This summer, over the 4th of July weekend, I will be at CONvergence in the Twin Cities, for the benefit of anyone who wants to attend and geek out with me. (Paul Cornell will also be there. I won’t be upset if you tell him that you came for him and not for me. We’ll [...]

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(with a tip of the hat to the wonderful ‘Room 237′…) The key to understanding the Kubrick movie ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ is to understand that Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, one who never left anything to chance. The reshoots that Kubrick undertook, reshoots that scrapped an already-filmed and extremely expensive ending, were explicit in [...]

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I’ve thought for a long while that any long-running series eventually stops being about anything other than itself. Each individual story might be about something; “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, for example, is about the absurdity of racial prejudice. But that’s not what ‘Star Trek’ is about. Other episodes of the series were about [...]

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There are some comics out there that for some reason just didn’t get the kind of success they deserved. ‘Leave It To Chance’, the series by James Robinson and Paul Smith, was a huge critical success that won the Harvey and the Eisner Awards for Best New Series in its first year, and yet it [...]

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I’m watching ‘Babylon 5′ for the first time this year. (What can I say, it’s not exactly something you do over a weekend.) It’s funny, because I remember all of my friends and most of my acquaintances absolutely rhapsodizing about the series when it was on, while I kind of didn’t get into it because [...]

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Yes, I’m posting about the new Doctor Who. Because if I do have a “thing” on this website, which I’m quite prepared to entertain arguments that I don’t, it’s that I’m the “Doctor Who guy”. And there’s a new half-season on, because the BBC is too cheap to fund more than about six episodes a [...]

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I originally wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about the Steubenville rape trial; I imagined that everything I want to say on the subject would be pretty obvious, and it’s not exactly a fun topic of conversation. But my wife pointed out that the people who need to hear most about the subject are [...]

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‘Smash Up’, by AEG, is pretty much a do-it-yourself version of all the “high concept” stories out there that slap two memes together as a substitute for actual creativity. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, right? The ones where some screenwriter says, “Oh, zombies are big right now, and steampunk is very [...]

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I don’t know if the 80s really were a sort of Golden Age of syndicated comics, or if I’m just remembering the highlights better than the lowlights. But there were some genuinely great strips back then, many of whom made the rare decision to exit the field before they got stale and stagnant. We got [...]

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As I’m given to understand it, Sony announced the other day that the astonishing perfection of the CD-based Playstation, which had been superseded by the even more astonishing perfection of the DVD-based Playstation 2, which had then been rendered obsolete by the Blu-Ray vision that was the Playstation 3, had in turn become an outmoded [...]

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…Robo-Rally. For those of you that have never played, it is one of the most chaotically fun board games ever, pound-for-pound. You steer a robot through an obstacle course (one that involves, over the course of the various expansions, lasers, flamethrowers, radioactive waste, crushers and bottomless pits, among other things) using your hand of cards [...]

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A few weeks ago, I suggested the idea of a Geek Guide to Everything, a sort of A-Z of geek interests that a young and inexperienced fan of cult fiction could use to pick up information on the things they were likely to hear about from folks with similar interests. The idea was not fondly [...]

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Way back at the beginning of my time on this site, I waxed rhapsodic about ‘The Elongated Man’, but I think it’s been long enough that it’s worth repeating: The old ‘Elongated Man’ backup strips in the Silver Age ‘Flash’ comic, which have been collected in DC’s ‘Showcase Presents’ series of big black-and-white trade paperbacks, [...]

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I’ll admit, I haven’t been playing nearly as many boardgames as I’d like these days; after storing up an entire wardrobe full of games for a rainy day, we’ve been in a situation for about two or three years where someone’s always working nights and/or weekends. Plus the little one is only now getting to [...]

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The crowd was loud, and in orcish fashion, it was constantly teetering on the edge of a riot. Every orc jostled another orc in the tight quarters of the rocky defile, and every orc so jostled shoved and pushed right back. Even Dorral did his share of pushing and shoving; any orc who didn’t push [...]

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