boreders

Category: Observations

  • J is for Jam

    J is for Jam

    All the jam I like isn’t even called jam most of the time. Until I thought about writing this, I didn’t even have it straight in my head what the variations in fruit preserves boiled down to (if you’ll pardon the pun). My favourite is Lemon Curd, which certainly sits alongside the jams in my…

  • F is for Family

    F is for Family I didn’t quite know what to write about today until I had a shower. Revelation most often happens in the shower. I have never worked out why. Without family where would I be? What would I be doing? I speak of myself here – not judging the quality of family or the…

  • Storms of Creativity

    I generally hate any article that comes with a Top 10 title. Yes, they pull people in. Yes, they sometimes work on me, like a Venus Flytrap lures with the sweet scent of rotting meat. As it happens I immediately saw the sense in half this link-fest of a Lifehacker piece on brainstorming. Finding ideas…

  • The Challenge of Reading

    Setting myself a reading challenge has a varied effect, it would seem, depending on the year! I’m not sure what that means about how I spend my time or how events impact my opportunities and drive to read. Right now, I’m not doing as well as I’d hoped for 2015. GoodReads has a feature where…

  • Gaming an Unfamiliar Setting

    Herein, I consider running ad hoc games using simple generic systems, like Fate Accelerated, with settings that might not be familiar, but have enough draw on common mythology to make the gaming experience a relatively easy one. For me, having a middle ground of creative and imaginative resource makes all the difference, because few of…

  • Quick Weekend Achievements

    I often beat myself up about what I get done at the weekend. I reach the close, the darkness of Sunday night, and wonder where all the time went. In that moment, I often also wondered what I managed to do with it all – and yet come out the other end with nothing much…

  • Not Really Seeing, Yet

    Wow… I’m reading a basic book on the buddha-dharma at the moment. If I’m taking anything away so far, it’s that if I think I have any idea what it’s about, I’m probably wrong. It would seem to have something in common with Heisenberg‘s Uncertainty Principle or perhaps Schrödinger’s Cat – something along the lines…

  • Too Little or Too Much?

    I had a chat with some of my roleplaying group the other day about storytelling games. We just finished a very tight and entertaining game of Fiasco – using Graham Walmsley‘s “Unaussprechlichen Kulten” playset – and had started to chat. The discussion concerned why certain storytelling games worked and others didn’t – or at least,…

  • Market Forceless

    Reading this article – http://bbc.in/kzJuPJ – on the BBC about the success of Google’s Android, tempered by the relative ‘failure’ of the Android Market, rang true with me. When I purchased an iPhone a few years back, I felt spoilt by the Apps available. I wouldn’t consider my spending excessive, but I did buy many…