Ken Newquist Just about everyone I know has one — a computer game handle they’ve been using since the dawn of time. This isn’t necessarily your online name — rather, it’s the name you use when you fire up a computer RPG for the first time, and need to name your character. Like in Zelda. Or TimeSplitters. … Read more
After a long hiatus from publication, Gamma World is back. This time around, Sword & Sorcery (the White Wolf Games imprint) has licensed the venerable science fiction setting from Wizards of the Coast, and is publishing a bunch of books for it, including a Player’s Guide, a Gamemaster’s Guide, a monster book and more. You … Read more
The gunslinger is not a whole man. For years he quested after the man in black, whom he thought was his key the Dark Tower. Along the way, he lost bits of his humanity. First, he sacrificed his hawk David to earn his guns by defeating his teacher, Cort. Then he lost his friends Cuthbert … Read more
I saw The Matrix: Revolutions last Wednesday, and based on some of the reviews I’ve read online (cnn.com, wired.com) I apparently survived a cinematic catastrophe of epic proportions. The sequel (as with its immediate predecessor) was big a failure as its progenitor was a success, or so speakth the pundits. Only the great unwashed masses … Read more
WizKids Games’ HeroClix collectible figure game veers away from the mainstream with its new release, IndyClix.
Two years ago, my science fiction ornaments were on the verge of conquering the evergreen-space of our Christmas Tree. Other ornaments — clear-glass bulbs and small brass ornaments we bought when we were in Wind Gap, nostalgic “Christmas of 19xx” balls, old hand-knitted creations from Sue’s childhood — were nearly overwhelmed by an SF legion … Read more
Puppy Paws Rock: Now that StarGirl’s mobile, she loves crawling across the floor to our yellow Labrador, Madison, reaching out for one of her paws, and trying to pet it. Madison is less than thrilled with this, and promptly gets up and moves to another part of the room. StarGirl, of course, follows, and the … Read more
Drawing on remembered fear of the anthrax scare, an e-mail hoax is alleging that seven women have died after inhaling few perfume samples they received in the mail. I wrote the original debunking on 12/16, but updated it on 10/24 with new information from the CDC (which further debunks the hoax). Here’s the original e-mail: … Read more
My daughter hasn’t been watching much TV — at seven months she doesn’t have the attention span for it, and would rather spend her time crawling around chasing dogs, chewing on blocks or hunting for power cords.
She does like the “Baby Genius” videos though, which feature puppets engaged in a bunch of different short films (and I do mean short — we’re talking films custom-made for baby attention spans, with each scene lasting somewhere around 30 seconds).
Given how much she liked the Genius puppets, we thought she might get a kick out of the Muppets, and decided to rent an episode of The Muppet Show from Netflix. They’ve got a bunch of the old shows on DVD, and when I saw they had one with Mark Hamill on it, I knew exactly which one I was renting first.
A while back I lamented the lack of speculative fiction Weblogs on the net (or at least, my inability to find them). Fortunately, someone out there heard my cry: Doyle Eldon Wilmoth, Jr, editor and publisher of SpecFicWorld.com, who noted that he’d put together a list of scifi blogs on his site. So naturally, I … Read more