A tribute to Tolkien
Instead of dismissing it with a gracious modesty, I'm going to shamelessly record for posterity that The Master quoted in Anand Venkateswaran's essay on J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hindu Literary Re…
Culture
164 posts
Character development in DnD
In all the DnD games I’ve played, I’ve felt there’s a tension between allowing the story to progress and the characters all helping each other participate in that progression. For example, we as playe…
Mongolian folk rock
An online culture zine called Phantom Sway just discovered Mongolian folk rock and can't stop raving about it (I found the article because 3 Quarks Daily picked up on it). What the superficial rev…
Catching up with the Kharkhanas tragedy
Can't believe I'm so late to the party. It seems that a year ago, Steven Erikson put the Kharkhanas Trilogy on hold, delaying the publication of the third book. The second book, Fall of Light,…
Who we will always be
I found this evocative image on Twitter today. It’s by a Russian artist named Yuri Shwedoff and the image is part of his ‘Space Series’, available to view and appreciate on Behance. I don’t know the p…
Looking for gemstones in the gutter
Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but…
A cultured evolution?
Can perceptions arising out of cultural needs override evolutionary goals in the long-run? For example, in India, the average marriage-age is in the late 20s now. Here, the (popular) tradition is to f…
What smells like a harmful thought?
A lot about our biology is intertwined with our culture. When such an association is encountered for the first time, it could sound interesting, intriguing even, but with time, it becomes an evident r…