#lost worlds

[spacenoirdetective]

Clyde Caldwell, cover art for "Sea of Time" by Will Hubbell, 2012

[literary-illuminati]

In the Shang Dynasty's defense, you have to admit the oldest known massive repository of a pristine written language being 'the inscribed turtle shells and bones used to perform ritual divinations about what sort of (often human) sacrifices are needed to placate a spirit for this or that occasion' is much cooler than 'accounting logbooks for temple estates'.

[skookworks]

Wrangling raptors is not for the faint of heart.

[mumblelard]

warm and dry and fed and read

last night i dreamt again about the endlessly tall wooden orchard ladder teetering and falling over

i dreamt about someone whose face i cannot remember, not even in a dream

this morning just before four, the racoon came to visit and boba was so excited, she had to wake me with the news. i wrapped myself in a couch blanket and shivered while we watched him eat

we had a big bag of cat food that didn't agree with boba, and i have been feeding the crows with it, even though i know its wrong. every once in a while the racoon comes to eat what they have left behind

yesterday, i ate a big plate of veggie nachos and a small piece of georgia fruitcake, and it was good

i haven't been able to watch more than fifteen minutes of any christmas movie this year. they're like sand in my eye, and i'm not sure why

i can remember her face, but only in a certain way. there are two photographs, one from when she was young and one from when she was not. in my mind's eye, i can see her face from those images and nowhere else. i think i would recognize her on the street, but i'm not sure. we knew each other for more than twenty years and i can't remember what she looked like when i was talking to her, when she was enjoying a meal, when she was about to be kissed. i don't even know when it happened that i lost all of that. i wonder if it's still in there somewhere

i'm having an extra cup of coffee this morning. my phone lost all it's charge and i have an appointment in an hour. i lost my moment to ramble, but later i'll be able to visit holbrook, and maybe still catch some of the long shadows

[vintagerpg]

This is Ace of Aces: WWI Air Combat Game (1980). This is the very first one, called Handy Rotary Series for reasons I don’t quite understand, as it isn’t a series. Maybe it refers to the planes.

Ace of Aces is a genius idea. It’s a box containing two books, one for the Ally plane, one for the German plane. Each book contains a mind-boggling number of illustrations of a cockpit from a first-person perspective (always locked on the enemy plane) and, by calling out the numbers at the bottom, you “perform” dogfight maneuvers. And that’s basically it — use the books to fly around and try to shoot the other player out of the sky. A two-player analog flight simulator.

This thing astounds me. Like the design of it. It is so brilliant and cumbersome at the same time. I can’t imagine the work that went into this. It’s so cool! I will probably never play it!

This is the first product by Nova Games, who would go on to produce the Lost Worlds series of one-on-one fantasy combat gamebooks in the same vein. The form would be periodically imitated by other game makers — West End knocked off both versions in a Luke vs. Vader lightsaber dueling game and an X-Wing vs. TIE fighter dogfighter.AceofAces

[ladythatsmyskull]

Prose story by Jerome Bixby. Art not credited.

Published in LOST WORLDS #5 (October 1952).

You may have heard the name Jerome Bixby before:

Drexel Jerome Lewis Bixby (January 11, 1923 – April 28, 1998) was an American short story writer and scriptwriter. He wrote the 1953 story "It's a Good Life", which was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. "It's a Good Life" was the basis of a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone and inspired one of the segments in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). He wrote four episodes for the Star Trek series: "Mirror, Mirror", "Day of the Dove", "Requiem for Methuselah", and "By Any Other Name". With Otto Klement, he co-wrote the story upon which the science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage (1966) was based. Bixby's final produced work was the screenplay for the 2007 science fiction film The Man from Earth.

[night-market-if]

How would Belladonna react if she ran into her father in the Might Market? Like right after she came through the portal he abandoned their world too and followed her, leaving everyone else to die but the portal spat them out in different places and they haven’t run into each other until now.

Belladonna was a daddy's girl through and through. I think there would be a part of her that would be so angry about the time they had lost. But to know that he had listened to her? Trusted her? It would heal so much within her. To this day, the fact that he chose to stay stings more than she'll ever admit.