Ken Newquist GenCon 2007 looms large on my gaming horizon. While I’m going there to game, I’m also going there to shop. I know some of what I want, but the best part of GenCon is the stuff I don’t know I want — the new games, tools and just plain neat stuff that lurks in the … Read more
An old virus hoax stumbles back to virtual life with a debunking bait-and-switch that points to a real threat, then repeats the same tired warning. Date Captured: 8/6/07 Subject: Serious Virus Threat per CNN Report Be cautious of this. Here is a link to the snopes page: http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR … Read more
Go to the bathroom of a non-geek, and you’ll probably find some fairly benign reading material — maybe a copy of Field and Stream, may be Real Simple, maybe the nearly-ubiquitous Chicken Soup for the [insert demographic here] Soul. Not me. I’ve got The Bloody Crown of Conan, a collection of three Robert E. Howard … Read more
We had our last full Game Day before GenCon yesterday, featuring the concluding chapter of the Khelez-Mar dwarven campaign. We’ve also been scrambling to do last minute preparations for GenCon and pounding away on transfering data from our campaign web site to the new wiki. Thieves in the Night The culprits behind the earthquake that … Read more
The summer reading list is going well. Since I finalized the list in Radio Active #51, I’ve finished Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, and Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds. The fiction pile is growing surprisingly short, with only Jim Butcher’s Storm Front and John Scalzi’s The … Read more
Steve Eley of Escape Pod lays down his Ten Laws of Twitter. #1 is probably the best: RESPECT. Every message consumes people’s time. Don’t twitter what you wouldn’t be happy to spend 10 seconds of your own life reading. But they’re all worth reading, and are applicable to more than just Twitter — Facebook wall … Read more
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – The Complete Recordings by Howard Shore and released by Reprise Records is a huge collection containing 3+ hours of music from the movie spread over three CDs and augmented by a video DVD documenting the soundtrack’s production. It’s so huge that a single review won’t do … Read more
I missed out on gaming last week, which makes me overly eager to throw some dice tonight. We’ll eschewing our normal role-playing campaigns in favor of a a round of the most excellent board game Arkham Horror, this time with the very cool-looking expansion, The King in Yellow. We have one, maybe two role-playing sessions … Read more
Where do Rainbows End? Find out in Episode #53 as I review Vernor Vinge’s near-future science fiction thriller in which a 75-year-old man awakens to find his Alzheimer’s cured, his body rejuvenated to that of a teenager … and the world transformed almost beyond belief. I also talk about what I’m reading (Pushing Ice, Harry … Read more
Reason has posted a good article discussing the merits of New York City Department of Education Ronald G. Fryer’s plan to give kids monetary bonuses for both taking and scoring well on academic tests. Some have praised the plan as providing much needed incentives to poor students; others slam it as corrupting the noble nature … Read more