by Amanita Design. Ray and I finished Machinarium this week. WHOAH.  I feel like we really accomplished something.  And neither one of us could have done it without the other.  We make a good team. Click on the link, play the demo. Anyway, the game is about a robot who wakes up in a trash […]

by Elizabeth Bear. Well, I can’t say this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I liked Hammered quite a bit. Does this book count as military SF?  It’s about a woman who’s been used and screwed by a military black ops division in Canada.  They now want her back, because the particular hell

by Kou Fumizuki. Wow.  I started reading these books expecting to just love this series. Ugh.  No like. Imagine Ah! My Goddess or Fruits Basket with bland, flat, stock characters who act in bland, flat, stock-character ways, and you’ve got this series in a nutshell. The “perfect woman” (that is, 100% docile and 100% loyal)

by Hal Duncan. I wanted to like this book, but I didn’t. No, I liked it enough to finish it – almost more to see whether the ending would work than to find out what happened, which was that there was going to have to be a sequel. It looks like a lot of people

by Diana Wynne Jones. This is another fantastic YA by DWJ about a girl who has done nothing but read books her entire life and has become thoroughly useless.  My mother may find this singularly appropriate; however, it’s the mother’s fault for forcing this uselessness (as a pretense to “respectability”), so watch it. The girl,

All the plots and betrayals are starting to come to fruition.  We’re in the endgame of an international fictional chess game, with perfectly defined pieces.  For as much as is going on in this series, it’s impressive that it hasn’t jumped the shark or started repeating itself, pretending to be ever more impressive.  FMA is

Good news – big work project is done! Bad news – Rejections 7/11. # Also, Machinarium still kicking our butts. However, we did collaboratively solve several nassssty puzzles. # Hey @ianthealy – Since I started reading your hockey story, I've been looking at the fans with a little less pure ?!?!? # @davisac1 Okay, I

by Serena Valentino and Crab Scrambly. Serena Valentino is the writer of Gloom Cookie (drawn by Ted Naifeh). I don’t know.  I wanted to be happier with this graphic novel than I was.  I like the art, I generally like the writer.  But the book just wasn’t scary enough, and the plot twist just didn’t

I didn’t expect the FAC to have such a sweet theater.  Allow me to gush:  it’s the perfect size.  Not so flat that they’re tempted to rely on tricks like doing theater in the round (annoying), not so small that they can’t sell enough tickets to pay for professionals.  Not so big that you can’t

I’ve been messing around with settings – here’s use of a higher ISO setting with no flash.  The graininess comes from the setting. Here’s messing around with the camera’s pitiful macro setting. Microplane! A picture for Ray – Tiger LPS in conquest of lasagna. And Tiger LPS explores the world of Mouse Guard. Ray’s foot