Brass Tak: Stargate by Stephen Robinett
Anyway, when I finally found the magazines, I was a little disappointed. The first one I bought, which is still around the house somewhere, was the F&SF for December 1973. It had an adventure novelet (sic) by Jack Williamson and a more literary piece by a new-to-me author named James Tiptree jr.– “The Women Men Don’t See” was the more-ironic-than-I-knew title. Other stories included an entertaining Shelley-esque pastiche by Gary Jennings, and Richard Lupoff’s “12:01 P.M.”, which still seems to me the most nightmarish horror story I’ve ever read. Then there were the features: a snarky film review by Baird Searles, a science article by my then-hero Isaac Asimov and a cartoon by someone named Gahan Wilson, surely one of the greatest Wilsons of this or any other age. So any complaints I had were not about content. No, it was just that the thing was so cheaply made: the coarse brownish paper on which it was printed was particularly off-putting; the digest size seemed strange–neither booklike nor magaziney. I bought it, read it, enjoyed it, kept it, soon was a subscriber to the magazine, but I was dissatisfied. It didn’t match the shining Platonic ideal I’d somehow formed of genre magazines. Now I know I was looking for something like the luminously maculate pages of Black Gate, but back then all I knew was that there was a painful gap between the real and the ideal, a lesson I’ve been forgetting and relearning ever since.
[More voyages in shelf-discovery beyond the jump.]
Hercules (1983)
Okay, I’ll admit that in a past indiscretion I went to an adult store (this was in the days before the Internet, when it was the only place you could get such things) and bought an anatomically correct blow up doll. But, it wasn’t for me. Honestly. It was a joke gift for a bachelor party. Nonetheless, I want to take this opportunity to apologize to my congregation, my constituents and my family for behavior that was actually perfectly innocent, though I realize it could be construed by some as some kind of perverted behavior by those who haven’t as yet been caught in their own perverted behavior.
A 
Courtesy of The New York Times comes this report of 
Come with me, if you will, to a magical, improbable land. A land where ideas and craft outweigh brand recognition and marketing potential, where films are the visions of writers and directors rather than of moneyed committees, and where the word ‘remake’ is most commonly associated with smoothing the bedsheets after a midday nap. It’s a place perhaps more fantastic than worlds of warring orcs and elves, since at least the orcs and elves are behaving according to their nature.