Thanksgiving is coming up next week. We’re going to be stuck with a lot of family members having weird conversations that none of us want to have. So I’m going to tell you a story about my mom.My mom is smart, college-educated, and generally a good person. We have had our issues, not gonna lie,… Continue reading External Challenge at the Holiday Table
Recently I’ve been spending a lot more time in comic book and super hero spaces. Despite being a low-key (and occasionally high-key) fan of a few different franchises for years, those kinds of spaces were not great to navigate as a kid or teen femme-presenting person. As an adult, I don’t give as many shits,… Continue reading How Comics Expose Our Expectations Around Critical Analysis
Last week, the next installment in the Dragon Age franchise released, Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I'm a huge fan of the series and the studio that makes the franchise. Now the video game community, as a whole, has a really high capacity for what really comes down to just…idiocy, honestly. It's been a problem pretty… Continue reading Cultural Conservatism and the Collapse of Media Critique
BlindsightPeter WattsScience Fiction-2006 From Storygraph: "It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the… Continue reading October Reads and Reviews
For a while, my husband and I opened our home to foster children for something called respite care. It’s basically multi-day to weeklong babysitting for foster kids when the primary foster parents have to attend to something else. Out of state trips. Long weekends. The kind of thing where you might drop a non-foster kid… Continue reading Childhood Fear and Horror as Psychological Development
We’re at a stage in the media landscape where I sometimes wonder if we should ever so slightly gatekeep the word camp, if only to preserve some sense of meaning. For the sake of this thought experiment, imagine camp in your head. Further imagine camp horror, specifically. Because we do this thing where we’ll say… Continue reading The Application of Camp in Horror Media
When I was about nine (give or take a year) some cable channel or other was re-running the 1990 It mini-series over the course of a week leading up to Halloween. My mom hadn’t seen it since in released the first time and thought it would be fun family TV. Now this might be horrifying… Continue reading I Hate the Book It, but Love the Mini-series
For horror movies, I love a good paranormal story. Something with demons or ghosts that present this sort of otherworldly threat. Mostly because I have the audacity to think I could take out a slasher, alien, monster, or otherwise corporeal menace. So I like a real threat.It's also one of the very few genres where… Continue reading Deconstructing Genre Expectations Through the Lens of Horror
A few years ago, a journalist bade the bold claim, on Twitter, that the Alien movies weren’t horror because they were set in space.I’ve always haunted a fair few movie and horror forums, and it was reposted there multiple times (here’s one of the places I saw it on Reddit where it’s still posted). No… Continue reading Refining the Definition of Horror (In the Dumbest Way Possible)
One of my favorite examinations of adaptation from book to movie or television is comics. That covers graphic novels, superhero comics, manga, webtoons, etc. All these types of comics while ostensibly in the same essential format present entirely different challenges.Graphic novels and completed short serials (ex. V for Vendetta, Gender Queer, 30 Days of Night)… Continue reading An Adaptation Casestudy in Comics
Pixels and Pins Studio 