Category: Nonfiction
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Mandarin Idioms, Ouyang Xiu and Medieval and Modern China
Sloganeering and some literary history in China – real sightseeing stuff today.
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Three Movies about Memphis, and the Death of Place in Recent American Cinema
American movies have lost their sense of place. What did we lose when that happened?
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Hamilton, the Quaternions, and Mathematical Mythologies
The arduous discovery of the properties of the quaternions by William Rowan Hamilton has always stuck in my mind as among the most romantic of modern math’s encounters. Until the fall of 1843, Hamilton was set to work extending the complex numbers, by then a regular feature of the theory of equations. As he would…
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Dramaturgical Notes on “Hamilton”
I follow in the tradition of the great A.C. Bradley in presenting here some odd notes on Hamilton I thought up while watching the filmed version a couple of weeks ago. I have adored Hamilton since 2016 or so, and I got there by way of The Knack’s “My Sharona,” which has always been to…
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What is going on with interest rates and the yield curve in Civilization VI?
Now that the summer doldrums have set in, I’ve turned back to playing Civilization VI. Fully equipped with its two expansions, Gathering Storm and Rise and Fall, the game really is fantastic – probably the best in the series – and able to keep me in rapt attention for many, many hours. Concomitantly, I’ve started…
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Addendum: The Conclusion of “Death Stranding,” and Playing Games in the Summer
I close up my playthrough of “Death Stranding,” and reflect on the game’s ending, while comparing it to the last time I finished a Hideo Kojima game on a summer night.
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“Death Stranding” and Being Hideo Kojima
As far as I can tell, legendary game designer Hideo Kojima spent all of his childhood, and then most of his following early adulthood, in Japan. He was born in Tokyo, but his father moved the family around for work and so he grew up first in Osaka and then in the smaller city of…
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My Twitch Stream of “Borderlands 3”
Hi all, I’ve started streaming on Twitch – check me out here https://www.twitch.tv/pepitodoscanones. Planning on streaming a big campaign of Death Stranding in a couple of days, and still working through Red Dead Redemption 2. On the multiplayer front, think I’ll be streaming some Borderlands 3, some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, especially Warzone. Speaking…
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Quests and Narrative Progression in “Borderlands 3” and Other Looter-Shooters
Schematically, the structure of looter-shooter stories goes as follows: To advance the story, players undertake quests comprised of objectives, upon whose conclusion players must return to quest-givers and receive quest updates, a step without which progression – and the loop – cannot be restarted, as exploration is halted. These quest-givers then deliver the story update…
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