Fake Non-Fiction Best Sellers

Elbow: The Mysterious Pattern Inside Everything and How It Will Change the Way We Think About the Economy, Health Care, and the Internet

What is an “Elbow”? As best-selling science journalist Jonathan Brainer explains, it’s a ubiquitous pattern that looks much like its namesake anatomy: a line moves in one direction and then– suddenly– in another. Brainer ingeniously shows us how Elbows seem to turn up any time we make a graph, no matter what data is used: stock markets, marmoset populations, even the contours of seemingly ordinary rocks. How should we manage the world differently knowing that another Elbow might come at any time? The implications for areas as diverse as global financial systems, medical insurance, and space colonization are discussed in eye-opening detail. Several chapters toward the end address how readers can learn to recognize– and take advantage of– the Elbows in their own lives. Starred Review.

Infectious Noise: A Brief History of the Snap

Why do we snap our fingers? In this entertaining and highly readable account, Preston Warner, the Roland P. “Bud” Lawson Professor of Social Psychology at Bellevue College, describes how snapping goes back to at least the ancient Romans, who would snap– not clap– to express their admiration for gladiatorial combatants. Asides into the etymology of derivative words like “snappy,” “snap-on,” and top Japanese boy band SMAP (widely thought to be a corruption of “snap”) keep the heavy subject matter from getting too bogged down in academic jargon. Warner argues that snapping is, ultimately, a democratizing force– the explosion of compressed air from the palm of the hand makes this signature sound a direct and forceful personal statement. Includes Index.

The Update of Incipient Narratives

I wrote another article for Kill Screen magazine, Issue 5, the Sound Issue. The piece, Cantus Firmi, explains how dynamic music is implemented in most of today’s games and discusses some of the developments that could make music in games even more responsive and specifically appropriate to the player’s specific actions.

Several months ago I was fortunate enough to be on the Brainy Gamer Podcast again. Michael Abbott and I spoke about about big budget versus indie, what producers do, how to break into the game industry, how I write, and more.

If you have not been keeping up with the development of Planck, last month we posted an update on the site. We’ve been a little quiet of late, but we’re still working on the game.

Magical Wasteland turns five years old this month. Five years is old for a weblog about video games– so thank you to everyone who read and commented on the pieces here. I continue to work on more writing, as well as other new things.

In the Realm of the Dragons

We were on a train for a school trip. Everyone had been up since early in the morning, sent off by our yawning parents, and the air was filled with expectations of adventure.

I was sitting next to another boy that I had not gotten to know well. My only impressions of him up until then had been that he was always chewing things—his pencils, the collars of his shirts—and that he was something of an outcast even among the more nerdy groups at school.

It turned out that he and I liked the same girl in our class. He mentioned her almost immediately, and it seemed as though she’d been only thing on his mind all morning, or all week. I felt a competitive pang, and chose not mention the fact that I was also an admirer of hers. It was, I told myself, obvious in any case that neither of us had any chance at all. She was smart, pretty, and from a wealthy family, and we were awkward geeks who didn’t know what to do about things like this. She was sitting just a few rows ahead of us. I could see her saying something to one of her friends.

My seatmate stammered a few more words about her, but trailed off. I looked out the window.

Several minutes later, he opened his backpack and fished out a handful of paper. He placed one on the tray table in front of him; it was a blank photocopied character sheet for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was unclear whether they were left over or if he had deliberately packed them as some kind of survival kit for the trip.

At the top of the sheet, he wrote the girl’s name.

His pencil hovered over the character stats. He pointed to the box labeled CHA— “Charisma,” he explained. Slowly, he wrote ‘18’ in the box.

“That’s the highest it goes.”

I remember thinking: what kind of dumb rule is that? That’s the highest it can go?

A similar thought must have occurred to him. Using the saliva-coated nub of his eraser, he rubbed out the ‘18’ and, over the resultant smudge, carefully printed ‘99’.

Both of us looked at that number for a while, silently.

Then, abruptly, he crossed it out, and crumpled up the paper.