Walking Straight Into the Past: David Keenan’s ‘This Is Memorial Device’

By Michael Grasso

“Worldbuilding” has become a trendy word to throw around when it comes to fictional universes. Franchises with the luxury to build their worlds over multiple motion pictures costing billions and billions of dollars fill the media landscape. In David Keenan’s debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, we enter a world with a much more humble, much more homely set of concerns, but with a universe no less studded with outsized personalities…

Adventures in Atari BASIC: Lesson Five – Take Aim and Fire

By Mikey Walters

In Lesson Four, we experienced a crash course in manipulating Atari computer memory, specifically to initialize and control Player/Missile Graphics, and we learned how to move our players across the playfield. With those powerful techniques under our belt, this lesson is action-packed! Not only will we cover joystick control, but also how to fire the mighty Fission Gun Tower…

“Look It Up, Check It Out”: REX 84 and the History of an American Conspiracy

By Michael Grasso

On July 5, 1987, the day after Independence Day, a year and two days after President Reagan’s centennial rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and at the height of the Iran-Contra hearings, a monumental story appeared in the Miami Herald. Penned by investigative reporter Alfonso Chardy, the piece claimed to expose the workings of a “secret government” in place during the first six-and-a-half years of the Reagan Presidency…

Pork Chops and Apple Sauce: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection

By Kirk Demarais

The world of The Brady Bunch can be defined by a conspicuous style. After all, the setting is an architect father’s passion project, accoutered with what Carol Brady once described as Danish Modern furniture. The family’s fashion arc went from Ozzie and Harriet in season one to post-’60s extremes in season three. Yet the Brady’s choice of household artwork seems oddly uninspired…

Vanishing Point: How the Light Grid Defined 1980s Futurism

By Richard McKenna

Of all the visual shorthand for a particular type of outmoded futurism, one of the most immediately recognizable—like the chrome lettering with which it is often paired—must be the light grid. Usually depicted as a network of glowing straight lines receding in perspective against a black background, occasionally with the outlines of mountains or the blush of dawn visible on the horizon…