When I was younger I had a great love for randomness.  One of the things I loved to do was create charts for the random creation of characters, stories, treasures, and in this case, planets to be used with my Starfaring game.  The following chart is from 1976.  It made perfect sense [...]

People ask me what I’m doing now that I’m retired.  Usually I tell them that I’m writing, and that usually means blogging.  I am writing some new material, but a lot of what I’m doing is rescuing old material.  People have asked me why I don’t simply donate my papers to a college somewhere.  I [...]

This blog is all about things that entertain me.  One of the things that entertains me right now is digging through my old books and papers that I wrote years ago, and putting them up on the internet.  Here’s one that I found this afternoon (May 20). This is another essay from the vaults, something [...]

Back in the day (the mid seventies) I used to draw maps for all the fantasy stories and games I made up. The Dragon continent of Ralf was originally created by James “Bear” Peters. When I started talking to him about the geography of places in Trollworld, he decided his Dragon continent map would be [...]

Being a game designer is a lot like being a writer.  It’s not so much that you want to invent new games, just like writers don’t necessarily want to write.  You can’t help it.  You can’t stop.  Game designers design games because they can’t NOT DESIGN GAMES.  Writers write because they can’t not write. For [...]

Last night I finally got to see the Avengers, my most hotly anticipated film since Conan.  I enjoyed it.  The action scenes and the special effects were outstanding–Academy Award outstanding.  The acting was superb.  The scriptwriters and director gave good lines and plenty of screen time to all the major characters.  I suppose I should [...]

I have almost run out of my own photos to post about Kiwiland.  Fortunately I have friends with cameras who are much better photographers than I am.  These pix were all taken by Kevin Bracey, and with him or Chris taking pix, I will appear in them more often.  That’s a mixed blessing at best. [...]

I haven’t run out of photos yet on the New Zealand trip.  Here are a few more things I saw and did. Then I flew off to the South Island where I was met at the airport by Kevin and Chris Bracey.  He took me off to see more tunnels and evidence of New Zealand’s [...]

Organization really isn’t my strong suit.  Neither is remembering things accurately.  From here on in, these blogs devolve into a bunch of pictures with whatever I can remember to say about them.  And they won’t necessarily be in sequence. Before I get started, I’d like to say a little bit about the Kiwi accent (New [...]

I have a lot of sayings that i live by.  They are trite, but true.  One of them is: IT’S BETTER TO BE LUCKY THAN GOOD.  Another is: IT’S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW; IT’S WHO YOU KNOW.  Well, I don’t think I’m particularly good, so I must be lucky, lucky enough to know a couple [...]