So apparently, the late H.P. Lovecraft has gained new-found popularity with younger generations, even though he was about as politically correct as Archie Bunker. Over at Suggested Reads, a new site for discovering quality literature, I had the opportunity to at last dive into the works of Lovecraft and ink out a map for the first-time Arkham tourist.
Continue reading “New at Suggested Reads: HP Lovecraft Books That’ll Give You Nightmares”
Iowa thunderstorm season always puts me in the mood for catching up on my horror reading. Call it Pavlovian conditioning from all the years watching mad scientists in castle laboratories working during a thunderstorm. So pawing through my bookshelf, it occurred to me that there’s one horror genre not born of literature, but film.
Zombies, to wit. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, serial killers, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, and Cthulhu, they all came from the pages of literature first, then got adapted to film second under the loving guidance of Universal, Hammer, Amicus, and company. But zombies formed on the silver screen, and they took a few decades to catch on there. And only then did they start showing up in literature in the same form.
Sure, technically speaking, the first zombie movie, 1932’s White Zombie, was based on William Seabrook’s 1929 novel The Magic Island. But these were early prototypes, still steeped in voodoo medicine (inaccurate, by the way). What we mean when we say “zombie” now is owed to George Romero, full stop, and then the genre had to drift into literature.
So, here’s a great reading list of zombie apocalypse novels over at Suggested Reads. Oh, yes, they’re all very modern. Quite a few of those have seen their own film adaptation, circulus vitae, including Patient Zero and The Girl With All The Gifts.
But this subject got me to wondering: What is it about zombie apocalypses that make them such a self-contained stock scenario? Their popularity stems from what TVTropes calls the “Cozy Catastrophe.” The apocalypse always just so happens to leave a few lucky middle-class folk who, in between fighting off the brain-hungry hordes, is having a smashing time having the world to loot to themselves.
No more boring office job for me! I’m going Mad-Maxing!
Continue reading “Bad Assumptions Everyone Makes About A Zombie Apocalypse”
A few of my reviews whirled by over at 366 Weird Movies while I was too busy with other things (week off for Father’s Day and all that). To catch up:
CAPSULE: AGAINST THE CLOCK (2019) – A messy mish-mosh of cyberpunk spy thriller themes, as half-baked as the sloppy CGI fractals and hyperactive jump cuts that frame this abortion of a film.
CAPSULE: KEOMA (1976) – Could have been a contender for the last great spaghetti western, but is ruined by the Soundtrack From Hell. Yes, you heard right, and you’ll wish you’d never heard. You’re asking of course, how bad can this possibly be? Here’s a sample. Now imagine that crotch-splitting abomination going on for the ENTIRE MOVIE. That’s right, it never shuts up, a continuous Greek chorus obliterating every serious moment for the 105 minute run-time.
CAPSULE: HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987) – A harmless descendant of Miami Vice, with lots of booby cheesecake and a loose story that has something impenetrable to do with a snake, a toilet, a blow-up doll, a skateboard, and a razor-edged Frisbee.
But let’s get to the important part
Continue reading “News At 366 Weird Movies – I’m in a book!”
Hey, I never did get around to writing about Legos! I loved them, my kids loved them, and there’s a nice wholesome culture of Lego hobbyists and collectors out there. So I thought I’d round up the most impressive sets released in Lego history and blog about them. Good luck tracking them down, some of these are highly sought-after collector’s items!
Continue reading “New at 123ish: The Biggest and Best Lego Sets Ever”
Anybody out there remember the elder days of yore on the web, when I was one of the few bloggers to talk about Linux and FOSS? I figured it’s time to update distro recommends for a new generation. So here’s the top five Linux distros for every kind of user.
As usual, I dodged the trendy meme distros in favor of time-honored practical systems for anybody from the most clueless newbie to the salty veteran power user. Wow, it has been a long time!
Follow on for one of my classic Linux essays, the final battle report of the Microsoft vs. Linux wars:
Continue reading “You know what I haven’t blogged about in awhile? LINUX!”
Conventional wisdom among spike tournament players is that you NEVER, ever ever buy boxed MTG products or even booster packs. Yeah, but like all absolutes, isn’t that not always true? Here, I define some of the typical boxed products that at least come close to a decent value for the money, pointing out the “Best Magic! the Gathering Sealed Products.”
And I’m of course speaking as a collector and player myself. Strategic MTG investment has worked almost like a second career with me over the years. Keeping an eye out for good value purchases I can break up and sell for individual value helps me stay in the game, even on my pauper-level freelancer budget!
After far, far too long a time, I finally popped the movie Dark Star (1974) off the reader-requested review queue at 366 Weird Movies. Not only is it a long-standing cult favorite for being the first theatrical release for both John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon when they were still film students, it’s also a quirky and unique sci-fi comedy whose “hippies in space” motif is just enough to flirt with the list of weirdest movies of all time.
So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.
Continue reading “IMGUR posts: 1980s Action Figures and Vintage Pulp Novel Cover Art”
I couldn’t help but notice a trend as I explored the covers of pulp genre media. In sci-fi, horror, and speculative fiction in general, there’s one damsel-in-distress pose that’s almost guaranteed to show up. It’s rampant on comic books and pulp fiction novels, and shows up in TV and film spanning from the earliest decades to the most recent.
I’m talking, of course, about women in glass tubes. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere, until you have to wonder if there’s a global conspiracy to encase females in crystal cylinders. Many golden age sci-fi rags did it; some did it up to three times in their print run. Video media has done it from the original run of The Outer Limits to the film The Hunger Games. It was even performed as a science experiment at a world’s fair! Women in glass tubes, nicknamed “tube girls,” just fill the genre to the point where you never find the end of it.
Continue reading “My IMGUR image essay on a peculiar sci-fi trope went viral”
My latest IMGUR image essay is a tour of Golden Age Science and Speculative Fiction. It’s a nostalgic trip through sci fi as I discovered it growing up, from TV series to movies to magazines to the glory of paperback novel hounding at used bookstores. It was a damn fun post to throw together and I hope everyone has fun remembering the classics or discovering the forgotten gems from the sub-Atomic Age of Sci-Fi.
UPDATE – Related science fiction stuff:
