When I was encouraged to read Ruthanna Emrys’s Winter Tide, which jumpstarts from the “Deep Ones” part of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology and is intended as the beginning of an “Innsmouth Legacy” series (Tor’s got some previews from the months before the book was released), it was fairly popular in my library systems. While waiting my turn I
So who’s seen Ender’s Game? Is it any good as a movie? Unrelated question: which, if any, parts of the feel & experience of the book does it get right? It’s funny, isn’t it, that those are unrelated questions? And movie reviews can only answer the second question when it’s obvious that the reviewer is
A shout-out to HRSFAN Aaron J. Dinkin, linguist of the dialectological variety, who appeared as a Major Quoted Someone for Slate last month in an article on the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS aka NCS). The article is raising awareness of some recent (~our lifetime) re-jiggering of “linguistic turf” for short vowels (cat, cot, caught,
I’m not sure what to think about the new shirt from Questionable Content. On the one hand: Cat! Jet pack! Science! Glow in the dark! On the other hand: What does the phrase “Science is a verb now” actually mean? The blurb for the shirt, to its credit, actually does use “science” as a verb:
I was intrigued but ultimately left unsatisfied by this article on Salon.com. Titled “Why America is flunking science”, the article takes on the question of why so many Americans don’t know basic facts about science. But rather than repeating the same tired claims about the uneducated masses, they consider instead the image of science presented
I heard about this just last night: Reapo! The Genetic Opera. Amidst a 2067 epidemic of organ failure, the MegaCorp GeneCo can sell you replacement organs…but if you don’t keep up on your payments, Repo Man will be dispatched to “repossess” them. Meanwhile, the show features Sarah Brightman, Paris Hilton, and no fewer than 61
Probably by now you’ve seen DC’s new gambit to make you care about buying comics: Neil Gaiman is going to write a Batman story called “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” (Eagle-eyed comics fans will spot the reference to the titularly similar Alan Moore comic, which, yes, is intentional.) This story is set to pub as
I’m not much of a videogamer, but I’m intrigued by what I’ve read about the new video game Mirror’s Edge. The game is a “first person runner” based on parkour, the art of running, jumping, climbing, and otherwise moving quickly through urban environments. Amusingly, the game’s main selling point seems to be that playing it
