The Monster Scouts are a wonderful thing: monster-obsessed makers who have created a collaborative, detailed, LARP-ish world in which monsters are real and an imaginary scouting organization called the Crow Scouts, founded in 1907, has operated for more than a century to help our monster friends.
Monster Scouts are a real society that you can join by pitching in, creating your own steampunkish scouting uniform, and adding to the lore and collecting badges for doing good works and making life more fun for your co-scouts. The organization was founded by the delightful Steam Crow people, artists who make and sell beautiful, vintagey monster designs. They've collaborated with the monster aficionados who signed onto the scouts to create a huge, sprawling, wonderful shared world that has, until now, largely existed at cons and meetups, but which is now making the leap to real-world campouts.
These weekend-long "shindigs" are coming to five US states in 2017, and are a combination of a family weekend, a gaming weekend, a LARPing weekend and a maker retreat. I ran into the Steam Crow folks at Denver Comic-Con yesterday and was blown away by the raw delightfulness of their vision and what they've achieved with their fan-collaborators.
Monster Scouts Camp
Radicalized, my collection of four novellas, is one of the Wall Street Journal's picks for best sf books of 2019! My thanks to Tom Shippey, who listed it alongside of David Walton's Three Laws Lethal, Daniel Suarez's Delta-v, Erin Craig's House of Salt and Sorrows and Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Mother!
We love DJ Rijo's annual Merry Mixmas albums, and for the 18th consecutive year, the legendary mashup DJ has released an album-length mashup of Christmas rarities (MP3), just in time for your holiday parties!
Alex from Copy Me (previously) writes, "Copying is one of the most essential steps to creativity. And if we don’t understand how it works, copyright can easily become detrimental to the very creativity we want to protect. Copy-Me's got a new video about how even the great geniuses copied others and how this practice goes […]
Once you’ve cut steak or poultry with some actual quality knives, it’s really tough to go back to those budget blades you bought at the department store a couple of decades ago. Consider that a fair warning about this 5-Piece Professional Damascus Chef’s Kitchen Set. The holiday discount makes it easy to buy for a […]
Concerned about your eyesight? You probably should be. And we’re not just talking about seniors here. Young or old, we’re all at risk of coming down with vision issues Most of us might get a vision test only once every couple of years or so when we get a new pair of glasses – if […]
We love our smartphones and tablets, but we also love to write. For a while now, there hasn’t been a workable solution. Either hook it up to a keyboard (which defeats the purpose of a portable gadget) or resign ourselves to typing on tiny, unresponsive glass icons. Looks like technology has finally caught up to […]
