Oh gee whiz, my apartment building's hot water heater blew a gasket and they can't get a replacement soon because Xmas. So I don't have a way to take a hot shower before the big family gathering tomo...
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Book Report: Season of the Witch
It's a history of San Francisco, concentrating on the weirdness of the 1970s and early 1980s. Jonestown, AIDS, … I'd read about bad things from those days, but hadn't followed Mr Rogers' advic...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even BRC
"Aug 30-Sep 7 Puzzle Hunt at Burning Man Black Rock City, NV If you go, you'll know it when you see it." –Puzzle Hunt Calendar No, I'm not going to Burning Man. But if you are, now you can re...
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Link: From Haight Theater To Goodwill, The History Of 1700 Haight Street An article with some San Francisco history showing that local politics makes some pretty $&#*ing strange bedfellows. &he...
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Book Report: What the Dormouse Said
When I blogged about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Daniel Fennelly (@danielfennelly) replied @lahosken I've heard good things about Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said" if you wan...
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Book Report: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
It's a book about the rise of LSD culture in California. It's a book about Ken Kesey as something like a charismatic cult leader, about the Merry Pranksters. It's easy to look back and criticize thes...
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Book Report: Subversives (The FBI's war on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise To Power)
This book about Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement was pretty amazing. It was also a slow read. Usually you say "So good I couldn't put it down," but in this case I might say "So good that I pu...
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Steam for Linux: a thing that exists
I set it up so that I could play @DoubleFine's The Cave... though it turns out that the Linux port of that game hasn't materialized yet. So that part didn't come together. Nevertheless, I got to play...
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Zion Nat'l Park (et al.)
I'm a little slow on the updating, but as of a little more than a week ago, I'm done with that cold. It's nice to breathe easy again, but I still feel fairly busy what with playtesting on Ghost Patro...
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Green Tortoise tour photos
Yesterday, I got back from a Green Tortoise (backpacker/hosteler bus) tour of some northern-USA parks, including the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, and Zion canyon. I haven't done a write-up yet, but the...
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Comic Report: Wilson!
Some of my readers are gentlemen of a certain age and sophistication. To these, it is enough to say: There is a new Daniel Clowes comic book out, and it's pretty good. If you don't know about Danie...
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Book Report: Inherent Vice
I'm too blissed out from playing Shinteki to write a new blog post. Fortunately, I have a backlog of book reports. Thus: Inherent Vice It's a mystery set in Los Angeles, but it's 60s Los Angeles. T...
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Book Report: Sane Asylum
This book is about Delancey Street, mostly about the way it operated as of 1974-ish, based on a visit by an East Bay reporter. I grew up with a big Delancey Street building in my neighborhood, but fr...
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100% Organically Farmed Software
The book The Mythical Man-Month pointed out the organic nature of software development in 1975 ...The building metaphor has outlived its usefulness... If, as I believe, the conceptual structures we...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even the Marin Headlands and maybe the Seat in Front of me on the Bus
There was that awesome Shinteki Decathlon game a couple of weeks ago. One of the clue sites was Hawk Hill, a high hill in the Marin Headlands. It seemed like a neat site, so... yesterday I went bac...
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Book Report: The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You
I read this book because it's by Dorothy Bryant who wrote the excellent The Confessions of Madame Psyche. I read it even though my mom read it and didn't care for it much. I didn't care for it much...
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Link: Coffee to the People
I guess as long as I'm linking to a cafe, I should link to the place where I pick up coffee on weekend mornings: Coffee to the People. I claim that it is awesome. It's a cafe at Haight on Masonic. T...
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Book Report: The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah (Cometbus #51)
This is a 'zine, the latest issue of Cometbus. This is a history of Berkeley's Telegraph avenue--mostly of the shops which arose out of a place called Rambam, which predates my Berkeley days. But t...
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Book Report: All the Right Enemies
Here is a mini-puzzle from BATH3 (that pirate-themed puzzle hunt from earlier this year): Prepithets Ye seek a four-letter word. Jack Flash _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Bill Cody _ _ _ _ _ ...
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Book Report: One Hand Jerking
My friend 'Lene was bicycling along, minding her own business, when this set of streetcar tracks came out of nowhere and flipped her bike over. I was making fun of her for getting into a bike accide...
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Book Report: Just for Fun
cranea17:/evidence> ls What do you think this is, UNIX? I think that's funny, but that's because I spend a lot of time in UNIXoid environments, specifically Linux. I'm biased. Maybe that's als...
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Book Report: People's History of the United States
Reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is hard work. He writes about some parts of USA history which I didn't know about. Some of these pieces of history were pretty disturbing...
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