Bricks Without Straw

After listening to the first episode of the " A Pixel Canvas " podcast, I decided to seek out and boldly go where few near-seniors have ever gone - straight to the Minecraft website. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to navigate the landscape, dig, create blocks and then destroy them, but not long enough to frustrate those with low attention spans. The problem with Minecraft is simply this: It is so incredibly addictive that you can easily lose yourself playing a game that is at its essence nothing more than a virtual building-block set similar to the wood-block sets many of us used as infants and young children. Perhaps this is why it is so incredibly soothing . The music, too, is soothing, so the entire experience - blue, lightly-clouded sky, verdant fields - is engaging because it becomes a meditative exercise in a pointless activity. It's a good way to get into your "Zen thing". It is not so much a game as a creative play set, like Meccano to

Robert Charles Wilson's new book, Vortex , wraps up his Spin trilogy. More connected to Axis than Spin , Vortex brings together multiple intertwining histories that lead ultimately to the discovery of the truth about the "Hypotheticals", and the eventual end of the known universe. Or does it? (Spoiler alert.)

Creature Tech by Doug TenNapel My rating: 3 out of 5 Recently I was handed a copy of Creature Tech to read, and after flipping through it, I did look forward to sitting down with it. But while I have enjoyed Doug TenNapel's art ever since the Earthworm Jim video game, I was not overly impressed by either the story or the characters in Creature Tech. I did not believe Katy's desire to be saved and "made whole", for example, and I thought that the symbiont was far too similar to Alien's face-hugger. The inciting incident (the arrival of the space eels) went virtually nowhere, so the wrap-up with the revivification of the mummified alien and departure by space eel seemed, well, boring and anticlimactic. I did not agree with the foreword's claim of how cinematic this graphic novel was, certainly no more so than others in the genre. It seemed to be just an average book, by a truly wonderful artist.

My short story, History of Early Music is set to appear in the November issue of Hobo Pancakes . This is a nearly-entirely fictional account of my young love affair(s) and music, guaranteed to not contain more that 10% truth. I wrote History early in 2009, and although it came close to acceptance a couple of times, it only found its current home more than two years after it was first submitted to a publication (which was, for the record, Taddle Creek ). The story (in its submitted form) contains several musical excerpts which I wrote specifically for the story, being somewhat inspired by the musical fragments that appeared in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners , as well as my own early musical compositions. The other inspirational source for the story was Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint , a brilliant novel of sexual self-gratification, frustration and guilt - not to mention neurotic family relationships - in other words, a book that has everything any reader would w