Darkness falls across the land The midnite hour is close at hand Creatures crawl in search of blood To terrorize yawls neighbourhood And whosoever shall be found Without the soul for getting down Must stand and face the hounds of hell And rot inside a corpses shell The foulest stench is in the air The funk of forty thousand years And grizzy ghouls from every tomb Are closing in to seal your doom And though you fight to stay alive Your body starts to shiver For no mere mortal can resist The evil of the thriller… Vincent Price – Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 1984. Dir. John Landis
Yep friends, it’s that time of year again: NaNoWrimo is upon us in 2 days. That means the noise ratio which has been generally quiet in these parts is gonna go up with posts about word counts. The good news is today started off generally well even if the weather starting to act up to the south of us. The Rhody Writing Group meet up went well. The group is coming together well I think and the pieces of work are getting a getting better because of the feedback. The Title of this Meet Up was: Caribou Caterers and No balls in sink. Once the meet up was over, half of us drove up to Johnston where the weather was changing to a mix. I decided to have the kick off at Brewed Awakenings. Overall, it worked out, a few glitches popped up: address mix up and table’s not being reserved for us. It beats trying to find parking to get to Blake’s Tavern. Stickers were handed out and everyone went over what they were doing this year. While we did that, Fox News talked about the snow shutting causing a great deal of outages in Jersey, PA and CT due to the storm. Thankfully, RI is only getting the east side of the storm so the rain/snow/mix line is taking it’s sweet time getting here. The trees may be a problem but the fact everyone had their houses decorated for Halloween hopefully won’t be too damaged.
“Those Norwegians dug it up.” I mentioned previously how much I love remakes/reboots and the like. Chris Nolan is one of the few directors I trust with material like this along with Zach Snyder and James Gunn. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. is no Zack Snyder and neither of them are John Carpenter. So, where does that leave us? That leaves us with a film that thankfully the producers pushed for when Universal thought about remaking The Thing. Don’t do a remake, do a prequel. Exactly what happened at the Norwegian camp?
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;” NaNoWrimo‘s website database wipe and upgrade has always been a fun thing to watch, two weeks before the first of November, the website has currently been revamped and 75-80% of the options are working. Now, as for whether the website won’t get slagged during the first week will be another story.
“This ain’t no video game!” Richard Matheson short story entitled “Steel”, first made into a Twilight Zone Television Episode and now gets a movie adaptation featuring Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lily and Dakota Goyo. Real Steel’s advertising is interesting because half the trailers showed Jackman alone and the other half show him and his forgotten moppet of a son trying to do the Rocky with Robots schtick. And, for the most part it works when the plot pits the father and son against the robot and their operators. The rest of the plot is paint by numbers and will bore you to tears.
Well, I can tell you where I was when I found out Steve Jobs news went out. Driving home from a quick jam session to hash out details of student film I’m helping to write, both of us with Apple products at the table at Panera. I was introduced to Apple in Junior High School with an Apple IIE and IIC and graduated to High School with an Apple IIGS. Appleworks being my bread and butter for a long time, so many bad self insertion novels so little time. And even managed to make it to a Applefest where I saw Richard Garriott aka Lord British. Say what you will about the prices of Apple’s products, the man and his vision will be missed.
“An American prisoner has been turned.” Showtime’s Homeland is similar in vein to Sleeper Cell except it takes more cues from The Manchurian Candidate than anything else.
“The death of time…” Like last years season finale this was on a small scale and brought about some great situations that come from a science fiction show. I mentioned in the past, alt reality episodes have become the bread and butter of most programs, Fringe has embraced it all of last season and last night’s episode was a perfect example of how to do it right.
