Roman d20 Up For Auction

The gaming world is abuzz with an online auction being held at Christies.com for a Roman twenty-sided die (d20). Check it out for yourself. The item’s described as a “Roman Glass Gaming Die” that was created around the 2nd century A.D. It’s deep blue-green in color, and has different symbols carved into each of its … Read more

On Dates, Dating, and Cryptography

Time to geek out a bit. Ok, ok … it’s time to geek out a lot. Those of you who aren’t interested in programming, Julian or Gregorian calendars or Neal Stephenson should probably stop reading now. I’m working on a project at work where I have to select a bunch of dates from a MS … Read more

Searching for Other Geek Christmas Trees

This year’s Geek Tree is almost complete. So is the feature about it for Nuketown, which will include a browseable database of the ornaments (with each one reviewed and commented on), photos and maybe, just maybe, video. I’m also looking to create a section linking to other geek trees on the Web. Which brings me … Read more

No Joy in Mac Land

I’m in the process of reviewing Wolverine’s RevengeĀ for the Mac — so far it’s playing like a fighting game crossbreed with a traditional third-person adventure game. Unfortunately, because of its console background (it was released for PS2 and Xbox before coming to the PC and now finally the Mac) the keyboard-and-mouse combination that’s served me … Read more

Dealing With Anti-D20 Snobbery

I’ve been gaming for a hell of a long time. For the last few years ago, most of the stuff I’ve been doing is d20 based. There are a lot of reasons for it, the biggest being that we converted our Greyhawk campaign to D&D 3E in 2000. It’s worked well for us (none of … Read more

A Boy Named Tac

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

Glitches in Gamma World’s Background Radiation

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

Topping the Geek Tree

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

Thoughts from a Seven Month Old’s Dad

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

The Muppets take Tatooine

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.