The Robert E. Howard
United Press Association is A website catering to Howard scholars
, featuring such wonders as a complete listing of everything found on Howard’s bookshelves and critical articles like a comparison of Conan vs. Bambi.
Big Dead Place is a site with stories about working in Antarctica:
Many of the early explorers who came to Antarctica were underfunded buffoons who did not first consult Appropriations Subcommittees before facing the unique and exciting challenges that Antarctica offered for the future. As a result, they lacked innovative leadership, and died miserably of starvation while freezing to death.
…
In fact, the main purpose of the United States Antarctic Program, as stated by an external panel report published by NSF, is to establish a physical and political presence. This presence is kind of like hopping out of the car to stand in a parking space so no one nabs it while your friend drives around the block. (Our friend in this metaphor would be the as-of-yet nonexistent technology to cost-effectively extract minerals or hydrocarbons from Antarctica.)
Bad Fellowship Of The Ring Captions (via Caveat Lector) demonstrate that shoddy bootlegs are good for a laugh.
Greg Costikyan, game designer and SF writer (and probably one of the most insightful writers to write about game design) has a blog (found on boingboing). Also with RSS feed.
High art is dead art. It’s art that gets show in museums, played in symphony halls, buried in dusty tomes. It’s worth preserving for the sake of the continuity of our culture, and because a self-selected elite loves it. But it’s museum art, it’s museum music, it’s museum prose. All those silly wine-swilling artists in Soho; all those academic musicians composing “new” symphonies; all those university professors writing novels, stuck in academia because they can’t make enough money to survive from their actual writing–they have a role to play in our culture, of course, but what they’re doing isn’t really very interesting.
Is it?
Low art is what’s fundamentally important. Low art reflects what’s actually going on in our culture today. Low art expands the boundaries of the possible. Low art is vital, exciting, vibrant, disturbing, cool–and, generally, fun. Popular music, genre fiction, comics, independent film, weird shit on the Internet–and games.
That’s where it’s at, man.
Grand Theft Auto isn’t art? Then I guess neither is Fatboy Slim, Sandman, or King Rat.
Heroes of Dark Fantasy is a web site with sections for Conan, Elric, Kane and several other, less-well-known sword and sorcery protagonists.