Super Doomed Planet

Viral marketing and alternate reality games are the great new thing in marketing. Saatchi & Saatchi thought it had a doozy of an idea for Toytota. They’d stalk Toyota’s customers. Unsuspecting participants in “Your Other You” would receive a week’s worth of threatening phone calls and emails containing personal details about their lives before being [...]

When I open a book called The Fourth Crusade I sort of expect to read about the Fourth Crusade, so the preface to Jonathan Phillips’s The Fourth Crusade came as a speed bump. It’s a two-page argument that the “holy war” has no equivalent in modern Western societies—we’ve given it up for the “just war,” [...]

Interviewed for a Doctor Who Magazine article years after Virgin Books published his Doctor Who novel Managra, Stephen Marley recalled being “excited about what the series almost was… I thought the point was to consider what it would be like were it done properly.” And, lo, the traditionalists were heard to mutter “how dare he!” [...]

I love Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. I will admit not every volume is a classic. The early books are shallow parodies, and sometimes Pratchett translates real-world phenomena much too closely and literally into the Discworld. I’m talking here about arbitrary pop culture, rather than institutions like police or postal services that would appear in some [...]

Here’s a good idea from Rep. Alan Grayson: setting up a website to memorialize people who have died because they had no access to health care. Here’s a bad idea from Rep. Alan Grayson: neglecting to have user-submitted content reviewed by an actual human being.

The Des Moines Register has an article on a funeral home that’s putting its death notices on electronic billboards. Alternating with ads for vacation getaways and gas station soft drinks, the 8-second announcements feature the deceased’s name and the day, time and place of the funeral. A picture is optional. Yes, I’m sure that’s how [...]

More things I want to be able to find again: Nedroid Picture Diary. It’s a webcomic. I know exactly how this feels. Another webcomic: Barney Banks, by Tom Hart. Comics Comics on proto-graphic novels. There’s a reference to at least one I’ve never heard of.

The mention of Dorothy L. Sayers in the previous post reminded me of a series of excellent essays written by Sarah Monette about Sayer’s novels. So I googled them, and I’m linking to them here so I can find them again.

Even in childhood, my feelings toward Winnie-the-Pooh weren’t far from Dorothy Parker’s (“Tonstant Weader fwowed up”). When I discovered the existence of The Red House Mystery, A. A. Milne’s one detective novel, my head swam with visions of Death at Pooh Corner. I felt I would someday have to read it. I was certain when [...]

(This is one more Interactive Fiction Competition review.) Earl Grey is the last IFComp game I feel inspired to review this year. Last month when I reviewed The Bryant Collection I mentioned that my interest in interactive fiction had in recent years coincided with the competition, and I’ve finally figured out why: playing through the [...]