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Showing posts from September, 2010

Why the University of Puerto Rico should change.

The Caribbean is a small place. I mean not if you're trying to swim it but geographically the countries are small. At one point the best University in the Caribbean was in Cuba. People went there to study pretty much any advanced degree.  The University of Puerto Rico opened up at the beginning of last century. At the beginning through enlightened leadership it became a premier institution. My grandfather who graduated from the UPR had a tiny class of around 200 students. He was always ever so proud of his university. My grandfather, played guitar, recited Shakespeare from memory, read French for fun, and had a rather extensive workbench, which I'm told he used a lot when younger. A very educated scholar, he was typical of the university's first years. However since them the UPR has become (all pardon me) a joke, a shadow of it's former self. Both physically and spiritually it has become a factory of students cranking out people in a quantity is more important that qual

Seeking...

I'm looking for certain things, thought making a list would help. 1. I'm looking for an open-minded committed reader for a comic-book I'm writing.  Writing a comic book was my summer project. Summer has ended and my project languished, (my fault totally, gotta let it go). One of the reasons was that I was unable to get a reader for it. One reader, I regrettably lost contact with; and the other reader was a guy who was a fan of the comic-book series I'm writing for, but he loved the series so much, he hated where I wanted to go it. So  I've added "open-minded" to the title. My best writing flows when it feels like play, like sitting down and toying with something until it's cool. I'd like to get that state easily, like switching on a light in a room filled with interesting stuff. 2. I'm looking for work that will best use my abilities and talents, that's full-filling, fun, and financially rewarding. 3. Work out buddy to motivate making time

Gaming Encounters

This is a response to Denis' blog . Here is the apparent problem with lots of RPG games: the encounters can favor either combat or exploration skills and characters that are good at one tend to be bad at the other so supposedly on type of character is bored during combat encounters and vice versa. Denis proposes that players use two characters. It's a neat idea.  I was thinking about how lots of RPGs degenerate into dice-rolling combat and "I want xp" fests. I liked the idea (also from Denis' blog) to only give xp for treasure that you spend on wasted stuff, like a wine, women and song. ("Brave, brave sir Robbin, sir Robin ran away...") But I remembered an idea I had a while back when I was considering what would make a good rpg game. I though that it was interesting that you had monks in RPG that are anything but monk-like, are really just fighters with less hair and bare fists.  I realized that part of the reason for this is that there was no incentive