One of my favorite books as a teen, and a huge influence on me during that time, was a novel called The Armageddon Rag, by the then-little-known George R.R. Martin. The book is about... well, it's about many things, including loss of innocence, the metaphorical end of the Sixties, the rewards and regrets inherent in revisiting the past, and the ( Read more... )

Final entry in the 2012 XYZZY best games review project -- Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis. With tremendous innovation, technical polish, and abundant humor, Adam Thornton upends the medium of interactive fiction with a work that's simultaneously traditionalist and transgressive, a layered and richly allusive delivery system for some highly ( Read more... )

[We interrupt our regularly scheduled IF reviews for this topical superhero discussion. That review of Mentula Macanus is coming soon-- er, on its way.]

I've been reading a lot of 1960s Marvel comics lately, letter columns and all. I did this once before, with just Spider-Man comics, which was a lot of fun. This time I'm skipping around more from ( Read more... )

Here's another entry in the series of 2012 XYZZY nominees game reviews: Robb Sherwin's Cryptozookeeper. It's the most Sherwin-esque Sherwin game I've yet seen. It's gonzo, it's funny, it's extreme, and it's shambolic, and it's all these things to the most highly refined degree I've ever seen Robb accomplish, which means it's all these things to the ( Read more... )

IF-Review has published the second in my series reviewing all the Best Game XYZZY nominees of 2012. The game this time is Wade Clarke's Six. I don't think I've ever been so charmed by an IF game.

It's been a long, long time since I reviewed a text game, so I'm embarking on a mini-project of reviewing all four games nominated for the 2011 Best Game XYZZY award. First up: Zombie Exodus. My review is up now at IF-Review. Thanks to Mark Musante for publishing it.

Last year, I wrote about the Beatles album Love, an astonishingly brilliant mash-up of Beatles songs crafted by George and Giles Martin. That album is the soundtrack to a Cirque Du Soleil show of the same name, which appears in only one place in the world: the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Well, when I knew I would be going to Vegas, ( Read more... )

On the very occasional occasions when I write some stuff on other sites, I try to mention it here. So...

I've just written a couple of Amazon reviews: one for the new Melissa Etheridge album, and one for an out-of-print book of quotations. Writing a review of an out-of-print book may be the very definition of pointless ( Read more... )

I've written before about GET LAMP, the text adventure documentary. Back in March, I got to watch an hour-long mix of it at PAX East. Now, the full film is available on DVD, so I get to write about it again. Let me get right to the point: if you love text games, or you want to know more about them, you should watch this movie. Stephen Granade ( Read more... )

I have to confess, the whole Love thing completely passed me by. I vaguely heard, four years ago or so, that Cirque du Soleil was doing some Beatles tribute show. Because I've never seen a Cirque show, and because my imagination has been stunted by television and video games, all I can picture is a bunch of guys in tights, swinging from trapezes, ( Read more... )