Notable Posts
Scenarios
Flash fiction webzine AntipodeanSF moved to a new online home: www.antisf.com.au. It's also published a bunch of new SF in its latest edition, including "Teamwork," by David McVeigh, "Saving The Planet," by Richard Kerslake, "Save The Last Dance," by Mark Farrugia and "In Development," by Mark Tremble.
The biggest box under the Geek Tree this year belonged to Arkham Horror, a board game I've wanted ever since my friend (and fellow Blackrazor) Lance got it a few years back.
We cracked it open for Friday's Game Day; there were only three of us to face the horrors of Shub-Niggurath because of the Christmas holiday, but we still had plenty of fun. Heck, we even managed to eek out a 17-point victory.
Leafing through the boxed set before the guys arrived I discovered that my version is the 2nd printing of the game. For the most part the game looks and plays the same as its predecessor, but there are a few notable differences:
I'm a creature feature kind of guy. There are few things I enjoy more than a bowl of popcorn, a cold beer and a monster-of-the-week movie. So it goes without saying that BBC's Primeval - in which portals to the past unleash horrors upon modern Britan -- is my kind of show.
The pilot episode of the 13-episode Season 1 sees a variety of dinosaurs wander through into the Forest of Dean, including one particularly nasty carnivore that's taken to hunting the woods for prey (and the occasional tractor trailer). Episode #2 features giant bugs infesting the London Underground, while Episode #3 has a giant aquatic dinosaur prowling the nation's waterways.
Each has traveled through a rip in space/time connecting our present with eras millions of years in the past. And the portal's aren't one way; creatures (and humans) can pass back and forth between the two time periods. They have to be quick though; the portals are unstable, and time travelers can easily find themselves trapped in the past when one of the wormholes evaporates.
Blink is a rapid-fire card game in which two players attempt to match shape-filled game cards as quickly as possible based on design, number or color. It’s also become our stocking stuffer/birthday present of choice in the Newquist household.
In the standard game, each player’s given their own deck with the same number of cards. The top card from each deck is flipped over, and players draw three cards from their respective decks. They then launch into frenzy, matching cards in their hands against the face-up cards. As they get matches, they draw new cards from their deck. The first person to run out of cards wins. Games typically last about 30 seconds.
It makes it a great way to pass the time on camping trips, at the airport, whatever. But what my wife and I love most about the game is how scalable it is. It’s designed for older kids and adults, but at its heart Blink is a matching game. That means that as long as kids can match, they can play the game.
The mid-December edition of SF Site is online, with reviews of The Jack Vance Reader, which includes three novellas by scifi/fantasy master Jack Vance, Star Wars: Street of Shadows by Michael Reaves, takes place shortly after the catastrophic Order 66 in Episode 3, and Busted Flush, a new Wild Cards superhero novel edited by George R.R. Martin. It also has a review of the remade The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Some of the second-stage books for D&D 4th Edition are hitting book stores, which has ignited a new wave of reviews among bloggers. I don't think any of these new books are going to change hearts and minds among those who dislike 4E -- that will have to wait for 2009's Player's Handbook II -- but I do think they serve to fill holes in 4E's lineup.
Interestingly, there are also a bunch of reviews out for Alpha Omega, a science fiction RPG that's been out for a year, but suddenly seems to have grabbed the interest of a number of people in the blogosphere.
4E overhauled/ravaged the traditional D&D cosmology, ditching the concept of aligned planes, merging the elemental ones into a single megaplane, and spawning the "Shadowfell" out of the intellectual ruins of Ravenloft. Living Dice reviews the new Manual of the Planes, which chronicles the new cosmology.
NASA is retiring the space shuttle fleet in 2010 and is actively looking for museums and other organizations interested in displaying one of the historic spacecraft, according to this CNN article. They don't come cheap -- NASA is looking for $42 million for mothballing and transporting one of the orbiters. Engines not included; you'll need to buy those separately.
After a long, hard-fought autumn spent coding, organizing projects and reviewing way, way too many video games, I've got the urge to read. It's a compulsion really, a strong desire to find a quiet corner of the house (or even a noisy, chaotic corner of the house) and lose myself in a good paperback.
I'm also looking for some good inspirational material for my Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign; not necessarily things I want lift to include in the story, but rather ideas that can serve as a spring board for my own creative wanderings.
I'm particularly interested in reading newer space opera, stuff published since the turn of the century (that would be the turn of the 21st century, for those who forget which one we're living in ... which happens to me from time to time). I'm also interested in some current hard SF, but with an emphasis on Thinking Big; give me super-sized space structures, transhuman wars or encounters with alien civilizations; anything but another round of grim, near-future cyberpunk derivatives. Yeah, I like that stuff too ... but it's not what I'm shooting for right now.
Every year I get out our Moravian Star tree-topper, and every year I think "Kal-El, Last Son of Krpyton, Hero of the Christmas Tree!"
Hmmm. Maybe I should find a smaller one for the Geek Tree...
Snow plays havoc with Game Days. We plan out everything -- whose house we'll be at, what game we're playing, who's able to make it and then whammo, a Nor'Easter comes roaring in and dumps a half foot of snow over our plans.
In the old days, that would have meant the end of game night but now we have Xbox 360 and Xbox Live.
The Blackrazors are primarily an role-playing game group, but we do break out the board games on occasion (and more than a few of us start to get twitchy if we don't). Thanks to Xbox Live, we can now play these games online -- there are digital versions of Carcassone, Catan, and Ticket to Ride, all of which are games my group's enjoyed.