Board Game Reviews

7 Wonders Duel An impressive little game that somehow fits many of the highs of a game of Civilization into a fast-paced 30-minute drafting game. I enjoy the Pantheon expansion for strengthening science and military while adding more interesting choices and effects, but it does make it more thinky and slows things down. 4/5 Arkham Horror: The Card Game A triumph in tabletop gaming. Deep deckbuilding, difficult decisions every turn, constant tension, and brilliant exploration of the design space. It is also mean, expensive, and administratively intensive. This is one I'm very happy to play with a friend and their complete collection rather than own myself. ...

September 25, 2021

Video Game Reviews

007: Nightfire The single-player campaign is surprisingly deep thanks to challenges, some open levels, and plenty of weapons, but the package is rounded out by a great multiplayer mode with AI bots, a rarity at the time. 4/5 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim The best-told narrative I've ever seen in a game. Gripping for all 30+ hours, and had me constantly thinking about how all its pieces fit together. Superb localization and art. ...

September 25, 2021

New Paper on Bereavement and Creativity

I am proud to announce that Death, Bereavement, and Creativity, coauthored with Kathryn Graddy, is now available through the Articles in Advance series at Management Science. The paper explores the link between its eponymous concepts, finding that despite the folk "wisdom" that artists do their best work while suffering, the link seems to be negative. Media coverage by The Independent on an earlier version of the paper is available here. On a personal note, this paper represents my first published research paper as an author.

October 30, 2017

Blogging with Emacs, Org, and GitHub Pages

When I chose hosting and content management solutions for this website, I knew the blog portion would be the hardest. A bio page, a link to my GitHub profile, these are easy. But blogs are dynamic, and require much more background logic to manage. I made my hosting and content management decisions very deliberately, and I wanted to do a rundown of my setup in case anyone else finds it useful. ...

May 16, 2017

(Finally) Buying a Good Monitor: Adventures in Hedonism and Native 4K

I built my first computer about a decade ago and can still rattle off all of its components. Gigabyte EP45-UD3R, Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, nVidia GTX 260 216 Core, 8 GB of OCZ Reaper DDR2 1066 RAM, a Western Digital 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, Creative Fatal1ty sound card, Antec 1200 case1, 750 watt Corsair power supply, Lite-On 48x DVD-RW drive. I had no fewer than three Razer products whose names I will pretend not to remember. But even though I looked at it way longer than any other component, I couldn't tell you the monitor I had. It was a 1680x1050 flatscreen somewhere in the 22" to 24" range, and it was bad, but that's all I know. I just treated it as a necessary evil that took budget away from the real computer, like a Windows Vista license. ...

May 9, 2017