If you’re the type of adult who would strip all belief in magic & wonder from a child, you’re a vile bastard and no one should ever love you. I tweeted that the other night, after Trey let me know that someone told him Sesame Street is for babies, and that the characters are just puppets. I guess by itself, that’s not entirely a bad thing. I mean, Trey is six years old now and it’s probably time to put...

New Orleans. City of southern dreams. The Big Easy. The nightmarish land of loneliness and regret. Take your pick. As you may have noticed, I’ve been absent for the past couple of months. At first, this was due to a lack of interest in the gaming series I was writing, but quickly became about just not having the time to sit down and string a few predicates and participles together. My new job is great, but it’s fairly...

Welcome to Chapter Two of Life Bytes. I’m not entirely sure why I’m calling these things chapters when they’re really just a series of blog entries, but I am. So deal with it. Anyway, continuing with the ‘if this was all a novel’ theme, click here for the back-of-the-book description of what this particular bit of insanity is about, or skip ahead and click here to jump straight into Chapter One. The choice,...

If you missed the introduction to all this and have no idea what the hell is going on, there’s a brief prologue sort of thing over here. I know I promised to start this series last week, but Major Life Developments happened of the sort that require significant life changes and a much-need boost to my salary. But more on all that later. Right now, lets get down to Life Bytes. In The Beginning… I missed the first generation of...

It’s 2011. Photorealistic video games featuring alternate realities and fully realized artificial worlds line the shelves of game stores everywhere. I can start up a game, hop online and kill, shoot, stab, beat, maim, assassinate, decapitate, dismember and just plain murder my friends around the world. I can log in to an MMO and live a virtual life as a fearsome orc or a noble hunter in a mystical realm filled with magic and wonder...

It’s time to talk about The Christmas Problem again, which I did last year and will repeat a bit this year, but most of it’s fresh. Or at least not dead-horse-beaten quite yet. Or maybe it is. I can never tell. Last year, I was in the dumps mainly due to a lack of both funds and sons, with the former having been stretched like a sheet of elastic putty over the newspaper comics so thin that the fat kid from Family Circus went...