We’ve been running our West Marches-style campaign for over a year now, and something’s become entirely too clear: this is a format best suited for experienced players. Unfortunately (though awesomely), the majority of players at work are new to the game. Where West Marches is meant to be a sandbox,...
Nicole’s primary character – a ranger/druid named Elokin – makes it a point to recruit at least one native fauna during each adventure. Often it leads to some memorable improv: horny British rhinos, a chipper-but-nihilistic grasshopper, and an Australian bull shark named Bruce (naturally) to name a few. During the...
Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes My rating: 5 of 5 stars Memoirs by comedians are a dime a dozen these days. Most are about comedy through the prism of their career, others are about their career through the prism of comedy. And there’s the rare memoir by a comedian...
At last night’s work D&D game, I took a turn as a player (while Dasia ran her first adventure!). The party is working through the maze that makes up the outer section of a green dragon’s lair. One of the obstacles was a series of puzzle rooms, the main feature...
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried My rating: 5 of 5 stars An excellent book for what it is: a look into different ways of doing things. Not just from a theoretical perspective, but from a company that is thriving. As long as you read...
Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life by Gary John Bishop My rating: 4 of 5 stars Alternate title: “Stoic Philosophy for People Who Don’t Like Reading Old Texts.“There’s not a ton of new material (naturally, given that stoicism has been around for over two thousand...
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek My rating: 5 of 5 stars I consider this book to be Sinek’s redemption for ‘Start with Why.’ I’m a huge fan of his presentations/videos, but ‘Start With Why’ felt lacking; it was a great presentation-length idea that had been stretched out into a...
If you poke around this blog a bit, it’s clear that I’ve been trying to do more creative stuff in my spare moments. However, I haven’t done any sketchnoting since last year’s Tri-State SHRM conference and – wouldn’t you know it – yesterday was Rhode Island SHRM’s 20th annual conference!...
Tonight we finished up a series of quests that involved Cothynta, the self-styled “Lady of Fire.” Sharry was compelled (by way of an agreement with a powerful efreeti) to close a rogue series of portals leading to the Plane of Fire. Sharry was still fuming as he wound up the...
The Voice of Knowledge by Miguel Ruiz My rating: 5 of 5 stars The thing about age-old wisdom is that it’s been around forever. It’s been around forever because it’s generally on-point, but this creates a marketing problem: how do you keep something like that from becoming a kind of...