I think I want to start out my analysis of Castronova’s claim that the Horde in WoW is evil, and therefore those who play Horde characters are engaging in ethical misdemeanors, by exploring whether there is a legitimate difference between acts we commit in our normal lives versus acts committed in a virtual environment such [...]

Edward Castronova is kind of my hero. He’s the brains behind The Arden Project, the first MMORPG ever developed with academic purposes in mind, and he got a quarter-million-dollar grant from The MacArthur Foundation to do it. In short, he’s an accomplished academic who writes with intelligence, clarity and humanity, and who’s forging his career [...]

Courtesy of Wired magazine, I bring you the future. Apparently, we’ll all be wearing one of these in order to change channels. Obviously, this technology is mostly cool and surprisingly advanced. It’s just funny that one of the things the scientists chose to do with this new device is to use it to change channels [...]

Let’s face it: if you are trying to break into the writing business without connections, most likely you’re going to have a rough time. Almost to a one, publishing houses of any size and stature require you to have an agent before they will look at (and most likely reject) your manuscript. But getting an [...]

So one of the reasons I want to keep a blog is purely selfish: I just want a quick place to gather all the Internet tools and resources I regularly use — all those sites and links and whatnot. And hey, if it turns out to be a public service to other writers, so be [...]

The One-Sentence Review: Winkie is a good first novel, but its author, Clifford Chase, will write better ones. The More-Than-One-Sentence Review (SPOILERS!): The writing is solid: richly imagined, sensuous, modest and endearing. For readers like myself, writing this good is mostly what I need to get me through a book; readers like me will delight [...]