I'm not actually a Charles Bronson fan, but a friend urged me to see Death Wish, and I liked it, so I watched a bunch of Bronson films. I'd seen him mostly in bit parts previously, and it turns out that he is a really good actor who has been in a lot of really good movies. Here is a list of all th...
The fifth movie is the Friday series suffers a little from its setting: a halfway house for mental patients. Obviously, it needed a remote location for the obligatory murders to take place, but I find that a home for people recovering from serious mental illnesses wasn't the correct choice. Not onl...
In my previous posts in my Friday the 13th series, I wrote about the movie that started it all, and its two sequels. This month, it's time to take a look at the fourth in the series.
First of all, let it be said that there's no way the filmmakers honestly believed that the fourth movi...
In my previous posts in my Friday the 13th series, I wrote about the original movie and its first sequel, and this Friday I review Friday the 13th Part 3.
If your idea of Friday the 13th is typical B-grade horror about unsympathetic teens being killed by a guy in a hockey mask, this is th...
May the fourth be with you (tomorrow). Have you heard the apocryphal tale of Splinter of the Mind's Eye?
When I first heard about Splinter of the Mind's Eye, it was as the mythical, proposed fallback-sequel to Star Wars that would have been made in the event that Star Wars had not been t...
In my previous post in my Friday the 13th series, I wrote about the original movie that started it all. It's not just one of the most persistent sequel film franchises, it provided the blueprint for the modern slasher horror genre. This Friday, I'll look at its first sequel in an impossibly long...
Having recently reread Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I naturally continue with the original Dragonlance books to this, Dragons of Winter Night. Once again proving that my fondness for the series and setting is not due only to nostalgia, this book continues the exciting story of Krynn's battle aga...
It's apparently difficult to date the original Conan stories, because many of them were written at more or less the same time and then submitted all at once to Weird Tales and printed whenever the editors decided. According to Wikipedia, though, Scarlet Citadel was published in January 1933, af...
The Friday the 13th movie series is a hugely influential franchise, and when something influences pop culture so profoundly, it can be hard to separate legend and reputation from reality. The best way to be objective, or at least as objective as one can be about works of art, is to go back to the...
The Devil's Workshop is a self-contained graphic novel about a steampunk Batman in Victorian-era London, fighting alongside Harry Houdini against an unknown foe. It is stylish, gripping, maniacal, and highly enjoyable.
Frankly, this work is so effective that it almost makes you wonder whether...
Jules Verne is one of my favorite authors. He's one of those classic speculative fiction writers who gets your imagination churning with cheap thrills and incredible plot-lines. I could spend a whole week reading his stuff and never get bored. Or I could just re-read a handful of his books, like 2...
I found Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning back when there were a few good video podcasts doing reviews of video games. Those are mostly all long gone now (at least the ones I was watching then), bought up and then killed off by TV stations looking to control visual media (I guess). At the time, I...
I'm a big fan of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian series. Along with the Tarzan series, I used to read Conan stories while visiting my grandparents, because my grandfather had a vast collection of dime novels stashed away in his workshop.
Today, I think many people associate Conan, or ind...
I stumbled across a little one-issue zine called A Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming today. It's maybe 12 pages long, and it is an *excellent* book on [tabletop] RPG gaming. If you're a fan of OSR, or if you're just curious about the history of RPG and how it influences games and gamers today,...
A Romance of Two Worlds by Maria Corelli provides you with so much to think about, your mind will be racing for the duration of each chapter. The obvious thing you'll be thinking about is the story as presented: a musician goes abroad in an attempt to rest and recover from depression and illness....
Seems like five years ago, you couldn't talk about editing a graphic without somebody raising their nose into the air, listing all the expensive software you just had to have to do it right. Luckily, people are starting to come around to the idea that there shouldn't be one software provider to rul...