Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I’m so freaking bored of geek culture feeling the need to knee-jerk defend enormous corporate entities. Large organizations hire professionals for the sole purpose of defending themselves against bad press. We don’t need to jump in. Tesla isn’t the five issue comic you loved as a teenager – it is a enormous money-rich company; no…
So Scalzi has been ranting on Twitter about this proposal for a new F&SF award — it’s more fallout from the Hugo mess, and this person proposes more gatekeeping, requiring membership in a “web of trust” in order to vote for a new award. I’m not impressed with the idea — it seems to…
I woke up at 4am the morning after Thanksgiving in 2014. I had been staying the night at my friends Liz and Rob’s house after imbibing what can only be called a festive amount of alcohol. The couch, comfortable as it was when I settled in to sleep, was a nightmare to wake up in…
One day Vader and Fett will recruit for the the dark side, disguised as an electronic music duo… they will be arresting ears and administering intergalactic rhythm and beats. The Rebels won’t stand a chance. This is their music video, featuring ‘Dj Gonk’. Like it, Share it and Subscribe to help us make more videos!…
“Video games are a boy thing,” my sister explains to me. “I feel like it’s a known fact. GameStop is a boy store. The commercials are for boys. It’s just something everyone knows.” My sister is 17. She runs a One Direction fan Twitter with 10,000 followers. She plans to major in fashion marketing. She’s…
July of 2015 is officially the moment of both peak geek nostalgia and peak geek nostalgia criticism. In less than two weeks, we’ve seen the release of Ernest Cline’s book Armada and the Adam Sandler movie Pixels, two different pieces of fiction with the same weirdly specific premise: aliens are here to kill us all, and only…
Illustration by Ethan Rilly Armada is a story about how gamers are the most important people in the world. This is not a new story; it’s served as the inspiration for countless video games over the past 40 years, not to mention the recent harassment campaigns that spawned out of gaming culture and the wounded,…
Survival indie MMO Rust recently changed how players were assigned characteristics for their avatar. Everyone used to start as a bald white man, then the developers decided to alter avatars’ race and face. Here’s the catch: You don’t get to choose. As lead developer and studio owner Garry Newman wrote: “Everyone now has a pseudo…
The 5 Most Insulting Defenses of Nerd Racism News has broken that Michael B. Jordan (Chronicle) is being considered to play Johnny Storm (The Human Torch) in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot. Naturally, comic book fans across the Internet are furious, because they’ve had it with all the reboots and just want to preserve the…
The miniature wargame play celebrated in the War Game Digest could reach only a limited audience because it required painstaking efforts from dedicated and artisanal adults. Avalon Hill’s board wargames, on the other hand, could reasonably aspire to reach the mass market. They built on the recognized tradition of juvenile board games, but with a…