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…)

The turkey has been eaten. The belt has been loosened. Some folks are working off their food coma in front of the TV, watching a football game or a movie. Some folks are on the computer, looking at their favorite websites. To you, we say, “Welcome!” Team Unwinnable is off with family and friends, just like you, but we thought we’d leave behind something to help pass your idle hours. Now that you’ve fed your stomach, we’ve put together a menu of twelve favorite pieces from the last several months to feed your brain. Bon appetit! (more…)

When I heard about Wired’s Relic Wranglers project, the first thing I thought was, “How has no one thought to do this before?”

The gist is simple. Take a highly motivated subset of Wired’s large and eclectic readership and put them to work scouring the world and the Internet for any traces or evidence of lost bits of media: shelved movies, scuttled videogames, unreleased albums and pieces thereof. If it is rumored to be out there, the Relic Wranglers want to find it and bring it to light.  (more…)