Comments on: For I Am ZINFANDEL!

By: Jim/VINEgeek

Jim/VINEgeek — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:48:40 +0000

Sam – Baldur’s Gate was the last one I played (unless you count Fable for the Xbox).

By: Jim/VINEgeek

Jim/VINEgeek — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:47:49 +0000

Jeff – Magic: The Gathering came along a couple of years too late for me. If not, I’m sure I would have been all over it back then. I actually do own a starter deck of the cards though. I once sold a marketing research project (my day job) about the game to the company that makes it, Wizards of the Coast.

By: Jim/VINEgeek

Jim/VINEgeek — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:44:29 +0000

Benito – You’re right… Hungarian wine names would be perfect. The Hungarian language is so odd and different from any other familiar language that it’s easy to imagine it being the language of kobolds or something.

Also … forget suave, embrace geekdom!

By: sam klingberg

sam klingberg — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:36:57 +0000

never read any of these books, bro. i’ve played a lifetime of video game rpg’s though, soo…

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:54:15 +0000

Oh, and for the record, no D&D here ever, but Magic: The Gathering was a couple of years long obsession…

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:51:57 +0000

Wheel of Time! Have mercy! Each book was like 2,000 pages. That’s a long dead figment of my memory. Thanks for refreshing it Benito. Perhaps that was what killed my interest in the genre too.

By: Benito

Benito — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:51:01 +0000

Jim–If I were DMing a game, say 3.5e instead of this new 4e nonsense, I’d use Hungarian wine names in a campaign and even serve them when appropriate. They sound pretty far-out if you’re not familiar with the language, and the translations are cool. Like how Egri Bikavér is “The Bull’s Blood of Eger”. I mean, that’s assuming that I knew anything about D&D. Of course not, I’m a suave and sophisticated wineblogger.

By: Jim/VINEgeek

Jim/VINEgeek — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:29:57 +0000

Jeff & Benito – I started with Sword of Shannara in 7th grade then the Dragonlance series came next for me. That led me to D&D (AD&D to be precise) which led to the Forgotten Realms Icewind Dale trilogy (Drizzt Do’Urden), which led to Feist, which led to Eddings (Belgariad, Malloreon and even the Elenium). And finally, like Benito, my fantasy novel ship crashed upon the unforgiving rocks of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time. Reading book after thousand-page book, it became more chore than enjoyment. Perhaps I’ll try to find some wine references in the books… (hmm, blog post idea…)

By: Benito

Benito — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:04:20 +0000

I never got around to Feist, but I read tons of sci-fi/fantasy up until I was in my mid-20s, and I think it was one of the Robert Jordan “Wheel of Time” books that pretty much killed off my interest in the genre.

I’ve gone back recently and tried to read a few of my favorites and man… is that embarrassing. I actually read the first 50 Star Trek: TNG books as they were released, often within a couple of days of them hitting the shelves.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:46:17 +0000

I don’t specifically remember reading that book, but I read a whole lot of Dragon Lance books when I was in middle school in particular. Now funny thing, I don’t remember many of the plot elements or anything like that, but I remember reading lots of them. I was also obsessed with the Shannara books by Terry Brooks. Haven’t read anything like that in probably 10 years…once I discovered Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, and John Kennedy O’Toole, I sort of forgot about fantasy books.