Having played video games for almost as long as they’ve existed, blogged about them a handful of times, and even dabbled in developing them, it’s fair to say I’m a gamer. Like many, though, I often find the game development industry puzzling. Why does it take companies so long to make new games, why do they sometimes cancel or delay projects that seem to have so much fan interest, and most importantly, why does the business seem to breed so many scandals?

My first complete solo audiobook is now online and free for anyone to download at Librivox. The Track of the Typhoon was a book I read in serialized form several years ago, in the delightful zine Messing About in Boats. It’s a travelogue from a slightly insane sailing voyage in 1920, written by the aptly named chief instigator, William Washburn Nutting. Nutting was the editor of Motor Boating magazine at the time, but he was a sailor at heart.

It looks like I’m starting to build up a decent set of chapter and short work contributions on Librivox. Anyone who wants to check them out can now find a continuously updated page of my free audiobook recordings there. The ones without a “Download” link are still in the editing process.

Another of my Librivox audio contributions is now online, in which I read the chapter on Sir Henry Morgan in Edward Keble Chatterton’s book Daring Deeds of Famous Pirates. Check it out here. Listening to some of the other narrators, I think I’m reading too fast, so I’ll try to slow down my pace a bit on the next project.

Responding to peer pressure from my wife, I’ve started getting into audiobook recording. I wanted to do some low-stakes pro bono work to iron out the workflow before holding out my services for hire, and after finding the delightful community of open-source hippies at Librivox, I jumped into several collaborative projects. My first published audiobook contribution is now online there. I read Chapter 11 of “Prowling About Panama,” a 1919 travelogue.

Think of a disaster movie. Any disaster movie. Whatever the central threat, from Godzilla to malevolent extraterrestrials to climate catastrophe, there will be at least one scene full of people behaving at their worst: looting expensive luxuries from abandoned stores, smashing windows, screaming in panic, shooting at their neighbors. According to Hollywood, society is just one bad event away from near-total collapse, unleashing the Hobbesian wolves of our worst impulses and setting everyone against everyone else.

Hope Jahren’s latest book begins at the beginning: her beginning, that is. Born in 1969, her parents picked her first name with typical Midwestern directness, expressing their own hope that their daughter would live a life of plenty, a life better than theirs. Like most parents in our culture, they wanted their child to have more. The rest of the book focuses on how our culture has defined that goal, how we’ve pursued it, and what those choices are costing us and our own descendants.

In our household, I’m responsible for the food. Breakfasts and lunches are easy, as none of us mind eating the same simple things for those meals day after day (oatmeal in the morning, granola bars at noon for me), but dinner is a perpetual challenge. That’s our family meal together. It needs to vary from night to night, and be tasty, nutritious, and filling. But I really don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen every day, so with the exception of an occasional gourmet hobby project on the weekend, these high-quality dinners also need to be quick.

For the past several years, I’ve been working my way through one of the longest, best selling, best written, and certainly funniest series of novels in the English language: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. To provide an idea of the scope of this project, I started at the beginning and just finished book 26, which means I only have 14 volumes to go in the main series. That doesn’t count several companion works that have been published on topics such as the geography, biology, and physics of Sir Terry’s richly imagined universe.

Kicking off a new series here, this is my first book review. Those coming from my “Self-Care” post on the Turbid Plaque will already understand one reason why I’ve started doing this. Another reason, though, is that my perspective on the hellscape of the modern internet has changed and deepened in recent months. That’s a direct result of reading Jenny Odell’s thought-provoking book “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Everyone knows how to determine the age of a tree that’s just been cut down: count the rings. But did you know that the same general strategy can be used to track ancient weather patterns, explain the rise and fall of great empires, and construct detailed histories of long-vanished societies that left no written records? I do now, thanks to Tree Story, Valerie Trouet’s well-written and engaging dive into the fascinating science of dendrochronology.