Friday, February 29, 2008

100 Chess Book Reviews, Part 2

This and the next dozen videos I just plow through book after book....

I figured out how to add music. I haven't gotten the relative volume (voice versus music) quite perfect. Also, if anyone knows how to cut and paste little clips of music rather than entire songs in iMovie, please let me know.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

100 Chess Book Reviews, Part 1

I promised a video swan song, and decided to review every one of my way too many chess books. The production values leave much to be desired (especially the sound editing), so you are getting BDK in the raw. I will publish the video in 10-20 installments that are each between two and three minutes. This thing is a monster. It ended up being almost 60 minutes long. I plan on publishing one to two a week over the coming ten weeks or so. It was fun making it, partly because it forced me to learn to use iMovie and YouTube and all that. It's all really easy, so if you have a video camera, do it up baby!

Note the "reviews" are very brief, some are very impressionistic, don't expect detailed reviews like the ones I often write up. This first video gets a lot of preliminaries out of the way, such as my grading system, a little cameo by Liquid Egg Product's mascot, and just a handful of reviews.

Part 1

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Transitions: Hens and hobbies

Samurai Knight had a brief sit in the throne as Secretary Knight. He has passed the sceptre on to none other than Tacticus Maximus. Treat them well, Tacticus, and thank you Samurai for taking a turn sitting on the egg. The 'Chess is crack' image is an homage to Samurai Knight.

I think I've successfully made the transition from chess-as-obsession to chess-as-hobby. It is quite nice. I gained a lot of tactical skills doing the Circles, and because the Circles took me so damned long (see Blog Highlites) I was lucky enough to learn a lot of other stuff along the way, from basic openings, endgames, to middlegame strategy, among other things. I no longer feel the urge to "study" chess in any disciplined way, and am pretty happy with my performance levels in chess, which by any objective measure in the actual chess community, are not impressive(probably around 1400 or so at ICC), but less unimpressive than when I started (950 at ICC). So, the guilt is gone, but the fun is still there (though admittedly with less pronounced highs and lows).

In the next week I'll put up what should be my last post for a while: I plan on making a goodbye video. We'll see if the experiment works. At that point, instead of trying to keep the Knights list updated, I'll put a link to the Knights Errant FAQ page, which should be up to date. I will continue to lurk and comment at blogs, though. There is a lot of great content out there!

Sunday, February 03, 2008

The agony of defeat

17-14. The better team won. Congrats Polly. Enjoy it. Their defensive line manhandled our guys, and your Giants deserved the win.

Time to crawl into a hole and cry....