Tomorrow is the first day of school for Primo. His first day in the big scary world of public school where we drop him off at 8 and don’t get to see him again until after 2 in the afternoon. We met the teacher, checked out the class room, got ...

If you’re a geek dad who grew up in the 1970s or 80s playing roleplaying games, it is very likely you got your start playing Dungeons & Dragons. While some of us have never left the hobby, a lot more parted ways with roleplaying games sometime in their late teens ...

As James mentioned, this week our oldest got his shots, got his eyes checked, got his finger pricked, got new school shoes and got registered for kindergarten. And to me, this generally indicates that he has started the process of being grown up and leaving us. I could cry just ...

This weekend saw the first annual Empire Big Screen film festival take place at London’s O2 complex, featuring three days of film premières, classic screenings, panel sessions and more. A number of famous names were present discussing their work and meeting fans along with a large array of shops and displays. As ...

A comic with a long publication history and a obsessive passionate fan base offers nearly limitless opportunities for historical overviews. Last month, I linked to a gallery of Batmobiles. This month’s clever gallery, at Zillionarts, is a collection of 70 years of Batman covers. (Not all of them, obviously–a ...

The other day one of my kids ran in the house after school and made a bee-line to his room.  In a matter of minutes the XBox360 was online and he was fragging (ask your kids, they know what it means) his buddies and trash talking (using his wireless voice-over-ip ...

We have internet access at the new place and a wifi signal that is strong like bull. I couldn’t get the laptop to communicate with the wireless router at first and I was starting to get a little frustrated. Before getting to be home with the kids I worked for ...

Before moving to Portland we lived in Indiana in this great downtown neighborhood called Fountain Square. It’s one of those neighborhoods that was cut off from the city center when the freeway came to town but has bounced back all these years later. This sunday as I think of what ...

In a world where your phone’s camera is possibly better than the camera camera you owned a few years ago, film is a hard sell. But for many people Polaroid cameras are a special exception—so much so that when Polaroid decided to discontinue its film, a bunch of Polaroid employees ...

The ’80’s and early ’90’s were a magical decade for gadgets for kids. Computing power and display technology were evolving and cost effective enough to penetrate the toy market in a big way. Purely mechanical toys evolved into electromechanical toys and gave birth to the digital toy revolution. For example, ...