These convention post-ops to tend to be rather repetitive; I get to hang out with my convention friends, listen to great music, discover new things to play and read, and generally have good time in the world of geeky hobbies and media. This weekend’s RavenCon was not an exception to this pattern. I came into […]

I started “reading” (well, listening to Wil Wheaton performing the text of) Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One this week. I’m only a handful of discs in, but I’m really enjoying it. It’s pretty much pure, condensed nostalgia – aimed pretty much dead center at the culture of my childhood (the pop culture of the 1980s […]

Other than the pope business, the big news in my corner of the internet yesterday was Rob “not the Matchbox 20 guy” Thomas’s Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie project. That this is even kind of a possibility is great news, because I loved me some Veronica Mars. In spite of it’s occasional flaws*, […]

Excellent grades in several AP History courses, a degree in History and Social Studies education (with significant credits sunk into American history), and the actual experience of teaching a high school honors history course as a substitute for a couple of weeks, and it wasn’t until today that I knew why the XYZ Affair of […]

My friend Dan Nokes, chief artist and idea man at 21st Century Sandshark Studios, makes some pretty neat comic books. I’ve talked about them a bit here and there in this space (In fact, you can go and read Impossible Space Tales of the Last Pit Stop and The Reptile and Mr. Amazing: The Return […]

This past weekend, we kicked off our Con season with attendance at Marscon in Williamsburg. This is our third year at this particular Con, and it competes pretty handily with Ravencon as our “home” convention. For me, anyway, the experiences are somewhat similar, because I see a lot of the same friends at both, given […]

Sunday morning, I heard this piece on NPR and got terribly excited about revisiting my undergrad history degree and writing up a clever treatise about my affection for the

Despite the fact that I’m pretty well loaded down with, well, life, lately, I need to take my escapism where I can. One of the most convenient escapes is reading, as I’m sure it is for many of you dear readers as well. For the last few months, I’m plunging through my backlog of pulp […]

Encountered via a passing mention in this week’s commute audiobook, David Hadju’s The Ten ¢ent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, an excerpt from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s commencement address at Dartmouth College in 1953: Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence […]

I purposely don’t talk much about work here except in generalities; there’s something to be said for establishing some boundaries between my lives there and out here in the digital æther. That said, this new job involves some definite life-changing arrangements that seem like proper grist for the blog mill, so, I’m going to talk […]