The podcast opens with the old X-Men cartoon theme song in honor of X-Men 3: The Final Stand and the launches into a review of geek mom and geek parenting web sites. There's no fiction review this time around, as I'm still slugging my way through George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows but I do have my summer reading list, which includes books by John Scalzi, Warren Ellis, Jack Vance, Keith Baker, Peter Hamilton and Joe Hadleman.

The Nuketown redesign picked up pace this weekend as I finally sat down and focused on it for a couple of hours. In the process I wrestled the new site's visual design into place, ending up with a fusion of the current blog-like look and the experimental magazine-still site I was playing around with. If you're curious, you can check out a JPEG of the current beta.

The new site echoes certain thematic elements from previous versions -- the atom logo by GreenTentacles is still there, and the color scheme -- white, grey, red, black -- reinforces it while at the same time evoking some of the earlier designs.

In early to mid-May, Berin Kinsman posted a series of thoughtful essays on the nature of geekdom to Uncle Bear. Called "The Karaoke Transcripts" (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Denouement) the essays inspired plenty of intelligent debate, and I contributed my fair share of comments. Since things have been slow at Nuketown (but insanely busy with family and work), I'm posting my response to The Karaoke Transcripts, Part 1 here.

I used to read a lot of webzines, but got out of the habit in the early 2000s when their numbers declined and my free time disintegrated. This month, in addition to striving to read more in general, I've specifically attempted to return to my old webzine ways.

Antipodean SF features something you don't see a lot of on the Web: Australian flash speculative fiction. While not all of its authors are from below the equator, a good number are (and each of those is denoted by an Australian flag). The monthly webzine makes for a quick read, thus making it an easy first-stop on my Webzine tour.

Zombies are the topic of the day with Radio Active #30, which features a review of Stephen King's zombie-novel Cell and Jonathan Coulton's Thing a Week song "Re Your Brains". Sites of Note looks at Joss Whedon's Serenity re-done in LEGOS, applauds All Games Considered on their one-year anniversary, and takes a look at Geek Culture. Finally, I've got a review of Coulton's music, including his first album, Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow and the aformentioned Thing a Week.

I took a break from watching Nowhere Man on DVD this month and last to get caught up on some movies, including The Triangle, The Island, The Aviator and Flightplan.

If you're wondering why Nuketown's been pretty quiet for the last few weeks, it's because I've been continuing to work on the beta. I've got a design that I like -- it needs some tweaking, but it accomplishes my goal of changing up the site enough to be different while retaining enough for it to be familiar.

The impetus behind this page was a speech I gave at a meeting of the Pocono Libertarians a few years back on "Libertarian Themes in Science Fiction." As a life-long science fiction fan, and later a libertarian, the unity of the two subjects always seemed obvious to me. But at that meeting I discovered that many of my fellow libertarian-minded citizens either hadn't heard of the books and movies I was mentioning, or hadn't thought of them in a libertarian light.

Over the years, Nuketown has evolved into an increasingly libertarian webzine, but it never had a full-blown section dedicated specifically to the intersection of libertarianism and sci-fi. Now, with this page, it does.