Yearly Archives: 2016


A Bard’s Eye View: Religion in Music

Religion in Music   Whether you are religious or not, it is generally assumed that artists who make a lot of religious references in their music are going to be a little bit on the lame side. There are some notable exceptions, particularly if country music or gospel is your […]


Boxed Culture: Seasonal Shifts

Seasonal Shifts As we play games through our lives there are ebbs and flows. Sometime we really love euros, then in a few months we may dislike the way all the ones we are playing feel. Sometimes there are shifts in the groups of people we play with or the time we have […]


Graphic Reviews: The Fade Out

The Fade Out As I have mentioned before, I am not what you would call a movie buff. If I had to list my media in order of preference, it would easily be books, video games and television/movies. It’s just the way it is when you grow up as bibliophile. […]


A Bard’s Eye View: At Long Last

At Long Last Gaps Between Albums Before the internet, when album sales were a direct metric of musical success, it was common to expect an album an every year. Sometimes, you could expect an album twice in a year. This was actually quite common in the 1960s and 1970s with […]


Digital Beard Stroking: Dr. Dehumanization or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Commodifying NPCs

Dr. Dehumanization or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Commodifying NPCs Games make use of abstractions to codify and standardize interactions between players and non-player characters.  This exists in every capacity and level of articulation.  From the greatly simplified children’s board game where your only power is a […]


Boxed Culture: Community or Clique?

Community or Clique? So this weekend an article by a tumblr blogger named latining went viral within the board gaming community. The article is here but be warned it has some very graphic descriptions of some events that have happened to a person or people in the board gaming community in Canada […]


Graphic Reviews: Black Widow

Black Widow Ever since watching Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (still winner of lamest superhero movie title ever), I’ve been stuck on the problem of movies about singular superheroines. More than anything, I want to see a proliferation of them. But here’s the problem: how many superhero movies are […]