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sThe all new pulp magazine Storyhack is a go! Bryce A Beattie has the latest news at his blog: We’re down to the last little bit for the StoryHack campaign on Kickstarter. We’ve hit and gone a little over the goal! Issue #1 is getting made. Thank you to everybody who has helped this happen. […]
Fallout Shelter: A Terrible Game by Terrible People
Monday , 5, June 2017 Computer Games 22 CommentsFallout Shelter is a terrible game by terrible people. It’s completely awful, top to bottom, with nearly no redeeming features. “But it makes a lot of money!” So do crack kingpins. What’s your point?
SENSOR SWEEP: Unqualified Fabricators, Civilized Virtues, Dreadful Warnings, and Ugly-ass Trousers
Monday , 5, June 2017 Sensor Sweep 3 CommentsThe Inklings (The Telegraph) Secret theme behind Narnia Chronicles is based upon the stars, says new research — “Dr Ward made his discovery in 2003 after reading The Planets, a poem by Lewis which refers to the influence of Jupiter in ‘winter passed / And guilt forgiv’nl – a theme echoed in The Lion, The […]
ON THE TABLE: SE4X Close Encounters on Extra Large 2-Player Map
Sunday , 4, June 2017 Tabletop Games 2 CommentsThis is had been an unplayed expansion on my shelf for far too long. My gut feeling had been that it was that it would be just too much to throw at people without having played more of the base game first. I think that’s wrong now. The stuff that is added in the first half […]
“Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war.” With that tag line, the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game sets the tone to an eternal conflict where the forces of humanity fight constantly to preserve their empire from the ravages of the alien, the mutant, and the heretic. […]
Jim Steranko (born 1938) had a brief career as a painter for sword and sorcery paperbacks in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He came out of the comic book milieu like Frank Frazetta and Gray Morrow. Steranko had started work with Marvel Comics in 1966. In 1969, he had a falling out with Stan […]
You already know who these commentators are, and you have seen their works everywhere. They thrive in the worlds of on-line journalism, blogging, news aggregators, click-bait journalism, and social media. Their ranks have swollen, and they have problematized everything under the sun. And without more worlds to conquer, they have set their eyes on entertainment […]
Son of the Pulps: Philip Jose Farmer, Part 1
Saturday , 3, June 2017 Appendix N, Authors, Fiction, Short Fiction 4 CommentsIt’s often been asked what later science fiction writers the pulp masters influenced. I wager there were many, even when it’s not directly obvious from the works themselves. For instance, the adventurousness of Heinlein’s stories and his classic heroes remind me strongly of the best pulp authors. But speculation aside, of all the great science […]
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year contemplating what the followup to Appendix N should be. Before the Big Three: The Real Golden Age of Science Fiction? Appendix T: the Literary Antecedents of Traveller? A Survey of Contemporary Short SFF? What hadn’t crossed my mind until now was the fact that I may […]
I used to think that sort of games I liked were complex. Mastering the rules, finding an opponent, and then teaching someone else how to play always seemed like a challenging undertaking to me, anyway. But everything’s relative. Compared to the old baseline of chess, checkers, Monopoly, Risk, and rummy the old “MicroGames” Car Wars, […]
Short Reviews will return next week with Duane Rimel’s “The Metal Chamber” in the March 1939 issue of Weird Tales! Cirsova Heroic Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine is now open for and accepting submissions! Details can be found here, but suffice it to say that we are looking for action-packed and exciting stories of daring […]
In my last post I was gearing up for a Classic Traveller Campaign by rolling up a Subsector and trusting to the fate of the dice. In that post I defined the basic layout of the Subsector Narzenia and the polities within it. Now, I focus a bit more on the largest political grouping in the […]