David Chart's Blog

Author: David Chart

  • Sitting Up and Eating

    Mayuki has reached the point of sitting up by herself. She still falls over after a while, and supports herself with her hands a lot, but she can sit up. She can even sit up from lying on her back, although she doesn’t do that very often. And then, while lying on her back, she…

  • Law in Everyday Japan

    This book is a serious legal/anthropological study of the effects of the legal system on various aspects of Japanese society. It was very interesting, in part because I learned a few more details of what the law in Japan actually is. It made me think that I need to find a basic “introduction to Japanese…

  • Birthdays

    It’s been a while since my last update. Sorry about that. One reason is that I finished the first draft of my first novel on Thursday. More about that at a later date: watch this space! The main reason, however, is that after finishing the novel I was extremely tired, which is doubly unsurprising. Writing…

  • I Was Right

    A while ago, when writing about the Conan book I had read, I said “Oh my god, it’s Dungeons and Dragons.” A week ago, Wired had an article about Gary Gygax, which included the sentence: “[Gygax] was a fan of the Conan the Barbarian books by Robert E. Howard and wanted to try to capture…

  • Estimates

    I just ordered a book from Amazon US; Amazon Japan didn’t have it in stock, and, with the weak dollar right now, it was actually cheaper to order it from the US, even including the shipping. Today, I got the ship confirmation email from Amazon; that was expected, as it was in stock when I…

  • Holding the Baby

    Yuriko has gone out again today, to a special meeting associated with her kimono class: there is a chance to see Okinawan kimonos and eat Okinawan food. She couldn’t really take Mayuki, so I’ve been left looking after her. Since I have no lessons, it is possible, but I’m trying to do some work in…

  • Spell Compendium

    Spell Compendium is a book for D&D 3.5. It does what it says on the cover: it’s a big collection of spells, from lots of previous D&D books, revised and updated to deal with problems found after publication. There are a lot of interesting ideas in it. A couple of things struck me. The first,…

  • Little Baby, Sweetly Sleep

    We’ve been changing our daily schedule here over the last couple of weeks. The general advice is that it’s best that babies go to sleep relatively early and wake up relatively early, so we’re trying to manage that. Of course, given that I’m teaching until 8:30 every weekday, there’s a limit to how much we…

  • Gary Gygax RIP

    Gary Gygax has died. Whether you know who he was depends on whether you’re a roleplayer. For everyone else: he’s one of the two people who created roleplaying games. Along with Dave Arneson, he wrote Dungeons and Dragons, back in 1974. He has, therefore, had more influence on my life, indirectly, than almost anyone else;…

  • New Diary Entry

    I’ve put a new diary entry online. Yes, again.