General

I can see the music

When I was 20 I didn’t really look back at the previous two decades of my life. I didn’t really look forward. Thirty seemed very old, in its own way. I didn’t even need to watch Logan’s Run to sense that. I just lived in the moment and stumbled along with youthful exuberance.

I remember being mildly traumatized when I turned 26, struck at how most of my 20s were behind me, that I was inescapably an adult and I would probably need to start acting like one. Three years later I grew a beard.

I never looked much into the future or thought about getting older much since the mini-crisis of turning 26. Turning 30 didn’t phase me and neither did 40. I started running at age 44 and by 50 I’d logged over 3,100 km jogging. At the same time I never really got into long term planning, never managing to successfully move beyond the stumbling approach of my youth. The difference now is if I stumble I have an increased chance of breaking a hip [old person joke].

What I have found in the last few years is an increasing tendency to look back to my youth and the things I enjoyed back then. This is nothing unusual, most of us do it as it brings a sense of comfort and familiarity as we grapple with the dawning realization that we are, in fact, mortal, and our time is limited, barring reincarnation as someone famous, spiffy or perhaps just a beetle that gets eaten by a curious cat. Or maybe post-death is some truly fabulous thing and no one ever comes back to offer concrete proof of this because our mortal minds could not handle that level of fabulousness.

All of this is to say that tonight I ended up on one of those nostalgia treks that led me to listening to the song “Something About You”, the 1985 hit from Level 42. It was a catchy song. I put the album its from, World Machine, on my wishlist in iTunes (not Groove, which, if it has a wishlist, probably adds random albums and songs that it determines are what you really want, not the ones you’ve selected, then deletes the list at some random point in the future, anyway). I continued my trek, listening to a smidgen of Cyndi Lauper, Roxy Music, Hole and yes, Nazareth. I found myself hovering over the Play button on Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” but had to draw the line somewhere. If you could wear out YouTube videos, I’d be close on that one.

I may have wishlisted the self-titled Boston album, though.

Most of my nostalgia is music-related because music is so of its time and is great at invoking memories in ways that TV shows, movies and books simply don’t. I’m re-reading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, for instance, but I couldn’t tell you when or where exactly I had read the book before, except that it was when I was young. I’m actually kind of shocked at how little I remember of the book (it’s quite good). But there are things I do sometimes look back on wistfully. I will reminisce about them soon in another post that pushes me that much closer to “old man yells at cloud” territory.

Apple Event September 9, 2015 -or- Canadians, Mortgage Your Homes

Yesterday (September 9) Apple unveiled its latest assortment of new devices (minus Macs, which are typically announced at a separate event). Nothing genuinely new, but lots of upgrades on existing products and new form factors for some. This post was originally made on Broken Forum.

While the event was filled with non-surprises thanks to weeks of persistent, detailed and pretty much accurate rumors, here are my thoughts on the announced products:

iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus: Nice improvements all around but two small steps backward, with both phones being slightly heavier than last year’s and equipped with smaller batteries. The latter is unsurprising as Apple has previously shown it’s willing to shave down battery size to make its devices thinner.

These phones are outrageously priced in Canada, as if we have all won the Lotto 6/49 (I won $10 on it once). It’s interesting to reflect that the original iPhone retailed for $499 U.S. (that was a 4 GB model). Here are the prices for the 16 GB models as listed on the US and Canadian Apple sites:

US Canada
iPhone 6s $649 $899
iPhone 6s Plus $749 $1029

Both phones are priced about 38% higher in Canada. The difference in exchange rate between the US and Canadian dollar right now is around 24%. Apple must hate moose or something. Boo to these prices, I say. There’s the “Apple premium” and then there’s just plain old soaking ’em for all they’re worth.

I’m unconvinced by Force Touch as a truly useful feature. Maybe when they add Force Choke to phones. I’d like to use Force Choke to hang up on spam calls. I don’t feel there’s anything about these phones to really swing more people Apple’s way. They’ll still sell a billion of ’em because they’re perfectly fine phones.

Apple TV: Since Apple TV hasn’t been updated for three years, this hardware refresh basically gets Apple caught up to the interfaces on other streaming devices. I’m not sure where the upper price point is for these things so I have no idea if the reaction to the new Apple TV will be “Must have!” or “Must wait for the price to come down.” The app store and gaming are nice additions but I don’t think they’ll convince a lot of people to buy or upgrade that may not have otherwise. Also, why does the base model come with 32 GB of storage while the phones still come with 16 GB? Bad, Apple.

Apple Watch: The updated watchOS finally gives third party apps a little more flexibility but it remains to be seen how performance and battery life are affected, as even Apple’s first party stuff has issues with responsiveness/lag. Perhaps more than any other Apple product in recent years, the Watch really seems best to hold off on until the second generation hardware arrives. Also, I saw a student at the college this week wearing an Apple Watch. Because the display is normally off when not in use, I was struck at how it looks like a very nice digital watch with a dead battery. Also that student could have spent the same money to buy enough Kraft Dinner for the entire school year. That would be super-gross to eat and maybe even fatal, but still.

iPad mini 4: After trying for a year to convince people to buy the iPad mini 3, which was the exact same hardware as the previous year’s iPad mini 2, only with Touch ID and a $100 higher price, Apple has announced the iPad mini 4 and quietly escorted the iPad mini 3 out back and had it shot. This is basically the iPad Air 2 shrunk down to iPad mini dimensions. Thinner, lighter, all that good stuff. It starts at $399, not a cheap price but not overly outrageous for the specs and quality of build. My iPad mini 2 died so I’d seriously getting this as a replacement over anther mini 2 (which had its price reduced). Except it costs $2 million in Canada.

The iPad Air 2 was not updated because Apple apparently needs at least one flagship product to bypass every year. But wait, maybe the iPad Air 2 isn’t the iPad flagship anymore, Maybe it’s the…

iPad Pro: This is kind of interesting but in the end it’s still just a very big iPad. It would be great for reading comics, which I rarely do. It would be nice for reading magazines, which I do more often, but I don’t need to drop [Canadian price redacted due to local obscenity laws] dollars on a magazine reader. The Apple Pencil seems like a decent stylus but initial impressions and specs suggest it may be good but not great for doodling. I’m not going to spend [Canadian price redacted due to local obscenity laws] for a doodling device, either. Or if I were I’d probably buy a Cintiq instead, but win the lottery first. As expensive as it will be, I still find it intriguing. I’m one of those nutty people who actually like large tablets (for certain tasks) and one that’s thinner and lighter than a Surface Pro has some appeal (I say, as an owner of a Surface Pro 3). Not being able to run “real” programs is a downer, though, even if iOS is getting better multi-tasking and the like in iOS 9.

Tim Cook’s Hair: This isn’t a new product but it still kind of scares me. I am waiting for Tim Cook’s Hair 2.0 to launch. Come on, Jon Ivy, you can do it. Make Tim’s hair the fastest, lightest, thinnest (er, maybe not thinnest) hair it can be.

How not to get your Groove™ on in Windows 10

Overall I am enjoying the improvements of Windows 10. Its quirks and issues have been minor irritants at best. I tried most of the included apps but they have so far proven too limiting in one way or another, even if they do include some nice/handy features (it’s not a good sign when the outlook.com web mail has more features than the dedicated Windows 10 mail app). There was one app in particular that I really wanted to commit to: Groove.

Groove is the current incarnation of Microsoft’s music app (see also: Xbox Music, Zune, etc. etc.) Like iTunes it will play your local music and let you buy more from a digital store. I wanted Groove to be groovy because while the name is dumb (even Edge is better) iTunes is a bit of a mess and I’m quite willing to move away from it as my primary music player should a better option present itself.

On the plus side Groove is minimal. You will not be overwhelmed with options. You will barely be whelmed with options. It has a light theme and a dark theme. It can import your iTunes or Google Music library. It will play your music. That covers most of its features.

I import my iTunes library. A lot of the artist pictures are weird and scary, a strange mix of artists when they were young and artists as they are at age 150. The artist pictures are all presented in circles, which is a UI convention I really don’t care for and I can’t say why, exactly. Album covers are mercifully presented as squares instead of, say, trapezoids. The importing of my iTunes library initially seems fine. I play some tracks. I like that Groove has large controls. It does what I want it to. It will even let me pin music to the Start menu if for some reason I absolutely need to listen to Pink Floyd in as few clicks as possible.

Then I decide to listen to 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields. This is a triple album that came out in 1999, when CDs were not yet considered quaint. As such it really was originally released as three physical discs. The iTunes version preserves this format, even labeling each Disc 1, Disc 2 and Disc 3. Groove preserves the notion of the songs spanning three discs, but it sorts the songs like so: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, etc. Yes, it wants to play the first song from each disc, then the second song from each disc and so on. This is, of course, madness.

I order it to find album info and it comes up with a lengthy list of choices, all of which contain fewer than the album’s 69 songs (most often because each only contains one disc’s worth of music). There is one entry that has all 69 songs and as a bonus has the correct cover art. I choose it, content that although Groove was bad, this fix is simple and painless.

I look over the copious collection of songs and something seems amiss. Closer study reveals Groove has duplicated a number of tracks. Further inspection shows the duplicates are in fact different songs that have been mislabeled. There is no way to edit the properties of a song from within Groove. Undeterred, I ordered Groove to find the album info again and when I choose the same album as before it highlights “problem” tracks and allows me to “fix” them by choosing other tracks to take their place. After carefully matching everything up–by checking the album in iTunes–I confirm my changes and am presented with the same garbled list of duplicates. Well, not entirely the same. On its second attempt Groove has garbled a slightly different set of songs, possibly for variety. The only option now is to delete the album from my library. This also deletes the files from my iTunes folder. This is what you call sub-optimal.

I gave up. I will probably try Groove again because I’m silly and stubborn about these things, but it’s unlikely I will ever really use it again because I have no confidence that the great mangling of songs is something that will ever be fixed (and to be fair to iTunes–how the very utterance grates–when it mucks up some songs it happily lets you dive into the track’s info and edit to your delight to set things right).

Groove, we shall not play music together.

Windows 10: The Quick List Review

I’ll offer more detailed thoughts on Windows 10 later but here’s a bullet list of the good, bad and ugly I’ve found so far. I updated my Surface Pro 3 the day of release (July 29) and my main PC a few days later and so far don’t regret updating either.

The Good:

  • refined look to windows–drop shadows are back, thick borders of Win8 are gone, widgets are thinner, classier-looking
  • ALT-TAB presents all open windows in a grid, making it easier to see and switch between them
  • the thin line underneath running programs on the taskbar is easier to see than the old glowing effect
  • ditto for the effect showing multiple windows open for the same program
  • Start menu is back and offers a balance between Win 7 functionality and the advantages of Win 8’s live tiles (with the option to turn them off)
  • File Explorer now has an optional Quick Access feature that makes it simple to find files you use most often
  • you don’t need to dip into Control Panel to change most settings anymore
  • a bigger, better calculator
  • a bigger, better date/time setting
  • built-in calendar, mail and store apps are better than before
  • redesigned Action Center has better notifications and handy quick task options
  • Modern (Metro) apps now run in windows and can be moved around and closed like regular programs
  • Cortana works decently though I rarely have need to use it (her?)

The Bad:

  • rearranging tiles in the Start menu is still needlessly fiddly (though not as bad as Windows 8)
  • requires rebooting to fix most issues (in my experience so far)
  • really wants you to sign in with a Microsoft account (I have one so no biggie but others may object)
  • the calendar and mail apps may be better but still aren’t good enough to replace better alternatives
  • ditto for Edge, a decent (and speedy) browser but way too barebones to replace something like Firefox or Chrome
  • the store is still filled with tons of junk
  • some parts of the UI feel unfinished (Settings is still not a full replacement for Control Panel)
  • Solitaire is not included and now features a yearly subscription (!)
  • you can’t change the color of title bars in windows without some hackery. Hope you like white!

The Ugly:

  • the Groove music app a) has a dumb name b) is also barebones c) will happily mangle your music library when you import it
  • probably more stuff but my ire hasn’t been sufficiently raised to be able to think of anything else off the top of my head

A mind is a terrible thing to force into writing blog posts

I am having brain freeze tonight, unable to decide what to write. I’ve done all the easy stuff on the blog lately:

  • written a haiku
  • made up dumb writing prompts
  • scanned in random photos from way back
  • made multiple lists

It’s time to wing it.

Today is Labour Day, one of those self-ironic holidays (“Celebrate labour with a day off”) and I’m tending to a mild cold, feeling a bit down about things beyond my control, lamenting the sudden demise of summer after the big windstorm (seriously, it’s like someone flipped a switch. We’ve had nice days since, including today, but it feels all different, like fall jumped in a month ahead of schedule the same way summer did. It’s all this new-fangled climate change, I’m sure, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it) and generally feeling blah and writing run-on sentences as a result.

My neck is itchy. I shaved my head today (I do this every two to three weeks, not because I’ve suddenly joined a cult) and touched up my neck, to keep the neckbeard thing at bay, but I apparently did it all wrong because the neck, as I said, is itchy. I can’t blame this on climate change but at least I started a new paragraph to whine about it.

Here’s a picture from either 1974 or 1975 of mom and a goat at Knott’s Berry Farm, I think. Farms often have goats so that seems right. Mom is clearly not impressed by the goat’s attempt at self-emasculation. This is really one of those “Write your own caption” things, so go ahead, write your own!

Mom and goat, circa 1974
Mom and goat, circa 1974

 

Fun alternatives to IT (fun not necessarily included)

I did a search using the phrase “best alternative career for IT.” Here are some of the results.

TechRepublic offers 10 alternative careers for burned-out IT workers. The title holds promise but the first suggestion is “Auto repair” and the last is “Farming,” with “Cosmetology” (hair design) somewhere in the middle. I don’t drive, I like farms best when I see them on TV and don’t have to smell them, and I don’t have any hair, making me a poor expert on the subject. To be fair, the author also suggests writing, teaching and other more obvious choices but somehow the list ended up leaving me mildly depressed.

I don’t dislike IT but I find as time marches on in that way it has a habit of doing I want less and less to spend my time fixing tech problems (mine or others) and more time making things. Creating things. Designing things (but not hair).

ZDNet has Five alternative careers for IT pros. This list may not be for me. I’m not a fancypants pro, just some schmuck offering tier one and two support. But I read on and…technology insurance underwriter? Equity analyst? Account executive? I have clearly found the difference between IT and IT pro because these occupations are about as appealing to me as rolling in honey and napping on a fire ant nest. I’m not saying these would be bad jobs for someone, but just uttering the phrase “technology insurance underwriter” comes close to inducing narcolepsy for me.

I looked at some of the less IT-specific searches and found 7 Alternatives to Working a Regular Job You Don’t Like. The title is a bit harsh as applied to me (I don’t actively dislike my job), but let’s see what bold ideas the Happier Abroad blog has:

  • Self-employment doing what you love. For me the best fit here would be writing. If you like this post please send me $10,000 to get started on making this dream happen.
  • Adopt a more minimalist lifestyle focused more on spirituality, interpersonal relationships, frugality and richness of experiences, rather than on materialism and status. Or, be happy being poor. I tried this before, it didn’t work.
  • Find a rich partner to date or marry. Direct, but not really practical. I’m already in a happy relationship and while money is nice and poverty sucks, I prefer a balance. My substitute option would be Win the lottery.
  • Live with your parents. My dad died 24 years ago. This would be awkward.

In the end the easiest thing to change is my attitude but I don’t think lobotomies are legal anymore so I’m probably stuck with mine for awhile yet. At least my hip doesn’t hurt anymore.

A haiku to half a summer of running

Half a summer of running is better than none.

I ran in the heat
Until my leg, it went “Ow!”
Walking, the new black

Okay, that’s pretty terrible, but in my defense I’ve got some kind of bug or virus or whatever it is I can walk a half dozen blocks, go down a flight of stairs, then feel exhausted and ready for a nap by the time I climb back up them (which describes my after-dinner walk tonight. I wanted to see how much of the tree destruction had been cleared. The giant tree on Sherbrooke had been chainsawed and piled on the side of the road but the smaller tree on Fader was still toppled over, albeit now with caution tape around it. It’s also not resting on the power lines. I wanted to check out if any clearing had been done down on the Brunette River trail but after climbing back up the stairs in Lower Hume Park–the trees at the bottom were still blocking the way–I was feeling more like exploring the comfort of being tucked under the sheets than the great outdoors.)

As to the running, the right leg is legitimately starting to feel better. I’m cautiously hopeful that with some physio and a few weeks of stretching exercises I may be ready to run again before the end of September. By then, of course, the light will be fading quickly after dinner and I’ll have little time to get runs in, but I’ll figure something out. At least it won’t be Africa hot.

Not tonight, I have a headache

I really do have a headache as I write this. It is being worked over by a pair of Extra Strength Tylenol. It took awhile but they seem to be masking the pain reasonably well now. I feel like I may be coming down with something (I have been both cold and flu-free all year so I’m due) but maybe it’s just more of that possible new allergy or allergies I’ve picked up. I’m on Day 7 of my two week Reactine test and so far I haven’t found they’ve made much difference to my clogged sinuses.

On the plus side, my right leg is actually starting to feel improved, even without any physiotherapy. Time heals all wounds and all that. Well, except wounds that cause dismemberment. Once that leg gets lopped off, you ain’t never growing a new one no matter how long you wait. But we can dream. Yes, that is what I will do, dream of a groovy future where we can grow back new limbs and eventually and inevitably it becomes trendy and fashionable to have extra limbs just because we can. There could be practical applications, though. How many times have you thought a third hand would be nice to have? Not many, probably. Maybe you’ve never thought about it at all. But think about it now and you’ll probably admit a third hand would, on occasion, come in handy (pardon the pun). I can’t actually come up with a good example right at the moment, probably because these mixed medications have addled my brain. This is why I’m going to bed soon, to have addled dreams in which I am a horrifying mutant with three hands, four legs and two heads that argue with each other over how stupid this blog post is before coming to agreement that it is, above all else, quite stupid.

Good night.

The Big Blow, August 29 2015

Today I headed out on my usual weekend trip to Lougheed Town Centre to get a few things and have some lunch. Despite a call for rain in the early afternoon, it was still dry around 1 p.m. so I decided to risk it. It’s just rain, after all, not sulfuric acid. Not yet, anyway.

I noticed it was a tad on the breezy side as I began heading out and in fact I had not even walked a block before coming across a giant tree toppled across Sherbrooke Street, having barely missed crushing a car. Two blocks later I found another downed tree ominously resting on some power lines. More trees were down in Hume Park and by the time I got to the entrance to the Brunette River trail the scene looked like a hurricane had torn through it. And in a way it kind of had. Winds gusted up to 80 km/h for a few hours, knocking out power, knocking down copious copses of trees, disrupting ferry and SkyTrain service (the latter due to a tree falling over the track near Royal Oak station). CBC has several stories on the mayhem, one of which you can read here: Fierce B.C. storm knocks out power and causes havoc.

As the wind was still blowing at the river trail, I opted to not risk it since a lot of the trees along the river lean precariously without the assistance of freakishly strong winds pushing against them. Instead I walked up North Road, bypassing the intersections without working traffic lights and made my way to the mall, but not before the rain did indeed start, giving me a nice soak on the way in.

I’ve made a gallery of the destruction I saw enroute to Lougheed which can be found here: Windstorm August 29, 2015. Enjoy!

Here’s a sample of the wooden carnage around the corner from my place:

You can almost hear Maxwell Smart saying "Missed by *that* much!"
You can almost hear Maxwell Smart saying “Missed by *that* much!”

NBE: Near Barf Experience

I had a weird sign-of-impending-apocalypse moment at Waterfront yesterday morning.

My route to work starts by taking the Expo Line from Sapperton to the terminus station downtown, Waterfront. From there I walk through the old Canadian Pacific Railway building to the stairs leading down into the Canada Line Waterfront station. I sometimes wonder how much it confuses tourists to have two Waterfront Stations for two different rail lines about a block from each other. At least a little, I think.

As I’m approaching the stairs I see a guy standing at the top of them, facing toward the stairs. I make a quick mental note to pass him on the left. He starts to pull off his jacket but otherwise does not change position so I revise my mental note to pass even further on the left.

Immediately as I did this he bowed his head forward and barfed onto the stairs. Whatever he brought up was mostly liquid and landed with a curiously loud splat on the concrete steps. He quickly said, “Sorry” and I simply kept walking down the stairs, appreciating his politeness in what must have been a difficult and embarrassing moment for him. I lament that I never stopped to make sure he was okay. I don’t know why but something just told me this was nothing more than a simple bit of vomiting (however simple such a thing might be), not something that would end with him crumpled in a gory pile at the bottom of the stairs.

It was later that I started picking up the sign-of-impending-apocalypse vibe, for a couple of reasons. First, we were in a building that serves as a hub for three commuter rail lines, a commuter ferry, buses and has nearby seaplane and heliport terminals. The Canada Line connects directly to the airport and from there the rest of the world. What if this guy was on a trip to Vancouver and also happened to be Patient Zero, carrying some new superbug? He’s now spewed that bug into the middle of one of the busiest transit hubs in a region with over two million people. That is some first-rate transmission there and I ain’t talking engines, unless you mean engines of DEATH. The apocalypse vibe was further strengthened by the fact that my short story “Hello?” has the protagonist–finding himself the only person in Vancouver, everyone else mysteriously missing–spending a scene in this very terminal building, musing about how it would be the perfect location for the zombies to manifest. Basically, these cavernous old transportation buildings kind of creep me out and people spontaneously barfing in them gets my mind a-working, as it is wont to do at times.

Magazines of yore -or- Back when I bought things to read on paper

I enjoy a good magazine. I also sometimes enjoy a bad magazine. I remember buying magazines off racks in corner stores, grocery stores and bookstores. I remember looking forward to some magazines a lot, a genuine highlight of the week or month.

I don’t remember the last time I bought a magazine this way (I’m all-digital now). It may have been a copy of Runner’s World a few years ago. I don’t miss paper magazines, exactly, because reading on a decent tablet has no real downside, unless the battery charge runs out. You can even zoom in to see extra detail you might miss in a paper magazine, handy for people not-as-young anymore.

What I do miss is the choices I had and the depth in some of those choices. The culprit, not surprisingly, is the Internet (or World Wide Web if you want to be more precise). This vast, always-available and (kind of) free source of information has directly replaced the way I buy magazines and more importantly has just plain supplanted many of them, especially when it comes to gaming.

Here’s a list of magazines I current buy regularly via digital means:

  • Runner’s World
  • Writer’s Digest
  • National Geographic

I occasionally pick up issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a one-off of others when a particular story interests me or a good deal is to be had (Rolling Stone, The Economist, Scientific American, etc.)

As you can see, it’s a pretty short list. All three magazines are available on newsstands but the digital versions are cheaper, I never have to wonder where I left a copy and they take up zero space. The zero space part is particularly nice, given the boxes of Writer’s Digests I used to carry around between moves. I’ve been reading it for over twenty years and buying it regularly. Storing twenty years of magazines is like trying to store an entire tree in the closet. It’s not convenient.

Here’s the list of the magazines I used to buy regularly. I’ve separated out the gaming and computer magazines because there’s so many of them:

Gaming:

  • Computer Gaming World (later Games for Windows magazine)
  • PC Gamer
  • Computer Games
  • Electronic Games (later Computer Entertainment)
  • Electronic Fun
  • Videogaming Illustrated

Computers:

  • Compute!
  • Home Computing
  • Creative Computing
  • Ahoy (Commodore 64)
  • Compute’s Gazette (Commodore 64)
  • PC Magazine
  • PC World
  • PC/Computing
  • ExtremeTech
  • boot (now Maximum PC)
  • Mac User (note: I never owned an actual Mac until after Mac User magazine was defunct)
  • Macworld
  • BYTE

Others:

  • Omni
  • Discover
  • Dragon magazine (more occasionally)
  • Epic Illustrated
  • Heavy Metal
  • Twilight Zone magazine
  • Weird Tales (one of its runs back in the late 80s/early 90s)
  • Fangoria (semi-regularly)
  • Cinefantastique (mostly for special issues, like the ones they had for Star Trek TV series)
  • Starlog
  • Mad magazine
  • Cracked
  • Entertainment Weekly

This is not an exhaustive list, as I would also sometimes buy news magazines (Time, Newsweek and Maclean’s), the occasional People or Us and not forgetting the magazines I’m forgetting. Some magazines don’t overlap much or at all–several ended their runs in the early 80s, some I grew out of, like Mad and Cracked, while others I just lost interest in. The cruelest were the ones that died before their time. I wanted to keep reading them, but market forces dictated otherwise. Some of my favorites were among them, too.

Here are my favorites:

  • Twilight Zone This only lasted eight years, and it was a terrific mix of short fiction (mainly horror) along with articles on TV and movies that had a TZ feel to them. It was intelligent and especially well-written for a genre magazine, no doubt guided by the hand of its founding editor T.E.D. Klein (an excellent if not exactly prolific horror writer)
  • Epic Illustrated This lasted a mere six years and ended its run due to a combination of high cost (glossy color throughout) and low sales. It was basically Heavy Metal without the giant boobs. A great selection of serialized and one-shot stories. I found it superior to Heavy Metal in that it seemed less oriented toward horny young men. On the other hand, Heavy Metal is still being published, so maybe Epic should have had giant boobs.
  • Omni A science magazine that had it all, including an admittedly obnoxious silver paper middle section that tended to leave your fingers silvery, too. A mix of fiction, features and regular columns, Omni made science seem accessible and fun. It even treated the subject of UFOs seriously, something virtually unheard of in any U.S. magazine not focused specifically on the subject. This actually lasted about 27 years in print form though in its later days it was hard to find locally and had become the proverbial shell of its former self.
  • Computer Gaming World One of the first PC gaming magazines and one that treated the hobby with respect. In its heyday in the early 90s (ie. just before the rise of the Internet) its holiday issues would come in around 500 pages. Most of that was ads, of course, but it was still a sign that the hobby was vibrant. It introduced the world to Jeff Green via a monthly column, a smart writer who always made me laugh. Sadly, he oversaw the demise of the magazine after it was rechristened Games for Windows. It had an impressive 27-year run (the last two as GFW).