Last Friday, I started noticing occasional pain in my left ribcage and shortness of breath. For reasons I've explained at length before, these are worrying symptoms, but they were so intermittent that I didn't reach the obvious conclusion. I was also occasionally coughing ( Read more... )

Because of attrition at my office, I work some distance from anyone else on my floor. However, my cubicle is immediately adjacent to the door from the equities trading floor. So, every now and then, one or another trader will stop and look over the wall to find out what I'm eating that smells so damn delicious ( Read more... )

Here's a comics Kickstarter project that showed up on The Comics Beat today. It looks like an interesting project--pretty colored pencil work with a decent visual storytelling senseI doubt I'll be backing it ( Read more... )

This is a story I've told orally many times, but it appears I've never written it down.

From 1992 until 2001, I worked for Crossover Technologies, a small and never particularly successful games company--well, we did some other projects as well, but our core business was online games. From 1995 to 1997, I was the producer for our first web-based ( Read more... )

Ten years have passed.

For some reason, the rest of you have not united to kill America in our sleep for your own safety.

I can't understand why not. Thank you for your mercy; we don't deserve it.

I'm keeping a list of science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror "tribute" volumes--anthologies of stories in the style of, using the subject matter of, or just in honor of major figures in the field. I'll update this list whenever I come across new information.

• Anderson, Poul. Multiverse. Greg Bear & Gardner Dozois, eds. 2013 (forthcoming).
• ( Read more... )

After reviewing the 1000+ comics I read last year, I came up with a score of works that struck me as exceptional and that meet the qualifications of being science fiction or fantasy stories which were completed in 2012.

• Avengers Academy: Final Exam, by Christos Gaga, Andrea DeVito, et al
  
• Batgirl: The Darkest Reflection, by Gail Simone & Ardian ( Read more... )

I would do a much better job of keeping up with my LJ friends if I could get friends-locked posts exposed to me, and only me, in Google Reader. However, there is apparently no way to get Livejournal RSS feeds to show friends-locked posts that doesn't involve creating a publicly accessible feed name with my LJ name and password embedded into it ( Read more... )

One of the pleasures of working on NYRSF is our weekly meetings, which are held at the offices of Tor Books in The Historic Flatiron Building^tm. A few months ago, I was walking down the hall and spotted Jim Frenkel, in for one of his quarterly visits from the wilds of Wisconsin, and we fell to talking. At one point, he mentioned that he had known ( Read more... )

A few years ago, I was driving home after my weekly trip to the recycling center. A large Dunkin Donuts iced coffee sat in the cup holder by my right hip, still mostly full. I cleared a small rise leading to an exit ramp and had to brake sharply on the downhill side because there was a surprising line of cars backed up waiting to exit. The coffee ( Read more... )