pole game! I almost saw my tail that time ( Read more... )

I'm not sure where I've encountered this phrase before, but the idea of it seems so applicable when I think about my experience as captain of a PuzzleHunt team ( Read more... )

It's nine o'clock on a Saturday. About me is a relaxed crowd awaiting the 10:15 flight into Pullman. There are some elderly couples here and there, some students on laptops huddled by the scant power outlets that the airports provides. And me, on a second tour of duty in the life of long distance ( Read more... )

ferntoo's cat is crafty at night. Before we locked him out of the bedroom, he would leap up on the bed, ready to lick us or sleep on our pillows. Now that he's in Pullman, in a new furniture arrangement, he does other things, such as climb up the desk to nibble at a helpless catnip plant, or climb further up into the window sill, trying to push the ( Read more... )