Bill Smith

The Preservationist

Bill Smith
Comics are, by nature, nostalgic. Look at Winsor McCay‘s work from the early 1900s and you’ll find that his Little Nemo strips aren‘t all that distant in spirit from the late 20th- and 21st-century comics of Chris Ware, or Daniel Clowes, or the Hernandez Brothers, or Seth, all of whom......

Piece by Piece

Bill Smith
Paul was a tall man in his 60s, I was a short boy in my 4s, and we lived a few wheels down from one another in a trailer court in Punxsutawney, PA. My parents liked Paul. He was a big, kind man without a right thumb. The reason Paul......
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Future Tense

Bill Smith
OUR PLAN WAS SIMPLE: TURN OLD TECHnology against the new. It was a little naive, but we were desperate. We called ourselves the Second Underground Railroad, though we came to be known as UR2 -- ironic, because a soulless acronym was the perfect symbol for what we stood against. Like......
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Life Is Binary

Bill Smith
IN THE YEAR 1970, JOHN HORTON CONWAY invented Life. Or more accurately, the Game of Life. Not the one where you spin the wheel and accumulate plastic kids, but a mathematical construct governing the behavior of cellular automata. Fifty-dollar words aside, J.H.C. made a set of rules. Before we get......
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Living Nightmares

Bill Smith
INSIDE THE GAME OF DOOM Several reporters have noted that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were avid players of the video game Doom. Below is one writer's experience with the game -- and a chart ranking it among other first-person shooting games. DOOM CHANGED EVERYTHING. Related Links: Assessment of Popular......

BANG!

Bill Smith
  On the range. I squeeze off the 10th round from my rented Glock 9, and before the memory of the recoil has left my hand I drop the clip and hit the switch to bring the target back to me. The grouping is fair — nothing to brag about......
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