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Alone, unmourned, and unloved
On the same day that BoingBoing announces that it’s publishing the newest Elquest story online, I read that Dave Sim seems to be quitting comics.
This is great news for the Pinis, but it’s unfortunate that the creator of the other big indie comic of that same generation can’t seem to figure out how keep his career afloat.
Granted, many of Sim’s ( Read more... ) -
Walling keeps creeping
You’d think René Walling would have taken his banning from Readercon as a warning, and cleaned his act up. That’s what a sane person would do, right? Take extra-special care not to be a sleazy jerk, just to be on the safe side? Just out of a sense of self-preservation, even if not out of an honest desire to be considerate of women’s feelings? You’d ( Read more... ) -
Boardgames 10 Aug 2012
I decided to skip seeing Lewis Trondheim at Bergen St Comics, and went to NerdNYC boardgame night. Here’s what I played:
Rise!
Simple two-player game. Each player gets to take two actions per turn, which is the primary constraint on the action. We didn’t even bother finishing the game out when it became obvious that I’d win and there was no way ( Read more... ) -
Digger mystery panel
I’m finally getting around to reading Digger, and not really enjoying it much, to tell you the truth. But I’m still fairly near the beginning (just started Chapter 2), and maybe it gets better later on. Anyway, I’m trying to figure something out. Could someone tell me what’s going on in this panel here?
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SANity mechanics for WaRP
Atlas Games has released an Open Games License version of WaRP, the mechanical part of Over the Edge. (For those who haven’t heard of it, Over the Edge was a tremendously influential role-playing game released 20 years ago. And yes, there’s an anniversary edition.)
The PDF included in the download package is so horribly formatted that I had to ( Read more... ) -
Hugo nomination
I forgot to mention it here (having covered it on Facebook and Google+, and had it covered for me on Making Light): I’m nominated for a Hugo award this year.
Technically, it’s The New York Review of Science Fiction that’s nominated (for Best Semiprozine), for something like the 22nd time. (We haven’t won one yet.) But this is the first year we’ve ( Read more... ) -
Home Fires, Gene Wolfe
About half-way through Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires, I gave up. Why?
The dialog. Wolfe’s never been great at writing dialog that sounds like real people talking, which is why my favorite Wolfe work (The Book of the New Sun) is one in which this flaw is made a virtue. But this is bad even for him:
“It wasn’t that at all. They tried … I was afraid ( Read more... ) -
Eminent Domain and Quarriors
Been a while since I talked about boardgames, hasn’t it? I’ve been getting my fix at the monthly NerdNYC boardgame nights. I’ve played a couple of new things:
Eminent Domain
I’ve played this a couple of times. It’s a space-themed deck-building role-taking game, like a cross between Race for the Galaxy and Dominion. The innovation is that each ( Read more... ) -
Unburying treasure
Treasures uncovered while looking for the gesso:
- A pack of a dozen 4×5-inch canvas panels, pre-primed, ready for painting.
- A small desktop easel.
- An old AOL bisk tin, filled with colored glass aquarium stones, of the type gamers use to track various game resources (hit points, Fate points, etc).
- My copies of four games from Cheapass Games’ “Hip ( Read more... )