The ongoing conversation
I’d like to make a quick pass of today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip: First, I think it’s funny. I get the joke, and it’s a good one. SMBC is a great comic, and one that I read regularly through my RSS reader. That’s my disclaimer, since I’m about to pick nits, but they do […]
If you’re a native English speaker, you probably learned in elementary school that there are five or six vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. The letters that aren’t vowels are consonants. It’s a nice enough rule of thumb, and serves many purposes well. But it’s not quite accurate. First, there is a […]
Thanks to hanging out with some puzzling people on Facebook, and growing up playing word games in general, I noticed oddities of letter arrangements while I’m writing. Like say I was figuring out how to make the past tense of “video”, then wrote “videoed”, then noticed the “EOE” sequence is pretty unusual in English. Maybe […]
These are from my contributions to a two-year-old Twitter meme #minoranagrambooks: The Lord of the Grins The Little Pincer Anne of Green Bagels The Scrotal Web Harry Potter and the Holy Lad’s Wealth The Very Hungry Cellar Tapir James Clavell’s Hung So Frank Herbert’s Nude What Color Is Up Your Trachea? Feel free to contribute […]
Another of my GURPS books made the jump to PDF from e23: GURPS Monsters can now be yours in instant download from: Warehouse 23 It just went “live” on April 25 and has been selling briskly, as far as my experience goes (which is not very far, admittedly). Enough so that in that handful of […]
Free Shakespeare! is back in downtown Dayton. All this week (24×7), Chris Shea and a parade of volunteers are down at the Dayton Visual Arts Center (now The Contemporary Dayton) for Shakespeare for Life, reading the complete works of Shakespeare. You should be too. I’ve participated both times that it’s been done here (the inaugural run […]
Recently on Facebook, Thomas J. Kwiatkowski Jr. called me on my usage of the word “scleras”. The sclera is the white part of the eye, and it’s taken from the Latin. In Latin, its plural would be sclerae, and that it how it is often pluralized in medical texts (doctors being familiar with Latin pluralization rules in […]
Sam: I mean how much for the whole thing? Coach: Oh, six hundred bucks Sam, but the salesman said, the salesman said satisfaction guaranteed. Sam: Or …? Coach: Now, that would have been a good question. I was reminded of that clip from Cheers when reading the rules for The Resistance. They include a restriction […]
I got to hear some short stories read by their authors this past Saturday. A Dayton publisher, Alliteration Ink, and a Centerville retailer, Epic Loot, brought some area authors (and their editor) together for a two-hour event in Centerville to read from Sidekicks! I took several photos at the event, as each author and the editor […]
An orc cook goes to the orc butcher and asks for some prime elf steaks. The butcher says “It’s not ‘prime’ these days. Elfmeat went to ‘good’, ‘plusgood’, ‘doubleplusgood’.” “Oh. Okay, gimme some plusgood elf steaks and some doubleplusgood pixie wings.” “Pixie wings are now grade A, B, or C.” “Erk. Gimme grade-A pixie wings. […]