The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced finalists for this year's Prometheus Awards, which will be presented during the 70th World Science Fiction Convention over Labor Day weekend in Chicago. The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published last year.

I recently went shopping for some new ebooks for my iPad, and decided to look up a few of my favorite authors. Surely, I thought, David Brin must have a new book out by now. And it's been a while since I checked up on John Scalzi.

In every case I found that my favorite authors did do have new books coming out ... just not now. All of them are releasing books this summer, which means my quest to find a book to read today inadvertently spawned my Summer 2012 reading list.

Red Wasp Designs' The Wasted Land takes Call of Cthulhu to the iPad and iPhone, transforming RPG horror into a turn-based squad game that seeks to prevent a German mythos cult from unleashing an army of undead during World War I.

The game unfolds in the No Man's Land between the Allied and German fronts during The Great War. A team of British soldiers, led by the mystic scholar Brightmeer discover that someone is re-animating the dead. It's a classic Call of Cthulhu storyline, ripped form the pages of H.P. Lovecraft's own "Herbert West: Reanimator", with classic CoC rules.

Nuketown now has a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/nuketownsf. The goal of this page is two-fold: promote Nuketown, and figure out how to use Facebook pages. As I discussed previously, although I've been using social media for years and have 975 followers on my NukeHavoc account, Nuketown was sadly unrepresented.

This created problems with my day job as the goal becomes marketing the college via social media, rather than networking as an individual. I don't have a lot of experience with tracking social media analytics or setting up a write-once, publish-multiple times mechanic. Getting this setup -- first one Twitter, now on Facebook -- is an essential part of the redesign.

The new Marvel Heroic Basic RPG by Margaret Weis Productions is generating a good degree of buzz in RPG circles. A number of folks I follow on Twitter have been talking about it, and it's been consistently hitting the top spot on RPGNow's Top 100 Sales List.

Since I'm a big Marvel guy, I decided the time was right to start working on a "Summon WebScryer" column for Knights of the Dinner Table on the new game, as well as previous iterations. I plan on doing the column for issue #187. I've found a half-dozen or so sites, but I'm looking for more. If you know of any, please post them in the comments.

Skills are a hot button subject for my gaming group. Most of the guys in my group loved D&D 3.x's approach to skills, which allowed a high degree of granularity and focus in such mundane concerns as crafting and professions. When the D&D 4th Edition dismissed Craft and Profession as un-fun skills, half our group saw red. They still fume about that given time. Others liked 4th Edition's condensed skill list, and focus on adventuring applications over crafting arrows or performing songs.

Naturally D&D Next is concerned about skills, and based on a recent blog post they are clearly looking to retain the customization options that 3.x offers, while making things more streamlined. First, they're talking about making a lot of your day to day "skill checks" using the ability scores. So instead of making a "Climb check", you'd presumably make a Strength check. Second, they also explicitly state they want to retain true skills so that they have a meaningful impact on the game and allow the sort of customization that we saw in 3E (and to a certain extent, 4E).

Mike Mearls talks about the concept of a one-hour D&D game in his latest Legends & Lore post. The goal here isn't to boil all D&D games down to 1-hour, but rather to benchmark what you can actually do in an hour. No doubt inspired by his lunchtime D&D sessions, Mearls envisions a game in which you can get in a role-playing encounter, a few quick encounters with traps and/or enemies, and a boss fight.

The Blackrazor Guild held its semi-annual homegrown convention in late February 2012. About 18 people attended NukemCon 2012, some long-time members of the gaming group, others friends who join us from time to time.

NukemCons have become a standard part of our gaming group; we first started holding them because we missed our annual pilgrimages to GenCon. We missed being able to hangout, talk, and have a few beers while throwing dice. NukemCon solved that problem.

With the holidays long over and the major work rush of January and early February completed, I've had a chance to dive back into fiction. As has been the case for the last few years, science fiction dominates my reading list, but historical fiction and thrillers keep sneaking in.

It's amazing what a little free time can do. Back in Autumn 2011 I worked hard to come up with wireframes, design comps, and an HTML build out of the new Nuketown. It was built on HTML5 and CSS3 and it was all going swimmingly ... until I looked at it in Internet Explorer 9.

The entire design fell apart. IE9, which I thought had better standards support than its predecessors, simply didn't understand HTML5 elements like "nav" or "figure". It refused to style them, and without the formatting, the design collapsed. About the same time work got nuts, and most of my free time was devoured by work projects. I probably could have pressed ahead with Nuketown, but truth be told I just didn't have the energy to fight the good fight.

Flashforward a few months. My big projects are complete, and I finally found some time to figure out what the hell was going so wrong with IE9. An hour of searching and experimentation revealed the answer: IE9 mode.

You see, Internet Explorer has a long history of "modes" -- ways of operating that supported (or broke) certain standards. It was quirky to say the least, and I'd forgotten about it. By default, Internet Explorer 9 operates in compatibility mode, which apparently means it tries to display everything as a sucky old browser would, while choking on the latest HTML5 standards.