Starfield – A Few Months In

Looking back, it was impossible for Starfield to live up to the hype. Twenty years in the Making! A Thousand Worlds to Explore! Massive Cities! Build your own Outposts! Build your own SHIPS! And it looked amazing. Screen shots of ringed planets filling the sky, space battles in asteroid fields, and characters that appeared to have-character. Turns out you can’t actually land on all the planets, such as gas giants and the like. The ones you can land on are, well, pretty empty. And the Points of Interest are procedurally generated. Meaning you can find the same Abandoned Listening Post…

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Still Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton

An Annotated Memoir “Never met your heroes.” Is a common refrain from fans who regularly attend Conventions. The actors who play your favorite characters, are not, in fact, your favorite characters. Most of them aren’t even fans of the shows they star in. If you ask them about the character they played, the odds are good that they’ll talk about the sets, the props, and a bunch of stuff that is interesting to them, but not so much to you. They’ll also bitch and moan about all the stuff you love. And they will definitely have a William Fucking Shatner…

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Starfield First Impressions of Gameplay Reveal

Starfield-Fallout 4 in Space Since this is as Bethesda Game, well, it looks a lot like Fallout 4. It’s a lot prettier. The artwork looks amazing. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the frame rates, but I’ve never been that kind of geek. My games either work or they crash, frame rates aren’t that important to me. In Fallout 4 the first companion you met is Codsworth, a very friendly and overly cute fellow with brilliant voice acting that gives him a lot personality. In the new footage from Starfield we appear to have a robot companion who…

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Fallout 4:Things I Love and Things I Hate

Just a few opening thoughts There are three YouTubers I found who spent a lot of time on Fallout. Oxhorn is kind of the unofficial Fallout 4 historian who dives deep into all the lore and everything you are likely to encounter in the game.  Gopher Gaming has a great Let’s Play series that covers the base game and the many DLCs that followed it. There are hundreds of hours of videos of these two playing Fallout 4, talking about Fallout 4, and complaining about Fallout 4. All these videos are, of course, several years old and both have moved…

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Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

If you like really long books… Middlegame took a few chapters for me to get into. I listened to the audio-book and Amber Benson went a little over the top a few times for me. She tried a little too hard to give the bad guys really bad voices and she laid the Boston accent of one of the heroes on a little thick. Still, she did a pretty good job and I really enjoyed this fantasy book set in the real -such as it is- world. We start off with an Alchemist creating some kind of super golem to…

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Outer Range-Season 1

Outer Range is an odd bit of business to be sure. It starts off like a number of other modern Westerns, a couple of rich ranchers hate each other, their kids are kind of idiots, the countryside is beautiful but hides all kinds of secrets. But we pretty quickly discover that this isn’t Dallas or Yellowstone, it’s more like LOST or Westworld with just a touch of the Twilight Zone tossed in. There’s an odd mixture of the mundane and the extraordinary. Most of the time we’re shown people doing normal real world stuff. Lawyers and land disputes. A rodeo…

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Fallout 4-Seven Years Behind Everyone Else

I remember the Wanderer commercial. That was cool, but not cool enough for me to shell out the money for a machine powerful enough to run Fallout 4. So I forgot about it. Until a few months ago when it showed up on Xbox Game Pass. I downloaded it and played several hours a day until I had gathered all the companions, become General of the Minutemen, destroyed The Institute, and learned to hate Settlers. I used Fast Travel, played on Normal, and didn’t realize there was a whole world of players that considered fast travel cheating, and playing on…

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Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much. Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own,  but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today. Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like…

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The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)

Katie Mack is a theoretical cosmologist and Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. She’s also a fan of Science Fiction and popular culture. She does a great job of covering the various ways that our Universe, as we understand it at the moment, could come to an end in a few billion or trillion years. Or in the next few minutes. She has a friendly way of talking about the most esoteric and abstract concepts. I was reminded of Sheldon teaching Penny about physics by starting with ancient Greece on a warm Summer evening. We all know a bit…

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Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter)

Number 27 in the long history of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. Anita Blake lives in a vast and complex universe and you can never be sure what you’ll find between the covers. Some are thinly disguised porn, some are slasher films, some are masterclasses on polygyny, and some are rather dry textbooks on the legal system of this alternate reality. In the beginning we had a handful of important characters, but the cast has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Half a dozen or so people make cameos in Sucker Punch and I have no idea who the hell…

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