My association with 12/21/12

I picked up my copy of this paper and pencil RPG about twenty years ago and played it throughout high school. If I'd been born a few years before, I might have played more DnD and a few years later and I'd probably have been sucked into Evercrack but this was better in my view: Magic and technology, side-by-side, with a character generation system that let you create pretty much any street samurai, battle mage, or rigger you wanted. The world of Shadowrun was deep, involved and printed in source books so cheap they pretty much disintegrated the second you looked finished reading through them.

But anyway, for me, 12/21/12 will always be the start of the fifth world, marked in the Shadowrun mythology as the date a dragon wakes up and flies around Mt. Rainier. Awesome! I will take that over some moldy misconception over Mayan calendar practices any day.

This also marks the last few days in the year, which I've traditionally marked with a round of Year's Best lists (What can I say, I like lists). I think I have a few more essays about writing and speculative fiction to round out this week and then the lead up to next year will be as follows:

My picks for music of 2012
My favorite films of 2012
My year in games (all types)
Things I'll remember about 2012
Wishes for next year

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With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl

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Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted. O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that happen

Ancient Logic

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