I recently dug out an old favorite game of mine - Age of Wonders II. It is a turn based strategy game set in a generic fantasy world, where a player controls questing heroes, manages cities and commands armies. Almost without thinking I find myself looking to see if the game still has an active fan community. This was because because I was looking ( Read more... )

Over the last two nights I sat down and watched Oliver Stone's third attempt at his film Alexander. Well holy shit, it was almost another movie compared to the disappointingly awful one I saw in theatres back in 2004. I have not seen the shorter 2005 DVD version which I have heard is "less gay, more action". Basically, it became a damn fine film, ( Read more... )

Perhaps some of you are already aware of what has now been termed Race Fail '09 (a brief summary) within the science fiction community. I'm not going to provide any commentary on the issue itself, as basically all that can be said has been said, with varying degrees of vehemence and offensiveness. Not surprisingly racism is an emotional issue, and ( Read more... )

Today in the mail, my father received a letter from Sarah Palin. Yes, it is that Sarah Palin. Anyway, the letter was related to the 50th anniversary of Alaska's statehood. My father had been doing research on a John Beaton, a man originally from this little Cape Breton village of Port Hood, who went to Alaska around the turn of the century. In 1908 ( Read more... )

Not really much to report these days. I've been working at a local grocery store part time. In my spare time I've watching Brideshead Revisited with karenjeane. We just finished this massive eleven part, 700 minute miniseries starring a young Jeremy Irons. It was excellent and full of interwar ennui in the upper classes. We plan on spending the whole winter ( Read more... )

A week ago, I finally got to see the film Passchendaele, the recently released film about the Battle of Passchendaele. Passchendaele was arguably the most iconic battle of the First World War, emblematic of the horror of industrialized warfare. Images of skeletal trees in the cratered moonscape of No Man's Land, and the mud which swallowed men ( Read more... )

On more of a personal note, I haven't been up to much. Still working at North End, altough part time now. In my spare time I've been doing a university course by correspondance through Athabasca University. Compared to regular university, I find it very refreshing. Not only is it much cheaper, but I don't have to attend classes and can work at my ( Read more... )

I work in a hardware store, and while counting inventory it's hard not to notice where the products come from. At least half of them are manufactured in China, and those that aren't proudly advertise this fact. In these past 20 years, China has become the industrial heartland of the world, producing mountains of cheap consumer goods for us in the ( Read more... )

For the little bit I've been playing FreeCiv, a free and open source redesign of the Civilization series, particularly to give it a stronger multiplayer component. I've always loved the concept behind the series - to take control of a society at the dawn of history and haul it up by the bootstraps to modernity and beyond. I was just never a fan of ( Read more... )