Happy New Year!

I wanted to mention that I’m also blogging over at Daily Kos. In addition to the political essays which appear on this site, my Daily Kos blog includes more ephemeral reactions to current political events.

The month of May was lost to World of Warcraft. I’m playing the warrior Merallen on the Emerald Dream realm. I’m also thoroughly addicted in precisely the way I promised myself I wouldn’t become thoroughly addicted.

Ah well.

In other news, I have a working scanner. I don’t think I mentioned it at the time, but when my computer died last fall it did something horrible to my scanner as well. This rather severely curtailed my ability to do a lot of stuff I would have liked to have been doing. For example, scanning in and backing up the maps I draw for my roleplaying campaigns.

Those of you who have been following the site for awhile may remember that I once promised to present a new sub-level for the legendary dungeon of Rappan Athuk, one of the best dungeon crawls ever published. Necromancer Games is going to be publishing an updated and revised, single-volume edition of Rappan Athuk this August, and you should definitely check it out.

The good news is that, with my new scanner set-up and ready to go, I can present not just one but TWO new sub-levels for Rappan Athuk. These will be appearing over the next couple of days.

Today we have the first brand new, never-before-seen WIR reaction to appear on the website. I spent the month of March reading through essentially every word written by Vernor Vinge, and this is the first in a series of WIR reactions which will cover his entire corpus of work:

WIR 46: The Short Stories of Vernor Vinge

I’ve also recently been spending a good deal of time listening to every single note of music ever published by the Flaming Lips. It may just be a personal and idiosyncratic synchronicity, but I’ve found that their albums At War With the Mystics and (even moreso) The Soft Bulletin have proven to be the perfect musical accompaniment for Vingean exploits.

Variety, schmariety. Three more What I’m Reading reviews:

36. The Merchanter Novels – C.J. Cherryh
37. Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
38. Skylark – E.E. “Doc” Smith

The next What I’m Reading is a review of the Lensmen novels by E.E. “Doc” Smith. I never finished this reaction, for a variety of reasons. For my next update I will most likely be cleaning up and finishing that reaction. That’s right: Completely new, never-before-seen content! Capture the excitement! An event to recount to your grandchildren!

More of What I’m Reading today. I might try for some variety tomorrow, or I might just keep chewing through these until I’ve got the website completely updated:

26. The Psi Corps Trilogy – J. Gregory Keyes
27. Komarr and A Civil Campaign – Lois McMaster Bujold
28. Midnight Sun – Karl Edward Wagner
29. Northwest Smith – C.L. Moore
30. 40,000 in Gehenna – C.J. Cherryh