It’s easy to cast a long shadow of nostalgia across your geeky past, now that you are standing taller. There’s no shame, no risk of ridicule or reprisal, now that nerds top the food chain. More confident, you might even …
Continue ReadingThe Examiner.com has reported and confirmed a rumor that’s already been echoing through the dungeons of D&D talk: that a Gary Gygax biopic is in the works. Michael Tresca wrote: George Strayton confirmed he is … the scriptwriter for a …
Continue ReadingThe booths have been dismantled, the games put away, the green goblin face paint washed off, and the last of the trolls, pirates and grognards have been swept from the halls of the Indiana Convention Center. Gen Con may be …
Continue ReadingHello from Gen Con, in Indianapolis, the gaming convention where I’ve been hanging this week. I’ve spent some time with the Gygax family and following their effort to raise money here on behalf of the Gygax Memorial Fund, which aims …
Continue ReadingI’m headed to Gen Con, the granddaddy of all gaming conventions. The big d20 throwdown runs Thurs-Sun, August 4-7 in Indianapolis, Indiana. And I’m pretty excited to go (it’ll be my second time). Here are some of the highlights I’m looking …
Continue ReadingWait, I’m how old? Yep, MTV — that’s “Music Television” for those of you who may have forgotten what the acronym “MTV” stands for — just turned 30 years old yesterday. It was on Aug. 1, 1981 that MTV aired “Video …
Continue ReadingToday (July 27) is the birthday of Gary Gygax, who would have been 73 this year had he not passed from this earth in 2008 to dance forever on the astral plane, which (according to the DM’s Guide) is a …
Continue ReadingThe film Super 8, which hit theaters a few weeks ago, weaves in pop cultural touchstones that triggered for me a nostalgic tsunami: whispering into walkie-talkies, perfecting techniques for monster makeup, and wearing my hair in a hobbity mop. A project in …
Continue ReadingGalileo Galilei (1564-1642), aka Galileo, had this crazy idea that perhaps the earth was not at the center of the solar system or for that matter, the center of the universe. In his day, most philosophers and astronomers believed in the …
Continue ReadingI was visiting my nephews, again. Within seconds of seeing me fiddle with my iPhone, my older nephew, Jack, who is 8, asked me, again, if my iPhone had any videogames on it. “Uh, no, sorry Jack,” was my reply, …
Continue ReadingLake Geneva, Wisconsin, was always a mythical land of enchantment to me, a kid raised far away on the east coast who spent much — OK, way too much — of his allowance on Dungeons & Dragons gear. While the …
Continue ReadingThe muse has hit me like a vorpal sword. I’ve been working on some poems for an upcoming comedy performance and it was impossible to resist the temptation to …
Continue ReadingSummer makes me nostalgic. Why? Because these long, boiling days of June remind me of my first time. Yep, that’s right. I was a virgin. And summer is when I lost it. I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first …
Continue ReadingI was hanging out with my nephews over the weekend. Jack and Henry are aged 8 and 4 respectively. A couple years back, Jack took tap dancing lessons. When he outgrew his shoes, and became a wee bit self-conscious about being …
Continue ReadingI attended the recent 3rd Conference on Middle-earth (in Westford, Massachusetts) where I listened to talks on blond elf imagery and debates on how to adapt The Hobbit into one movie or two movies (and the wisdom of that latter …
Continue ReadingI was drawing pictures with my nephew Jack. “What shall we draw?” I asked. “Let’s draw Star Wars,” Jack said, innocently enough. We began to draw Star Wars. Jack drew a guy, then a box. Next he drew a face …
Continue ReadingFirst, it was confirmed that Orlando Bloom would reprise his role as Legolas in The Hobbit production now being filmed by Peter Jackson and company down in New Zealand. As many of you know, while Legolas features prominently in The …
Continue ReadingWhen I was a kid and deathly bored in the summer, I’d make movies. I borrowed a Super 8 movie camera from my mom (she was a teacher and used it in her classroom) and I took to the woods …
Continue ReadingIf you’re a 30- or 40-something geek like me, you probably played video games as a kid. Not on the personal computer, which in the 70s and 80s was only in its infancy. I mean the big, hulking, stand-up video …
Continue Reading“That isn’t reality,” the man said of my years reading J.R.R. Tolkien, playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, and my other interests in so-called “escapist” hobbies.
Fantasy and gaming are pointless, he said. Useless. What’s the point in playing them? Waste …
It was a time of “Frodo Lives!” and “Gandalf for President.” And a LOT of pipeweed. Back in 1969, the First Conference on Middle-earth took place in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois on the campus of the University of Illinois. The Second, in …
Continue ReadingPegg: We wanted him to look like we’ve seen him before. We wanted him to look almost like every alien you’d ever seen [was] in him, because of the joke that he’s been influencing culture. That a lot of the …
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