Tag Archives: fun

Delightful Games to Play (Part 1)

Video games are a pretty huge part of my life. I endeavor to make them. I stream them, both for my monthly Future Proof Plays streams and some on my own. Gregory and I have a standing Saturday morning date to play something before the world begins its demands on our time. I also play quite a lot on my own, although admittedly more in depth than in breadth.

I’m often eager to fall in love with a game, especially a game that might land the two objectives I talk about in my Paradise Killer post. As a result, this list of kinda-sorta-okay-definitely-favorites is:

  1. Unsorted,
  2. Pretty biased towards recently-played games,
  3. Has no games I “appreciate”, but don’t actively enjoy playing, and
  4. Sometimes explicitly about the game design, but often about my own emotional reactions

Hot Blog Summer is all about hitting the damn publish button, so this is being split into (at least…) two parts so that each can stay a little meaty.

I’m going to try not to be spoilery here, but leave a comment if I fuck up.

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DragonCon, Morning One

No, I don’t think I’ll be posting an obnoxious sequence of posts on the minutiae of DragonCon. This my first visit, though, and I am sitting and waiting for my first panel, a Torchwood panel featuring John Barrowman and Kai Owen.

In some places, my schedule is 4-5 events wide on my calendar, where I haven’t yet decided which to do. Oy.

DragonCon!

I Wanna Be a Gymnast When I Grow Up

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Okay, no I don’t, but I was fair at gymnastics when I was a young’un.

Anyway, last night I finally fulfilled my dream of seeing Cirque du Soleil; their Michael Jackson: The Immortal tour hit Charlotte this week.

That was a real circus. And one hell of a performance in general.

I have no pictures, because they disallowed photography of any sort, but I’m okay with that. (On a side note, does “Because of the pyrotechnics and strobe lights, we ask that there be no photography or recording of any kind” really translate to “We do our own PR and don’t want your crappy recordings on the internet”?)

They paid tribute to MJ’s life rather inclusively–the Jackson 5 (meh), his love of nature, his desire for world peace, his painful childhood and escapism, and hints of the scandals thru dramatized mentions of wanting privacy.

There were some absolutely amazing dancers on that stage. (There were also plenty of very good dancers.) I’m biased towards dancing that involves a lot of isolation movements (hip hop and belly dance; what do you expect?), so my favorite act was “Scream” by the “male rhythmic gymnasts”: orchestrated tumbling and flipping on an inflated cushion serving as a trampoline of sorts. I think I screamed when, in the opening, a guy that had been thrown in the air fell flat to the floor… and bounced.

A damn circus. So cool.

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Setting up for 5/3/1

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Have you gotten your recommended dosage of sexism lately?

I have.

I bought an ebook containing a very smart, simple, sensible weightlifting program, and in the process of reading it and surrounding articles, pushed my sexism meter about as high as it would go without me punching someone in the face.

Even if punching Jim Wendler would likely get me snapped in half. Look, the dude can bench press over 400 lb.

(Although I suppose that being able to bench 400 lb isn’t a true indicator of his infraspinatus strength, so he might not be able to just rip me in half…)

If you haven’t gotten your daily dosage of sexism, let me give you a hint as to the kind of advice you can expect from 5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System to Increase Raw Strength:
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