Recent content by Autumnal

No question that some of Simmons’ work is vile trash. But his best work influenced both my taste and my writing style. Life is complex: it has real parts and imaginary parts. Hey! Want a change of pace? Check this out:

Dan Simmons died of complications from a stroke yesterday. I’ve moved up a reread of the Hyperion Cantos, Carrion Comfort, The Hollow Man, and maybe some others in memoriam. He was a huge influence on my tastes and my own writing style.

I’ve read some of Absolute Batman and was surprised at how much I liked it. I’ll be trying some of the others on March.

Credit to Groucho Marx. “Gentlemen, Chicolini may look like an idiot, and sound like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

You’d think! But over the years, more than one person taking part in gaming forums has said explicitly that they have to try to drown out and silence advocacy of possibilities they don’t like. Otherwise, there’s a risk their players could encounter these ideas and ask their GM to include them...

Time for a snack and a nap.

A possibility is that more power is flowing through the bond than a newbie PC can handle, so it splashes and is dissipated. A higher-level character has the goods to take in and use more of the available power. Leveling prepares a soul and body to use the rewards of the pact.

I shotgunned the Sprawl trilogy back to back to back, thanks to you lot rousing my curiosity about how I’d feel about it now. Short form: just as pleased as ever. The shift in narrative style from Neuromancer to Count Zero is great. Mona Lisa Overdrive seems draggy at the start - too long to get...

It really is. For a while at the end of the ‘80s, he and his friend John Ostrander co-wrote 18 issues of a horror comic for DC called Wasteland. Some issues included autobiographical riffs from Close, like the time he’d taken LSD and gone to explore Chicago sewers, emerging to see a newspaper...

See the death & legacy section of this guy’s biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_Close

Oh yes. George talked some about how he planned to end the series, in a sixth book, but his ex-wife Barbara Hambly found very little in the way of notes or anything about how he planned to get the among his effects.

For me, the rise of solo RPGs has had a simple impact: it’s the difference between actually gaming versus reading and daydreaming but never getting to play. Overall, I don’t think the quality of gaming writing and production have ever been higher. I keep getting staggered at how great my...

Most excellent. I picked up a couple Chris Wraight 40K books I’ve been wanting I’m Audi, and Kenneth Harl’s Great Coursss series on steppe empires of Central Asia fo cheap!