scifi
aardvarchaeology | August 16, 2017The 75th World Science Fiction Convention took place in Helsinki and seems to have had the second-highest attendance ever: more than 7000 people in the Messukeskus convention centre, 2000 of whom had (like myself) never attended a WorldCon before. There were 250 programme items only on the Friday between 10 am and 10 pm, so there is no way that I'll be able to tell you everything that went on. (Check out the programme here.) Instead I'll tell you the bits I enjoyed the most, plus some observations.
The WorldCon crowd was incredibly diverse even if you disregarded the cosplayers. Men and women…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2017
Ascension with its four days off is shaping up to be the geekiest time of the year. This time I had three big events to choose from: the LinCon gaming convention, the Kontur/SweCon scifi convention and the 45th anniversary of the Tolkien Society. Tolkienians do things in nines.
I decided to spend two days at LinCon on the Linköping University campus and one day at Kontur/SweCon in an Uppsala hotel, saving the Sunday for family pastimes.
Here are the games I played at LinCon. And I had lots of free Nepalese tea from the tea bar!
Through the Ages II (2015). This update of a 2006 civilisation…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2013Here are my best reads in English during 2013. It was a really good year for quality, though I didn't read very much: 41 books, twelve of which were e-books. The latter number was boosted by the Humble E-Book Bundle that I bought at Junior's recommendation (sadly no longer up for sale). Find me at Goodreads!
Pirate Cinema. Cory Doctorow 2012. A fun, engaging and optimistic piece of polemic fiction, slightly preachy in parts, about the social and artistic consequences of intellectual property law.
Old Man's War. John Scalzi 2005. Energetic co-ed military sf.
Stiff. The Curious Lives of Human…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2013Though I really enjoyed my late 70s childhood visits to Disneyland and Disneyworld, I am no friend of disnification, and I've always seen the Paris Disneyland as a bit of a joke. But my mom wanted to treat my kids to a visit last week, and so I came along too.
The Paris Disneyland has five sections. The US small-town nostalgia section full of Disney memorabilia shops, the faux-16th century fairytale section, the adventure movie section and the wild west section didn't do very much for me – though the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is admittedly hugely atmospheric, and the Small World ride…
sciencepunk | April 22, 2010Rhizome has a cache of incredible 1980s-era Soviet animations of American science fiction stories. Quite fittingly for Earth Day, here is Ray Bradbury's "Here There Be Tygers" as imagined by Russian animators. The hyper-synth music is especially awesome. неимовеÑно!
More wonderful animations of stories by the likes of Stephen King and Robert Silverberg can be found at Rhizome.