author: Rebecca Skloot
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2014/12/20
date added: 2014/12/29
shelves: biography, ebook, health, history, non-fiction, own, sociology, science
review:
Fantastic! Fascinating mix of personal, scientific, and historical dramas.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
author: Rebecca Skloot
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2014/12/20
date added: 2014/12/29
shelves: biography, ebook, health, history, non-fiction, own, sociology, science
review:
Fantastic! Fascinating mix of personal, scientific, and historical dramas.
Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters
author: Mallory Ortberg
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/20
date added: 2014/12/29
shelves: humor, non-fiction
review:
I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did. Maybe it’s better read a couple at a time over the course of a few months. (Like a website, even.) Maybe I just don’t know some of the text she’s parodying well enough. (Altho I’ve read no Descartes and that one made me laugh most of all!) It was funny, and some of it was LOL/giggly funny. But some of it fell really flat, not that I hated it, but that it didn’t hit for me.
(But really, what I want is a gorgeous coffeetable book of Women in Western Art pieces.)
Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters
author: Mallory Ortberg
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/20
date added: 2014/12/29
shelves: humor, non-fiction
review:
I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did. Maybe it’s better read a couple at a time over the course of a few months. (Like a website, even.) Maybe I just don’t know some of the text she’s parodying well enough. (Altho I’ve read no Descartes and that one made me laugh most of all!) It was funny, and some of it was LOL/giggly funny. But some of it fell really flat, not that I hated it, but that it didn’t hit for me.
(But really, what I want is a gorgeous coffeetable book of Women in Western Art pieces.)
Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters
author: Mallory Ortberg
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/20
date added: 2014/12/29
shelves: humor, non-fiction
review:
I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did. Maybe it’s better read a couple at a time over the course of a few months. (Like a website, even.) Maybe I just don’t know some of the text she’s parodying well enough. (Altho I’ve read no Descartes and that one made me laugh most of all!) It was funny, and some of it was LOL/giggly funny. But some of it fell really flat, not that I hated it, but that it didn’t hit for me.
(But really, what I want is a gorgeous coffeetable book of Women in Western Art pieces.)
Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters
author: Mallory Ortberg
name: Elaine
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/20
date added: 2014/12/29
shelves: humor, non-fiction
review:
I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did. Maybe it’s better read a couple at a time over the course of a few months. (Like a website, even.) Maybe I just don’t know some of the text she’s parodying well enough. (Altho I’ve read no Descartes and that one made me laugh most of all!) It was funny, and some of it was LOL/giggly funny. But some of it fell really flat, not that I hated it, but that it didn’t hit for me.
(But really, what I want is a gorgeous coffeetable book of Women in Western Art pieces.)
This a test
I’m goofing around with IFTTT to see if I can convert things that I write in Evernote (because I do that from time to time) into posts on my blog.
Drink recipe: Major Tom
At some point a few months ago, C got into drinking sparkling water with Tang, and I turned that into a bit of a mixed drink. Since he was calling his beverage an “Aldrin” in honor of the astronaut (because Tang), I’ve called my fancier version a Major Tom:
- 1 rounded tablespoon Tang
- 1 tablespoon lime juice
- 1 oz elderflower liqueur (I bet there’s other fancy things that would have a similar effect. We just happened to have a bottle of this.)
- 1 oz white whiskey
- about 10-12 oz sparkling water (club soda, whatever)
Mix in a pint glass and drink, although note that things get a little crazy when the Tang & the fizzy water interact, so mix accordingly. Usually I put in the Tang and about half the water and stir until it calms down, then add the other ingredients, then as much water as is left in the can.
Enjoy. 🙂
My first Dungeon World campaign
I just finished my first adventure running Dungeon World. It was a relatively brief set of sessions, maybe 8 altogether over three months, because two of the players just moved away to go to grad school. Overall I really enjoyed it and I look forward to playing more.
It’s very different from running D&D or Pathfinder, even if there’s a lot of cultural homage to them. The stats and the character generation are pure old-school D&D; they feel like Basic, which I ran a few years ago. But the action is all Apocalypse World, all D6, and the DM almost never rolls. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I never needed much in the way of battlemat, at most just a quick sketch of relative positions when the party got ambushed by kobolds.
On the one hand, how the rules work, and how you’re encouraged to work them, are great for improving at improvisation. And that’s something I could definitely get better at. More than that, it’s a lot of fun, because it WANTS you to do something even more crazy.
On the other hand, I never really felt confident about starting any particular monster encounter. Maybe this was because 90% of this game was wilderness; I think it could work better in a purely dungeon environment. The final night of play felt strongest strategically, but I don’t know how much was me developing new ways of organizing, and how much was being in a dungeon. But it still feels like an awkward aspect of the rules.
I love the collaboration with players in fleshing out a world. I had a rough idea of a place, based on some old game ideas I’ve played with before, but being able to ask the players about where their characters came from etc gave me new ideas that I ran with later on. I hope that I get to keep running a game with the players who have not moved, so that I can use some of the ideas that never got touched on.
As a GM (and busy person) it was pretty great to be a light hand on prep; it was weird to be told by the rule book NOT to have a scenario all ready to go, but I was happy to oblige. I think going forward I’d to put a bit more time in between sessions; by the last game I had started to play with some ideas using cards as an ad hoc flow chart, and I also had a lightly annotated dungeon sketch.
Totally separate from the game system, having gotten into drawing was great for my game. I drew some landscape-style drawings of the dungeon’s surroundings and of the town that the party visited. I also used some specific techniques from class: a nice section drawing of the dungeon, and a conceptual plan of both the town and the temple (of Flufhe). (The conceptual plans helped me prep for drawing the landscape, even!) Plus a perspective sketch of a location, which I initially drew for my own amusement but ended up using in play.
Also separate from system: I played with people I’d never played with before, who mostly hadn’t played together. And it worked! The people who initially asked me to DM wanted to play D&D but were game to try Dungeon World, which I really appreciate, and when their friend fell through, were happy to let me recruit other people. The play styles meshed well, I think, and I always enjoy playing RPGs with people who are willing to be totally absurd while also in character. I was just sad that Justin wasn’t able to be in more of the games, although at least he picked a character for whom disappearing unexpectedly was completely in character.
So yes: I like Dungeon World, I want to keep playing with these rules, and I want to keep playing these rules and this world with these people. Which all in all seems damn successful for a role playing game experience.
(At some point I want to write about how I used Github, XSLT, and Drupal to make my own DW monster compendium. But that seems like a tangent.)
great-grandmothers
A series of tweets I read, related to Hedy Lamarr, made me think about my great-grandmothers, about the options and choices of women a hundred years ago. (This one in particular.) These women are all quite a bit older than Lamarr (my grandmothers were her age), but these stories and their fragmentary nature raise intriguing questions for me. My mother and my father’s sister have both compiled family books that include some element of storytelling, and there may be important details I’ve missed here because I’m writing from memory. (With help from Geni.) But these are my great-grandmothers:
- Helen (1886-1920) born in what is now Slovakia and emigrated to New York City when she was a child. Died while giving birth to her fifth child in 9 years; her first child, my grandmother, came suspiciously close after her marriage at age 24.
- Lillian (1881-1969) born in Indiana; also lived in Texas and New York, died in California. Married at 29 to a man who was by all accounts a raconteur and alcoholic. The Texas move was apparently to try ranching; they were married there. According to family legend they left because of Pancho Villa, but I doubt that was the only reason.
- Elizabeth (1882-1970) born in Indiana, had a child at 17, abandoned him (and his father?), moved to southern California to recover from health issues. Her second marriage was at 28 to a railroad man with a bad temper, and they were later divorced. She had two daughters in her early 30s, one of whom died young. The other was my grandmother. She was really into Christian Science.
- Carolyn (1889-1960) born in Ontario, Canada and emigrated to the US (Michigan? then California?) when she was a child, lived in various parts of California during her adult life. Grew up farming, married at 23, had 5 children in 10 years. Her husband was a minister. Apparently had at least a bit of college, maybe met her husband in school?
Two of my great-grandmothers I’ve always heard described as incredibly difficult women: Lillian and Elizabeth. Mom once said that Lillian made it almost to 90 entirely on spite. She was cruel and imperious, rude to her daughters-in-law. I don’t remember the particulars on Elizabeth, but I take it she wasn’t especially pleasant to her son-in-law.
And then I take another look at Lillian’s husband, at her being pulled all over the country; I wonder how she met him, how Brooklyn and Delphi, Indiana came together, and why no one before that. (Maybe she was just as prickly as the stories make her sound? And did she have to live at home? Did she go to school anywhere?) I imagine her in her 30s, poor with two small (and very bright) children in a big city far from home. What I’ve heard is that he used to disappear on benders, and that his buddies in the neighborhood made sure she and the kids had enough to eat. The boys ended up going all the way to California, both of them, with the wives she didn’t approve of.
Then Elizabeth: a teenage mom who as far as I know left her son; I’m pretty sure he wasn’t raised in the same household as her other children. I don’t know anything about her son’s father. Deathly ill (tuberculosis of the spine), and she believed it cured by an oddball religion and a strange climate. Her (second?) husband had a terrible temper; my grandmother said that he once threw her (grandma) against a wall so badly that it was the cause of her later spinal disc degeneration. Her second daughter died of a childhood disease, I think measles, less than a year old. Her living daughter had her husband’s red hair and high temper. Later, her son-in-law was a minister in a religion that wasn’t hers. She got divorced; her daughter was divorced no less than 4 times.
Difficult lives led with difficult people. Life choices that make me wonder if there was some yearning towards something else, something bigger than a bunch of kids and keeping house. Something they couldn’t have in their circumstances in their times. Even Helen, I seem to remember, wanted to have a career and was discouraged by those who raised her. When people talk about good old days, I think of Helen: five kids and dead at 33.