Books and Adventures finishes off a series on comics and educations with a discussion of superheroes and real world issues between Books and Adventures’ Matt Finch, Professor Mark D. White of CUNY; Tom Miller of McMaster University; critic, screenwriter and University of Melbourne graduate student, Martyn Pedler; and artist-educator and doctoral candidate at Teachers College, [...]
Sy Montgomery has a lovely piece up about octopi, intelligence, consciousness and, maybe, friendship. (via @hudsonette)
Cracked provides a list of questionably haunted items, including an evil Zippy the Pinhead doll. Who will have the heart to tell Zippy creator Bill Griffith?
Define reality. I’m not a big follower of reality tv shows, although I find myself sucked in to an episode if I start watching. Sometimes I appreciate the talent and sometimes I’m just rubbernecking at the train-wreck drama or the otherness of other people’s lives, but when my favorite contender on The Glee Project was [...]
For reasons of personal safety, please take time to review these Entrances to Hell in the UK. (Thanks, Steven!)
Former Gutter Overlord and Games Editor, Jim Munroe, has written a really nice little text adventure set at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. Rock Paper Shotgun calls it an “[o]ddly human little thing which captures quite a bit about the human side of development.”
“It’s common practice for one of those guys, in a single day, to chainsaw his way out of the belly of a giant worm, take a detour through a zombie shantytown, euthanise his long-lost wife, and spend hours in a sewer trawling through blood and waste, with monsters leaping up at his face and depositing [...]
Usually, when the media talks about Real Life Superheros they mean firefighters or EMTs or police. NPR’s Monkey See blog means something more awesome: costumed superheroes, featuring the World Superhero Registry. If only they’d included the superheroes’ one costumed mad scientist, Professor Widget.
Oh, to live in the era of the Regency Romance or the epic medieval adventure! Oh, except that life would suck: “No painless dentistry, eccentric provision for sewage, no penicillin and no concept of asepsis, and the condition of most women was not one that I aspire to.”
Michael Moorcock’s latest, and last, fantasy trilogy winds different strands of his fiction together intointertwining, virtually meta-fictional narratives reflecting on mythic and heroic archetypes and the power of stories to create new realities. If you like Moorcock, you will enjoy these books. If you don’t like Moorcock, they probably won’t change your mind. And if [...]
How many games can you play while doing the activity depicted? Margaret Robertson comes up with a grand total of… Chocolate Castle!
A videogamer visits San Francisco and gets a serious case of deja vu — with pictures.
What is science fiction good for? One answer: to speculate on what the future might be like. But I would argue that the game of science fiction is only sometimes about predicting the future. Sure it’s fun to invent flying cars and moonbases, but as even these two examples show, the predictive track record of [...]
What, it’s June already? I’m sure a I had a whole year here a minute ago. In any case, summer means humidity, allergies, and a sad lack of home AC. This year, it also means squirrels in the roof (don’t ask. No, really).
