The life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze – and it is a life, fuller than any other character in videogames to date – raises an interesting question, namely: why do we care? (more…)

“Should anything happen to me, Claudia, should my skills fail me, or my ambition lead me astray, do not seek retribution or revenge in my memory, but fight to continue the search for truth so that all may benefit. My story is one of many thousands and the world will not suffer if it ends too soon.” (more…)

That amazing grace sort of passed you by
You wake up every day and you start to cry
Yeah, you want to die but you just can’t quit
Let me break it on down: It’s the fucked up shit

- Warren Zevon, “My Shit’s Fucked Up”

We are all going to die. Some of us sooner, some of us later. It may come violently, accidentally, quietly, painfully, in our sleep, in a great conflagration, in the middle of the day or in the dead of night. What happens when it arrives has been a matter of some debate for several millennia, but, while there have been compelling arguments of all stripes as to what happens next, the answer is one that each of us will only find in our own time, alone. (more…)

In late 2008 and early 2009, my father was inexplicably recovering from a cancer that was, by all accounts, relentless and deadly. The people around me, friends and family, seemed to be hopeful. I think that I might have even seemed optimistic. But my outward appearance wasn’t an accurate reflection of my state of mind. (more…)

One of my earliest memories of videogames is also one of the last clear memories I have of my aunt, my father’s sister, Donna. It was cold out, but not quite the holidays. We were sitting on the shag carpet in my grandparents’ house, where she lived, playing Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle. The ColecoVision was plugged into one of those horrible console televisions that looked like it belonged in a cathedral rather than a living room.

She was pretty good – I’d never seen anyone else rescue Smurfette. I, on the other hand, wound up frequently impaled on a purple stalagmite. It was 1984. I was five. The next year, Donna died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She was 21. (more…)

The room is dark. On the left sits director John Milius, the man who wrote Apocalypse Now and the basis for Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. On the right sits Arnold Schwarzenegger. The air is thick with cigar smoke and the room is a little too warm to be comfortable. Milius is sweating. There is a click and a whirr, and the darkness is pierced by a shaft of shimmering light. The first scenes of Conan the Barbarian illuminate the screen at the front of the room and the two men begin to talk. (more…)

In the short time between the point when my father lost his fight with cancer and his eventual death, he was left in agonizing, wasting pain. Those difficult weeks, both for him and my family, were mitigated by the care and compassion of a hospice center. When, several months later, I heard about a fundraising drive that involved selling comic books for the benefit of hospice, I donated my entire collection – all sixteen longboxes.

The fundraising program is called Superheroes for Hospice and it continues to benefit the Barnabas Health Hospice and Palliative Care Center in West Orange, New Jersey. Spiro Ballas, who heads up the program (and just took a couple more boxes of comics off my hands), was kind enough to chat with us ahead of his big comic book sale this weekend – go out, buy some comics and support a very good cause! (more…)