This is another post from my “Daddy Daze” series, an anecdotal exploration of my odd little adventures in parenting in bite-sized chunks (for your reading enjoyment) and because the last thing this world needs is yet another doting parent blog. No Attention Required I’ve noticed that Claire is an interesting kid when it comes to watching television. Sure, I have a sample size of exactly one, here, so this isn’t exactly a scientific investigation. Maybe all kids watch television like this in 2012, and [...]

I used to firmly hoist my flag inside the I-Love-Winter camp. I’m not so devoted anymore, though I have not quite left some aliegence behind: I love the chill of the air. I love the cozy, claustrophilic feeling of a world wrapped in a blanket of fresh and falling snow. I love the sound of the crunching pack underfoot and the effect of leaving a temporary footprint trail through an untouched expanse of refreshed whiteness. But as winter turns to spring and the chance [...]

I was, earlier today while working on some of those mindless tasks at the office, listening to a podcast interview with David Hodgson. Hodgson is (sort-of) known as the guy who writes a lot of game strategy guides, particularly for the games I’ve personally been playing a lot of lately — Fallout and Skyrim, to be specific. While I didn’t ever pick up the strategy guide for Fallout, I have lately (after clocking over fourty hours of play therein) purchased the guide for Skyrim. [...]

I’ve been playing a fair share of role-playing video games lately. RPGs. And actually, I’ve primarily been swapping between two right now — Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on my desktop and Fallout 3 on my PlayStation — but have dabbled in a bunch of others in recent months and years, too. RPGs are the types of games where you take on the “role” of the central protagonist of a vast and interactive story. This is different from a first person shooter (FPS) game because [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. On the Tick For the fourth year in a row, approximately mid-morning on New Year’s Day, I found myself standing in the start line of Resolution Run garbed in a brand new (blue) race jacket and in some state of freezing and [...]

I wanted to carve something a little less traditional for Halloween this year. Digging through the ThinkGeek pumpkin template archive I discovered a ready-made black-and-white stencil to mimic the in-game Jack-o-lanterns from Minecraft. If you’ve never played Minecraft, understanding that pumpkins are something of a residual anomaly in the game might give you a better sense of their meaning. The game itself seems to have evolved over the last year, adding new features here, dropping a few over there. But pumpkins, serving no real [...]

A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy. The Chopping Game I’ve been playing Minecraft again. I’d kinda been off it for a while — the summer mostly — but in the last couple weeks I’ve ventured back into the world we created last winter and I’ve been chopping my [...]

It’s been a while since I attended one of our Monday Night Games Nights. Let’s use… uh… summer as an excuse. But last night Chris gathered a few of us together for an altogether-satisfying, nearly three-hour round of Magicka bleeding well into the hours somewhere between past-my-bedtime and not-quite-midnight. It’s been six months since I played that particular game and for the first hour, give-or-take, my chops were still a little rusty. Unlike the typical WASD control-scheme employed by most every other PC game [...]

I occasionally do this weird thing because of this blog: I’ll write something, then go out the next day to do the exact opposite thing that I wrote about in said blog post… as if I have this need to disprove myself. It’s a kind of… well… compensatory response I think. For example? Two days ago I wrote a lamenting post on the state of my lack of gaming lately, essentially excusing myself from having not really been playing much of anything besides some [...]

I haven’t written much about gaming lately. This is probably because I haven’t been doing much gaming lately. Not much, with the exception of some mobile stuff — because I can play mobile while I am mobile, and I seem to be mobile a lot. That, and it’s summer, so gaming is kind of a winter sport around here. So… mobile-wise, I’ve been playing a stupidly addictive little iOS game called Tiny Tower, a time-sucking, resource-farming-style game (yes, in the spirit of Farmville, et [...]

I enjoy eclectic electronic music. So, when the guru of Minecraft, Notch, posted a note that about an eclectic collection of electronic music on his Google+ stream, music composed and performed by an artist named C418, and music connected in some I-still-haven’t-figured-out-exactly-how way to the game, I thought I’d give it a listen. I downloaded 72 Minutes Of Fame a couple days ago, and I’ve been (nearly) through the album twice now. Once, I put on the little white earbuds and listened at work, [...]

A few days ago the PlayStation Network Store came back online after being down for nearly a month. Someone hacked it. And who would have thought half a dozen years ago that a store getting hacked would have garnered such an international mix of emotional outcries? Not this guy. The upshot for those of us who didn’t really care too much — other than not being able to buy more games on a whim — was that our indifferent patience was rewarded with a [...]

I may be coming to the party about five years late, but I’ve been only a little short-of-obsessed with the world of Scott Pilgrim lately. I had downloaded the movie — just to see the hype — and ended up ordering in from Amazon in pristine HD multi-disc Blu-ray edition less than twenty-four hours after watching the download. I picked up a boxed set copy of the seven volume manga-esque graphic novel version and have been picking through them while riding the train, despite [...]

A few months back, when I first started at my new job, my new coworkers– by way of subtle hints and overheard conversations — got me into this game called Minecraft. Right now? It’s late in the evening as I write this, and rather than stress myself and my fingers trying to explain the game and its addictive properties in my own words, I include the following excerpt from the latest iteration of Wikipedia’s entry on Minecraft: The core gameplay revolves around construction. The [...]

I’ve been spending some of my rare free time lately playing a little capture-the-flag-style game on Playstation called “Fat Princess.” (I’ll leave you to research the details on your own, if you are interested.) And while I’ve been playing video games for most of my life — our first console was a Coleco Vision where my sibs and I spent hours acing Zaxxon — I grew up in the generation just prior to what is now quite common in video games: online gaming. And [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. Surprised? One of the themes for a bunch of my recent stuff has been to get away from the hard science fiction and fantasy writing and build stories around slightly more plausible fictions, in particular stories about the culture and ideas of the net. From a couple of perspectives, namely that of (a) a hack of a social anthropologist and (b) a card-carrying member of the geek tribe, net culture is fascinating to me. So, rather [...]

I think I like Fat Princess. My brother got me onto it via a very short introduction at his house over the summer, and I downloaded it a few days ago for myself. One of the big problems I normally have with games that derive a good chunk of their value from the online, multiplayer experience is that I’m what the industry calls a casual gamer. By that definition my wants and needs should probably be ignored. But I have purchased multiple gaming platforms, [...]

I picked up a copy of the Wii Fit upgrade yesterday, Wii Fit Plus. Oddly enough, since buying the original (balance board and game, etc) about three months ago, we now put in the majority of our Wi-time on that particular title. Why? Claire loves it. And she can almost do it. (For some reason she loves the ski jumping, even though nearly every single time she ends up as a snowball with zero points.) So it gets dragged out and we spend a [...]

Sony unveiled their latest iteration of the PSP, and in the subsequent few days it has been universally slammed as an epic failure. The PSP Go, unlike my older model, is unilaterally tied to a Sony-controlled online-only media store, hampered by a boggling array of proprietary cabling, and proudly displays a smaller screen than it’s older brother — and all for about eighty bucks more, too. I’ll be sticking with my 3000, thanks. But unless you are foolish enough to dip your toe into [...]

Our copy of Mario Kart Wii arrived in the mail yesterday, wrapped in a box the size of a milkcrate. We broke our Tuesday TV-off rule to both play and watch post-inauguration coverage. Can you blame us? And I schooled some poor kids from New York late into the evening.

Almost exactly two years after writing THIS Karin and I cracked open our own little white box yesterday and officially joined the frenzy. And what do you want? An excuse. Yes, there is a meandering and lengthy story around the grand event, but — for now — let’s call the purchase “differently intended” and the actual keeping of the thing, “Plan E”… Huh?

December 5 What luck. A couple weeks, according to Karin, Claire randomly picked a video game from the shelves of Best Buy when they were shopping for birthday presents for me. She picked a game called “N+” on the entire basis that Claire wouldn’t let go of the case in the store. Actually, it’s pretty good. Day 5: Gimme Cheeze! The game itself is based on a free online flash game called N-Game that has been ported to a slightly revised version for the [...]

I make no shame of my geekery here on this blog and I have noted on occasion [1] [2] [3] [4] that I’m a bit of a sucker for Final Fantasy games, in particular having played through VII at least three times. That particular game was the motivating force behind my original purchase of a PSOne back in the days of university, and the only PSOne game that has been loaded into the PS2. So, you might imagine my subtle joy when I not [...]