Simpson's Paradox

So Genevieve mentioned that she’s guest posting over on Marjorie Liu’s blog, and as I start reading a really hilarious piece on Couples Who Should Totally Have Gotten Together In Movies (Note: Not actually the title), I’m also wondering why Marjorie Liu sounds kinds of familiar.

Genevieve is an amazing writer, who was my classmate at Cambridge, and then my cheap-theater buddy in London. I will condense her super-impressive list of works down to last year’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti and Geek Wisdom.  (Oh, and hey, if you’re ever wondering where to take a guy you have a crush on? “My friend from England is throwing a circus book launch” is an automatic win.)

After reading, I started clicking though Marjorie’s China blog, and it dawned on it me that her name had sounded familiar because she’s the author of the Tiger Eye novels and of the script for Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box, an HO/adventure game I’d helped to test.  And she’s also a writer on X-Men, and Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, and about a thousand supernatural novels…

Anyway, check out the awesomeness combined with more awesomeness in Genevieve’s post on Marjorie’s blog, regarding People Who Should Totally Have Gotten Together In Movies.

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Purple and Alive, by Simpson’s Paradox

After an escalating series of office pranks, Chip warned me by text that the office poltergeist (the unseen force with a penchant for redecorating desks and hiding Hello Kitties and Domomons) had left something purple on my desk. The following text told me to hurry into work, because it’s alive!

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My friend Matt has an awesome new post up on Nitrobeard about hanging on to game systems.  The whole article is worth a read, whether it’s a scarily accurate peek into your own rationale or insights into why your gamer boyfriend won’t trash hardware that’s been collecting dust for years, but this one line is brilliant:

The internet has made it harder to tell how old a person is – but a quick and easy way to figure it out is to ask which console is their all-time favorite. Whatever that console is, that’s when that person was roughly 13-15 years old.

Via Nitrobeard – Latest Musings – Why Gamers Horde – Matt Pierce

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I’m at Stick’s house in Denver, sitting on the couch with him and catching up.  Stick is telling me all the ridiculous Facebook user names his team is using to test his Facebook game, and I am laughing and telling him all the goofy names we’re using on *my Super Secret other project*.

“Oooh!”I say, “Could my test account and your test account be Facebook friends?”

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Iris Magazine just did a piece on my classics background and developing MMO missions, as part of a great series of interviews with classicists in unusual fields (MI5, for example!). I like to think the topic was inspired by all the times classics are asked what they’re doing to do with that major.

When asked if there’s an interest in classics in the culture of gaming, where her project will be competing with everything from the gory Grand Theft Auto to light and fluffy Angry Birds, Meg Stivison is more than optimistic. “The myths of the classical world are appealing to all of us,” she says, “The larger-than-life characters, the intrigue, and the emotional themes in myth will always be attractive in entertainment, whether they are presented in epic poems or movies or interactive games. I’m just the next in a long, long line of storytellers to make use of these myths.”

via Iris Online – Playable myths: Classical Gaming. Thanks, Iris!

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My cousin Ian got me a book on business and management, with the message “The next time someone asks if you want to be a VP, Meg, the correct answer is yes.”

So this is what I got him for Christmas.

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