Check out the end for book sales and deals from indie authors. There’s a style of online game called a “Hero Shooter.” Think Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, or my recent time sink, Marvel Rivals. For the uninitiated, the gameplay loop is two teams of six fight each other for an objective. Either domination of a… Continue reading Video Game Metas and the Logic of Failure
Note: There are two versions of this: a shorter outline view and more detailed one describing my logic. This is the shorter version. I've determined there're two ways comics can approach a Big Narrative Change. There's the unexpected and the out of character. And this has nothing to do with fandom response or the quality… Continue reading Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger-A Case study in Major Narrative Shifts (Short Version)
Note: There are two versions of this: a shorter outline view and more detailed one describing my logic. This is the longer version. I've determined there're two ways comics can approach a Big Narrative Change. There's the unexpected and the out of character. And this has nothing to do with fandom response or the quality… Continue reading Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger-A Case study in Major Narrative Shifts (Long Version)
There’s this extraordinarily silly thing that happens on TikTok every year like clockwork. One batch of users talks about the one- tw0- three- hundred books they read that year. Another batch is utterly baffled at these numbers to the point of conniption. “How is it possible?” is the cry they lift to the heavens. “Don’t… Continue reading High Volume Reading as a Moral Imperative
Check the end for promos, free books, and special sales. Landscape with Invisible HandM. T. AndersonScience Fiction2017 From Storygraph: When the vuvv first landed, it came as a surprise to aspiring artist Adam and the rest of planet Earth -- but not necessarily an unwelcome one. Can it really be called an invasion when the… Continue reading December 2024 Reads and Reviews
The Mimicking of Known SuccessesMalka OlderCozy Science Fiction-2023 From Storygraph: "On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems. Pleiti has dedicated her research and… Continue reading November Reads and Reviews
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
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
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
There’s this really annoying (to me) piece of advice that gets flung around in writing circles about the use of dialog tags. The short is just to not use them at all. Just use “said.” On the surface it’s that same sort of blanket advice that doesn’t actually work and isn’t reflective of real life… Continue reading Acting and Set Design Theory for Books
