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Civilization and Storytelling
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3–4 minutes·
12 comments on Civilization and StorytellingI’ve only ever written fan fiction twice in my life, and both times it’s been for Sid Meier games. Nurturing a civilization from a band of illiterate settlers to an empire that’s trading goods and blows across the world tends to make you feel rather attached to your people, and it’s hard not to be…
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Mssv gets Civilized
Over the next couple of weeks, I’m dedicating Mssv to the strategy game series Civilization, in anticipation of Civilization V’s coming out in September. Civilization’s sheer depth and replayability has made it one of the most beloved strategy games in the world, and its longevity means that I’ve literally grown up with it. Each game of…
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Total Fail at the Kinect Galleries
Update 3rd Sept: Shortly after I made this post, I got a nice email from someone running the Kinect Galleries campaign telling me they took the problems very seriously and were working to make sure they didn’t happen again – from the comments on this post, it sounds like that’s happened! I also went to…
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Reading on the iPad is fantastic
Reading on the iPad is fantastic. I don’t care what other people have said, I just know that after using it for a fortnight, I can tell that it’s changed the way I’ll read forever. I used to spend several hours a day in front of my iMac at home, using a combination of Google…
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Meaning and Magic on a Disney Cruise: Part 2
Read Part 1 here… Day 3: Valletta (Malta) Malta isn’t a place that I would go out of my way to visit. Its capital, Valletta, has plenty of charm and interesting architecture – a legacy from the incessant invasions and occupations by Greeks, Romans, Sicilians, French, British, and a bunch of other people you haven’t…
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Meaning and Magic on a Disney Cruise: Part 1
Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be posting about my 11 night Mediterranean cruise on the Disney Magic, and other Disney-related thoughts. I’m also (slowly) uploading photos to my Flickr. On a Disney cruise, you never stop hearing about the fantastic time you’re having. Wasn’t last night’s Captain’s dinner just delicious? Didn’t you…
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Writing Frankenstein
When Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, Europe experienced a ‘Year Without a Summer’. At the time, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (aged 18), and her lover (and later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron in Switzerland. With outdoor activities being unappealing due to the poor weather, they spent a lot of time indoors. It was during…
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The Unbidden
If you’re a parent, you want the best for your children. You want them to eat healthily, to do their homework, to keep fit, and to be well-mannered. You may go a step further and carefully study nutritional information to make sure they receive the right balance of calories, protein, and vitamins. You’d hire a private…
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Cash Gordon: This is Not a Game
There was much hilarity today as the Conservative’s new Cash Gordon website was deluged by tweets; these tweets, by exploiting some shoddy coding on the site, redirected all visitors to unsavoury sites. Cash Gordon was pulled, and only returned several hours later after some hasty fixes. I am not here to make fun of the poor security…
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Books of 2009
I haven’t talked much about the books I’ve read recently, and having finished a slew of them recently, I thought I’d take a look back at all the books I’ve read this year. On the whole, there aren’t as many as usual; work, magazines and periodicals, and notably Infinite Jest, really took their toll. January…