Mac Moyer's LiveJournal

The new year begins

2010-01-03T08:13:58Z

The great wheel turns. The cycle is renewed.

On cranberry sauce

2009-11-27T06:23:45Z

I love discovering that the best way to cook something is the simplest. I contributed turkey and cranberry sauce to the Thanksgiving feast with my wife's family this year. I had some glitches with the turkey (I should make turkey a few times through the year to practice it), but my cranberry sauce was definitely successful. I used this recipe, and it was so quick, simple, and delicious that I don't know why anybody ever buys that canned cranberry jelly. I didn't add the optional pecans, though that sounds good. I added a dribble of vanilla extract and some ground cinnamon after the simmer, and it rounded it out nicely.

A few years back I used Alton Brown's cranberry dipping sauce recipe. I enjoyed it, but it's more work and a lot more ingredients than the recipe above. It also makes a lot more sauce from the same twelve-ounce bag of fresh cranberries. A lot more. Way more than you could use on three turkeys. And it wasn't nearly as popular at dinner time, so I had a ton of leftover cranberry sauce.

That's how I discovered that good cranberry sauce is really yummy on vanilla ice cream.

Joellen, on the other hand, was in charge of pies this year. She made her late grandmother's crust recipe from scratch, and we disassembled, steamed, peeled, and pureed fresh pumpkin for filling. The hard way really does make a better pie.

Cranberry sauce, though, wants to be simple.

Small Worlds, Samarost

2009-11-03T20:03:49Z

I enjoyed Small World. It's short, and I recommend leaving its music on for the duration.

Samarost is like playing a game within a piece of art. Lovely, engaging, weird.

Wii games on my feet

2009-09-26T18:10:53Z

The Wii has some innovative controls, and one of the nice ones is the balance board. But I can't help thinking that game designers are really missing the boat.

Nearly all of the Wii games that employ the balance board (as the primary or optional control) are sports or exercise themed. As a fat gamer, I'm really not that interested in sports and exercise. I mean, I know I need more exercise, but an exercise theme doesn't motivate me to play.

Because I know I need exercise, I like that the balance board gets me on my feet and makes me move them around. But I don't like that it just makes me feel like I'm exercising. If I liked exercise, I'd be doing it already. I want a game that motivates me to exercise, but isn't about exercise.

What I want is a strategy game that has an option for using the balance board as a basic control. Not as a dexterity, balance, or timing challenge, but just as left-and-right control buttons, that I have to use constantly through the game. Make a game that gets me on my feet and makes me step up and down on the balance board constantly. And is addictive to play.

Do they still make good Nintendo strategy games? I remember playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms on my NES for hours on end. Or something like Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. Those are the games I really want to play.

But I want to play 'em on my feet.

DINO-TASTIC!!!

2009-08-05T20:16:11Z

Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar is the best video game ever.

And it's the perfect length for my attention span.

I laugh every freakin' time

2009-07-31T05:30:40Z

In the spirit

2009-07-29T06:57:08Z

karjack gave me some drambuie. She hates my liver, or likes my tummy.

Maybe both.

On a completely unrelated topic, it's possible to be too drunk to play the ukulele.

Spotted at Wal*Mart, part II

2009-07-29T06:02:21Z

I saw this on the back of a pickup truck as we pulled into the parking lot, and I couldn't help following to take a picture... once the driver was out of sight.

My thoughts, in order:

You combined the jingoism of an anti-France statement with the class of a pissing Calvin sticker. Way to... go?
I'm pretty sure France give that statue to the United States as a gift.
Does Lady Liberty really pee that way?

My new love...

2009-07-27T03:14:03Z

...is a Lanikai LU-21 soprano ukulele.

I played guitar and bass (badly) in high school and college, in a couple of garage bands. But I stopped for several years. Lately I'd been thinking about picking it up again, especially since Riley arrived and started enjoying music. But even an entry-level guitar is a few hundred bucks, and it's a big piece of furniture to have in the house with a toddler around, and it was kinda one of those things I was never really gonna do.

So one night I have this dream I'm singing in a nerd rock-cover band. My buddy Eli is playing guitar, and a bunch of (vague, unspecified) friends are behind me, and I'm playing ukulele and having a fantastic time. When I woke up, I said, "Yeah, that's it."

So I picked up this little sweetheart, and I've been taking lessons from local musician Alison Losik (who also teaches piano, voice, and music theory), and I'm having a great time.

Spotted at Wal*Mart, part I

2009-07-18T05:10:31Z

I'm glad that somebody out there whose job is to design crummy toys to be mass-produced in China and sold at the biggest of big box stores has a sense of humor.

And a boss that okayed this.

Holiday breakup

2008-12-15T03:54:49Z

I made some peanut brittle with the Good Eats recipe this evening, and I declare that recipe to be full-scale awesome.

Peanut brittle + cayenne pepper = world domination.

When beavers attack!

2008-11-20T19:44:16Z

Our smallest apple tree was chewed down completely a couple of nights ago. As soon as I can, I need to get out and wrap some hardware cloth around all ~~five~~ four fruit trees on the property.

The second-smallest apple tree has already been nibbled a bit. I hope my castorific friend lets it live until the weekend. I really like that tree.

Information imbalance at the heart of horror?

2008-11-13T08:48:04Z

I loves me some Trail of Cthulhu. I ran a one-shot for Halloween that I think was pretty successful. I'm thinkin' of writing up the scenario for some form of publication, I liked it so much. But that's not what this post is about.

In the ToC rulebook, Ken Hite recommends several Lovecraft pieces as especially appropriate background reading for the game, and I made a point of hitting all of them as part of my summer reading. I think that reading did a great job of informing the Halloween session I was so pleased with, but again that's not what this is about.

While reading all that Lovecraft, it struck me that... well, Lovecraft is hard to read, I think for several reasons that multiply each other:

Multiple decades of style development renders most writers somewhat hard to read. Pick up just about anything from the '20s, '30s, '40s, and there will be a bit of challenge. Of course there are writers who cut through the haze of decades, even centuries, easily, but they're the exception, not the rule. And Lovecraft wasn't one of them.
Lovecraft really wanted to be a 19th-century author, so he deliberately imitated a style even older than his own timeframe. That is, he intentionally increased the above problem.
Lovecraft liked to be elaborate, and notoriously like big, obscure words. He liked big, obscure sentence structure, too. He wasn't big on clarity.
He was writing a certain flavor of horror, in which he dragged out the suspense for dramatic effect, trickling out information at a maddeningly slow rate. It's a deliberate choice, and often effective, but it does make it harder to read.

Anyway, that's not what this post is about, either.

I noticed that, in spite of the things Lovecraft isn't very good at, he was a master at framing a certain set of information for the reader, and keeping it very separate from the set of information in the possession of the protagonist. The protagonist, who is often the speaker, has a certain (usually very scientific, enlightened) perspective of the events he (never "she," in Lovecraft's stories) experiences. But the reader knows it's a horror story, and that invariably informs the reader's perspective. And Lovecraft plays this to the hilt. As the protagonist discovers increasingly strange facts and events, always searching for the reasonable explanation at the core, the reader knows the protagonist is driving towards something horrible and supernatural that the protagonist just can't see. Lovecraft may not have been the greatest writer in many ways, but he had amazing control over this dynamic of information.

So, it occurs to me that this may be the core of horror. Think about this the next time you experience a horror story, especially a movie. The viewer has more information than the protagonist -- if nothing else, the viewer knows it's a horror story, and the protagonist doesn't. That, I think, may be the key to horror. We watch in dread as the protagonist moves unknowingly into danger, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. That's it, plain and simple.

In action movies, the protagonist often has more information than the audience. Before the big showdown, the protagonist tells his cohorts, "Okay, this is the plan..." and then the shot fades into a preparation montage. The action story moves the protagonist into a dangerous situation, leaving us to wonder how the protagonist will get out of it, and then the protagonist surprises us (that's the plan, anyway) with a clever solution.

I really think (at least right now... I have a pet theory every week) this is what makes horror horror. I think this may also be why I find horror hard to replicate in a roleplaying game.

If horror is defined by the viewer having information that the protagonist doesn't, and watching helplessly as the protagonist moves into danger, then this gap is impossible to replicate in an RPG. Because the audience of an RPG controls the protagonist. The audience can have more information than the protagonists (I've experimented with this quite a bit), but they always control the protagonist. A good player might get a sense of accomplished verisimilitude or even glee when they guide their unknowing character into the jaws of the nightmare, but it's not the same as not being able to stop it. We can borrow the scary trappings of horror, the tone, the monsters, the psychopaths. We can make our players feel a risk, a thread, even suspense. But we can never make them feel exactly that sense of helplessness, that experience of screaming at the screen "Don't open that door!"

Can we?

Sweet light

2008-11-05T07:42:25Z

Man, it's been a long eight years. It sure feels good to turn this corner and see some light at the end of the tunnel, and not just more tunnel.

The next president has his work cut out for him, but I'm just looking forward to a president who can use the English language.

Arab, Muslim... fear, ignorance... tomayto, tomahto

2008-10-16T19:11:12Z

A troubling bit of video was in rotation at CNN and CNNHN last weekend, John McCain and a supporter named Gayle Quinnell at a rally. The exchange goes like this:

Quinnell: I can't trust Obama. I— I have heard about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, um.... He's an Arab. He is not....
McCain: No, no. No, ma'am. No, ma'am.
Quinnell: No?
McCain: No. No, ma'am. No, ma'am. He's a, he's a, he's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on, on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about. He's not. Thank you.

Now, there's a lot that troubles me about this, but I'll strip it down a layer at a time to get to what really bothers me.

First, Quinnell says Barack Obama is an Arab, which is... patently wrong. Of course, what she means is that Barack Obama is a Muslim. I'll get to that, too. But my first layer of objection is her inability to distinguish between Arabs and Muslims. Given that the U.S. is engaged in a two wars in the Middle East, and has complicated relationships with a number of countries in the region, I think it would behoove us to familiarize ourselves with the most basic sociological groups in that very, very rich, complex region. Especially if those of us who are volunteering in political campaigns, like Ms. Quinnell.

If you don't know the difference, please take a moment to survey those Wikipedia articles I linked above. Please... seriously. But the bottom line is that they're not the same. There's a lot of overlap in the two groups, but they're not the same. An Arab is someone who identifies with an ethnic group. There are Arabs who practice many religions. A Muslim is someone who observes some form of the super-religion of Islam. There are Muslims throughout the world, in the Middle East, in Europe, in India, in Indonesia, in China, in the United States, and of all ethnic groups.

Okay, so Ms. Quinnell is ignorant about the difference between an Arab and a Muslim. That a 75-year-old American woman would be confused about cultures she doesn't encounter regularly is not terribly shocking. I'm sorry that's probably representative of my country as a whole, but it's not what really bothers me.

Now, Quinnell is clearly face-down in the koolaid that some rightist propagandists are pushing about Barack Obama being a Muslim. And a whole lot of other people are, too. This is really strange to me. I'm not sure how the guy can be evil because he's a Muslim -- I'll get to that, too -- and also be evil because his fiery preacher at Trinity United Church of Christ is a really angry guy.

But, hey, that's politics for you. If you oppose somebody or something, you tend to have a couple of genuine reasons, and then you stack up borderline reasons around them like cordwood. Obama's family connections to Islam (his father was raised Muslim, but stopped practicing before he moved to the U.S., and young Barack Obama learned about Islam in school, like we all should have; that's about the extent of his connection to Islam) are inflated to one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition to Obama in public polling. But, come on. We all do that. It's human nature.

What really chills me is McCain's reaction to Quinnell's statement. She says she doesn't trust him because he's an Arab... that's kinda foul and pretty racist, but not very detailed. McCain is the one who makes it worse. Seriously, read it. McCain says he's not an Arab, he's a family man and a citizen. So, an Arab can't be a family man or a citizen? But, again, they're not really talking about Arabs. Quinnell meant "Muslim." I know it, and I'm pretty sure John McCain knew it, too. So a Muslim can't be a family man or a citizen?

Yeah. That's it. That's what's bothering me. So let me look hard at that.

I'm not a very objective observer — I've picked my side in this election, and it ain't John McCain — but I can step back and look at what John McCain is doing here. He's not saying that Barack Obama can't be an Arab or Muslim because he's a good family man and a good U.S. citizen. He really isn't. He's running a political campaign. He has a message he's pushing, and anything outside of that message has to get swept aside. I don't blame him for that. The game demands that he work within the format of sound bites that look good on TV, and a lengthy explanation of the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, and about how many of them are good people who work hard to support and better their families, about how many of them are doing that right here in our United States, and how none of that has much to do with Barack Obama, who is neither an Arab nor a Muslim, isn't going to play well for his audience.

Just now, it's not John McCain's job to educate anyone, it's his job to get elected. I don't blame him for that. My guy does the same thing, and I know it. John McCain was trying to be an honorable player, quickly stepping away from the crazy and moving on to what's going to play better for TV.

But, by golly, there's an awful lot of prejudice and hate in this country. If John McCain isn't standing up and saying, hey, there are over a million Muslims in the U.S., and they're just folks like the rest of us who work, or don't, who have families and mortgages and problems and dreams, and some of them are criminals and most of them are not, and some of them are sinful and many are virtuous, just like all Americans... who is standing up to say that? If he's not standing up to say there are 1.5 million Arab Americans, and they're as American as the European Americans and the Asian Americans and the African Americans and the Latin American Americans, and maybe everybody else is a little less American than the Native Americans... then who is?

I was taught this as a basic fact of America: it's you that matters, not your nationality, ethnicity, religion. Who did you help today? Who did you hurt today? Nothing else matters, damnit. That's the koolaid I drink. I know it's a delusion, but it's the one I want to have come true.

"Family man" is not the opposite of "Arab." I don't really believe John McCain meant that it was, but he did kinda leave it hanging there. And somebody needs to shoot it down. We all need to shoot it down.

It's the sort of thing you'll like, if you like this sort of thing

2008-09-24T21:49:22Z

I really dig the Mountain Goats' album Heretic Pride. You should check it out.

Yes, you.

They have a song about Lovecraft. Or sort of about feeling like Lovecraft. When he lived in Brooklyn. It's called "Lovecraft in Brooklyn." It's a good name. And a good song. You can't go wrong with lyrics like:

Woke up afraid of my own shadow
I mean, like, genuinely afraid
Headed to the pawnshop
To buy myself a switchblade
Someday something's coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here
And store our brains in mason jars

What does Indie Press Revolution bring to the table?

2008-07-22T17:41:39Z

EDIT: I've received some very helpful responses from folks who work at IPR in the comments. Some points:

Publishers set prices at IPR, and IPR takes a 15% cut, which is smaller than a typical bookstore model.
I've personally had very good experiences buying directly from indie RPG publishers, but that's not always the case. IPR is providing professional customer service so you don't have to take a risk working directly with the guy who wrote a beautiful little RPG, but can't seem to offer customer service worth a damn. They're out there.
IPR's slightly-higher-than-usual S&H fees reflect more expensive packaging to better protect their books. I can vouch for this first-hand: they do use better packaging, and it does work.
drivingblind points out ways to keep S&H-cost-per-book lower... see the comments for details.
Even folks who work at IPR aren't 100% pleased with the e-commerce software they're using.

The answers to my core question -- what does IPR do for me? -- has a lot of answers, and many of them are publisher-oriented. But the fact that I got so many thoughtful, rational responses from folks who work at IPR indirectly answers the question better than anything. It's clear these guys care about their business and want to serve consumers. They're making a quality effort in a challenging sector of a tough industry, and that deserves some support.

I'm going to leave the post below as originally written, but be advised that my mind has changed.

In my continuing fascination with indie RPGs, I've noted that in the last year or so most indie publishers are moving to Indie Press Revolution to handle their mail-order sales. I don't know a lot about their operating model or the economics of their unique product range, but I do know that as a consumer I don't care for a lot of things I'm seeing at IPR.

First, their prices aren't good. Now, these are indie RPGs, and I accept that I'm paying a premium for buying from small presses. But it seems to me (my memory may be faulty) that I paid less than $22 for my copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard" when I bought it directly from the publisher's web site (which isn't an option anymore, now that the publisher only sells it online through IPR). And it seems to me that IPR is a middleman taking a cut of the money I'm paying... but what am I, as the consumer, getting for my extra dough?

Second, their shipping fees are awful. Perhaps I'm too coddled by Amazon's free shipping deals, but I'll point out that independent sellers through Amazon charge only $3.99 for shipping a single book. IPR charges $5.79 for shipping a copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard," and even more for bigger books. Now, "Dogs" is a great game, but it's a tiny little book. Why so much for shipping? It's only a couple of bucks, but on top of their already high product prices it gets amplified. As a fan of indie RPGs, it's hard for me to feel good about selling my friends on a copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard" when I know it will cost them nearly $28 for a 160-page, digest-sized book. Worse yet, I already own and love "Dogs," but I'm reluctant to buy any games I'm less familiar with from IPR, because I don't feel comfortable with the value I'd be getting.

Finally, the web site is hard to use. It's hard to find stuff, even with the search function when you know exactly what you're looking for. Do a search for "spirit of the century." The game "Spirit of the Century" is the ninth entry on the page! WTF?

Making this worse is IPR's habit of posting a full entry for each available format for a product. There's an entry for the print edition, an entry for the PDF edition, and an entry for an option that includes both. All for the same book. It makes much more sense to me to put up just one entry per product, and show a column with the available buying formats and corresponding prices. It sure would be easier to browse the results of my search if there weren't three nearly identical entries for every project, producing a list so unnecessarily long that it extended over three pages.

I know IPR is scraping out a niche for itself in a hard-to-sell area of an industry that isn't exactly the place to go for profitability to begin with. And they must be doing something for publishers, or so many indie publishers wouldn't be using them. But, as a consumer, I'm not seeing the benefit of using IPR. I never like to be a complainer, especially about a small-fry operation that's serving the gaming community, but IPR needs to do a better job of telling me why I should support them. So far I avoid it as much as I can, but if they continue to be the main outlet for small RPG presses it's going to be hard to follow indie RPGs without them.

At the hospital, vaguely

2008-07-09T20:35:02Z

I'm staying at Sacred Heart Medical Center for a few days. I'm reluctant to post details, because detailed medical information posted in public could be used against me or my family in the future, but it's not because I don't want my friends to know.

Feel free to contact Joellen and me directly, and we'll do what we can to fill you in.

So long, George, and thanks for all the F-bombs

2008-06-23T16:36:37Z

When I was in high school, Nick-at-Night started showing classic ('70s) SNL episodes edited down to half-hour best-of shows. (I bet NBC would have a hit on its hands if it did this with current SNL episodes... but I digress.) My favorite of all of these was George Carlin's appearance.

Other comedians go for the laugh first, and a few good ones occasionally make you think. Carlin's comedy always went for the thinking first, and the laughter came as a result. I never looked at the world the same way after I first saw George Carlin's standup.

We've lost a great American hero, a guy who fought hypocrisy and never ran out of enemies. And I can't help feeling we lost him just when we need him most.

No Play NW!

2008-06-12T16:55:03Z

Last year, I wanted to go to Go Play NW, but we were on the verge of Riley, so I didn't. As Riley's first birthday approaches, I got to thinkin', "Hey, I bet Go Play NW is coming up soon."

So I looked it up, and it was almost a month earlier than last year. It was May 31st through June 1st.

Man, I need to get on some kinda mailing list for this thing.

SCIENTIFICTION!

2008-06-02T18:40:41Z

I'm reading The Skylark of Space, and for some reason this passage struck me as especially iconic:

For forty-eight hours the uncontrolled atomic motor dragged the masterless vessel with its four unconscious passengers through the illimitable reaches of empty space, with an awful and constantly increasing velocity.

I don't know why that passage strikes me as so representative of pre-Golden-Age science fiction. The elaborately stumbling rhythm? The lengthy description without a drop of imagery? The awkward pairing of the emotional adjective "awful" with the factual "velocity," in a sentence already weighed down with numbers? Above all, I can't figure out how you would build a sentence like that without a word processor. It's like the Stonehenge of sentences.

Science fiction in academia

2008-05-14T23:01:45Z

A bit ago, I commented about science fiction not being part of the academic canon of literature. Today I stumbled across an exception, a collegiate course on science fiction, by Dr. Courtney Brown at Emory University. And it's a podcast. (Scroll down a bit, or track it down on iTunes.)

It's called "Science Fiction and Politics," and it's a social science course, not a literature course, but... whatever. It's close enough.

Trail of Cthulhu player's guide = smart

2008-05-07T16:48:45Z

Trail of Cthulhu is nifty and gorgeous. It's also a $40 core rulebook. And Cthulhu campaigns are notoriously short. So Pelgrane Press has done something I think is very smart. They're selling a player's guide for $11.

Now, for most systems, a player's guide is extra material... an extra expense. But in this case the player's guide is a subset of the core rulebook. Just what the players need to play the game, but not something extra for the GM to buy.

Pelgrane also offers PDFs of the ToC rulebook. I've seen from experience that, when a PDF is available for an RPG, especially a short campaign, the GM will often buy a copy of the core rulebook and spread the PDF around among the players... who never buy the book for themselves. With an inexpensive player's guide, I think Pelgrane is opening up a way for non-GM players to support the company and the product line, and they're not overcharging for it. In other words, I think many players who might otherwise be inclined to violate the copyright now have a very reasonable alternative.

It's good for everybody, and it's smart. I would sure like to see this model catch on. Way to go, Pelgrane!

Geek affirmation

2008-05-06T17:05:26Z

I'm feeling a little ungeeky today.

It's because of podcasts. I listen to the Butcher Block podcast, which is dedicated to Jim Butcher stuff. At least, I did until yesterday afternoon. While I enjoy the Dresden Files books very much, and I liked the SciFi Channel show, I was seriously outgeeked by the last episode of the podcast. After the speaker got very worked up about a new Dresden Files graphic novel and the cover art for some upcoming books... I turned it off and unsubscribed. I just couldn't share her excitement. I just can't get that revved up about those things. Somebody let me know when the next Dresden book comes out in paperback... other than that, I don't have the mental bandwidth to spare.

I'm listening to the GeekDad podcast this morning, specifically the second of their "HipTrax" episodes. The first song was about Harry Potter (which I don't pay any attention to), and the second was about World of Warcraft (which I don't pay any attention to).

*sigh*

I didn't immediately turn that one off and unsubscribe, but it was a sharp followup blow. I'm feeling very out-of-touch, geekwise. So pardon me while I affirm my geekiness.

I once watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies, extended editions even, in one day.
I self-published a board game.
I started a local science fiction reading group.
I go to at least one game con a year.
I know the name of that guy with the weird nose who threatens Luke Skywalker in the Mos Eisley cantina in Episode IV.
I refer to the first Star Wars movie as "Episode IV."
I wear glasses.
Once a week, I am a Dungeon Master.
On alternating weeks, I play a Japrilian diviner named Abu Zayn Mahdi ibn Asad al-Ragush al-Guluq. He was trapped in a crystal sphere for seven hundred years, after finding said sphere in the enemy palace his side captured at the Battle of Korhan. His sister Hafsa, a batulifaizah (virgin battle-priestess), was a crucial leader in the battle, and Mahdi had received word the night before he entered the palace that his wife had given birth to their first child, a son. He has seven levels in wizard, and five in the geometer prestige class. His Intelligence score is 21. He does 24d6 damage with his Disintegrate spell (26d6 if he uses a spellglyph), if his target fails a Fortitude save (5d6 if the target succeeds), and he usually casts True Strike first to get +20 on the hit roll.

Okay, I feel better.

Laying a foundation

2008-05-02T17:34:51Z

My friend shadroe and I started up a local reading group for classic science ficion. We settled on the Classics of Science Fiction list to guide us, a compilation of several critical lists of the best and most important science fiction novels. While I consider myself a science fiction fan, I went through the list and checked off only about a dozen titles I'd read, out of almost two hundred.

Why so few? Because I studied English literature in college, and science fiction isn't really in the canon. You can often take a course on science fiction, but in one course you won't read enough novels to give you a solid foundation. And colleges don't generally offer more than one. So my fiction reading bandwidth was occupied with lots of non-scifi.

It's been a great journey for me. After the last year of reading almost nothing but strong scifi classics in my spare time, I have a new understanding of the history of the genre, and I feel like it's just barely a first glimpse. But it's already been such an amazing view, I'll be on this path for a while.

As we reached the end of our last reading cycle (all the members of the group pick a book from the list, and we read one every three weeks before we pick another batch), I read far enough ahead that I decided to independently read the three volumes of Asimov's anthology Before the Golden Age, stories that appeared in the magazines when Asimov was growing up in the '30s. I'm halfway through the collection now, and it's a particular eye-opener. I kind of knew science fiction magazines were more important in the early days of science fiction than they've been in my lifetime, but it's a new experience to actually read some of the best short stories from the early days. It's like I've seen the mountains for my whole life, I'm finally trekking out to climb some of them, and I'm finding the beauty of the valleys and rivers below them. I've already made a point of picking up some of the other short-story collections on our list, Campbell's 1952 Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, Conklin's The Best of Science Fiction, and Adventures in Time and Space. I'd like to read all of these before I get to the new-wave Dangerous Visions anthologies.