VR Researcher (and a major nerd hero in my teen years) Jaron Lanier was here at the last Ottawa Writer’s Festival promoting his book “You Are Not a Gadget”.  I missed his lecture, but caught bits and pieces of similar talks he presented over Youtube, which seemed shockingly anti-tech given his body of research to [...]

[Read more →]

I read the first few chapters of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” the day before I had to return it to the library, which was a big mistake because I got completely hooked and then realized my next turn in the booklending queue wasn’t going to come around for more than a month. It was [...]

[Read more →]

A bunch of things we’ve seen lately:

Woman in Black: Creepy! Harry Potter plays a grownup widower lawyer who has to go to a haunted house to sort through an old lady’s papers. The house is magnificently creepy and full of freaky victorian-era ephemera (a museum’s collection worth of wind-up monkeys, clowns and porcelain dolls). At [...]

[Read more →]

I finally got around to reading the much-talked-about Hunger Games Trilogy and really enjoyed them!
The series documents the life of Katniss Everdeen, a miner’s daughter in a dystopian future where the government annually selects children from the colonies to fight to the death in an arena as punishment for a failed rebellion. Katniss volunteers to [...]

[Read more →]

Alan Weisman has written a clever science book – a thought experiment that considers what would happen if all of humanity vanished suddenly (a scarily plausible thought), leaving behind our homes, cities, infrastructure and ecosystems to fend for themselves. The result is a gripping account of nature’s unrelenting, powerful forces reclaiming our world and wiping [...]

[Read more →]

Very excited congratulations go out to my friend Louis Dozois and his dedicated team at Northern Bytes who are living the dream by publishing their epic indie iPhone game, “World to Conquer“!

WtC is a turn-based hex-grid re-imagining of Final Fantasy Tactics, with more than a dozen character classes and tons of spells and powers. So [...]

[Read more →]

Madeleine L’Engle is one freaky-deaky young adult author. I read A Wind In The Door as a kid, but all I could remember was a vague recollection of talking mitochondria – so I gave it a second reading this week and rediscovered her trippy dimension-hopping, telepathy-wielding, scale-breaking stories.

The main character, Meg, is a confident, capable [...]

[Read more →]

Earlier in the winter I stole one of Natasha’s book club titles to find out what all the fuss was about. Room by Emma Donoghue (a Canadian!) tore up the best-seller charts for good reason, it’s an excellent book that’s difficult to put down.

Room is written from the perspective of Jack, a 5 year old [...]

[Read more →]

I don’t know if it’s that games were hard to come by when I was a kid or that I’m infinitely patient, but I’m philosophically opposed to starting a new game while leaving one incomplete, which Call of Duty 2 makes particularly frustrating. (Yes, I recognise that I’m a full 5 years behind)
The problem with [...]

[Read more →]

I was listening to Q on CBC late one night as Natasha and I often do while getting ready for bed, and there was a panel of people (who I thought were “Canada Reads” panelists) discussing books. One panelist, with only a few seconds to pitch “The Book of Night Women” by James Marlon, described [...]

[Read more →]