Google Doodle Fun

Yesterday NASA’s Juno probe reached Jupiter.  Google Inc., as a hotbed of science-loving goofballs, saw fit to mark the occasion with an animated banner showing Team Juno celebrating the event.  This is what the world looks like to Google: The Google Doodle, an irregular feature of the world’s most trafficked...

Fight Stories: Homecoming

I’m just a regular guy, you know?  Half of what I know about boxing comes from experience a little of it firsthand and everything I could tell you about boxing comes from reading about it.  All those deeper meanings and insights into man’s internal struggles have been noticed and...

Guest Post at Castalia House This Week

Monday the good folks over at Castalia House published a guest post by yours truly:  Wargaming for Wargamers Who Don’t Have Time to Wargame.  As a wargame-related article, I had thought it would go up today, but they snuck a high fast one past me here.  It’s not too...

Big Nasty Bugs

Giant scorpions are some of my favorite wandering monsters.  Big, armored, and poisonous, even mid-level adventurers have to consider tangling with them.  Wandering around, they don’t even have any treasure.  (Unless a clever player thinks to carve out its poison sac for sale to an alchemist.) I’ve been trying to...

Fight Stories: Celebration or Cry For Help?

The conventional wisdom states that when it comes to mens’ adventure magazines in general, and magazines with a sweaty guy on the cover in particular, they simmer with barely disguised homoeroticism.  The counter culturalists of the red pill argue that this modern day conventional wisdom was drafted and promulgated by...

DMM: Express to Hell!

The second offering in the April 1938 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine is a short revenge story by Julius Long called Express to Hell!.  On a foggy night, four railroad executives are summoned to a meeting on the railroad owner’s yacht.  The meeting is certain to be a discussion...

Fantasy Boss Monster – Filthy Beast

This is a Reaper Bones miniature, called Filth Beast (#77125) and carved by K. Williams.  This was challenging for a couple of reasons.  It is the first real miniature from Reaper that I’ve painted, and this plastic is not easy to deal with.  I’ve also been experimenting with washes...

World Star! 1938 Style

One of my personal goals in re-reading old pulp adventure magazines is to study the way writers of the first half of the 20th century described high-adrenaline moments.  One of the most frequent high-adrenaline incidents being the classic fist fight.  Let’s take a look at a fight written by...

Dime Detective: Arms of the Flame Goddess

The February 1911 issue of Adventure magazine was grounded in the real world.  It featured the real world exploits of a real-life adventurer-pirate and the inventor of the machine gun.  Even the fiction stories took place on a contemporary earth within the realm of the natural world.  This magazine...

Jolly Good Show, Brexit!

Congratulations to the good people of Great Britain for pulling off a neat trick that we Yanks couldn’t – you’ve regained your independence without firing a shot and without bloodshed.  Must have picked that up from a few of your other colonies.  From this side of the pond, we...