Here are some pretty good doodles I just came across in one of my notebooks from USC. Something tells me these are from around the time that 300 and TMNT came out.
Science fiction author and podcaster
Here are some pretty good doodles I just came across in one of my notebooks from USC. Something tells me these are from around the time that 300 and TMNT came out.
New HBO Game of Thrones trailer. By far the best one yet:
Dammit. Just saw that Irvin Kershner, director of The Empire Strikes Back, has died. I took his screenwriting class at USC a few years ago. Really nice guy, and I doubt there was anything about movies that he didn’t know. He was also a good sport about answering all my Star Wars questions, when I’m sure he would have rather been talking about Ingmar Bergman.
Episode 1 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is now up on io9. This is a slightly more polished version of the file that ran on Tor.com back in January. If you missed our premiere episode, now’s the perfect time to listen to us chat about zombies, video games, and the end of the world. Featuring an interview with Chet Faliszek, lead writer on the Left 4 Dead games.
Via John Joseph Adams:
I’m editing another anthology of reprint fiction for Night Shade Books, this time focused on Cthulhu/Mythos fiction. It will be called The Book of Cthulhu and will be released sometime next fall. As I’ve done with most of my other anthologies, I’d like to solicit recommendations, so if you have any outstanding examples of Cthulhu fiction you’d to point out to me, please feel free to let me know about them by entering them into my Cthulhu/Mythos Fiction Database.
Keith Burgun, lead designer of the awesome 100 Rogues iPhone game, writes in response to my blog post “Best Doom Deathmatch Map Ever”:
I can totally vouch for this as one of the greatest Doom deathmatch levels ever devised! I absolutely love KPrison, Dave, so much that I ripped several elements of it off in various maps of my own. I even had one map that I called “KSFALLS,” and I think I just added the K because I wanted it to sound like it was like kprison (The “S” was because it was “slime-falls”).
HBO has launched a new video podcast for A Game of Thrones with featurettes about the upcoming series.
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is listed as one of the Top 10 Favorite Podcasts over at the Pansentient League. The SF Signal Podcast also made the list.
Here’s a review on PopMatters of The Living Dead 2:
Almost without exception, the stories here are quite good. The assembled writers know where zombie fiction has been, and either mine existing conventions for more substance, or take the genre in new directions entirely. David Barr Kirtley returns to the intriguing world he built in the first volume’s “The Skull-Faced Boy,” in which zombies form organized armies to fight the living, in the expansive “The Skull-Faced City.”
Just found out about this. It’s Doom on my iPhone:
Episode 25 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast is now available. This episode features an interview with Robert Kirkman, creator of the graphic novel series The Walking Dead, basis of the new hit series on AMC. John and I agree that these graphic novels are the best zombie story we’ve ever seen, and the TV show is quite good too so far. Kirkman’s first ever prose fiction publication, “Alone, Together,” appears in John’s new anthology The Living Dead 2 (alongside my story “The Skull-Faced City”). This episode also features John and me comparing notes on some of the zombie stuff we’ve watched recently.
Here’s a great panel discussion. The Seattle Geekly podcast presents Retrospective on Roleplaying:
This last year saw the loss of Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and Erick Wujcik, three of the founding fathers of the RPG hobby. What were their contributions and how did roleplaying become what it is today?
In this panel, recorded Saturday August 8 at Dragonflight 2009, gaming luminaries Peter Adkison, the founder and first CEO of Wizards of the Coast, Tim Beach, who contributed material to virtually all of TSR’s campaign settings in the 1990s, Skaff Elias, the original VP of R&D for Magic: The Gathering, and Jonathan Tweet, one of the lead designers for the 3.0 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, discuss the past and future of the hobby.
Christie Yant, who has assisted us mightily with the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, just had her first published story, “The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories,” picked by Rich Horton for his Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition. The story, which appears in the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard, is free to read online. Congrats!
So after mentioning Amber Diceless Role-playing in the SF Signal Mind-Meld, I tried searching for podcasts featuring the game’s designer Erick Wujcik, which led me to an interview with Jason Durall in Episode 7 of the Unfettered Development podcast. Durall wrote sections of the Shadow Knight supplement, and signed on to write the never-released Rebma sourcebook (the cover of which has turned up online), and according to him he finished the whole thing but it was never released due to problems with the publisher. Sounds like there’s still some hope of it being published someday. I would really like to get my hands on that. Also, it looks like Durall is currently working on a very Amber-influenced RPG called Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, utilizing the Amber game rules.
io9 has decided to run Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Episode 25 tomorrow rather than today, so as not to have a bunch of big features all come out at the same time, but never fear, the show is ready to go and will be appearing on Thursday. (In this episode we interview Robert Kirkman about his graphic novel series The Walking Dead, basis for the new hit show on AMC.)
I was invited to take part in my first SF Signal Mind Meld, on the topic of favorite sf/f games. I discuss Ultima, Monkey Island, Doom, Amber Diceless Role-playing, and Interstellar Pig. The article also includes responses by Ari Marmell, Scott Schaffer, Tobias Buckell, Kevin Brusky, John Scalzi, Tim Zinsky, John Joseph Adams, Trent Ditto, and Tim Akers.
100 Rogues, a super-fun iPhone game designed by my buddy Keith Burgun, just got patched to version 2.0. This is a major, major upgrade that adds all sorts of new features, such as more varied dungeon layouts, tons of new monsters and items, a new boss monster, and a greatly expanded finale in hell. I just made it up to the final boss, Satan, for the first time, but alas, he vanquished me. If you own an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and are looking for something to kill time on long flights/train rides, this is just the thing. It’s even drawn the notice of Bioshock creator Ken Levine. Check it out.
Who’s the new boss in 100 Rogues 2.0?
You’ll just have to play it and find out.
Just saw that Myke Cole, who I know from back in the day when he was an assistant at Weird Tales, has sold his fantasy novel Latent to Penguin Putnam in a 3-book deal. I ran into Myke this year at New York Comic Con, where he described the book as “military contractors who are also sorcerers.” (Myke has been on the ground in Afghanistan working as a military contractor.)
This is fascinating. The Skeptoid podcast takes a critical look at “speed reading.”
My story “The Skull-Faced City” is singled out as “the biggest disappointment” in this commentary (contains major spoilers) on The Living Dead 2.
My grandfather Roger Barr passed away early this morning at the age of 98. He was my mom’s father, and was my last surviving grandparent. He was being cared for by my uncle Steve (his son) and aunt Denice — both medical professionals — and was still sharp and good-humored in his final days. Yesterday […]