Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

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The book is sheer fun. If I have one complaint, it's that it starts with the conceit that it's a hard-boiled detective story set in this world, but concludes as a superhero action story; I'd have liked to see the hard-boiled finale.

So, resuming now, any neglect of my blog isn't technical in nature.

"The Social Network." This made me feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg, or as bad as I'm likely to feel for a billionaire in his twenties who's overseeing running roughshod over the privacy of hundreds of millions of people. I read The Accidental Billionaires afterwards, the book on which it's nominally based. Very little of the movie's portrayal of Zuckerberg could be found there, and the book itself has been accused of displaying an anti-Zuckerberg bias. Sorkin has stated in interviews his priority on a compelling story over the facts, and he succeeded by that metric. It was a good story. But I figure if you're making a movie about events just 7 years old, all of whose players are living, it'd be good form to pay a little attention to an honest portrayal. Or not to make it.

"Charlie Wilson's War." (Shortly after seeing it, I managed to misremember the title as "Charlie Parker's War." But Clint Eastwood already made that movie.) Moviegoing happiness is a scene between Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman scripted by Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols. I've always felt pretty neutral about Hanks, but he was great here.

Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart. Fun, brief attempt to explain what mathematicians are talking about when they talk about math, and to survey some cool things in the history of math and in modern mathematics.

The Secret House by David Bodanis. A house serves as a framing device to inspire digressions on all sorts of topics in science, engineering, and the histories thereof. A good book for factoid-lovers.

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. There were a lot of surprises for me in this history of the telegraph, and the parallels to the Internet the author was pursuing were more striking than I expected.

Lovecraft Unbound edited by Ellen Datlow. Anthology of mostly original nominally Lovecraft-inspired stories. Highlights were Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's "Mongoose" and Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill." Joyce Carol Oates' "Commencement" was a turkey.

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers. Outstanding collection of fantasy stories. Just the thing to tide you over until Hide Me Among the Graves gets here.

I checked at home, and realized I was confusing it with GURPS Dragons, which I'd bought a few months ago, so I went back and got it.

Ever since, I've had this image of a dinosaur and dragon, brows furrowed, forelimbs akimbo, glaring at me saying "What! You think we all look alike?"

The Digital Antiquarian discusses ludic narrative and has been filling in by bits and pieces an amazing history of recreational computing and adventure gaming. [...]

Highly recommended for geeks who were there in the '70's and '80's, and those who weren't.

From it, I learned that H.G. Wells wrote a wargame (arguably the first) for use with toy soldiers, Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books. And a whole lot of other interesting things, even about topics I thought I knew a lot about.

Will Crowther created the first text adventure game and wrote the first routing protocol used by the ARPAnet.

"Internet" and "Interactive fiction" both begin with "inter." Coincidence?

As usual, there were diamonds in the rough, especially moments of good dialogue in the issues Whedon was directly involved with. But there was a whole lot of rough.

Spoilers below...

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One I'd been looking forward to was Strange Detective Tales. During the Universial monster movie craze in the '30's, lots of monsters and various other strange entities ("creeps" they call themselves) moved to LA hoping to sell their stories and make big bucks. Well, the fad passed, but the creep community remained. A detective agency consisting of Renfield and a mad scientist's assistant is the only place creeps seeking justice can go.

The story gets weirder from there, featuring the Green Mafia (the aliens who landed at Roswell), Renfield's ex, and Howard Hughes. The art is Gahan Wilson-esque, and perfect for the tone.

...and it hasn't been collected and its 3 issues will be a pain to find. Sorry about that.

I'd also like to note that the backup story in issue 1 was excellent -- a haunting tale of an aged supervillain whose memory isn't what it used to be, and who doesn't have long to live, calling up his long-retired never-too-bright henchman, trying to figure out whether he'd ever gone through with one of his schemes, installing a failsafe in his body to poison the whole world if he died.

And it was really from Paypal.

And yet there were some drastic reminders of how long ago it was. The narrator sees fit to comment that an elevator didn't have an operator. When musing about the attractive, probably for-show books in an expensive apartment, he thinks that the pages have probably never even been cut. He not only speaks of "loiding" a lock, but he really means celluloid.

It's a decent mystery, with a good twist, and a fun narrative voice, but is replete with the kind of contrivance that so often frustrates me with mystery novels. (I've gotten tired of staging elaborate traps requiring uncannily accurate prediction of how the bad guy will jump. But I'm still reading Nero Wolfe novels, so this tiredness can be overcome by other attractions...)

And I was OK with all of that. Action-hero Lovecraft no doubt made a much better character for an action story than accurately-screwed-up Lovecraft. What did bug me is that he was portrayed as loathing Providence, and wishing he could get out of this damn town. This is the guy that has "I am Providence" on his tombstone. If he loved anything in this world besides weird fiction, it was Providence.

The depictions of extra-dimensional horrors were nicely done, though. So, in conclusion, an enjoyable action-horror story having about as much to do with Lovecraft as Lori Lovecraft does.

Not so. In months of trying, I've only managed to play a couple of actual sessions. Many other plans have been scuttled due to cancellation after cancellation. Jobs, kids, houses, obviously, there are lots of perfectly understandable reasons that other things can take priority over playing make-believe.

But it's still disappointing. Anyone local and up for some Trail of Cthulhu?