Detective Comics #854

I haven’t yet read a thing by Greg Rucka that I didn’t love. Detective Comics #854, aka The One With Batwoman, is no exception.
I love this book.
Now, I want this blog post to be a cogent, articulate review. I want it to be a clear discussion of the text that conveys the high [...]

Slow weekend

It’s been a mighty slow weekend. My family’s been in Chicago, and I truly miss them. But they come home late tonight, so, yay!
Rob Ashby’s memorial is today at 4:00 at the Bloomington Sheraton. That hotel holds a huge amount of our community life together — conventions and weddings and pool parties [...]

Work, why you gotta be this way?

The last few days of work have been full of the wtf-ery. Including, but not limited to, an adjacent center controller violating my airspace while being an ass about it, bad weather and thunderstorms, inexplicable pilot accents, horrible military radios, lightning strikes on radio frequencies, surprise radar outages and repairs, and representatives of the [...]

. . . diminishes us all.

Rob killed himself last week.
I’ve started this post three or four different ways. And I’ve realized — I can only describe Rob in terms of how I saw him. This is an obvious truth, of course. But it’s an important point when discussing loss — my personal loss is minor. Rob [...]

Apparently I Know Who Satan Is

Well, I may not know who Satan is. But the above is the title of the new book from Sara J. Ford: Apparently I Know Who Satan Is: My Fight Against Maturity and Other Irritating Social Norms.
I should say, up front, that I know Sara. I see her almost every week at [...]

My days off:

1. I am doing worldbuilding on a new original comic idea. It’s fun, and I haven’t done it in ages.
2. It’s gloomy and cold here, as if it were April and not June. I object.
3. I saw Terminator Salvation last night and thought it had the worst world-building since Waterworld. [...]

Me and the ZA

It is a truth of living that existence is not entirely under one’s control. That financial empires falter, that tsunamis strike, that bridges collapse, that events occur. I do not enjoy these truths. Don’t get me wrong — I am generally an optimist. I believe things for the most part improve, [...]

Slightly Obsessed Update

I can see things coming together for Slightly Obsessed Studio. In other words, my third job, the one as a writer. (As opposed to the first job, homeschooling parent, and second job, air traffic controller.)
The learning curve on all this is steep. But the positive news this week has me burbling and [...]

RiP David Eddings

David Eddings is dead.
Every time I read Diana Wynne Jones’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland I think of Eddings and laugh. As so many fans have pointed out already this morning, his works were not perfect. I have received much grief over the years for buying the Mallorean — for buying the same story [...]

Non-objective panel notes: “Turns Out This is Your Dad’s SF”

Turns Out This is Your Dad’s SF: Friday, 9:00 pm
David Levine (mod)
Eileen Gunn
Chip Hitchcock
Brad Lyau
Pat Murphy
The premise of this panel was, as presented by David Levine, a question: Are there any new ideas in science fiction, or are we merely retreading old ideas? The panelists, particularly Eileen Gunn and Pat Murphy, promptly [...]