Unwinnable

I am a monster.

As Stu has mentioned in the past, we have a board game club going, and a favorite amongst our group is Panic Station. Basically a cross between The Thing and Alien, Panic Station begins as four to six explorers enter a station besieged by a parasitic alien hive. It’s a search and destroy mission where the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Each player has one human and one android token that he or she can move around the board. The explorers and androids need to find the Hive and burn it with a flamethrower. Pretty straightforward, right? There’s only one catch: one of the explorers is an alien host who must preserve the Hive by infecting or killing the rest of the team. (more…)

From the first line of the Genesis 1:3 to the radioactive arachnid bite that turned scrawny Peter Parker into a spider-man to the titular face-hugging creature in Alien, the greatest stories ever told all owe their beginnings to a single metaphorical light-bulb going off in someone’s head. (more…)

“The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.”
– George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

My history with the unknown began at a young age. Monsters under the bed, aliens hovering outside of the window, ghosts in the old pipes of the house I grew up in – these things terrified the hell out of me. That’s not even counting the crazy dreams that would often haunt me the next day. I still have the occasional nightmare of the xenomorph from Alien chasing me, or a zombie horde closing in on any of the random houses or apartments I’ve lived in over the years.
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The Dusty Hoard is a regular feature in which Ian Gonzales delves into comic shop discount bins, quarter comic boxes at flea markets and his own personal collection. He’s looking for the comics that made him smile as a youth – long-buried treasures that get the occasional wink and nod in today’s mainstream comics. Sometimes he’s lucky – most times he’s not. (more…)

When I look at the night sky, I see only constellations.

Despite a passing childhood fancy for astronomy (and years spent watching Star Wars movies over and over again), I have never fallen for the promise or majesty of space.

Carl Sagan’s breathless tour of the cosmos did not fill me with wonder. The scientific optimism of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov has never moved me. Most space-faring science fiction that has followed in their wake has left me cold. (more…)

Imagine if your mother became your worst enemy. Imagine, if you will, that she is everywhere at once, controlling your every move, making sure you ate a certain thing, went certain places, picked up certain things, kept telling you that you’re getting fat…it’s not hard to imagine, is it? Well, not if you have my mother. (Mother, that is a joke – look, I’ll go to the gym soon, okay? No, I won’t brush my hair.)

Videogames use this idea of the controlling mother figure to play with us, to scare us. She’s meant to be caring, protective and helpful but she often turns out a bitch from hell. I’m talking about the soothing computer voice – the Artificial Intelligence we all trust. And these days, it’s usually a ‘she.’ (more…)

Inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Renaissance vegetable-collage portraiture, digital artist Till Nowak has created this lovely depiction of a classic figure in American cinema. (more…)