In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a HRSFANS event was hosted in the Lowell Senior Common room. The event was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning. For

The following post was written by Tony, and is posted here at his behest: In anticipation of vericon TWELVE, in 2012, which is TWELVE months from now, I wrote a song: The Twelve Days of VeriCon: On the twelfth day of Vericon my hrsfa gave to me… Twelve Friends a greeting Eleven Creatures Tapping Ten

Dennis Clark has made a new social networking tool. At his request, I reproduce his introduction to it, below: Hey all, I’ve just finished making something I really want to show you all. Since leaving college, I’ve missed HRSFA-Social pretty hard. It was just totally great when you were feeling bored to be able to

I just ran across Law and the Multiverse, a blog which tackles legal issues raised in superhero comics. I’m not a comics enthusiast or a lawyer myself, so I have little expertise with which to judge its quality, but I’d be curious to hear the opinions of those who know more about either of these

Kevin Gold has got two very thought-provoking articles on the jeopardy match-up between human jeopardy champions and IBM’s AI “Watson”, up on Tor’s website. Check them out here and here.

This Washington Post article discusses the story of a Tolkien scholar whose strategy of producing podcasts about Tolkien’s novels for public consumption seems to have won him some success in academia, not to mention a large online following. The hub of his online activities is a website called The Tolkien Professor, which includes the aforementioned

A friend recently asked on her blog what fictional characters we (her readers) relate to. Two that immediately came to mind for me were Helen Narbonic (from Narbonic) and Agatha Clay (from Girl Genius). Both are female mad scientists from webcomics, which got me wondering what other female mad scientists I might be missing out

At the intersection of current affairs and computational linguistics, Language Log’s Philip Resnik has written a thought-provoking piece about how events in Egypt are fueling a shift in computational linguistics. He calls it the “social media revolution”, and main idea is that whereas current computation techniques are good at dealing with large, clean data sets

Returning to a "slow-burning" personal-intellectual project I first mentioned here in October, I consider the questions raised in my mind by a friend who does not read non-fiction (except for academic work). My case study is Henry VIII of England the break from his first marriage.

[The following email was sent on November 4th. The webmaster apologizes for forgetting to post it to the blog until just now. You have one week left to vote.] The HRSFAns constitution calls for an election “The Election Chair shall announce a date and time for counting ballots in November, and shall distribute ballots to