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Sometimes I do things with words. Sometimes I do not.

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The Body and the Bear

With The Keeper Chronicles, Missie Peters expertly brings a rare perspective to fantasy with this delightful pocket-sized adventure. And when you finish the first, you ...read more

21 November 2024
Reviews Reading
Realplay

She is calm. It is a strange feeling, though not wholly unfamiliar. The calm washes over her, a warm ocean tide that flows and ebbs gently against her body.

07 April 2021
Fiction
The Future Machine

Some people who should have known better tried to say that the machine must have brainwashed us. That’s nonsense. We were fanatics and the future was our scripture.

15 March 2021
Fiction Draft
Attraction

“You’ve got the most gorgeous eyes,” he says to me with what I assume he thinks is intensity.

07 February 2021
Fiction Draft
w.

The ideal Experience is as much a magic trick as it is whimsy work. You can’t just throw *Alice in Wonderland* at a client and call it a day.

20 January 2021
Fiction Draft
Shout Kill Revel Repeat

“This is your Great Work, sorcerers!”

17 February 2020
Reviews Reading
Amo: Volo ut sis

In a letter to Hannah Arendt1, Martin Heidegger claims that Augustine once said, “Amo: volo ut sis” — without citation, of course. This leaves us ...read more

28 November 2018
Arendt Heidegger
Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon

Well, I did the thing.

28 October 2018
Running
Army Run Ottawa Half Marathon

A race where things went... wrong.

23 September 2018
Running
Summer Classic 10km

A race report involving ten very hot kilometers.

23 June 2018
Running
Tamarack Ottawa Half Marathon

Our intrepid runner has his first race in almost twenty years.

01 June 2018
Running
Step Two

Maciej Cegłowski: If you’ve ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we’ve theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it’s ...read more

07 May 2016
Philosophy Technology
The Necessity of Christmas Villages

Richard Kelly Kemick for The Walrus: An elderly woman walks up beside me. Her snow-white hair is freshly permed. Two gold chains hang around her ...read more

10 February 2016
The Walrus
"Getting the soul in motion"

William Deresiewicz in an interview with The Atlantic: Ultimately, colleges have inherited the spiritual mission of churches. As religious beliefs have declined with the rise ...read more

27 January 2016
Education Philosophy
The Sacred and the Popular

A couple weeks ago, Bob Chipman’s review of Adam Sandler’s Pixels was making the rounds. His various descriptions of the film are most certainly worth ...read more

21 August 2015
Pop Culture Reviews Film
Mother Canada

Heather Mallick for The Guardian: It’s particularly hard to honour the drowned from dry land. So the statue is reaching out its skinny arms to ...read more

03 July 2015
Canada
The Senate is Not the Problem

Now that the Auditor-General’s report on the Senate has been released, Canadians are scandalized by the details: 30 senators with questionable expenses, 9 of whom ...read more

07 June 2015
Canada
The Tell-Time Heart

(With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe) True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous my tweets have proven I had been and am; but why ...read more

16 May 2015
Fiction
The Jewelled Tent

The supposed death of philosophy is always said to be the eternally upon us tomorrow – and if not outright death, then merely its inability ...read more

26 April 2015
Death of Philosophy
Spirits in the Machine

Alexis C. Madrigal for The Atlantic The vexing, remarkable conclusion is that when companies combine human intelligence and machine intelligence, some things happen that we ...read more

16 February 2014
Pop Culture
"But I am the real Strider..."

SasquatchPhD on reddit/gaming: I always thought “plumber”, in the Mushroom Kingdom at least, was more like our “ranger”. The Mushroom Kingdom is obviously built on ...read more

24 January 2014
Pop Culture Gaming
Man of Steel

Superman stories have no unified properties – not even Superman himself as protagonist1 – so it is somewhat ridiculous to claim that Man of Steel ...read more

15 July 2013
Pop Culture
"The most wordy of novels"

Allan Massie for the Telegraphy: Ulysses has outlived its critics, just as it has outlived the banning … Nor is it only because it has ...read more

20 June 2013
Philosophy
Dungeons & Dragons & Storytelling

Just as the limitations of genre, form, and style bind written stories, so too are there rules in D&D that confine what is possible, but role-playing removes the absolute authorial control that comes with solitary storytelling.

13 June 2013
Storytelling Improv D&D
Total Recall (2012)

From the Zhuangzi: Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He ...read more

04 September 2012
Pop Culture Reviews Film
Democratic Illusions

Rebecca Traister for The New York Times: There simply was never going to be a liberal messiah whose powers could transcend the limits set by ...read more

04 August 2012
USA Politics
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

He is not my first dragon. He may not even be my fortieth dragon. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is, after all, high fantasy and ...read more

29 July 2012
Gaming Pop Culture
The Things You Own

The Economist: Dichter concluded that it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else ...read more

23 July 2012
Storytelling Philosophy
Adding To The Canon

No matter the works involved, it is heresy to reimagine the canon. Just think of the outrage there would be if someone were to remake ...read more

10 July 2012
Storytelling Pop Culture Film
Why I Read

Visual stories can exhaust me. There is an excess of information that I am required to process in order to comprehend them to my own ...read more

20 June 2012
Reading
Cultivating Literacy

Michael J. Coren for Fast Company: Stanley is doing more than providing paper; he’s creating the psychological motivation for students to dive into literature (or ...read more

12 June 2012
Reading Pop Culture
Knowledge is Not Power

William Johnson for the New York Times My best teachers, the ones I still think about today, exposed me to new and exciting ideas. They ...read more

27 March 2012
Education
Zelda Doesn't Need Saving

Tevis Thomson, regarding The Legend of Zelda: The point of a hero’s adventure (and Zelda is the hero’s adventure in gaming) is not to make ...read more

21 February 2012
Pop Culture Gaming
We Are Flawed Characters

Lionel Shriver for… wait, what? for the Financial Times?1: Sometimes you simply cannot bear the company of an author’s characters, who inspire the same claustrophobic ...read more

10 February 2012
Reading
"Wherever polygamy exists"

Justice Robert Bauman, upholding the constitutionality of Canada’s polygamy ban (emphasis mine): In my view, the salutary effects of the prohibition far outweigh the deleterious. ...read more

24 November 2011
Canada Politics
The Call for Scientocracy

Gwyn Morgan, for The Province: Politicians and regulators frequently come under intense pressure from ill-informed groups opposing commercial ventures even when it’s abundantly clear there’s ...read more

31 October 2011
Politics
I Keeping Meaning to Read Faust

Imagine, for a moment, that your name is Robert Leroy Johnson – in your hands is a guitar that you can not play worth a ...read more

25 October 2011
Fiction
"The future is a verb"

Alan M. Webber, for The Christian Science Monitor, writing about “the Apple effect”. He explains the most important insight Apple has had about PCs: The ...read more

18 September 2011
Technology
'T'

Andy Rutledge is a designer who is one of those capital ‘t’ Talented individuals and when he writes, it is often with all the same ...read more

30 August 2011
Technology
Vancouver Doesn't Want You, Joe O'Connor

Apparently, Vancouver is hurting for fans these days. At least, that is the story as Joe O’Connor of the National Post seems to see it ...read more

02 May 2011
Pop Culture
Technologies of Access

Steam, the Kindle and Netflix are three radically different technologies—the first is a digital distributor for video games, the second is an electronic book reader, ...read more

25 January 2009
Technology