I knew George Ziel, but I did not.
Meaning, I was familiar with some of his most iconic covers, but had never explored further,never connected a name with a graphical style, with a certain cover.
Then, yesterday night, I saw this…
… and I decided I need to read this book, and I wanted to know more about the cover artist.
It reminded me of Karel Thole – but he was in fact George Ziel. Continue reading
A very quick heads-up – The Sign of the Moonbow, by fantasy legend Andrew J. Offutt, is free today in Kindle, and it’s well worth a read.
I’m planning a review ASAP, but I wanted to signal this offer while it still lasts (and I don’t know how long it will last, actually).
The Sign of the Moonbow is a story featuring Cormac Mac Art, one of Conan’s brethren, created by Robert E. Howard.
Offutt is enjoying (if that’s the word) a bout of new popularity due to the biography published by his son, in which his activity as a pornographer is described in lurid detail.
I never read any porn book by Offutt, but I read his fantasies – and the guy was a solid entertainer, with a certain sense of humor and a good pacing.
Check out The Sign of the Moonbow.
I was asked about Prince of Persia 2 a few hours back, just as I was looking for some images to illustrate this post.
I’m not a fan of nostalgia gaming, but indeed there were some interesting gamesd in the past1, and maybe something interesting can be extracted from those memories.
The complete title was Prince of Persia2: The Shadow and the Flame, and it came out in 1993. It worked with both DOS and Windows.
By that time I had a color PC display, and the new game looked like a million dollars on my Zenith . And indeed, superficially, it looked just like that – more eye candy, a refurbished look for a game that was basically the same.
The gist of the game: evil vizier Jaffar, that we thought defeated at the end of the original game, is back. He steals the Princes’ identity, puts a death spell on the Princess, and sits on the throne. But once again the Prince escaped his captors, and he’s on a quest for the tools that will help him defeat the bad guy. Continue reading
I think I already mentioned how much I like radio.
Radio dramas (old and new, with a soft spot for the Thrilling Adventure Hour), music (and vintage wonders like the Buddies’ Lounge), and talk radio.
Now, something happened two nights back.
I was not feeling well (what with old age, the cold and the mileage thing), and so I stood up the whole night, and scanned the airwaves with my small, cheap multi-band radio receiver to try and get my mind off my aches.
My brother was up with me, and a little worried, but in the end we chanced upon a strange radio program from a very local station. Vinyl Dust it’s called and no, it’s not a fetish sort of thing – it’s an all-night talk and music show in which a guy that does not know how to properly pronounce English talks about vintage records, and plays old 45s.
The show focuses on covers and alternate versions of classic songs from the 60s, weird stuff produced for the European and Italian 45 and juke-box markets. Always quirky, often bad. And my oh my, was the show we caught focusing on bad. Continue reading
The 1980s. Videogames.
The Adventures of Robin Hood, Erroll Flynn and Basil Rathbone.
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Rotoscoping and Max Fleischer.
The Arabian Nights.
Fantasy writing and three writers laughing and reminiscing.
This post had to happen.
A few days back I mentioned Prince of Persia, cited as a direct influence by a young fantasy writer, who replayed it as documentation for a novel.
That post led to a chat with two friends of mine: Mauro Longo, game designer and writer, and Samuel Marolla, writer, publisher and screenwriter. We laughed a lot, wondering if the young novelist re-played our Prince of Persia.
The one that ran on a single floppy disc, and in which you could save only after the third level.
We all had our special memories of the game – the almost hypnotic state in which repeating the sequence of commands would drop us. The sword duels. The traps.
We laughed a lot, and we remembered the fun we had back then.
Later other friends joined the discussion, pointing out how sophisticated and elegant the game was for its times, how mind-bogglingly beautiful it looked in that time of 8-bit graphics.
But at that point, of course, I had already reinstalled it on my PC, and had a go at it after twenty-five years. Continue reading
I might need a little help here, so suggestions are welcome.
Last April I wrote a story, in about a weekend. It was a one-shot horror story set in New York in the 1930s, but as I usually do when I write shorts, I designed it to work as the first in a series, should the characters meet the fancy of the readers.
I wanted to do something in the vein of the old pulps, but also more modern, closer to our modern sensibilities.
Straightforward but quirky.
So, it was a one-shot “with possibilities”, and it was intended as (possibly) the first outing of my very own occult detective/monster hunter, the extremely reluctant conjurer Steve Davies, a.k.a. The Mysterious Doctor Wu Yang1… Continue reading
On the first day of August me and my brother launched our small-scale venture, RE:CON Service, a fast, cheap and reliable research outfit aimed at writers and game designers.
Research is important – no matter what some people think – and sometimes you can’t invest a week researching details for a story you will write in one afternoon.
It’s just anti-economic.
That’s where RE:CON comes to the rescue: you drop us a line, we discuss the depth and width of what you are looking for, we agree on time and budget1, and you get a report covering what you needed.
So how did it go? Continue reading
Karavansara 