Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month

Broken Picture Telephone

Remember Telephone -- the "pass it down" game of crazy miscommunication from your youth? Well you no longer have to get uncomfortably close to your neighbor to whisper into their ear. Broken Picture Telephone is an ingenious game of text and stick figure drawing that will have you laughing for hours. It involves responding to obscure messages by drawing what they say -- and vice versa -- until you get a very bizarre story reminiscent of David Lynch's surrealism. For example, my first test of the game gave me the sticky note above ("a smiling bowl of meatballs with feet…
April 10, 2009Posted inOnline Gizmo of the Month
Posted inWeblog Exclusive

Zombie CSU: The Lost Arnzen Interview

In August 2008, Kensington Books released a great nonfiction title called ZOMBIE CSU: The Forensics of the Undead, written by Stoker Award-winning author Jonathan Maberry, that is definitely worth a look-see if you're a fan of this subgenre of the undead. Reminiscent of -- but far richer in scope than -- Max Brooks' classic Zombie Survival Manual, Zombie CSU covers far more than just "Crime Scene Unit" material. It is, in fact, a thick cultural guide to virtually everything associated with these brain-eating maniacs, with chapters devoted to every possible subgenre within this huge subgenre, alongside original art by many…
March 14, 2009Posted inWeblog Exclusive
Posted inArnzen News

The Ecology of Housecleaning

Still alive... catching up with all sorts of projects.  Almost overlooked this one: My microfiction, "The Ecology of Housecleaning," appears in the latest issue of Dustin LaValley's deceptively disturbing Micro100 journal.  Happy to see my old friend Kurt Newton has a tiny tale in there, alongside all sorts of other 100-word-or-less stories involving knives and babies.
March 11, 2009Posted inArnzen News
Posted inSnippets of the Strange

Authors: Dead or Alive

αΩ   Dead or Alive? How many of your authors are dead? Dead: 49 / Alive: 116 / Unknown: 153 / Not a Person: 1 Percent alive: 70.3% xo   The above is a report generated from a neat new analytical script that LibraryThing can do to your home bookshelves, called "Dead or Alive?" I sort of assumed I'd have more dead authors.  Ah well.  Ironically, they listed my own name as "Unknown"...and I found that a little soothing.  Call me anthropomorphic, but I think I'd rather be among those undead than "Not a Person". [Scrolled to the bottom ... They…
February 14, 2009Posted inSnippets of the Strange