(no subject)
I do live! According to recent reports, anyway. I've actually been trying to post this for a week, but am only just now getting to it. I have a lot of things to catch up on, and hopefully am getting to a portion of them this weekend.
The move, a high volume of chaos (and travel) that followed it, and then rocketing full bore into the new job have all conspired to eat my brain. Many things to catch up on, some of them sad, most of them happy. But since this is time-related, I'm posting that friend/editor/Homeless Moon co-conspirator scott_h_andrews's online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now live, with its first issue featuring work from Chris Willrich and David D. Levine. It's a beautiful issue, and the first line of Willrich's two-part story caught my attention in particular:
One storm-lashed sunset in the Eldshore’s antique capital, beneath Castle Astrolabe’s crumbling perch and near the Zodiac Coliseum’s bloody stones, Gaunt and Bone scaled Heaven’s Vault, there to make a hellish deposit.
A very pulpy but fun story.
David Levine's "Sun Magic, Earth Magic" is a complementary pairing, smooth and clean but distinctive. Check them out!
With these, sneaking in a few sale announcements that I've also been remiss on... "Stormchaser, Stormshaper", an Of Fire and Sea universe short story, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. As others will tell you, Scott has very exacting tastes, so I was thrilled that he liked this story. After many exchanges, "Impress of the Hills" is officially sold to Spacesuits & Sixguns, and Mythic Delirium picked up "Beauty Sleep", a short poem/alternate perspective on a fairy tale you can probably guess.
I also twittered about this, but didn't mention it here, that "We the Gamers" went up on the Escapist last week. It picked up a mention on kotaku, and even got (so far) 617 diggs, though mostly, it seems, because of a single quote that was pulled out by one of the journalists along the way and got them thinking I was talking primarily about DRM. The subcultures of these places are interesting -- apparently "meatspace" is a word one does not use around digg folk. I wish I could even claim I'd been using it to be pretentious -- it's actually part of my common vocabulary, which, given where I work, isn't surprising, but possibly is sad depending on your perspective. ;) The comments vary, as they usually do, from RTFA-bait to insightful, but it does amaze me how many in the gaming community persistently dismiss anything having to do with MMOs. Obviously because of where I work I have a biased perspective on this, but at the moment I'm convinced that not only is the MMO, in one form or another, the dominant genre (with WoW's subscription figures alone there's little disputing this), it's simply the future of gaming, end of discussion. And yet clearly there's a talking-point dismissal of MMOs as subject matter in gaming circles, which leads me to believe that there is a market gap in a definitive news and discussion source for these millions who actually play online games (The Escapist, much as I love what they do, isn't it, by its demographics, and TerraNova is too riddled with academics [no slight on academics, I love them, I'm just limited in my maximum dosage]). But thoughts for another time...
The move, a high volume of chaos (and travel) that followed it, and then rocketing full bore into the new job have all conspired to eat my brain. Many things to catch up on, some of them sad, most of them happy. But since this is time-related, I'm posting that friend/editor/Homeless Moon co-conspirator scott_h_andrews's online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now live, with its first issue featuring work from Chris Willrich and David D. Levine. It's a beautiful issue, and the first line of Willrich's two-part story caught my attention in particular:
One storm-lashed sunset in the Eldshore’s antique capital, beneath Castle Astrolabe’s crumbling perch and near the Zodiac Coliseum’s bloody stones, Gaunt and Bone scaled Heaven’s Vault, there to make a hellish deposit.
A very pulpy but fun story.
David Levine's "Sun Magic, Earth Magic" is a complementary pairing, smooth and clean but distinctive. Check them out!
With these, sneaking in a few sale announcements that I've also been remiss on... "Stormchaser, Stormshaper", an Of Fire and Sea universe short story, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. As others will tell you, Scott has very exacting tastes, so I was thrilled that he liked this story. After many exchanges, "Impress of the Hills" is officially sold to Spacesuits & Sixguns, and Mythic Delirium picked up "Beauty Sleep", a short poem/alternate perspective on a fairy tale you can probably guess.
I also twittered about this, but didn't mention it here, that "We the Gamers" went up on the Escapist last week. It picked up a mention on kotaku, and even got (so far) 617 diggs, though mostly, it seems, because of a single quote that was pulled out by one of the journalists along the way and got them thinking I was talking primarily about DRM. The subcultures of these places are interesting -- apparently "meatspace" is a word one does not use around digg folk. I wish I could even claim I'd been using it to be pretentious -- it's actually part of my common vocabulary, which, given where I work, isn't surprising, but possibly is sad depending on your perspective. ;) The comments vary, as they usually do, from RTFA-bait to insightful, but it does amaze me how many in the gaming community persistently dismiss anything having to do with MMOs. Obviously because of where I work I have a biased perspective on this, but at the moment I'm convinced that not only is the MMO, in one form or another, the dominant genre (with WoW's subscription figures alone there's little disputing this), it's simply the future of gaming, end of discussion. And yet clearly there's a talking-point dismissal of MMOs as subject matter in gaming circles, which leads me to believe that there is a market gap in a definitive news and discussion source for these millions who actually play online games (The Escapist, much as I love what they do, isn't it, by its demographics, and TerraNova is too riddled with academics [no slight on academics, I love them, I'm just limited in my maximum dosage]). But thoughts for another time...