The Eye, and the White City

The Eye, and the White City

I have the pleasure of knowing Jon Mollison [http://jonmollison.com/2020/05/14/book-clubbing/], Alexandru Constantin [https://thedacian.com/2020/05/12/short-story-book-club-introduction/], and Sky Hernstrom. I got to know Sky Hernstrom as a friend before I knew he was an author, and had not read any of his work until he had released The Law of Wolves , and Mortu and Kyrus in the White City. Alexandru over at Dacian has proposed a kind of book-club blog discussion, which Jon has picked up on. A…

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Style inNeon

Style inNeon

Alexandru Constantin recently put up two posts I'd like to tie together. The first was a review of "Neon Harvest" by Jon Mollison [https://barbarianbookclub.com/2020/03/23/book-review-neon-harvest-by-jon-mollison/] . > Neon Harvest does something different, something cool. It’s not a true sci-fi nor a true cyberpunk. Jon takes the technological baseline of the early 80’s and stagnates it. It’s a pre-digital cyber-thriller. The heroes still use pay-phones, newspapers are still on paper, and cas…

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Things to Do, Things to Avoid

Firstly, I guess we'll see what actually will happen with the Wu Flu here in the states. I've been running around helping other people prepare to work from home. A few thoughts on the impact on our day to day lives so far [https://barbarianbookclub.com/2020/03/13/fear-shopping-corona/]... > It’s clear that many of us live day to day solely dependent on our massive globo-capitalist system. No spare food, no spare supplies, no safety net of any sort. We live in a fantasy that we will be taken c…

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Glorious Battletech

Glorious Battletech

Over at Walker's Retreat [https://bradfordcwalker.blogspot.com/2020/02/my-life-as-gamer-amaris-civil-war.html] , he links to a couple videos on the history of the in-universe lore of Battletech, and points out that yes, Battletech doesn't get the love it should. Cue Razorfist: Yeah. I bought my first copy of the base Battletech rules when game shops still had copies of it's earlier iteration, BattleDroids on the shelves - rename courtesy of Lucasarts. The artwork varied from utterly pedestria…

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False Depth in Storytelling

False Depth in Storytelling

One thing I often get - most recently regarding the show "Succession" and mostly from people who don't know me that well in my circle of acquaintances - is shock that I don't like [Stephen King | Game of Thrones | Whatever piece of dross that's popular today that involves horrible people being horrible to each other ] "But you should try it out instead of dismissing it right away / after a few minutes" The answer I give echoes Alexandru Constantin's [https://barbarianbookclub.com/2019/12/20/en…

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