This product offends me. Not because I think Ouija boards can accidentally (or deliberately!) summon demons. If we could accidentally summon supernatural beings they’d be everywhere. Moreover, of all the things that might accidentally bring forth the powers of darkness, a mass-produced printed piece of cardboard seems pretty far downContinue Reading
I spent my junior year of college at Lancaster University in Britain, which was fabulous for someone going into medieval English history. One of my courses covered Elizabethan England. (Yes, I understand that’s not medieval.) The professor was particularly notable not just because he was American teaching English history inContinue Reading
Yesterday, Scotland voted 55/45 to remain within the United Kingdom rather than separating off into an independent state that hasn’t existed since 1707. Friction on the matter has existed pretty much forever. The Scottish see themselves as having a different culture than the English, although as someone living in theContinue Reading
This semester, I am teaching Religions in America at UW-Oshkosh. Rather than simply being a survey course of religions, the course specifically addresses how these religions manifest in and interact with American culture. I debated long and hard whether or not I would cover Islam on Sept 11. I don’tContinue Reading
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS “Deep Breath” marks the first episode with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. We’ve gone from the youngest Doctor ever (Matt Smith, who was 28 when cast) to the oldest (Capaldi is 56, while the first doctor, despite his aged appearance, was only 55). That hints atContinue Reading
Remember when I crucified the costuming on Reign? Well, today I stumbled onto a tumblr dedicated entirely to Reign‘s costuming. It’s pretty much an advertisement for modern designers, showing the costumes on the show and then the same items on a modern model as depicted for sale, sometimes with aContinue Reading
Although there is some debate as to the specific month and day of the eruption, August 24 is the most common one given as the start of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE. The disaster buried the nearby cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and caused one of the highestContinue Reading
In my young table-top roleplaying game years, the GenCon gaming convention was game, game, game, sleep, game, game, game, sleep? game, game, nap at table, game, sleep, game. Today there’s a little more sleep and a little less gaming, but there’s also friends. Every year since I started seriously LARPing,Continue Reading
This is the last of the GISHWHES submissions. You can read about previous ones involving myself as well as those submitted by my remote teammates. A Novel Life Form I created this the same day I made the tribute to Stonehenge Apocalypse (featured in a previous post). By day’s end,Continue Reading
Continuing from my first installment of submissions… All GISHWHES teams have exactly 15 members. Since we had a team of three, we were combined with other teams, a totally of five teams of three, to be exact. Here is the second installment of hilarity from our GISHWHES team, this timeContinue Reading