Trash Culture

My current reading material is Tom Shippey’s JRR Tolkein: Author of the Century, a compilation of critical essays on Tolkiens work (and no prizes for guessing from the title that they’re largely very positive). It’s an absolutely superb book and one that I’d encourage anyone with more than a passing interest in Middle-Earth to acquire and read but I’ll save the details for a Trash Culture review piece sometime. Rather, Shippey raises a point almost at the beginning of the book that has wide ramifications for anyone, anywhere who likes fantasy, whatever they...

I haven't bought a Marvel comic for 2 or 3 years now, nor have I followed anything major since Civil War. So I guess that makes me the target audience for their Point One Initiative, an effort to provide a perfect jumping on point for some of their most popular characters. These books are supposed to make it easy for new readers and returning readers (like myself) to get an idea of what's going on in the Marvel Universe right now, as well as get ongoing readers excited for what's coming up. So this month and...

With Oscar less than two weeks away, and my chances of seeing 2010 movies greatly diminishing what with my new hobby of changing poopie diapers, I thought it was high time to make my best of 2010 list before the Academy steals my thunder. Normally, I like getting this out before nominations come out, but the arrival of my first, Emily, trumped all else.

I don't feel like reviewing a game tonight. I have one all ready to go, but I'm just not in the mood. I just found out that one of the best friends I've ever had is moving to Oklahoma, and in honor of how much I'm going to miss him (never mind that he's only three hours away and will still be coming back to town every weekend), I'm going to review vigilante night patrol, instead.

EARTH REBORN came out at the end of 2010, and it turned out to be the dream game that I didn't know I was looking for. It's got my favorite type of gameplay (SPACE HULK command point stuff), a theme I really dig (post-apocalyptic), sweet components, limitless playability, so on and so forth. I can stop looking for that perfect game that takes what made SPACE HULK so great and truly takes it to the next level, which I don't believe any game of its ilk had done up to this point. But there's still...