The new Battlestar Galactica RPG was a long time coming, and for a while, it seemed as legendary (and as likely to be found) as Earth is in the television series. But Margaret Weis Productions was selling the game at GenCon, and the general public should be able to get their hands on it by September.

Today's Game Day will see me putting the copy I picked up at the convention to good use as I get behind the screen to run a playtest. I was able to play the game at GenCon, and greatly enjoyed it. Our ground-pounding adventure saw a bunch of Colonial Marines and their Viper pilot captain fighting Centurions, liberating a number of prisoners, and eventually breaking for orbit aboard a stolen transport. The game played fast and furious at GenCon, and its Plot Point mechanic -- which allows players to modify their dice rolls and even bid for minor changes to the story -- proved itself an excellent tool for encouraging role-playing and dramatic play.

After months of tinkering, the new version of UncleBear.com is online. The updated site features a new look, a new WordPress back-end, and the ever-entertaining "Random News" block. Berin's also been working on a variety of other projects, including the long-discussed Imagination's Toolbox, so you can look for a steady stream of coolness emanating from UncleBear.com over the next few days/weeks.

"Green River Rain" by John M. Whalen is the latest short story up on SpaceWesterns.com. Whalen's work has also appeared in Ray Gun Revival.

Jake Bracken never liked the rain. It always seemed to bring him bad luck. It rained that night back on Earth when Holly left him. Took off with a pharmaceutical salesman from Abilene. It rained the day he came home from the Terror War and saw that the Qaeda had burned his ranch to the ground. It was raining now, as he pulled his Hover Jeep up to the boardwalk in front of the Green River saloon.

Can a prescooler get drunk and even die from drinking hand sanitizer? The short answer is ... yes, they can. The following e-mail describes swallowing a squirt of hand sanitizer was enough to make a four-year-old loopy and while it gets some of the specifics wrong -- namely that the child couldn't have had an 85% blood alcohol level, since .10% is enough to kill you, and she probably had a lot more than one quirt -- the general warning is valid. Most hand sanitizer contains a large percentage ethyl alcohol, which can be intoxicating and even deadly if swallowed.

The August 2007 edition of David Langford's science fiction newsletter offers a round of genre news and happenings, including Gardner Dozois' quintuple bypass operation in July, Clive James' lamenting J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis hadn't strangled each other, thus ending their respective fantasy universes) and the lowdown on the Nebula Awards.

The dates for the next three MEPACONs have been announced by the staff of the mid-eastern Pennsylvania game convention. The dates are:

• Fall 2007: 2-4 November
• Spring 2008: 11-13 April
• Fall 2008: 7-9 November

All three conventions will be held at the Holiday Inn in Dunmore, Pa. You can learn more about the convention by visiting its web site at www.mepacon.com.

An e-mail claims that Mars will soon be looming so large in our skies that it will rival the moon. The truth is that while Mars did get very close to Earth a few years ago, that merely turned it into a slightly brighter red star in the sky. If it actually did get as close as the email claims, the Earth would be wracked by high tides and thrown out of its orbit.

Parents are buying domain names for their newborns, partly to make sure the address doesn't get bought up by someone else, partly to provide friends and family with an easy way of getting photos/news and partly because hey, they are geeks. Well, not all of them -- one of the points of the story is that the practice is happening beyond geek circles, with others seeing the value of parking their kids' domain name from day one.

There are privacy concerns -- some folks aren't locking down their kids sites, others are concerned that being able to easily guess a child's domain name (e.g. first name, last name, .com) is an invitation to unsavory types.

GenCon is over. And now I've got a huge pile of loot sitting in my gaming room, just waiting to be read. Amazingly, there's not a single Dungeons & Dragons book to be found among the stack, not even the Expedition to Castle Greyhawk, which I was sorely tempted to buy, but resisted at the last moment.

As the morning sun shone on the final day of GenCon I arrived at my last game of the convention, a Savage Worlds game taking place in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting called Sundered Skies. After liberating a dragon from the deathly bonds of necromancer, I returned to the exhibition hall to complete one final quest: the search for a new set of dice.