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More or less gaming-related rambles are relaxing as long as I make sensible choices and maintain a useful-to-me ignore list. :)

Neat stuff, @Alzrius - I love the level of self-reflection going on, and aim for it myself. I got an ice bucket of bad news this week and am overhauling my reading plans to match. There’s a thing called a calcium score test, a CAT scan that measures the level of plaques in your coronary...

@pemerton , your example doing-stuff roundup is amazing. I love that kind of thing in my games. Discussion of related actions is often a goad to my imagination as well as a handy reference.

Agreed a lot. Being very clearly past its era makes it easier for me to treat it as its own thing. So does being older myself, better read, and all that. I like to think of Imperial ships’ bridges with teak and chrome. :)

For me in particular, Traveller fell off the map of games I sought out to play and run for two major reasons (with the usual halo of smaller ones). 1. Falling behind the times in both reality and sf. Now, I had an unusual position in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Dad worked with Jet Propulsion Labs’ Deep...

I gotta take a week off for some periodic paperwork and chores - no crises, thank goodness, just stuff that will likely leave me tired and grumpy and not wanting to look at the screen or post responsibly. Happy reading, y’all.

Big books? Big series? This is the song of my people. The Sun Eater Saga by Christopher Ruocchio is my current fin of this sort. Seven big volumes - the seventh is coming in November - and several interstitial novellas and four volumes of related short stories. What began as excellent but...

That’s in my queue. Glad you enjoyed it so much.

Gotta like that. August was a month of really big books for me, four ranging from 27 to 47 hours. September has been a month of smaller ones, and heavy on nonfiction ranging from history to moral philosophy. We’ll see what October turns out to be.

This is where I plug paleontologist Peter D. Ward as an excellent science writer, too. Out Of Thin Air, Under A Green Sky, The Medea Hypothesis…a lot of very accessible fascinating work.

I’m mildly interested in that. Are there any particularly good starting points? I’m one of those people who’s sort of a hardcore fan of a Star Wars that never quite existed. I thought at the time that Empire went off the rails with the Skywalker family stuff, which undercut the kind of drama it...

Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s long-term lyricist, wrote “We Built This City On Rock and Roll”, with Martin Page. And also “These Dreams” for Heart.

Yeesh. Yeah. Back to Bruce Sterling: “The Street has its own uses for things.” Whatever a controlling interest is up to, it won’t last. Whatever comes next will probably be better and worse and different.

Oh, yes, good point. The two trends are siblings in mutant deviation.

Arguably, “D&D but narrative” is the oldest genre of play that’s distinct from D&D as whatever TSR/WotC is doing at the moment. It emerged in the first few months of D&D being for sale, with various communities of connected people and campaigns taking various approaches to mechanics and...

Yeah, about the closest I can think of are stories where a harsh Singularity drastically dehumanizes its victims, turns the planet into grey goo, or something like that. And even some of those show that better outcomes may still be possible.

I probably did when it was new, but not since.

Michel Foucault Plays D&D. Thoughts While Reading Disciple & Punish: In discussing premodern (before the last couple centuries) punishment in European legal codes, Foucault discusses various ways the body of the condemned is made to testify to the finding and sentence, a second testament for...