Ken Newquist sion of Nuketown. The ol’thermonuclear burg has been thoroughly overhauled, with a new look, a new structure, and a few new tricks. This redesign has been a long time coming — the last time we did something like this was back in August 2000. That design was a good one, and it served us well … Read more
The movie should have been a half-hour longer. I want to throw that out first, because almost every review I’ve read of the movie has gushed over its new, darker, more adult demeanor, and utterly ignored the gutting of the novel’s climax. The movie opens identically to the book, with the boy-wizard Harry once again … Read more
I’ve been reading a fair number of gaming magazines recently, foremost among them being Electronic Gaming Monthly, in a quest to find new games to review. As I’ve paged through them, one thing’s become obvious: these magazines weren’t written for me. They’re aimed at people who live to game …rather than gamers who have lives. … Read more
Nuketown has been online since June 1996. That’s 8 years folks — eight long, fun, content filled years. But as I work my way through Nuketown’s redesign, I’ve reluctantly come to terms with the fact that it’s time to burn a few of the ol’thermonuclear burg’s bridges. There are pages on Nuketown that haven’t been … Read more
Observant visitors to the beta for Nuketown’s redesign site will note that I’ve removed all of the e-mail addresses from the site. You can still contact me via Nuketown, but you’ll need to do it via a Web-based form. Even fiction and non-fiction queries will be handled through a form rather than by an e-mail … Read more
After months (well, more like years) of threatening it, I’m finally redesigning Nuketown. The current design launched back in 2000, and has served the site well. It’s seen several innovations, not the least of which was the introduction of database-driven content. But as with all Web sites, time has not been kind to Nuketown. New … Read more
My last name, Newquist, is fairly uncommon (at least in New Jersey) so it always surprises me when I come across another member of my extended clan. It surprises me even more when said clan member has a blog that’s talking about me. Russell Newquist has a blog called, simply enough, RussBlog and he’s occasionally … Read more
It’s been a while since I posted one of these, so I figured I’d catch everyone up. StarGirl is now 15 months old, and growing like a weed … but a pretty damn cute weed. Her vocabulary remains limited to “Daddy”, “Hi!”, “Uh-oh” and something that sounds kind of like “puppy” (which she happily says … Read more
My friends and I have a problem. We’re scattered geographically and temporally, with jobs, families and commitments that keep us from gaming as much as we’d like. We’ve tried online gaming via Windows but have been disappointed every time. Poor net connections, aging hardware, and incongruent patches foiled us time and again. But the Xbox … Read more
I was driving into work on I-78 in New Jersey with the top down on my Wrangler, sipping my still-steaming hazelnut coffee and enjoying the view of the clear blue skies overhead when I heard it: the unmistakable droning of cicadas. Not just any cicadas though — the Brood X cicadas which journalists have been … Read more