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sOkay, we just sort of kept playing and playing and playing here. I don’t think this should have worked– this was an unscheduled game set up on the spur of the moment at a small town university science fiction and fantasy convention. Basically no one signed up for this, either. Well, a couple people did– […]
For St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to really read Fr. Andrew M. Greeley’s The Magic Cup. I tracked down a used copy of the paperback about ten years ago, based on a friend’s comment on the book. I read the beginning, lost interest as I scanned through it and put it away. I pulled the […]
I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve read a novel in one sitting, and I can’t ever recall reading a short story collection without stopping along the way. There’s too many natural breaks for me to keep turning the pages. But Brad R. Torgersen’s Lights In The Deep captured my attention and held […]
The AVID Assistant Kickstarter is live. Finally. After more than three weeks of laying the ground and telling people it will happen, and getting approvals taken care of by Kickstarter itself. And a week of learning how to use a non-linear video editor for something that I was told should take about a day, tops. Video […]
The King In Yellow: Overlooked Futurism and Social Fate
Tuesday , 10, March 2015 Uncategorized 4 CommentsBecause of its intense esoteric undercurrent and the highly influential underlying prop of the madness-inducing titular play, it is easy to overlook the futuristic society and its doomed social order portrayed in Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. It shouldn’t be. The oddly woven anthology, a blend of Poe-like horror, Gothic romance, and near-future […]
What is Prezcon…? Well, it’s a whole bunch of things going on at once. I go up on Wednesday and don’t stop playing games until Saturday or Sunday. Most people there seem to come for the tournaments. There are scads of them, for all kinds of games: popular euro games, serious wargames, and everything in […]
An interesting anthology of sword and sorcery fiction is The Barbarian Swordsmen. This was a U.K. paperback from 1981 published by Star Books edited by Peter Haining under the pseudonym “Sean Richards.” Why the pseudonym? L. Sprague de Camp was the first to put together an anthology of sword and sorcery fiction with Swords and […]
REVIEW: War Before Civilization – The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H. Keeley
Saturday , 7, March 2015 Book Review 6 CommentsI completely understand wanting to turn back the clock. Go back to simpler times. Return to Eden. Flee from the rat race of urban life and revert to a primitive, tribal “state of nature” — where we can be peaceful, wild and free — hunting the buffalos, but as bros, you know? In “War Before Civilization”, Lawrence Keeley not only dispels […]
I had planned to write a longer piece this week, but I learned more about video editing than I ever wanted to. Video editing is an arcane art. I’ve learned more about frame rates, color spaces, audio synching, and the fact that different editors and recording setups output to different codecs that the others can’t […]
The Seduction of the Ignorant: How Our Pre- and Post-War Betters Whipsawed Comics
Tuesday , 3, March 2015 Uncategorized 5 CommentsFew will take issue with Dr. Wertham when he stresses the many disgusting aspects of comic books. The pictorial examples and quotations he presents are irrefutable evidence that the comics incite to crime and violence, that they make their appeal often through sex, perversion and sadism. That the aesthetic quality of the drawings and writing […]
I believe this was the first tournament ever for this game. There were three full tables running in each of the two heats. The people that showed up were really excited to play this one, but that first round was a little rough. It’s still so new at this point, a lot of us needed a […]
Dangerous Women is the cross genre anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois that came out in between Warriors and Rogues. This is also the last of the Tor books before the editors moved over to Bantam. Hardback, 784 pages, twenty one stories, nine by men, twelve by women, $32.50, published in […]