Fandom?

A piece that’s a few years old but still pretty entertaining, The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom: “There is a diabolical twist to Star Wars fandom, you see, that defies comprehension, and yet is the life-blood of all Star Wars fans. It is this: Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.”

Pullman Backlash

Some snark, and more importantly, alternate recommendations, in response to the news that Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights is supposedly the best children’s book in the last 70 years.

Abyssal Creatures

Fascinated by the ocean’s abyss? There’s a gallery of mysterious wonder and beauty—and even more mysterious occasional cuteness—at the website for Claire Nouvian’s new book about abyssal species.

Comics Fans, Grow Up!

Over at Salon.com, Douglas Wolk writes a dense article about comics culture, graphic novels, collecting and nostalgia and urges comics fans, whether art or pop, to grow up: “The medium’s new enemies are internal: the much less casual snobbery of the commercial mainstream and the art-comics world toward each other, and cartoonists’ nostalgic yearning for the badness of the bad old days.”

Games x2

Gamers With Jobs looks at the pendulum that’s swinging from fantasy back to science fiction: “After ten years of elves and magic, I could use a bit of a change.”

And The Escapist is the new home of Shoot Club! Awesomely nerdy dialogue reproduced faithfully, and some insights too: “There’s nothing like bald math to undermine a game. The scales fall from my eyes and I cannot bear to earn another XP.”

Steam Trek

Steam Trek: The Moving Picture is a silent setting the starship Enterprise in the steam era. In space, no one can hear you—though the music cues are neat. Go here for a full version and here for more information. (Updated and thanks to Hellblazer.net).

The Bar is Set High

Do you think someone can come up with 300 brand-new never-before-used gameplay ideas? In 300 days? Sean Howard is giving it a try!

JLA Songs and Stories

Just hearing the first song on Songs and Stories about the Justice League of America left me stunned. By the second, I decided it might be one of the best things ever with its hammond grooves and swinging Sixties songsters. But the stories are fun too with a villainous Zsa-Zsa Gabor imitator, a lot of plastic and scientific exposition. The only way it might be better is if Ann-Margret played Wonder Woman. Way Out Junk has the whole amazing presumably common domain album here. (Thanks, Ian!)

Kryptonite Discovered!

A mine in Serbia has turned up a sample with the same chemical composition as the fictional Superman-killer. Dr. Stanley was interviewed by BBC News: “Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral’s chemical formula - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luthor from a museum in the film Superman Returns.” (Thanks, Mr.Dave!)

Listening to Generation Loss

The first chapter of Elizabeth Hand’s new novel Generation Loss is available as a mp3 at her website. It’s nice listening. She’s got just the right voice for desolate punk noir. (According to Boing Boing, it’s in honor of April 23rd, International Pixel Stained Technopeasant Day)

This Retro Game is Not Retro Enough!

Okay, Doom is now more than a dozen years old, but apparently it’s not old-school enough for some people. Check out this ASCII-only version called DoomRL: “One of the more entertaining things about the game is that, while the graphics are ASCII and the gameplay is turn-based, the sound comes directly from the original game.”

Busy, Busy HPLHS

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society has been awfully busy since releasing their Call of Chthulhu silent on DVD a couple years ago. Their next film will be The Whisperer in Darkness shot as a 1930s horror movie. If you need some tiding over till then, you can always listen to their At The Mountains of Madness radio drama, their musical There’s a Shoggoth on the Roof or one of their seasonal CDs or just follow the link to Nueva Logia del Tentaculo’s e-zine. Don’t forget the Expressionist wonder of the Call of Chthulhu trailer

Harryhausen Creatures

Do you miss the days of dynamation? Stop motion skeletons and Selenites? Mighty Joe Young and the Minoton? Chinese Jet Pilots has a Ray Harryhausen Creature List with clips of nearly every creature Harryhausen made. There’s also a link to some nice stopmotion footage. Check out the beetlemen by the lesser known but still swell, Pete Peterson.

BSG Surprise

Spoiler alert! Abigail Nussbaum talks about the finale of season 3 of Battlestar Galactica: “In fact, I find myself dangerously close to the ‘but it’s not supposed to make any sense’ mindset that keeps people watching 24 and Lost.”

Knitted Zombie Doom

Behold the power of a knitted Dawn of the Dead, Tom Savini from Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead (see the flickr slideshow
if you’d prefer) and the knitted Shaun of the Dead all created by cakeyvoice. cakeyvoice sells them, too. (All props to jiang tou at spiltpopcorn for the catch)

Incredibly Cool Control Scheme

Instead of an accelerate key you have to make motor noises into a microphone to make your racing car go? Awesome! Clive Thompson takes a look at some very innovative indie games.

“It’s a delightful way of breaking outside well-worn control techniques — buttons, thumbpad, keyboard. This isn’t a game I’d play for hours, not least because my cubiclemates would think I’ve gone out of my mind. But Skinflake gets monster points for uniqueness here.”

The ads in Children of Men

One of the many exceptional things about the movie Children of Men were the media bits and bobs featured in the background, from the ads to the government public service announcements. The audience only got subtle glimpses, but you can check out the assets in detail at the website of the company that created them. (Via)

Vampires VS Big Pharma: Who’s More Evil?

On the subject of Kaiju-biology (monster biology), Peter Watts narrates his brilliant slideshow that explains vampires from an evolutionary perspective, and then explains how humans can profit by harnessing their predators. Watts brings his experience as a scientist and his talent as a science-fiction writer to bear in creating this biting satire.

godzilla’s biology

Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology has a fun article up on Godzilla’s biology full of zoological goodness like cartilage pads, bony scutes and “plasma glands.” All the fun of science without the joykill.

Game Mega-Wrapup

Game Tunnel, a site for indie games, picks their 10 best for 2006, with a platformer called Gumboy Crazy Adventures taking top honours.

Kottke wrapped up 2006 with a list of addictive little online games, and the new version of Line Rider is mentioned first.

And for those who like big budget PC games, CVG looks at 10 games to watch for in 2007.

Tales from the Vault!

Yearn for pulp fiction about mounties, possible marital infidelity and Winnipeg’s pock-marked Frankenstein? Tales from the Vault provides Canadian pulp history in French and English with more than just a gallery of covers. That’s right, there are whole issues!

On the Road with Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud is doing a crazy road tour for his new book, Making Comics, complete with family blog and entertaining video podcasts (with interviews of writers and artists) done by his kids.

Science of The Tick

Cocktail Party Physics takes a look at that awesome cartoon character, The Tick: “And there’s lots of science! Of a particularly twisted nonsensical sort, granted, but science nonetheless.”

Not Cranking Out the Same Old Thing - Is That Good?

After some quite excellent fantasy novels, Lois McMaster Bujold goes for (mostly) romance: “But with this one, she’s just gone the Lifetime Channel route.”

It’s Been Done

Is the “thug life” Grand Theft Auto-style now officially overdone? The Dubious Quality blog ponders Saint’s Row, a solid game that feels stale: “For me, though, there was a moment when this genre went from exhilarating to depressing.”

Valve Turns It Up Another Notch

Portal is a thinkin’ man’s first person shooter coming out from Valve, the folks behind Half-Life 2. Talking about HL2, Episode 1 has exceedingly clever in-game commentary that is reviewed and excerpted at Waxy.org.

Ultimate Timewaster?

If you play Civilization IV for three months, your next novel will probably be late - it happened to Iain M. Banks.

Hip-Hop Videogame

Is there really such a thing as a hip-hop videogame? Watch this convincing video to judge for yourself. A neat mix of arcade culture and hip-hop.

(Keith Schofield also made a pretty awesome pi-related video).

Cultural Appropriation

Naomi Novik makes a stand: “I would rather take my characters to China and Istanbul and Africa and make mistakes and get corrected for them than confine myself to the safe Western European sandbox and pretend the problem doesn’t exist.”

Her next Temeraire book is set in Africa, and she went there to do research.

Changing Perceptions

Lou Anders takes a look at an old problem: “It’s almost as though we are becoming a society of SF&F fans all worried what the other guy thinks and apologizing to each other for our tastes when the other guy is a fan too.”

Calm Guidelines

How to write a female character in comics in 8 steps, from Girls Read Comics: #6 says ‘“I hit boys!” is not a strong feminist statement.’

Inevitable Decay

Season 2 slump? Abigail Nussbaum says Lost and Battlestar Galactica had nowhere to go: “they have a story, and they don’t know how to handle its ending.”

He Can Say This Because He’s a Browncoat

Henry Jenkins says Snakes on a Plane might do better than Serenity, two films with comparable prerelease internet buzz, and thinks Whedon should have broken out of the broadcast media mold: “…if he had gone that route, we would have been able to enjoy many more hours of quality science fiction/western action on television, where it belongs, instead of burning up the whole franchise in two hours of big screen excitement.”

Black vs White

Incredible. Sony’s ad announcing a new white case for the Playstation Portable looks like it’s inciting a futuristic race war.

Half-Life Bonanza

The writers over at Gamers with Jobs look at the new Half-Life 2: Episode One, and provide some too-high praise for the original game - if you want to know why people buy Half-Life games willy-nilly, read this article.

Why Care About Indie Games?

Check out Slate’s Why there are no indie video games:“Why should gamers and industry bigwigs care if it’s tough for the little guy? Because back when games were cheaper to make, the independents came up with the ideas that moved the business forward.”

Ask a Ninja!

A compelling case for the importance of editing in video: compare Ask a Ninja 1: Ninja-Mart Store to the latest, brilliant Ask a Ninja Special Delivery 4: Net Neutrality.

Live Action Mario

A re-enactment of the first level of Super Mario Bros. at a talent show in Massachusetts. Gotta love the black-suited puppeteers sneaking to and fro!

a game for all ages

Before the press conferences of the Big Three at E3 2006, TIME magazine explains why Nintendo’s strategy for success is “don’t listen to your customers”. And given the anticipation for their revolutionary new console, it seems to be working.

Blow Em Up Real Good

Clive Thompson decides to raise hell: “Let us talk openly about how just totally awesome it is to grab a fully loaded railgun in Quake 4 and wade into a mass of gibbering Strogg aliens and kill and kill and kill again, until there are guts on, like, the ceiling.”

And he has a point: “After all, we now live in an age where the pop-culture mainstream has decided that games are fascinating — but only the ‘complex,’ socially nuanced ones.”

Turok Comic

A scathing/affectionate look back at some insanely cheesy Turok comics from the 1990s: “They crash-land in the Lost Land, naturally. There the survivors are attacked by dinosaurs, kidnapped by telepathic aliens with sharp sticks, and menaced by a huge shapeshifting monster made of flesh-melting goo. It is awesome.”

Best Webcomix Evar

Nicholas Gurewitch’s the Perry Bible Fellowship are my favourite webcomics. They’re hilariously sad, outrageous, subtle, grimly clever and will leave you, as the kids say, ROTFL.

IGF Nominees

Gamespy has a handy overview of the Independent Game Festival (IGF) finalists, along with handy download links: “Here’s the deal: freed from the constraints of big-budgets and risk-averse giant publishing houses, indie games made on shoestring budgets can actually feature original gameplay or bizarre subject matter.”

Gutter Lovers

A spunky site with a similar mandate of taking low culture seriously does romance novel reviews: Come for the Dominican Bitches, Stay for the Man Titty.

Beware A Cylon’s Love

For those of you who’ve just seen the stellar Battlestar Galactica morph from a fascinating West-Wing-In-Space premise into something very very different in the recent season finale, check out this heartfelt commentary.

Scott Adams is a Hydra

This interview with Scott Adams, the text adventure pioneer, has him talking about how he uses several keyboards to set up a Hydra in the multiplayer online world of Everquest II. It’s refreshing to hear oldschool game makers talk about their current game obsessions rather than moan about the good ol’ days.

SciFi and Nonexistent

A surprisingly lucid and yet still impossibly nerdy look at The Top Ten Sci-FI Films That Never Existed: “There was a movie that perfectly captured the Douglas Adams experience, the combination of bitter sarcasm and sharp imagination, the droll British wit and whale-exploding slapstick that infused his novels. And that movie was Shaun of the Dead.”

Conglomerate News

Book-publishing mega-corps getting on your nerves? They’re changing. Some are selling to European companies: “Publishing, alas for all the authors among us, is a small business in the scheme of things.” And the number-crunching for 2005 says that kid’s books and YA are still the hot thing.

“They fuckin’ love it all”

Laura Barrett’s Robot Ponies is a haunting song with lyrics that would make Philip K. Dick swoon: “They feed on plastic bags, cut up like lettuce right out of your hand…” Click play to hear it.

Games, Games, Games

Clive Thompson writes up 6 indie games, all free (my fav: RSVP), saying “If you really want to see innovation, there’s only one place to go: Off the grid.” Peter Butler lists the 10 best free games at Download.com (my pick is Mono). Also making the rounds: the anti-Kinko’s simulator, Disaffected! (I’m not sure if I want to try their other stuff though).

Google Robots FAQ

“Google Robots are our human-like machines that walk the earth to record information. They do no harm, and they do not invade your privacy.” This satiric FAQ from 2030 nails the GoogleTone: reassuring, occasionally witty, and not above the occasional exclamation mark.

Haldeman on Syriana

Joe Haldeman on Syriana: “I saw it as a kind of modern interpretation of the James Bond film… I don’t think the viewer is supposed to totally understand it, either; you sort of absorb it.”

Red Prophet now a Graphic Novel

Orson Scott Card’s alternate history of the American frontier, Red Prophet, is soon a graphic novel (preview at Newsarama): “We felt that a book set in history like Red Prophet should have a ‘Great Illustrated Classics’ kind of feel to it.”

Ninjas vs. Pirates

It’s an idea whose time has come: Ninjas vs. Pirates! Sounds homebrew too: “Almost all scenes in NVP were shot in front of 9 sheets of 30-cent green posterboard in a 12’x13’ apartment living room, lit with $12 Wal-Mart halogen work lights.”

All Psych Studies Stink?

Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality takes himself as the basis for his study of computer gaming causing violence: “After playing ‘killing simulators’ for decades, how am I not some kind of crazed predator? Why are me and my droogs not out for a bit of ultraviolence?”

Lovely Free Flash Game

Samorost 2 is a point and click adventure puzzle game you can play in your browser. It begins with our protagonist in his nightcap rocketing off to save his kidnapped dog, and he must explore a romantic-industrial planet to do so.

Free Finnish Trek Movie

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning is a feature length movie that its Finnish creators have released for free. I’ve only seen the trailer, but its production values are amazing for a zero budget flick and the line it walks between parody and fan film is intriguing.

Red Panda in Yer Ear

I ran across a poster in my neighbourhood advertising Decoder Ring Theatre, and boy, do they deliver the goods! Check out their old-timey radio serial podcasts featuring Red Panda, Canada’s Greatest Superhero. It’s a pretty dead-on pastiche of ’40s dramas like the Green Hornet.

Games for Greybeards

The fabulous new videogame magazine The Escapist takes a look this week at what happens when the first generation of gamers starts to get older, including this gem: “Donna and Jack discovered a fact lost on our culture’s anti-game crusaders: Gaming is an extraordinarily effective parenting tool.”

kill your phone

Ah, it’s not all crappy ports of arcade classics. Rebecca Cannon, Australian DVDzinester is working on a mobile phone game called The Kill Yourself Game which pits you against hordes of enemy yous. Highschool teachers are going to love that one.

Joss and Neil talk Geek

“I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven’s sake. They’re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. ‘No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!’ We like it here in the gutter!” Neil Gaiman in discussion with Joss Whedon

Weird Wasteland

The upcoming Tony Hawk game is set in 1980s L.A. with, if the trailers are to be believed, a soundtrack featuring Dead Kennedys and the Pixies. Prominent in the trailers are bike riding and a light rail train, which is cool but also very weird: L.A. is a horrible place to ride transit and bike.

Christina Socorro Yovovich over at Strange Horizons on what drew her to sf: “What kept me reading science fiction was the way it made my immediate surroundings alien, too. Everywhere I looked, something familiar turned new and strange.”

Warriors, Come Out and Plaaaay….

Rockstar’s doing a videogame based on the 1979 gangsploitation flick The Warriors, but the trailer makes me worry they’ve been slavishly faithful to the movie. It’s great and all, but I didn’t watch it for its dramatic oration.

Imagining Robin Williams on Warcraft

Susan Marie Groppi reads the Warcraft forums so you don’t have to, and muses on whether celebrities enjoy anonymity online gaming gives them or whether it makes them lose their shit.

New Games Journalism the New Emo?

From the comments after Game Girl Advance’s article on the backlash against experiential game reviewing: “New Games Journalism is the new emo. No one wants to be called it, and everyone is accusing everyone else of doing it.”

Some preliminary details about a computer game based on the Bone comic: “We plan on executing the story as it is told in the comics. There will be added interactivity and we will take some license, but we are trying to stay true to the comic.”

Mike Sterling takes a brief look at the (possibly one-joke) comic, Here Doesn’t Come the Flying F—-!: “The eponymous hero is a slovenly sort, fighting for truth, justice…well, actually, just fighting for his right to watch television uninterrupted, mostly.”

Ah, the perennial music nerd topic, Desert Island Discs. On the Beatles’ Help: “This album falls on the trailing edge of their original Beatlemania phase and the beginning of their brief folk-rock/art-pop phase (a phase I wish had lasted a little longer before they went pepperdelic).”

Over at Maisonneuve, Michel Basilières writes a heartfelt appreciation of the career of Fritz Leiber, a writer who “was equally at home with science fiction, modern or urban fantasy, horror stories and sword & sorcery—an expression he coined.”

Joystiq reports the clumsiest product displacement yet, where Electronic Arts removed a reference to Sega in House of Pain’s anthem “Jump Around” from NBA Street v3. The corporate revisionist megamix in yo face!

The Grumpy Gamer (Ron Gilbert, creator of some great old Lucasarts adventure games) goes off on cutscenes: “There is a very different visual and structural language needed to tell a story in an interactive and malleable environment. You can’t just lift that structure from a linear form like movies, cut it up into chunks interspersed between gun-play and call it good.”

Nick’s Flick Picks puts Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at the top of the list for 2004: “Popcorn-munchers, digital video enthusiasts, bleeding-heart romantics, dyed-in-the-wool Eeyores, pot-heads, mad hatters, and the Friends of Alexander Pope finally have a movie they can enjoy together.”

There’s an interesting interview with an actress in ilovebees, a “search opera” run to promote Halo 2 that was more innovative than the shooter itself (probably in no small part due to novelist Sean Stewart’s involvement).

The four editors at Revolution SF have their say about What is Best in Life 2004: “It’s almost overwhelming, really, to think about how mainstream and blasé everyone has become about Geek Culture… If anything, all of these movies, books, TV shows, and what-not are proof that We Were Right all along.”

Hard to believe someone might believe this was real: History of Robots in the Victorian Era. A retrospective of lesser-known sf of the 18th century.

Slate pans Michael Crichton’s new book, State of Fear: “Crichton is like a college professor who insists on lecturing 10 minutes after the class period ends, when his students are edging toward the door.”

Jamie Friston compares Lucky Wander Boy to Philip K. Dick’s VALIS and Haruki Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase and calls it a “delightful surreal trip through geek culture.”

Comic Book Galaxy’s 2004 has typical ‘best-of’s, as well as a roundtable, but as Bookslut points out: “no women creators at all, nor any comics in translation.”

Sequential Tart interviews Erika Moen (Girly Queer Vibrating Comics), who gives this advice: “Don’t wait. Do it now. You can’t call yourself an artist and then only do art when you’re ‘in the right mood’ or ‘have the time.’”

In the ongoing adventures of Shoot Club, Tom Chick gets around to trash talk: “Trash talk is like politics or religion: there’s a right time and a right place for it. And even then, you handle it differently with different people.”

The screenwriter of the upcoming Doom movie dreams big in this interview: “I never thought of it as a video game movie. I wanted to write first a great movie, then a great science fiction movie and then a video game movie.”

What makes a good sex scene? Sara Donati of Storytelling investigates, with the basic rule: “If you can substitute ‘and then they had sex,’ the scene is useless.” With 10 examples.

The cultural gutter indeed! How about an overview of comics based on video games: “This is not what worried parents had in mind. Comic books were bad enough, but reading comic books about games could be likened to brushing one’s teeth with icing sugar.” [Site has annoying ads]

The latest Rain Taxi says “a fantastic and witty history explodes with a Big Bang” in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and that Transmetropolitan: One More Time is “a dynamic conclusion to the story that Warren Ellis and his cabal set out to tell.”

The first issue of Graphic Novel Review on Bone: One Volume Edition: “Ignore the larger storyline, the workmanlike High Fantasy backdrop Smith chose to use as an excuse to make us spend time with these characters (we didn’t need an excuse). Focus instead on the individual moments, the characters themselves, the joyous, masterful cartooning, and you’ll have a blast.”

If all stories were written like science fiction stories: “They selected one of the hydrocarbon-powered ground transports from the queue which waited outside the airport. The fee was small enough that it was not paid electronically, but using portable dollar tokens. The driver conducted his car unit into the city; though he drove only at 100 km/hr, it felt much faster since they were only a meter from the concrete road surface.”

The Flick Filosopher thinks The Village mistakes a twist ending for good writing: “[Shyamalan] figured Let’s go all the way and make a film that’s nothing but secret sauce. It makes for a film that is frustrating and tedious and then — bam! — slams the audience with the knowledge that they’ve been had, and maliciously so.”

“I find it sadly ironic that in worlds only limited by our imagination, no one seems to have one.” Bill Harris (on his blog on sports videogames, Dubious Quality) talks about why City of Heroes doesn’t excite him.

Tee Morris at Strange Horizons worries about elitism in science fiction, gets scathingly rebuked by Nick Mamatas, and less scathingly commented on by Matthew Cheney over at Mumpsimus.

Zachary Houle writes about Michael Chabon’s latest: “The Escapist project is a sprawling, ambitious form of comic-book meta-fiction that bounces back-and-forth between rediscovered potboilers from the ’40s to ’80s and scholarly essays offering context and academic takes on these works.”

Clive Thompson wrote a terrific article on the economics of massive multiplayer online games that goes beyond the usual “people are making money with their hobby!” coverage and explores what virtual economics says about capitalism at large. Wonderfully readable, too.

People who’ve discovered the joy of stashing a couple of interviews on the mp3 players should check out The Agony Columns archive of interviews with SF writers and beyond like Jonathan Lethem.

Something Awful (whose slogan, The Internet Makes You Stupid, says a lot about the site) has a great parody of videogame hype, Solitaire 2: Solitaire Harder. Sample soundbite: “Authentic card sound effects beautifully recreate the real sounds of playing card games. The sound will be so amazing you’ll think tiny demons are shuffling decks of cards inside your brain.”

After an intro like this, the game (Onimusha 3) will have to be a let-down. But still, if it has a tenth of the imaginative power it’ll tower above most games. And it’s not just because I’ve always wanted to fight zombie samurai within insectile zepplin-esque motherships.

Greg Costikyan tells science fiction writers: “I want to be challenged with interesting ideas, distinctive writing styles, unconventional ways of looking at things, and transportation to a world very different from our own. I don’t want to sink into the familiar, I want to be surprised and shaken up.” (His blog also has an excellent post about GDC).

Dylan Horrocks writes: “New artforms bring new aesthetic paradigms. Those who fail to recognise this tend to miss the point of the work altogether, dismissing it as frivolous, bad or even dangerous.” A long article about comics, videogames, and fantasy novels.

The Mumpimus writes about Stories of Sex and Identity: “Despite a fairly conservative base of readers, SF has been investigating sex and gender since at least the time of Theodore Sturgeon, and a few recent stories which fit into this tradition have caught my attention.”

Joe Haldeman interviewed at Strange Horizons: “You’ll meet people who grind out really hackneyed crap who read Joyce all the time or keep up with the blue-blood writers. But then again, I’ll meet a lot of serious writers in academia who’ll confess they read mysteries and even science fiction. A lot of us got into writing because of the intense pleasure we got from it when we were very young.”

Not to be navel gazing, but the Toronto Comic Jam discussion board has a lively discussion on the offensiveness of us calling the gutter the gutter.

Richard Scheib on Big Fish: “It is really like Burton has been abducted and replaced by a pod person.” Scheib reviews hundreds of obscure B-movies on his site.

Small Beer Press’s Gavin Grant does an interview with China Mieville, a fantasy writer who considers what he does “the pulp wing of surrealism.”

It’s been just over a year since Frisco writer and editor Marc Weidenbaum
founded this stellar blog, a public service to one of his dearest passions. “Writing about comics on the internet is itself a form of reading in public,” he says.

“In the ’70s and ’80s cartoons and consumer electronics were bigger and trashier than ever and freaked kids out… Now these kids are getting older and are freaking everybody else out by using this same throw-away trash.” A glimpse at the fucked cartoon genius of PaperRad is worth braving their technicolor website for.

This article on the brilliant Game Girl Advance site begins with the author getting woken up on a weekend for a phone survey, and ends up sparking a great discussion on making a videogame out of Jimmy Corrigan, 100 Years of Solitude, and Battle Royale. Ya give some people lemons…