The ball bounces off the tide-packed sand and Bailey leaps to catch it with lithe grace and accuracy. He returns to deposit it at my feet for another go. It’s nearly dusk; the beach is ours on this January evening. It stretches ahead, the rising tide low enough to give us ample time to reach … Continue reading DP FICTION #51A: “What the Sea Reaps, We Must Provide” by Eleanor R. Wood
Watership Down is a survival adventure book written by Richard Adams published in 1972 that might arguably be classified as fantasy as well, which was adapted into a well-known children’s movie in 1978. It follows a group of young bachelor rabbits who run away from their warren when one of them has a premonition of coming disaster. The book follows them as they try to find a suitable location for a new warren and try to settle back down.
Multiple rabbits are point of view characters throughout the book, but the most important rabbit to the story is Fiver, the one who has the premonition of disaster (an upcoming construction site where the warren is located), which might be psychic or might just be intuition based on the sudden incursion of signs announcing the construction project. Hazel is the one who first believed Fiver’s warning and helped convinced the others to make their escape. Most of the group are pretty scrawny, secondary members of the warren, except for Bigwig, who is a member of the Owsla, the warren’s internal enforcers. And then there’s Blueberry who seems to not think like a rabbit at all, coming up with new strategies that no other rabbit would even consider.
In a generational shift that some claim threatens the fabric of existence and the sanity of all humanity, surveys show that worship of the Elder Dark is at a record low for one particular group—millennials. Bob Rawlins is worried. “When I was growing up in the 1950s, I made my obeisance before the Manifold Insanity … Continue reading DP FICTION #50A: “Why Aren’t Millennials Continuing Traditional Worship of the Elder Dark?” by Matt Dovey
written by David Steffen Her Story is a keyword searching mystery game developed by Sam Barlow and released in 2015. The game begins with you looking at a console program on what appears to be a Windows 95 machine. The program has a search box with the word “murder” in it, and 4 video clips … Continue reading GAME REVIEW: Her Story
written by David Steffen You are the Chili Pepper Knight, and you have already vanquished your foe and rescued the princess. But, now, time is rolling backwards and you have to replay the game in reverse, in this comedy platformer from Megafuzz in 2013. This is harder than you might think, because if you take any … Continue reading VIDEO GAME REVIEW: Spoiler Alert
A man walks through the night, carrying a staff and a baby. He knocks on a door, gives the baby to a woman there, and then keeps walking. The baby becomes a man, and henchmen come pounding on the door. The boy flees the men through the night, eventually finding refuge in the mysterious and deadly Tesla Tower.
Teslagrad is a Metroid-style platformer action/adventure puzzle game published by Rain Games in 2013. As you might expect from the name, the obstacles and tools in Tesla Tower are based around electricity and magnetism–opening/closing electrical gates, changing the polarity of objects or of yourself to repel or attract in strategic ways to achieve your objectives.
written by David Steffen You’re a new employee at the company, and it’s time for you to start making your way up the career ladder. They say it’s hard to find good help, but with clear enough instructions, you’ll do exactly what you’re told. Human Resource Machine is a computer programming logic game that requires … Continue reading VIDEO GAME REVIEW: Human Resources Machine
The summer that God came to Whartonville, I ended up trapped on the drugstore roof with only half a peanut butter sandwich and a seraph to keep me company.
The sandwich part is true! Hell, all of it is true. I’d eaten the rest of my lunch on the bus, before God’s approach hit the news. I can always buy more lunch in the hospital cafeteria. When the cafeteria and the rest of the city aren’t under three feet of water, at least. I know it was bad, and people died, but I’m still glad we got a flood instead of the plague of locusts that just hit Fargo. Two months later and you still can’t step outside without a crunch, is what I hear.
Anyway the seraph must have flown up before the rain really started coming down, and I managed to climb up onto the street light and from there to the roof. So there we were together in the middle of the storm. “I thought He didn’t do this shit anymore,” I said to the seraph. They shrugged, or at least I thought they did. It’s hard to read body language on someone who’s seven feet tall with six wings and a dozen mouths, but I’ve had practice lately. You know they can’t really speak for themselves? Sure, they talk, but everything they say is an echo from the Almighty’s own lips. Or at bare minimum from one or another of His prophets. So body language turns out to be kind of important. “There was a covenant or whatever.”
On that island there are two kingdoms, equal in area, and both are distinct in character. The northern is a state of order and precision; the southern is a realm of chaos and indecision. Two borders with a narrow neutral strip between them mark the frontier. The northern is a wall of constant height that traverses the island in a perfectly straight line; the southern undulates randomly over the mountains and marshes.
There is no commerce between the nations, no diplomatic, cultural or academic exchange. The frontier is impassable; both regions are isolated and self-reliant. They receive foreign visitors rarely and discourage them with different methods; in the northern zone, by ignoring them until they leave; in the southern, by failing to protect them from violence. They are worlds unto themselves, reticent, exclusive.
Yet even divergent evolutionary paths can circumnavigate the sphere of possibilities and end up leading in the same direction. So finely tuned was the northern territory that no aspect of modern civilisation was absent from it and every facility enjoyed by the citizens of the most sophisticated outer countries was available to its denizens too. For example, it featured a zoo that was a public political experiment.
Connor was shy, introverted and a thousand other things that made sitting there, at the tiny coffee shop table, torturous. He didn’t want to be tortured. He wanted to hear harp music and cherubs giggling and all the other noises that accompanied your first date with your soul mate. It had taken him weeks to screw up the courage to ask Kayla out for coffee. As far as he was concerned, glitter should ooze from the walls in a poltergeist-style reward for the brazen bravery he’d demonstrated.
Meanwhile, Kayla pretty clearly didn’t realize this was supposed to be a date.
She wasn’t being weird or anything. And Connor wasn’t sure what she ought to be doing instead. But she wasn’t nervous or awkward or in any way different from how she was when they hung out with Debra and Joe and the rest. This was basically the same as hanging out in Kayla’s workshop for their hack-a-thon sessions, except the coffee was better, nobody else was around, and Connor felt entitled to glitter ooze.
