Posted inFiction Movies

“The Devil’s Night” — David Jacobs

[amtap book:isbn=0425178609]

They only come out at night

Cloth tear­ing, she spread-eagled her arms and legs, taut­ening the leath­ery folds of swelling batwings. The wings were part of arms, grow­ing out of the shoul­ders, attached to the long thin­ning skele­tal arms and legs with scal­loped leath­ery black bat membranes. 

Batwings beat the air fran­ti­cal­ly, try­ing to stop or at least slow the fall. 

Among the Undead, only the most pow­er­ful vam­pires can muster the occult force need­ed for shapeshift­ing, to become a giant bat, a wolf, or mist that can drift through sol­id walls. 

Such a queen vam­pire was Marya Zaleska. 

Count­ess Marya Zales­ka, Drac­u­la’s Daughter. 

The Uni­ver­sal Mon­sters: Drac­u­la, Franken­stein’s Mon­ster, the Wolf­man, Drac­u­la’s Daugh­ter. All return­ing, just as they returned in so many Uni­ver­sal hor­ror movies, this time in fic­tion­al form. 

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Posted inComics, Comic Books, Comic Strips or Manga

“A Midsummer’s Nightmare” — Justice League

[amtap book:isbn=156389338X]

All across the world, peo­ple are devel­op­ing super-pow­ers, and the estab­lished super-pow­ered beings are nowhere to be found. Called “sparks” and the phe­nom­e­non “spark­ing”, it is turn­ing the world into a super bat­tle­ground as gangs of sparks bat­tle for turf. Its a dream of some, of hav­ing super-pow­ers, that is turn­ing into a night­mare for the entire world.

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Posted inComics, Comic Books, Comic Strips or Manga

“Vision Machine”

What could hap­pen if there was the facil­i­ty to share your vision, lit­er­al­ly, with every­one else in the world? How would that change the way peo­ple see each oth­er and inter­act? How could that change the world? How could some­one else use that pow­er of com­mu­ni­ca­tion not to increase com­mu­ni­ca­tion but to lim­it it?

That’s the ques­tion posed in “Vision Machine”.

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Posted inFiction Games Mythology

“Dungeons & Dragons” — The Hypnotic Side

When Dave Arne­son showed Gary Gygax the new game he and his friends were play­ing, it prob­a­bly did­n’t occurr to either that they were on the brink of cre­at­ing not only a new game but an entire­ly new type of game, result­ing in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new gam­ing industry.

Dave Arne­son took the tra­di­tion­al minia­ture game, where minia­tures rep­re­sent­ed groups of indi­vid­u­als and start­ed using them to rep­re­sent indi­vid­u­als. He also added the ele­ments of char­ac­ter class­es and expe­ri­ence lev­els, allow­ing for char­ac­ter spe­cial­iza­tion and growith. This was a rev­o­lu­tion, in that play­ers could project them­selves into the char­ac­ter, devel­op­ing them over time and play. Since both he and Gary Gygax were avid mina­ture ship game play­ers, he shjowed Gary his game and togeth­er they cre­at­ed Dun­geons & Drag­ons.

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Posted inFiction

The “Lensman” Series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith

[amtap book:isbn=1568658044]

[amtap book:isbn=0739402625]

Descrip­tion: The “Lens­man” series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith is one of the clas­sics of the pulp era of sci­ence fic­tion. A bat­tle between Impos­si­ble oppo­sites, with whole civ­i­liza­tions as pawns and coun­ters in the game. There are bat­tles in space between fleets so large they dwarf whole solar sys­tems, weapons so immense as to stag­ger the imag­i­na­tion, and crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cies that cov­ered galaxies.

Yet at the cen­ter of the series was the bat­tle between the sup­port­ive men­tal giants of the plan­et Arisia and the con­quer­ing Eddo­ri­ans from anoth­er uni­verse. The Arisians find the Eddo­ri­ans too tough to take on them­selves, but find their relent­less phi­los­o­phy of con­quest unpalat­i­ble, and resolve to oppose them. To that end, the Arisians began a slow, mil­lions of years long project to pro­duce the men­tal pow­er need­ed to final­ly elim­i­nate the Eddorians.That tale, told in var­i­ous stages, makes up the sto­ry line.

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