Sometimes ideas come to us at the weirdest times. The middle of the night is all too common. In my house, we refer to a shower as "Brain Rain" for a...
Soldiers on Ice
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J.S. Morin
The Only Fun Pandemics
The two classic responses to crises are avoidance and action. If you don’t want to hear any more about rampant diseases and what to do about them,...
In a Few Years, This Will Feel Normal
Once upon a time, there were games you played with rocks on a table. Then carved pieces on a table. Eventually, people developed little cardboard...
Choose Your Own Fantasy Race
After magic, the most defining feature of fantasy fiction is the inclusion of non-human races. While you CAN have a fantasy without them, the...
Cowboy Bebop != Cowboy Bebop
Spoiler alert: Cowboy Bebop (Netflix and original animated versions)OK, so I’ve watched all of Cowboy Bebop, both the original and Netflix versions....
Fun idea, wrong outlet
Time to dust another idea off from the old scrap heap and take a look at why it’s still there. Our latest autopsy subject: Master of the Clouds.What...
An RPG you have time to play
Sleeping Gods is a different sort of RPG. Or board game. Or both. See, this is where it gets a little hybridy. It’s a board game with a map...
The Rosie / Terminator Continuum
Imagine a future where you wake up to a freshly brewed coffee and the morning news, provided by your personal robotic assistant. You dodge deftly...
Who’s Your Crew?
A starship is just a hull with some engines and maybe guns. It’s the crew inside that makes it truly special. Zipping back and forth across the...
Futurama, but in the past
While movie theaters have been shut down and people staying home, Netflix has become the heartbeat of the entertainment world (and maybe it has been...
“What If…?” but for Star Wars
OK, so all of us have some free time on our hands now and then. Even before “What If…?” became a big thing on Disney+, I’d had a version in my mind...
You had me at lightsabers
Ask any child from the Star Wars era whether they’d like to play with a lightsaber, and it’s a good bet you’ll get an enthusiastic "YES!" Yet from...
Your new genes won’t be denim
Science news is an endless drumbeat of “on the verge” when it comes to gene therapy. It’s almost become background noise by now. In and of...
Wizarding Real Estate
Fantasy stories take us to wondrous places, whisking us off to the impossible, the breathtaking, occasionally the terrifying. Crystalline forests,...
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Sequel
When I first heard that there was going to be a third movie in the Bill & Ted “franchise,” I cringed. Hollywood has been awash for years in the...
A License to Spoof
When Author Scrapheap comes around, you’re often subjected to half-baked or off-kilter ideas that had little hope of turning into anything...
The best of games / The worst of games
I don’t feel like I’m doing it a disservice to call Dwarf Fortress the game with the worst user interface in the history of successful games....
Vacation in Space?
Captain Kirk has now actually gone to space. Well, there’s some debate these days over what qualified as “space” for the purposes of quickie...
For the Horde!
I played World of Warcraft waaaaaay back in the day, back when there didn’t need to be suffixed qualifiers to explain...
Where we’re going, we don’t need tables
When I was a kid, there was a set of shelves in our basement stacked with board games. Monopoly, Sorry!, Clue, all the old classics....
Year 8 of my 5-10 Year Plan for Overnight Success
My expectation going into 2020 was that it would be a year dominated by an exhausting number of hindsight jokes. In hindsight, I wish it had been....
It Used to Come in the Mail
2007... Fox was still trying to make Fantastic Four movies, the iPhone had been announced and was a year from stores, the Oklahoma City...
We’re Celebrating WHAT?
It's autumn in the northern hemisphere. It's a time of changing leaves, football games... and Halloween. There are plenty of holidays on the...
History Like It Never Happened
Alternate History.It's not the sole province of dictators and totalitarian regimes. Alternate History is also a niche subgenre of science fiction...