Follow Friday - The Saint Petersburg Lyceum 239 Is a Famous School Specialized in Math and Physics

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - BookLoverCircumspect4 and Billbrarian.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What’s your favorite non-bookish website hangout?

I suppose that the non-bookish site I visit most often would be Shamus Young's Twenty Sided, which is mostly focused on video games. I originally found the site by coming across Young's DM of the Rings webcomic, a series that used stills from the Peter Jackson adaptations of The Lord of the Rings to imagine what the story would have been like if it was a role-playing campaign with a fairly stereotypical array of troublesome players, but I stayed after that series ended. The site isn't entirely video game related: Shamus has written a novel and a memoir, so there is a little bit of bookishness on the site, but it is mostly about video games, a little bit about the internet and technology, and a tiny corner dedicated to other things.

Oddly, I don't play all that many of the video games that are featured in the content on the site. I've played the first Mass Effect, and I've played Fallout III and Fallout: New Vegas, as well as a pile of strategy oriented (and mostly older) games such as Starcraft and Civilization, but most of the games featured on the sites regular let's play series Spoiler Warning are not only games I have not played, but are games that I am unlikely to ever play. Most of the games talked about on the podcast the Diecast are games that I will never play, and in some cases, never see.

But I keep coming back, in part because Shamus is an insightful writer, and because the voices he has surrounded himself with for projects like Spoiler Warning provide commentary that is interesting enough that they make watching videos of games that you will never play fun to do. I think the main reason for this is that the commentary generally doesn't focus on mechanics or game play issues, but instead deals with character development and characterization, how to put together a plot, and other issues related to how to make a story work. Those are interesting even if one isn't actually familiar with the game itself, because how stories are structured is almost a universal concern.

Even though Twenty Sided isn't really about books, it is about stories, and taking stories apart to see how they work (as well as taking games apart to see how they work), so while it isn't bookish per se, it is about the things that books are built out of, which is why I like it.

Previous Follow Friday: Uranium-238 Is the Most Common Isotope of Uranium

Subsequent Follow Friday: There Were 240 Pence in a British Pound Until 1971

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