Saturday, March 29, 2008

Stories of the 1920s and 1930s

In the past three months I have been reading the best of pulp fiction from the 1920s and 1930s from two of the most acclaimed writes of the time Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. The genres for which they became famous are remarkably different, with Lovecraft being hailed as the creator of modern horror and one of the precursors of science fiction, whereas Howard popularized fantasy fiction with his very own sword and sorcery type of story.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Dungeons and Dragons


It has been a while since I last posted in this blog, which is probably due to my either not having enough PhD work to do, or too much to do that it is blocking my mind (that is for someone else to decide). Besides the PhD work and other existential decisions I need to decide in the next three months. Throughout these last weeks, however, I have been assailed with strange dreams where I find myself playing dungeons and dragons, with the dream usually ending with me trying to bluff the GM into letting me succeed a vital saving throw that I just failed. The interesting thing about the dreams is that I have not played DnD for almost ten years now, and not so coincidentally, Gary Gygax, the creator of this game has died quite recently. This seems to be the most plausible explanation for my dreams, unless some semi-psychic Internet dweller wants to offer me some more esoteric explanation. Or it could be that I am losing my mind as a result of my PhD work, in any case, this does not bode well for me (I guess).