En Garde! Meeting Engagement

Confession time: My social media presence has largely shifted over to the dreaded tweet machine and my fiction writing blog.  Funnily enough, I ran into Chicago Wizard over there, too!  Like minds gravitate toward each other and all that.  Due to the usual vagaries of modern political discourse, my...

Spoiling the Loop

Smart sci-fi, genuinely thoughtful sci-fi on the order of a Solaris or a Primer, is a rare thing these days.  Hollywood much prefers to devolve a thoughtful sci-fi property into two men punching each other atop and exploding high place (see Star Trek) or to use slow-mo shots, soft...

Another Saint CoronaChan Miracle

Happy Taxman Cometh Day! Looking for a bright silver lining to the plague cloud of imbalanced bodily humours that our friends in China shared with the world? You can find one at a big box store whose name rhymes with Shome Repo. While bopping around running work related and...

Revised Recommendation: Tales From an Uneven Loop

Previously, I made a strong recommendation for Amazon’s Tales from the Loop. They got me. This discussion will be semi-spoilery.  No major reveals, but you can’t do an episode by episode discussion without touching on the plots, and you really do want to go into this show as blind...

Post-Apocalypse Fiction in A Time of Apocalyptic Non-Fiction

Is now really the best time to write a post-apocalyptic novel? It is if you know what you are doing. And as a writer, let me assure you – I know what I’m doing. The sad fact is that we already live in a post-apocalyptic world.  Several of them,...

How Not To Expert Responsibly

They think we are stupid.  Too stupid to notice what they think of us. Being an expert these days requires an unshakable confidence that you absolutely have the right answers.  Even if your answers change from day to day, just power on through the obvious contradictions as you adamantly...

For The Catholic Bros And Sympathetic Fellow Travelers

At some point the forces of suck will draw out the knives and come for the Catholic Hierarchy.  Now is the time for them to stand strong and help the laity develop enough of a backbone to stand and fight.  Because if they wait for the day when it...

Recommend: Tales From The Loop

If you’ve got an Amazon Prime account and you are into long, slow, and thoughtful sci-fi pieces, you’re going to want to check out Tales From the Loop. As the title indicates, this is an anthology show with each episode a (mostly) self-contained story.  Set in a small Ohio...

Quarantining Alone – The Wargamening

All this extra time on my hands freed up by the lack of a commute bought me a chance to play a round of this solo wargame by Command Decision Games. It’s a card-driven event game combined with a hidden objective search that plays mighty smooth.  There aren’t a...