Category: Writing
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New Story at the Decameron Project
Seven centuries ago, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a series of stories, presented as tales told by a group of travelers seeking refuge from the Black Death in a house near Florence. The tale-telling takes place over ten nights, giving the work it's title: The Decameron. In the present era, our plague isn't quite…
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Big Podcast News!
My short story "Treatment Option" will be the lead episode of the new DUST studios podcast series Flight 008, which releases tomorrow, March 25. You can listen to it here. There's even a nifty trailer video! This project began as a Web-based fiction collection, Seat 14C, which was part of an XPrize Foundation look at visions…
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Hamiltonian Musings
A couple of weeks ago the Crack Team launched an expedition to the distant isle of Manhattan. We toured the museum ship Intrepid, saw an exhibit of clockwork automata at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ate some fancy food, and saw a matinee of Lin-Manuel Miranda's famous hip-hop musical Hamilton. Quick summary: it's good. Just…
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Arisia 2020 Report, Day 3
Sunday was my final day at the con. Most conventions are three-day affairs: show up Friday afternoon, do stuff Friday night and Saturday, maybe a few things Sunday morning, then head home after lunch. Not Arisia. Taking advantage of the MLK Day weekend, it stretches into Monday. That means Sunday is a busy full day…
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Arisia 2020 Report, Day 1
I drove out to Boston on a sunny but cold January afternoon, left the car at the disintegrating Alewife garage, and rode the T to the good old Westin Waterfront hotel. Various delays en route and long lines at the hotel meant I barely had time to get my room, get my Arisia badge, and…
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Lovecraft and Claptrap
This past weekend I attended (as a humble paying member) NecronomiCon 2019 in Providence, Rhode Island. If you know anything about horror fiction or games you can probably guess that NecronomiCon is a convention focused on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern horror. I had a great time and plan to go…
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Antagonists and Villains
In both fiction and roleplaying games, there's a distinction between a character (or NPC) who is a villain, and one who is an antagonist. The villain is evil, or at least selfish and callous. Not only do his (or her) goals oppose those of the heroes, his character is morally inferior. Even if he believes…
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Be Careful What You Wish For
It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then. Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of…
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Changes in Fandom: A Different Perspective
Judith Dial (editor of the delightfully un-redacted Conspiracy! anthology) published some remarks on the Amazing Stories blog about the shifts in fandom which provide an interesting "parallax view" on my own musings about status and social class in SF. You can read her post here.
The Cambias Digression 