Lit Matters: The Moomintrolls of Tove Jansson“I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes, and dream!” said the ever-whimsical Moomintroll, hero of Finnish author Tove Jansson’s beloved series of children’s books. Jansson, who was well known as a painter and an illustrator as well as an author, won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for her imaginative and wistful stories. […] Continue Reading |
The Bi-weekly Gamer: Returning to the throneFilling the shoes of anyone in any job is hard. When you are set to replace all-star mid laner Enrique Cedeño Martinez (xPeke, now retired), it’s more daunting than ever imagined. Luckily for League of Legends team Fnatic, great scouting and coaching produced one of the most underrated mid laners to come out of Europe […] Continue Reading |
Lit Matters: The storied truths of Tom King“The truth about stories is, that’s all we are,” wrote Thomas King, a Canadian novelist, essayist, and native-rights activist who uses humour as often as he uses polemic to bring awareness to the sociopolitical and historical context of native peoples in North America. King grew up in California, the son of a Cherokee father and […] Continue Reading |
Lit Matters: Joseph Mitchell’s New York peopleJoseph Mitchell was one of the greatest long-form magazine writers to ever work for The New Yorker, one of the greatest publishers of the genre. Despite that, today he is almost as famous for what he ended up not writing: Mitchell suffered a 30-year writer’s block at the end of his career, and although he […] Continue Reading |
The Bi-weekly Gamer: What is a sport? (part two)Following up on last issue’s topic, this article will continue examining what exactly can be considered a sport nowadays. Anyone who watches professional League of Legends (LoL) will be well aware of a new team called Echo Fox. Originally known as Gravity, the team was bought by three-time NBA champion Rick Fox back in December. […] Continue Reading |
The Bi-weekly Gamer: What is a sport?I want to talk about the word “sport,” the definition behind it, and how e-sports is dismantling the stigma of gaming. This topic is a hefty one, so I will be breaking it up into two columns. The Oxford Dictionary defines a sport as “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual […] Continue Reading |
Lit Matters: Marian Engel bears it all“Remember that it is not enough to have everything around you beautiful, remember that there must also be change and flux, because it is through change that we pretend that we can make decisions, and keep our pride,” wrote Marian Engel, a Canadian novelist who was very much interested in stories of personal change. Engel […] Continue Reading |
The Bi-weekly Gamer: A struggle against the metaBack in November, I wrote an article on Guild Wars 2 and the then-newly released expansion pack. Since then, many fixes and updates have been dumped on the player base. Two big changes are the revamp of player-vs.-player (PvP) ranked matches and Elite Specializations, which aim to allow players to explore new ways to play […] Continue Reading |
Lit Matters: Paul Auster’s identity collage“Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for,” said Paul Auster, an American novelist, essayist, and translator who is probably best known for his existential detective novels, collected as The New York Trilogy. Auster, who began writing in the early ’80s, is impossible to pin to a single genre. […] Continue Reading |
Lit Matters: Nicolle Brossard on making sense out of reality“Before I became a feminist, I suppose I was an angel, a poet, a revolutionary,” wrote Nicolle Brossard, a Quebec poet, novelist, and essayist who has written more than 30 books since she began publishing in the 1960s. Along with numerous other awards she’s won, she’s taken home the Governor General’s Award for poetry twice, […] Continue Reading |
