West Karana

Rumor has it that The Middleman, probably the best SF/comedy on TV this season, is in danger! Not of cancellation, but of being restricted to just one season. Creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach writes on The Middleblog that despite stellar network support, ratings haven’t been great, and they have decided to end The Middleman at episode 12, and to go out with a bang.

If you don”t watch The Middleman, you should. And if you DO watch, but via torrent or something, well, watch it on TV (I do, now), or watch it online — ABC Family streams each show after it airs, and people watching via the web in that way definitely support the show.

It’s way better to support these shows while they are still on the air, than to discover them on DVD years later and ask, plaintively, why they don’t make shows like THAT anymore! Just what I have to say about Firefly…

If you actually CAN watch this, then I guess their servers have managed to recover from yesterday’s crush. After trying for awhile, I just got the first episode of Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” through a torrent.

Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, a struggling mad scientist hoping one day to join the supervillain group, “The Evil Society of Evil”. He occasionally does a video blog where he discusses problems like how his transmat ray is going, what his nemesis Captain Hammer (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) did to him last week that really hurt, how his evil laugh is coming along (he has just gotten a vocal coach), and how nervous he is about talking to a girl he sees at the laundromat, Penny, played by Buffy’s Felicia Day.

This leads into the song “Freeze Ray”, about a gun he wants to invent that will freeze time, so it would be easier to talk to her. He’s interrupted by his friend Moist, who has the power to make stuff damp. He’d been on a date last night with the super-villainess Bait and Switch. At the end of the night, he’d been hoping to go home with Bait, but… oh well.

Among the sopping wet pieces of mail he delivers is a letter from Bad Horse, the evil equine leader of the Evil Society of Evil, which leads right into the song, “Bad Horse” (and where did those cowboys with the painfully fake mustaches come from?).

The thing is hilarious. It’s short, has four fantastically funny songs (the other two are the one Penny sings as she tries to get signatures on her petition to convert an old building to a homeless center, and the song that ends in a three-part harmony between Dr. Horrible, Captain Hammer, and Penny, “A Man’s Gotta Do”).

I won’t spoil anything — but watch it. There will be two other “webisodes”, and even though all three together will likely be only half an hour — I’d buy the DVD.

edit — link to Joss Whedon’s post about Dr. Horrible, how it came to be, and what will become of it. Next episode is up THURSDAY and after July 20 they will no longer be free to watch, though it’s well worth paying.

Just discovered the blog of Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator, writer and artist for “The Middleman” comics and the new TV series of the same name. Monday nights. ABC Family. Lots of inside info about upcoming episodes and behind the scenes stuff. Yeah, I know YOU’RE already watching the best comedy SF show on television right now, but I’m just letting those other people who are too good and hip to watch television know about it.

I mean, I just can’t believe where you (not you, those other people) get off always telling me TV is crap. Every single season I have to come back and say, look at this, this, and this. Now my preggers (but not for long) sister has just revealed she has just started getting into Battlestar Galactica. Welcome to three years ago, Hillary :) Finally, though!

So anyway. The Middleman. You’ll love it. You overseas people, it’s just now starting to hit the torrents.

I almost — ALMOST — bought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith this weekend, for the PS3. And I probably would have, if I’d gone there Sunday instead of Saturday. Games for the PS3 are $60, the new price point, and I’d have had to buy a guitar controller for the PS3 as well.

I have two guitar controllers for the Xbox 360 and two more for the PS2. My desire to invest in more guitar controllers is precisely zero.

And yet, I wanted to find a game to play for my PS3. It’s great for watching Doctor Who on the big screen (”The Stolen Earth” — AMAZING.) but I feel really frustrated that I haven’t been able to find even one game for the PS3 worth the $60.

I thought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith would be the one. But it wasn’t for sale when I went. I played the Guitar Hero demo system they had set up near the Aerosmith display, thinking it was a preview for the new game. I realized, though, as I worked through the set list, that this was Guitar Hero III, a game I’d played through once on the PS2, but was so turned off by the awful boss battles that I never played it again.

I went home, plugged the PS*2* in, and played Guitar Hero III again. I was AWFUL. Absolutely HORRID.

What followed was at least an hour or two of calibrating the game for the new widescreen TV. Ahhhhh…. I could play again.

I mean, when you can’t even hit the notes at the very slowest speed in practice mode — it’s not you.

Anyway, I wanted the game for the PS3, but it’s the exact same game as for the PS2, and I already have the controllers for the PS2 (and they remain my favorite of all the controllers). The picture was a little fuzzy but the music was just as loud.

I WANT to believe. I WANT to believe that the $400 lump of metal and plastic beneath my TV is worth more than just a REALLY GOOD media controller to someone who isn’t into shooters and war games. (PS3 fans go WTF? What other kinds of games ARE there?).

My search for a game that I can show people that will justify the PS3 continues.

Tor has been continuing their free release of books in electronic form, and I have been totally enjoying these free glimpses into new works, formatted to display well on my Sony Reader. First, though, is a book still hammered into the beating heart of dead trees.

Matter by Iain M. Banks — Banks’ returns to his much-anticipated stories of people at the fringes of his Utopian spacefaring civilization, The Culture. In the Culture, all boring work is down by non-sentient machines, the intelligent machines and human-kinda people basically do what they want and live in gigantic spaceships or massive orbital stations, and are really kind of boring. Since it’s no fun being part of the Culture if you can’t fiddle with other less advanced civilizations, the Culture stories almost entirely focus on the Special Circumstances crew; those who have a taste for harsh living and interference.

It’s a good thing they do, because what’s happening in the local Shellworld could mean bad juju for the entire galaxy. Shellworlds are gigantic artificial planets built as a series of nested spheres by an ancient civilization that had surrounded the galaxy with them back in the day. Their original purpose was unknowable, but since they all left, and the civilizations of the galaxies beat back the other aliens who were systematically destroying the Shellworlds, colonists have arrived now and again to start new lives amidst massive alien tech.

Matter starts us out in the middle of a war between two feudal societies both pulled into the Industrial Revolution by covert alien influence. Level 8 of the Shellworld attacks Level 9. Betrayals, intrigue, flights, a trip into the vastnesses of many alien civilizations (including eventually the Culture), the invasion of Level 8 by Level 9 in retribution, a massive waterfall slowly wearing away the cliff that covers an ancient alien city, a princess sold to (assumed) slavery in the Culture, a prince deposed… Matter splatters bits of color all over the canvas to begin, and by the time its filled in the rest of the painting, you’ve read galaxy-spanning space opera at its finest. I would recommend Matter as a good introduction to Iain M. Banks’ science fiction.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson — Here’s when I fell in love with this book.

The Milky Way was a band of white fluorescence (now brighter, now darker) lit by flaring, dying stars. Stars were created and stars were demolished with every breath of summer air.

And it all moved.

Moved in vast shimmerings and intricate dances suggesting ever-greater, still-invisible cycles. The sky beat like a heart above us. “So alive,” Diane said.

One night, the stars quietly went dark. Every satellite in the sky came crashing to Earth. People panicked. The Earth was veiled by an opaque field they came to call The Spin, and it wasn’t just making astronomy impossible, it was pulling the Earth into the future; a million years outside the Spin were a single year on Earth. Hardly anyone believed this until an ill-considered nuke strike against one of the orbiting structures thought to be responsible for the Spin dropped the veil slightly for awhile, and the effects of accelerated time were all around.

The rapidly aging Sun making life on Earth unprotected by the Spin increasingly impossible. The people of Earth plot a desperate plan to use the passage of time itself to save them from an inevitable death in the corona of the expanding Sun and to find out just how and why they were abducted by the Spin at all.

SF is full of stories about unknowably advanced aliens who put a shield around the planet to protect us from the galaxy, the galaxy from us, punishment, judgement, as an incubator — whatever. It’s a common trope. What sets The Spin apart is Wilson’s incredibly apt portrayal of how life can continue on a world where something incredible has taken place… and yet people still have to work and eat, taxes must be paid. The story of life under the Spin is interwoven with a tale of life after it; both tales give clues about the other in an indirect way that doesn’t spoil many surprises. The eventual reveal of the Spin’s purpose is telegraphed far enough in advance that we needn’t wonder too much how the book will turn out; what’s important about the Spin is not its end, but the journey there.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi — I loved Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as much as anyone when I was a kid. Remove the libertarian politics and add more sex, and you have Old Man’s War.

In the future, Earth has colonized the stars. But it’s a busy place out there, and nothing is given for free. We have to fight for places to live, fight to keep them, and fight in revenge when they are taken from us. Life in the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) is brutal, and usually short. They need lots of willing recruits who are glad of whatever extra time they get to defend the colonies. And they get them in the senior centers of good old Earth. For a promise of renewed youth, the elderly of Earth are sent out to fight and die for the colonies. A writer and his wife sign up for the CDF when they are 65; if they make it to 75, they are allowed to ship out. He makes it, she doesn’t. From there we follow Rico’s career is a space marine, dropping onto strange planets to kill what they need to kill, trying not to be killed, and watching the idiots who don’t follow order die, and good friends who did, also die. Can an old man in the body of a twenty year old find love among the stars and also stay alive long enough to enjoy it? It could happen. If you loved Starship Troopers for its tales of brave soldiers fighting every description of homicidal alien, you’ll enjoy this acknowledged homage to that classic of SF.

—

Tor keeps sending books to me and I have to keep putting them on my Reader. I found a site that publishes classic SF works that have fallen out of copyright in electronic form, and I’ll be writing about that soon. Cory Doctorow just posted his latest work, Little Brother, about a group of teens who use brilliance and technology to throw off the creeping Big Brother-ism that is engulfing the US and Britain, and I’ll be giving that a glance as well.

Currently finishing up Julian May’s The Golden Torc just for fun.

Ah, I think I found the problem…

I haven’t written about the Fires of Pompeii episode or Planet of the Ood because, well, who cares. I’ll never watch either episode again. Scratch that; I watched the Pompeii one twice. That was good Who. Planet of the Ood will be sent to the psycho-recycler by armies of gray-clad, tentacly-faced Ood.

This week, the Doctor rehearses a goodbye speech, Donna visits her Uncle Ben and Aunt May, Martha Jones takes a crash course in effective minion management, the people of Britain forget how to roll down their car windows, and Evil Wesley Crusher helps an army of ugly hobbits take over the world, in part 1 of the Sontaren Stratagem.

Spoilers follow!

(more…)

The problem is not that Battlestar Galactica has tranformed science fiction television. The problem is that it has set such an impossibly high bar that its future imitators won’t be able to surpass it. I just got to watching Friday’s episode. This fourth and final season, every single episode goes places I have never seen in any sort of fiction, science or otherwise. I’m not even going to try and urge you to watch it. You do or you don’t. All I want to say here is, sometimes something comes along that changes all the rules. There has been a lot of good SF on TV — Babylon 5 was pretty awesome, but it went a different way. B5 was a mirror held up to the Star Trek shows that said, here are the parts of your shiny happy world you never talk about. Battlestar Galactica says, fuck the future. This is a cruel story, and all cruel stories end the same way.

Last night, millions of Britons (8.4 millions to be exact) sat down to the first episode of the latest series of Doctor Who, the first with Catherine Tate (who co-starred in the 2006 Christmas special). And today, millions of people outside the UK downloaded it and watched it as well. I watched it on my television via my Vista laptop running the media center extensions for a show I’d downloaded on my Linux desktop computer. The wonders of a home network :) As I watched it from the couch with my morning waffles and Diet Coke, I thought how wonderful it will be when BBC makes some sort of deal with some US network so we can see it the SAME DAY.

I mean, it’s the same thing going the other way. People around the world watch our Lost and Battlestar Galactica; I bet they’d love to see it same day as well. I faithfully watch Jericho, Lost, BSG and so on, on the television, as they are broadcast, with commercials, because I want to support these programs and see more like them. I would gladly do the same for Doctor Who if I could get it on Saturday evening like the do in London. So, speaking of London, on to the show.

I don’t know much about the UK aside from what I learned in school — the king, mad with lead poisoning, puts his onerous taxes on us until we elect George W. Bush who cuts them and then we declared independence and gave them Canada or something. I’m not sure on the specifics. Apparently they no longer even have a king! Maybe they lost him in a poker game with France? Battle of Hastings… William of Orange… I dunno, I’m an American. Reformation. Are they still doing that? But I’m pretty sure that Cardiff must be the Vancouver of England, though. A nice city in another country which you can claim is New York, Los Angeles, or London.

Anyway, past here is all spoilers. So if you want the episode to be deliciously unspoiled, stop here. Otherwise, click on through.

(more…)

There’s something supremely, unapologetically geeky about going to a science fiction convention or comic convention. I went to San Diego Comicon back in 2006 and you know, it’s just our kind of folk there. Before that, when I was employed anyway (and living in the greater Bay Area), I would hit up Baycon, SiliCon and Fanime every year up in San Jose.

Problem since I’ve moved to Connecticut is that I had no idea how to find out if similar things went on around here. I found out about Boskone way too late, but then, that’s in Boston, two hours away.

This morning, Cory Doctorow wrote about his new app, Confinder, on boing boing, and Annalee just wrote about it on io9, so there might be something to it…

Went there, typed in my zip code — epic FAIL. Typed in a zip code NEAR mine — SUCCESS! There’s one in HARTFORD (the city where I am writing this RIGHT NOW) in August, and the famous Readercon — for those people who (gasp) like to READ SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY (as opposed to getting their SF through movies, comics, cartoons or games) — is in Burlington MA, the city where I interviewed for a job with Digital Research that moved me to California and changed my life forever.

Anyone in the southern New England area going to one of those?

Arthur C. Clarke, grandmaster author of some of the greatest science fiction ever written and inventor of the geosynchronous communication satellite, is dead today.

He’s one of the last from SF’s Golden Age. He worked with Stanley Kubrick, to turn his short story, Sentinel, into the movie (and accompanying book), 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Without question, he will be missed.

I’ve been a fan of his from my earliest discoveries of written science fiction. His light-hearted stories of tall tales told in a bar (many collected in Tales of the White Hart would later inspire such famed writers as Larry Niven and Spider Robinson. His book Childhood’s End, to be made at some point into a movie, was an obvious inspiration to such invasion epics as V and Independence Day, and was one of the first books which discussed the next stage of human evolution might bring, and what the effect on those of us left behind might be. Imperial Earth inspired in me a love of puzzles which is still with me today.

The world has lost one of its greatest thinkers and inspirations today.

What has Portal got to do with Postsingular, anyway?

I didn’t do a whole lot of gaming this weekend. I spent most of it curled up with my Sony Reader, devouring Rudy Rucker’s book “Postsingular“, which he is offering for free download on his website in PDF and Reader-friendly HTML. I love HTML books because I can scale the text up nice and big and make reading an anytime, anywhere pleasure. I have Iain M. Banks’ new book, “Matter”, in dead tree form and I can barely make out the words. Have I mentioned how much I love this thing?

I’m a little angry at Sony for not offering “Matter” in their eBookStore. The absolute, number one, worst thing about the Reader is Sony’s bookstore. Amazon doesn’t have it for their Kindle either. How can science fiction be so stuck in the 20th century? Here in the good old 21st, it’s all about the digital. Get with it.

It’s all about the digital in “Postsingular” as well. A crazed nano-machine maker creates voracious little critters called “nants” that, once released, promptly devour Mars and the the world and everything in it, recreating everyone in a poor simulation called “Vearth”. Well, mostly everyone. Those not in the President’s political party didn’t make the jump. And dogs. No dogs. Dogs pee on things. Dogs bad.

Just before his family is due to be swallowed, another nano-engineer figures out the code to get the nants to run in reverse, sends his autistic son (who has memorized the code) into Vearth, upsetting his wife, who sees their son explode into a cloud of nants as he crosses the Earth/Vearth boundary. That puts a strain on their relationship, even though the code does work, and the nants run in reverse, recreating the Earth, Mars, and dogs who pee on things. The President is executed. The nano-engineer later unleashes a new strain of nanos called Orphids, which blanket every surface and give the world and all who live in it access to, well, everything. Orphids can also eat nants — just in case the dog-hating nant creator is up to something even more nefarious behind his prison of quantum-mirrored walls.

And that’s the first couple of chapters of the book. From there, it gets a little weird. Angelic giants from another dimension (the kind of angels that wear green sweats and old t-shirts with dragons on them, and also happen to be the mayor of San Francisco). It’s an adventure that never lets up, and Rucker packs more invention into a page than most people can pack into a lifetime.

I saw Rucker talk once or twice at Bay Area science fiction conventions when I lived there. He seems so normal on the outside.

Definitely read this book. Heck, it’s FREE (but it’s in bookstores as well!)

—

I played through Portal again this weekend, as well as a fair amount of Audiosurf. Single player games for the win…

First, a bit about LAST week. Playing for Keeps, the superhero podcast, came to a thunderous end last Thursday. If you’ve been hesitating to start it, wanting to wait until it was done, well, it’s done, so enjoy.

Drew and I went to see Jumper Saturday. It doesn’t have much to do with the book. Among the things we don’t find out are: how people can have a high speed teleporting car race through the center of Tokyo without anyone noticing, what happened to the other Jumper, how many Jumpers are there, why don’t their paladins wear plate armor, why don’t you always make some false jumps to throw off the trail before making your final jump so psycho paladins with machines that can open the jump scars you leave can’t follow you, why don’t Jumpers get wealthy by “jump” starting a new business teleporting people and goods around (as the ‘jumpers’ in Kevin O’Donnell Jr.’s “McGill Feighan” books did). After awhile, the movie ends somewhere in the middle of the story.

I did like the original Stephen Gould book, though. I haven’t read the sequel.

The writer’s strike is over, but we won’t be seeing new episodes of anything soon. Heroes has been picked up for a third season, which means, no more Heroes until the fall.

American Idol is down to their top 24 and I’m not really excited by many. I felt too many of last year’s contestants showed no spark of originality in them at all, the winner included. At least Blake Lewis reinvented Bon Jovi in an amazing way, but that turned out to be a fluke. I’ll still be watching, even though the whole idea of a showcase for amateur singers, somewhat bent last year by two professional backup singers, and now destroyed by people who have been successful professional singers in the past, kinda makes me wonder if the show has lost its reason to exist.

Tuesday is Jericho. Last week, the US Army, Cheyenne version, came and quieted the war between Jericho and New Berm. Because I am borderline retarded, it didn’t occur to me until I rewatched it that the whole series is about 9/11. Well, DUH! you scream. You figured that out from the first commercial break from the very first show last year. Me, well, it took me a little longer.

What if the government was using a terrorist attack in order to have an excuse to turn the US into a totalitarian nation? And instead of waiting for an appropriate attack, made one of its own?

*insert paranoid 9/11 conspiracy theories here*

Just because you’re paranoid, remember, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

Anyway, moving on to Thursday, and Lost. Last week, we learned that Sayid, in the future, off the island, becomes a paid assassin for evil “Other”, Ben. Wha-HUH? Butbutbut… Yeah, we know Ben can leave the island whenever he wants. The boat people want Ben. Everyone wants Ben. Who the hell IS he? Thursday, you’ll find me in front of the TV.

No more Battlestar Galactica or Doctor Who until next month. Grrr. I want them now.

I finished Perdido Street Station over the weekend. So what to read next… well, Amazon sent me a little letter wondering if I might enjoy reading Iain M. Banks’ “Matter”? Well, of COURSE I would. I also got “Feersum Enjin” again; that book was a victim to my Great Monterey Book Purge and I hope is enriching some library patron’s life back there. I could have sworn I kept back all my Banks books, but apparently not, and I have been slowly buying them all a second time.

In between, I’m rereading some older books. Midway through Julian May’s Pliocene/time travel/psychic elves from space epic, “The Many-Coloured Land”. I was such a big fan of this series back in the day. I even wrote a filk song about it. Oh yes, I was a HUGE filker. All I can remember now is the chorus: “The Pliocene is a lonely place without you, Genevieve.”

I would love to have all my old writings. I think I stored them on those Bernoulli disks I have in a box, but I remember I password protected them, lord knows why, and now I have no idea what the password is. Or how the heck to read a Bernoulli disk. That was formatted for the Mac SE/30. So: because I wrote on the computer, all my songs and unpublished stories are gone, gone, gone. Well, the stories weren’t that great. I’m a better writer now.

Probably going to the Bronx next weekend, so not much gaming or TV watching. Well, there will be Guitar Hero, I think :) And whatever Korean soaps Genj has for us. But there may be something happening with Drew Tuesday which could shake up all those plans, so who knows?

I bet you thought I would forget about my Reader, return to paper books (and I admit, I do have Iain M. Banks’ “Matter” winging its way to me in dead tree form). But I swear to you, the Reader is my constant companion. Tucked away in my purse are about twenty books, some bought, some free, and whenever I have a few quiet moments to read, out it comes.

I do wish it dealt better with PDFs.

I just now, a couple of minutes ago, finished China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. Said station is a meeting of the railway lines that snake their way through New Crubuzon, with the towering Spike looming above. New Crubuzon is a melange of cultures, both human and xen — nonhumans — the insectile khepri, the froglike vodyanoi, the avian garuda — a conflagration of steam and magic at the joining of two rivers on the world of Bas-Lag.

Portly renegade scientist Isaac Grimnebulin happily tinkers away at his research into the mysterious crisis energy that underlies and ties together both the natural and supernatural and is also madly in love with a khepri sculptor named Lin. Khepri look like human women with a scarab beetle for a head. Khepri think human women look like khepri with ape heads. It’s all a matter of perspective, some of their friends are more accepting than others.

When an exiled garuda whose wings have been cut off walks into Isaac’s laboratory wishing to fly again, both Isaac, Lin, and all of New Crubuzon are plunged into a nightmare of soul-eating moths, extra dimensional spiders, demonic bureaucrats, Remade freedom fighters, sentient floor cleaners and a thousand other things, crammed into paragraphs and held there by Miéville’s prose.

It’s a heck of a read, and it took me awhile to get drawn in. But these last couple of weeks, I’ve read nothing else. Don’t read Perdido Street Station for happy endings — you won’t find any. Read it for a glimpse of an alien world that will sear itself into your brain, and a story you haven’t ever read before.

I signed up a couple of weeks ago for Tor’s “Watch the Skies” promotion, where they send you a dozen of their books, once a week, in PDF format. I’m always on the look for more books to put on my Sony Reader, but PDF files are usually formatted to a much larger page than on the Reader, and this was no exception — the text, even zoomed, was unreadable to these old eyes. It displays well on my faithful Linux box, Baphomet, in fact very well.

The first book is Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson.

I don’t often trust fantasy books that come with detailed maps. I don’t really care where your continents are, or what the street layout of your city is, or whether there are sufficient parks per square furlong. I guess it’s nice you went to all that trouble to draw it, it must have taken quite a long time, but unless your book is about young Penwise the plucky map-maker, I really don’t care. I’m never going to turn back to it trying to follow the main characters as they turn right at the corner of Potter’s Way and the Boulevard of Tears and head south to the Executioner’s Plaza.

Just tell me. It’ll be okay. Don’t need a map. Just cuz Tolkein did it doesn’t mean you have to.

What I am looking for in a book are words, sentences, paragraphs of startling ingenuity and creativity. Just bring me somewhere I’ve never been and I’ll be a fan forever.

Aside from the map, the book itself in its first dozen pages looks fun, reminds me of Asprin’s old Thieves World anthologies.

More news about that later. I am still finishing up China Mielville’s “Perdido Street Station”. I don’t know why that book is taking me so long to finish. It must be huge in real life. But there are still some sympathetic main characters who aren’t dead yet. I hope enough of them survive to kill off the slake moths. When last I left them, they were about to spring upon the brooding matriarch of the moths.

Tuesday — American Idol begins Hollywood week, which winnows the people who made it through the audition process to the twenty-four people who will make it to the actual contest. This year, people are allowed to play instruments. I don’t know how this fits into a singing show, but I guess, anything for the ratings.

Also, Jericho season 2 starts. Fans demanded the return of the show, and CBS delivered. I’ll be watching!

Thursday, Lost season 4 continues. Two weeks ago, viewers were confusingly dragged all over the place from past to future to present. Last week, we learned more about the freighter crew, and they are incredibly cool. I am officially hooked again. This week, we find out why the freighter people want Ben, and perhaps why Oceanic Airlines faked the finding of doomed Flight 815. But who really knows. Polar bear skeletons found in an archaeological dig in Tunisia — wearing a Dharma collar? What’s up with that…

Thursday, Mur Lafferty posts her final podcast of her novel, Playing for Keeps, also available as PDFs. In the finale, Keepsie, a bar owner whose super power is that nobody can take what is hers, survives the battle for power between the superhero Academy and the failed heroes trying to bring it down that has come to be centered around Keepsie, her bar, and the cadre of barely-powered superheroes that drink there. Fantastic podcast, excellent story — catch up on the podcast and be waiting with the rest of us Thursday for the final episode.

I also finally sat down and listened to Brent’s Virgin Worlds podcast #100. Hilarious at times, definitely worth a listen, but in the end, it’s a three hour present from the MMO podcast community to Brent.

I listen every week, and he deserves all the praise he gets. He has inspired a community.