As John and I grow closer to finishing up the Second Edition, we’ll be writing more on the blog. Instead of rehashing our work and discussing the elements that are new, we thought it would be more interesting to talk about emerging trends in today’s world that mirror a bit about what we wrote about […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my friend, Lali, with whom I shared a very intense friendship twenty years ago. We had one of those inexplicable connections that tethered us together for years. As I was traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I wondered if maybe her family was from here since this is Mennonite country […]
The most common question I ask myself while researching: Why? This seems like an easy question, but it’s precisely the easiness of it that causes you to continually return to it. If you can answer a series of repeated whys (along with a few whens) you can construct a meaningful timeline of not just what […]
“If you do it will be, in the writer’s opinion, almost a copy of the German jaeger rifle because these Bakers were making guns from 1717-1754 — the earliest gunsmiths I have found in this area of Pennsylvania.” — Sam Dyke, 1972. “The Baker Family of Gunsmiths in Lancaster, County 1717-1754 The problem with history […]
I arrived in Lancaster just a little after noon today after surviving a drive that took me through the foggy Appalachia mountains, torrential rain down pours, and hours of driving time without mobile cell service. As some severe weather is headed my way, I skipped some of the preliminary research today and instead got my […]
One of the themes we explored in Dungeons + Dreamers was the computer game designers attempt to graft the real-world interactive and communal experience of paper gaming with the virtual world experience. This is a powerful idea because virtual spaces remove geography and time from experience. When you remove those two elements from an experience, […]
While the subject of the Clay County feuds is often seen nowadays as something akin to old west nostalgia, as per the Hollywood treatment of the Hatfield/McCoy variety, or even a History Channel presentation a few years ago of Clay County’s “Hundred Year War’ it is to many local people a subject of the untwist […]
Video Games: The Movie I just came across this Kickstarter campaign to help fund the post-production for this documentary on video games: I’ll be donating to the cause on June 1, and you should consider it as well. I never grow tired of hearing designers and developers discuss how they made games. However, I look […]
This Sunday, I’m packing up my car and heading east to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is the home of American gun making. The reason: before the Bakers settled in Clay County, Kentucky, the family lived in Lancaster, where they helped make the Pennsylvania Rifle (also known as the Kentucky Rifle or the hog rifle). According to […]
The Reverend John Jay Dickey was a traveling minister who spent a good deal of time both chronicling his journeys through the mountains of early America and his attempts to set up churches in schools in towns. The Dickey Diaries paint an amazingly clear picture of the daily life (and frustrations) he observed. Each time […]
“I arrive at the age of fifteen, at this period I had learned only in a moderate degree to read write and cipher having like most children neglected to improve the opportunities afforded me at the common schools. And not being able to appreciate the great advantages derived from education and an improved mind, however […]
There are two major problems with telling this story. Every generation of Bakers has multiple sons, and those sons all name their sons the same names; and Trying to find the narrative lines that tell the story I want to tell. The first problem is actually the most complex. While we have copious amounts of […]