Justin Howe's Blog, page 21
September 23, 2018
Insta Bad Habits
I’ve activated an instagram account under the name @the_other_justin. Feel free to check it out. It very much revels in the quotidian. Much easier to do that on instagram than here. So if you like pictures of cats, muddy riversides, dirt, and/or dirt adjacent things you might enjoy it!
September 10, 2018
Periling Hand
September 2, 2018
Favorite Reads August 2018
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The Light of Day by Eric Ambler: A heist novel full of grotesque characters narrated by a petty crook! So much to like and love here. Not only are people awful, but they have dandruff and leak fluids at inopportune times. My kind of book! Oh yeah, also the basis for some classic movie by some director that annoying film-buff friend of yours won’t shut-up about even though they’ve never seen any of the director’s movies.
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Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn: Despite what it says on the Goodreads tin,...
August 2, 2018
Favorite Reads July 2018
I did some traveling over July and that meant a lot of time spent on planes, trains, buses, and even a boat for a few hours. Also a lot of time sitting in airport lounges and awake at odd hours from jetlag.
Long story short this meant I read a lot.
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A Coffin For Dimitrios by Eric Ambler: I am a sucker for thrillers that involve little more than a nebbish protagonist traveling around the world so they can listen to various weirdoes monologue at length. Here a mystery writer gets fascinated by...
July 25, 2018
Blades in the Dark, but badly
I’ve run a few sessions of Blades in the Dark (BitD) now and am going to outline some of the problems I’ve encountered trying to teach D&D players a new game. Your mileage may vary, but seeing the potholes I’m hitting might clue you in to what pitfalls to expect when leaving behind “the world’s most popular roleplaying game”.
One big problem is that my players don’t have a common language for RPGs like they do for board games.
Now I don’t think Blades is any more difficult to learn than D&D....
July 5, 2018
Favorite Reads June 2018
Yo. Here’s some of what I read and liked over the month of June.
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The Ipcress File by Len Deighton: I like the spy novels that tumbled in on the wake of Ian Fleming’s James Bond and which positioned themselves as being distinctly anti-Bond. The nebbish cuckold of John Le Carre’s George Smiley and Len Deighton’s working class paycheck and expense account obsessed Harry Palmer. This is the first in Deighton’s Palmer series (which isn’t even the character’s name but the one Michael Caine gave hi...
June 15, 2018
Close Your Eyes by Paul Jessup
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Close Your Eyes is a hallucinatory space opera, well, a nominal space opera at least. It reprints the 2009 novella Open Your Eyes and adds a continuation on to it as the misfit salvage crew find themselves in an alien world.
In this book language is a virus, but you likely heard that one before. What might be news is love is a virus too. It consumes and destroys as efficiently as any microbe-borne fever could.
A woman impregnated by a supernova, a man obsessed with an imaginary woman, a woma...
June 10, 2018
Favorite Reads May 2018
Hey chingoos, summer time’s here.
Hopefully you have your beach reading sorted by now.
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The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle: My third or fourth read, but my first in a decade or so. No lie, I love this book. The older I get the more I enjoy it. Schmendrick and Molly Grue are fantastic. And I love the meta weird anachronistic bits.
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The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard: A Watson and Holmes style space opera detective story with a damaged sentient spaceship taking the Watson ro...
May 23, 2018
“In Search of Lost Books: The Forgotten Stories of Eight Mythical Volumes” by Giorgio van Straten
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A manuscript hidden away for decades in a bottom drawer discovered after its author’s death.
Another manuscript lost when the suitcase it was stored in gets stolen from a train compartment.
Or another manuscript destroyed to protect the author’s associates and families from scandal. Not to mention the other, other manuscripts destroyed by their authors for not being good enough. Or even no manuscripts at all, just the rumors of them. Books that may or may not have ever existed but which stil...
May 5, 2018
Favorite Reads April 2018
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Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob: Schwob’s one of those decadent fin-de-siecle French fellows I’m crazy about. Here he plays with biography by writing a short set of in-depth profiles of various ne’er-do-wells, nobodies, and the corrupt. While the profiles aren’t absolutely accurate, they dig deep into the mundane and dredge up moods and ideas that resemble truths.
A fun little book, it’s easy to read this and see how its influence on later writers such as Borges.
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Dread Nation by Justina Ir...
