Agent Palmer

Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer is a grand retelling of the life and times of Ernest Gary Gygax, from his childhood and earliest inspirations, playfulness, and adventurousness ness to his early wargaming and the creation of the game which is synonymous with his name Dungeons & Dragons, to the exile from the company he founded in TSR and his resurgence as a celebrity. It’s all in the pages of this books.

The author of this book takes a novel approach to the telling of Gygax’s life story by making a narrative out of it.

In what seems like another time and place, my former producership at 7 Days A Geek, had me coming up with an idea to fill time with the two hosts at that time, The Angry Ginger and The Kilted One.

So, I compiled a list of 50 questions, to get two episodes out of asking them each the same lot of questions separately. And it went well… So well in fact, that I was able to ask Bill of The Wicked Theory Podcast the very same questions.

Consider this a love letter to lazy Saturday mornings, sugary breakfast cereals, and a production company whose hits knew no bounds.

Those of us fortunate to have been raised in the 1980s and 1990s fondly recall great Saturday morning cartoons by the handful. This, of course, was long before the ill-fated fall of that blessed Saturday morning programming block forever changed in September 2014. While it’s easy to look back now with fond memories, you might be surprised to learn that many of Saturday morning’s greatest hits were maintained by a single production house.

There is something uniquely wonderful about the autobiography of Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, and it is indeed the author Michael Collins.

Collins writes of his journeys into the astronaut corps and of his flights on Gemini 10 and Apollo 11 with such descriptive simplicity, that the book is both hard to put down and hard to continue without taking a moment to think about the story he has just told.