Gary Devore's Blog, page 3
September 9, 2014
Leo Tolstoy on not eating meat
I’ve been a vegetarian since about 1989 when I went away to college and could control my diet for the first time in my life. When asked why, I usually reply it was a mix of health andconscience reasons, though as time goes on, I’ve realized I’ve stuck to it for more of the latter than the former.
In the novel I’m currently writing, I debated about putting in or leaving out a scene where an animal is sacrificed on an altar to an ancient Roman god. My own disgust at the practice had to contend a...
May 21, 2014
“What it means to be with you”
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about constructing social circles and “constructed families”. This is mostly because I’m at the stage of having to create a completely new local social circle from scratch in my new home of New Hampshire (which is not exactly proving easy). Also, I’ve discovered that ‘creating a circle of caring friends’ is the goal of the protagonist in the ancient Roman novel I’m writing, and I’m busy going seeding through earlier chapters the roots of this desire.
May 11, 2014
Eurovision 2014 Post Mortem
Wow, Eurovision. Just…. wow.
Well done you!
I had become cynical about the Eurovision Song Contest. Sure I still enjoyed watching it (and listening to Graham Norton’s fantastic commentary) but I was resigned to the fact that 1) the songs I liked would never win and 2) the voting was hugely unbalanced and messy. To be fair, this had always been very obvious in previous years. The countries would always vote for their neighbors, and the Scandanavian and Balkan countries were always a massive bloc...
April 22, 2014
Happy DeathDay Shakespeare!
Today is the anniversary of the death of Shakespeare.
Back in college I wrote a play about a theater company in 1933 Berlin trying to put on “the Scottish Play”. A great group of friends and I put it on, and I’ve recently released its updated (and improved) script. You can find it here.
Here also is a bit of Shakespearean fun from the Black Adder
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March 30, 2014
The Narrative Failure of Elder Scrolls Online
I’ve been playing the beta of the new Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) since last year and have seen its development. I’m a huge fan of the single-player Elder Scrolls games, and was greatly looking forward to a massively-multiplayer version of Tamriel which drops this upcoming week. Unfortunately, while the game basics are fine (if not all that different from other MMORPGs), the storyline and quest dynamic fails like many multiplayer games before it. In short, no attempt has been made to explain w...
December 16, 2013
Best Games of 2013: #3- Guild Wars 2
Guild Wars 2 (published by ArenaNet)
Fantasy-themed MMORPG
(free-to-play once purchased, around $50)
Few MMORPGs possess as much fun, whimsy, challenge, and sheer breadth of opportunities that Guild Wars 2 does. I had never been much of a fan of the first Guild Wars, but I’ve taken GW2 to my heart. Most gamers know about this game (it has been out since 2012) but it was this year that I finally adopted it. With continually updated content, a huge world, and a wide range of things to do inside th...
December 9, 2013
Best Games of 2013: #2- State of Decay
State of Decay (published by Undead Labs)
Zombie post-apocalypse sandbox-style game
(currently $20 on Xbox and Steam for PC, DLC “Breakdown” is $6.99)
State of Decay is both an amazing game experience and sometimes an amazingly frustrating game. I am usually not a big fan of zombie games (and I am often wary of their bloodthirsty fan base), but I really like State of Decay, and it was definitely the second best game I played this year after The Secret World.
Also like The Secret World, I only stu...
December 8, 2013
Best Games of 2013: #1- The Secret World
The Secret World (published by Funcom)
Free-to-play MMORPG after purchase of the game (currently $30 on Steam)
This is the best game you’re probably not playing/never heard of. I only found it myself by doing a random search on Steam.
The premise of The Secret World (TSW) is that worldwide secret societies, conspiracy theories, mythological tales, are all true. The player joins one of three secret organizations (the Templars, the Illuniati, or the Dragon) and plays through a clever and well-writ...
The best games I played in 2013
Along with being an archaeologist and writer, I am also a gamer (well gaymer actually). Over the next few days, I’m going to post my impressions about the best games I played this year in my opinion. It is an end-of-year summary that hopefully will also introduce you to some games you may not know about or haven’t yet tried but are very worth your while.
Not all were released in 2013, but this was when I played them. In descending order I’ll be posting reviews and impressions this week about t...
November 4, 2013
Oldest Mentions of Rome?
Brought to my attention by Dorothy King the PhDiva: “A fourth century BC sword may have the oldest known inscription of the name of Rome.”
The inscription reads:TR POMPONIO(S) C (f.?) (M)E FECET ROMA(I). The letters in parentheses are supplied by the excavators, since often Latin inscriptions could leave out parts of words and endings. They reconstruct it as: “Trebius Pomponius, son of Gaius, made me in Rome”. Presumably the “ROMAI” they supply is in the locative case, which would be “AE” norm...
