For this month’s Symposium, we had Reed and Isaac from their band World Racketeering Squad share some music with us. It was very “VH1 Behind the Music” as they shared their writing process as well as the inspiration for several of their songs. Isaac was able to describe some of the more technical aspects of songwriting in a way that I, the average non-musical person, could understand. They also treated us to two new songs still in beta. Their homage to Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was well received indeed. After that, Reed and Isaac blew my mind by creating songs on the fly, based on audience input, improv style. It was like a friend suddenly revealing a mutant power.

For the amusement portion of the evening, we returned to the bridge of the Artemis for a few hours of space exploration. This time around, we set up a network of laptops in the office. The laptops were then paired wirelessly with iPads which controlled the laptops remotely. That way we could all stand on the bridge with nothing but a slick Star Trekky-looking slate and play the game.

We had all six stations in play: Captain, Helm, Engineering, Comms, Science and Weapons. It was great to see how quickly everyone fell into using the bridge communication patter we’ve all been trained to use by Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. Even though the Artemis was destroyed more often than not, everyone seemed to have a really good time.

I’m amazed that Artemis is not more widely known. Thom Robertson could be the next Markus Persson, bathing in money. Artemis is the Rock Band of sci-fi games, hours of fun. If you have a couple of Windows computers, a large screen, $40, and some buddies, I definitely recommend you check it out.