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Posted on 10.31.05 by Widge @ 2:21 am
Please send help or something. God, this is unbearable. I can't remember the last time I've wanted a bunch of kids in a horror movie to die. They're asking for it. Nay, begging for it. And there's still an hour and fifteen minutes to go. The boredom is unbelievable.
Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.31.05 by Widge @ 12:05 am
1. Night of the Living Dead (1968) Coming up next… Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.30.05 by Widge @ 8:14 am
Because I can, I've recorded a reading of the first part of H.P. Lovecraft's story. Should have the other two parts finished by Monday. Any strange pronunciations are definitely my fault. I can see where making a silent film adaptation of the story (like the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's incredibly excellent one (full review is forthcoming)) has the lovely by-product that you don't have to actually speak words like this aloud. Egad, people. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.28.05 by Widge @ 9:34 pm
 Very few horror movies are worth rewatching. Even fewer are worth watching multiple times. But there's a small select number that you can watch and get an impact every single time. Romero's first zombie flick is one of them. Oh sure, you can watch its sequel several times and still enjoy it, because it's just so damn fun. But with Night, it's very easy to watch the film and wind up going down a particular track. You can spend an entire viewing session checking out Romero's use of light and shadows. You can spend one analyzing how the film is basically humanity in a microcosm. And so forth and so on. This time around I was struck by the slow escalation of shocks. By now, we're used to see all kinds of atrocities on the news. And we've, you know, watched a lot more zombie movies. So the novelty of the film can be lost to those who don't know any better. But think about how an audience back then would enter into the film: it starts off normal, with the brother and sister in the cemetery. Once it turns, though, it keeps going, slow and relentless. At first, the zombies are just a murderous mob. We are introduced to more than one corpse. Then it's mentioned on the news about the fact that "assassins" are now eating the flesh of their victims. After that point, it is made clear that yes, they were dealing with re-animated corpses. Only aways into the film do you actually see the flesh-eating taking place, and again, we're used to it. It's a staple of Romero zombie flicks to have the buffet scene. Multiple shots of the zombies going to town. But, man, what I wouldn't have given to have been sitting in the cinema in 1968 and seen the first showing of that. A probably mostly virgin audience, and Romero leads them down the path bit by bit, shock by shock. But that's not the worst part, of course. There's worse shocks than that. The daughter eating her father and killing her mother with a garden trowel…that disturbs me more now than it did when I first saw the film. The sister being dragged to her death by her own reanimated brother. And then the final, incredible sequence with Ben's final fate. It still amazes now and I don't know how many times I've seen the movie. Romero proved he could still make a film worth watching with Land of the Dead, and Dawn will always have a warm spot in my heart. But Night is truly his masterpiece. First stop on Widge's 2005 Halloween Film Fest. For the next stop, click here. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.28.05 by Widge @ 11:47 am
I find it fascinating that every time I send out a Needcoffee newsletter, there's always a dozen or so folks who instantly unsubscribe from the list. These aren't longtimers who are now sick of our shite, they're all brand new people receiving their first newsletter. They probably requested to join via the contests and didn't realize what they were doing. Which leads me to the conclusion that when they received their confirmation e-mail that says, "Please confirm that you want to join this Needcoffee/One Tusk newsletter," they clicked yes. There's no other way to get on the list. And they clicked yes without even checking out the site. Because it's no mystery who we are or what we do. So they blindly said, sure, send me a newsletter without even investigating us. Can you imagine how much spam these people must get if they just click "Sure" any time someone asks them something? I have half a mind to send them a Paypal request for payment and see what they do. I bet they also believe the spam when it says, "Unsubscribe me by e-mailing us here." People. They do amuse me so. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.18.05 by Widge @ 4:35 am
Lying awake at night, I can hear it: the way they breathed, Filed under: Projects
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Posted on 10.18.05 by Widge @ 4:27 am
Last night, I dreamed I was Icarus. (You may have seen this before…I needed to get it here so I could work through something that's supposed to follow it. Move along, please.) Filed under: Projects
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Posted on 10.17.05 by Widge @ 7:40 pm
 Words cannot express my love for this Threadless design. And yet…it's in forest green. So I cannot wear it. Why must they taunt me so? Why must everything be heartless and cruel? Sigh. Filed under: General BS
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Posted on 10.17.05 by Widge @ 5:22 am
In case you missed the Please Stand By message on the LiveJournal, I've pulled the trigger on the PDF versions of both Something Else: The Complete First Season and The Sunday Before You. These are both available under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to download and enjoy. If you really enjoy Sunday, order a copy. Still working up the hard copy chapbooks of Something Else, so stand by for those. I've already gotten requests from folks for HTML and PDB versions of the files, and that's on the to-do list. So never fear. Filed under: Projects and Something Else and The Sunday Before You
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Posted on 10.16.05 by Widge @ 6:16 pm
Here's the latest Lying in the Gutters, from Rich Johnston. In it, he spends a great deal of time talking comic piracy, bit torrents and such. A couple thoughts. First up, I have downloaded comics. And I will attest to the fact that things I like, I will go and add to my pull list at my local shop. I would never have picked up Strange Girl from Image otherwise, nor would I have ever ventured into Goon from Dark Horse. But now Strange Girl is on my pull list and Goon, I just bought the hardback edition of his first story arc. (Goon is brilliant, BTW, and I have no idea why someone didn't force it on me much earlier.) So there. You've got an unsolicited testimonial. With me, it's a net gain. I buy things that I download, and the stuff I didn't buy, I wasn't planning on buying anyway. Congrats. Second up, they mention CrossGen, which around here we call Valiant 2.0 (V2). And I have no idea if they made any money in the long run off of their online presence, but V2's Comics on the Web website was awesome. For a reasonable monthly fee, you had access to their entire run. Yes, they only showed up on a staggered basis, but they were there. And you could very quickly catch up on whatever it was you were interested in. If a company was smart, they would figure out some way to make this model work. Third up and finally, comics, for the most part, suck today. I'm sorry, if you actually dig what's going on in the DCU, you have issues. No pun intended. Murder, rape, torture–is this what passes for a "mature" comic these days? If so, we're all fucked. I haven't read a DCU comic I really enjoyed in I don't know how long. Marvel's House of M series is all right, but the spinoffs are tossoffs, really. And I can't tell you how little I'm looking forward to this idea that Xavier had some kind of deep, dark secret in the foundation of the new X-Men team (circa GS X-Men #1, if I understand it). Why the hell must everything have a deep dark secret to begin with, anyway? And the fact that a major DC comic character is going to needlessly bite it in the wake of Infinite Catharsis…oh yeah, really looking forward to that. So yeah, a lot of the Big 2's books simply aren't worth buying. What does all of this mean? Nothing. While folks like Carla Speed McNeil and Batton Lash lead the while, the Big 2 and others will sit on their asses, produce crap, and try to sell it to you. And, sadly, a lot of you will pay them for it. Filed under: General BS
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John Robinson is a writer of prose, poetry and comics who also writes under
the pseudonym of Widgett Walls.
This is my latest book. Short stories written especially for you, or at least someone who reminded me a lot of you at the time.
