Man vs the Mobile Post

I'll make this quick as I'm typing this post from my phone.  For a long time I've resisted ebooks; now I have the Kindle app.  For a long time I resisted digital comics; now my weekly haul is through Comixology.  That doesn't mean I'll eschew paper entirely, but digital isn't so bad. So I'm only a little bit behind the curve.

Man vs Pop Culture Week 4/16-4/23

Better late than never, here goes...

I rewatched Christopher Guest's folk mockumentary A Mighty Wind.  I didn't realize that Guest, McKean, and Shearer actually performed as the Folksmen before the film by a couple of decades (and even had them perform as the opening act for their other alter egoes, Spinal Tap), but they fit right in here.  However, they take a back seat to Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara as the duo of Mitch and Mickey.  Levy especially sells his role as the perpetually shellshocked Mitch.   It doesn't hurt that the songs (all written for the film!) are catchy.  I had "Never Did No Wanderin'" stuck in my head for days after.

I also finished up the brief run of Hawkeye & Mockingbird.  I've been a Hawkeye fan since Kurt Busiek's run on Avengers, so I caught this series when it came out originally, but forgot most of it since, so it was nice to revisit this.  The two had something of a rocky relationship ever since their time on the West Coast Avengers, so it's good to see them back together, even though it doesn't last.  And, yes, it also ends with a teaser for the crossover with Black Widow that eventually just became the (sadly, unread by me) Widowmaker mini after both books were canceled.

I also re-acquainted myself with another avenging pair of super-spies: John Steed and Emma Peel.  I dug up the  DVDs of ITV's The Avengers.  These were some of the first DVDs I bought, back in 2000 (I got a DVD player for Christmas '99), thanks to some Barnes&Noble (or was it Borders?) gift cards.  These sets have gone out of print, I think, so I doubt I'll be able to continue the run.  (I only ended up with one and a half sets after all was said and done, thanks also to the newer-at-the-time Amazon.)  I watched a couple of episodes from the 1965 season, including a personal favorite, "A Surfeit of H2O." (Rain as a weapon!  A sinister winery!  Local eccentric builds an ark!  Young Geoffrey Palmer!)  Now, I don't even recall why I bought these, since I never actually watched the show before, but I'm glad I did.  The combination of wit and spy stuff reminds me of another ITV favorite that got a bit more airplay on one independent channel or another, The Saint.  Plus, 1960s vintage Diana Rigg?  More, please!

Man vs Pop Culture Week : 4/9-4/15

Now that I am mostly settled in the new apartment, I am ready for regular posting.  Taking a cue from Siskoid, I am posting various nerdy, genre, and pop-culture accomplishments from throughout the week.

Primarily, I watched the final two series of British sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look.  Some of my favorite sketches poked fun at television, not as parodies of specific shows (which runs the risk of alienating overseas viewers), but of television in general.  Witness the Gift Shop Sketch, as (over)produced by the fictional "False Jeopardy Productions", or the increasingly desperate Quiz Broadcast, which shows that even after an unspecified apocalypse, television endures.

I also read the full, short run of Marvel's Black Widow series.  The first arc, by Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuña, was pretty solid and atmospheric, but after the creative team changed, the second arc focused on a different PoV character and ended up with a cliffhanger tying into the Widowmaker mini, which was initially conceived as a crossover with the even-shorter-lived (but more fun in this blogger's opinion) Hawkeye and Mockingbird series.

More to come in weeks ahead!

Man vs the Big Move (or, Pardon Our Dust)

Things have been fairly quiet here at the Fortress of Inevitability, but that's bound to change fairly soon.  I will be moving to a new apartment in a few weeks, in a new environment hopefully more conducive to wacky ramblings, so my sporadic-at-best posting will resume shortly.

Man vs the Thing in the Chair

In the spirit of Kindertrauma's "Name that Trauma!" feature, I'd like to share this old, strange memory I have.  Whether it was from a movie, a TV show, or a particularly vivid dream, I don't know.  It's just a fragment of something, but it's pretty freaky as it is.  In it, an older couple are checking something in an attic (it may not have been for the first time), and find a doll sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth.  Anybody who came up to see this doll was terrified, even though it didn't do anything other than rock in the chair.

Now, a quick Google search doesn't bring up anything like it.  Just things like a 100-plus-year-old doll named Robert, and a link to the productivity black hole known as TVTropes (which I will not link to from here, thankyewverymuch.)  And, sure, creepy doll movies/TV episodes are a dime a dozen (I did peer into the aforementioned productivity black hole just to see), but I recently stumbled across something interesting that brought this whole thing up in the first place.  It's part of a phenomenon I call the Thing in the Chair.

I came across this last week while watching some old episodes of Dark Shadows, a few instances in the space of 10 episodes.  First, when governess Rachel went to investigate the mysterious tower room, the cliffhanger showed, just beyond the door, a cradle with two dolls in it, rocked by an unseen hand.  Then, after another cast member gets killed and revived via black magic as a zombie, Rachel (again!) wakes up to find him rocking in a chair right next to her bed (another cliffhanger).  Interestingly enough, the next episode has a scared-more-than-usual Carl Collins go into the bedroom to confront said zombie, similar to how my memory of the Thing in the Chair plays out.

As of this posting, I haven't seen how the zombie storyline goes from there, but let's look at the math.  Dolls are creepy (thank you, doll room in the Million Dollar Museum).  In fact, anything resembling a person, yet clearly not alive, but still somehow sitting up (like the aforementioned ambulatory dead guy) is pretty damn creepy.  Rocking chairs that rock on their own?  You bet that's creepy.  Combine them together, and you get the Thing in the Chair (which, surprisingly, doesn't seem to have been used as a title nearly as often as you'd think.  Maybe I'll crib it for a ghost story of my own).  In fact, I've had a real-life Thing in the Chair moment myself (though, in the interest of tact, I'll not talk about it now.)

Here's where I leave it to you, dear readers.   Have you ever come across the Thing in the Chair?  Or is there something else, some nagging fear-thing in the back of your mind?  Comments are open, so feel free to reply.

Man vs Arbitrary Goal Month

Yikes, did I really go through all of October with only one post to show for it?  Not even a post on Halloween?  (What kind of blogger with sometimes horror-related content am I?)  However, I had an epiphany, just after midnight, that just may change my blogging habits for the better.  Now, I hear that blogging about blogging is a sin, but this is something I feel needs to be shared.

Now, there is a certain writing challenge thingy out there on the internets for the whole of November.  I'm decidedly not participating this time around, rather than ambivalently not participating like previous years.  (Last year, I was psyched up to throw my horror western concept at it, but my user ID apparently got eaten during the registration process.  I still don't know how that happened, but I took it as a sign that maybe I didn't want to continue after all.)  This particular challenge emphasizes quantity over quality anyway, and given my propensity for self-editing (you don't want to know how many times I re-wrote this sentence), I would either give up entirely or have very little personal time remaining trying to meet that goal.

Monday night, after the Halloween festivities died down (that is to say, some left to make an early night of it, others left to attend the launch of the aforementioned writing challenge thingy, and the rest made repeated attempts to find, somewhere in town, a copy of somewhat-after-my-time witchy kids movie Hocus Pocus (And they call that a Halloween tradition?)  Just before I drifted off to sleep, it hit me.  What if, instead of focusing on a word-count goal set by someone else, I were to set my own goal in time with something I was already doing?  And thus was born Arbitrary Goal Month.

So, here's the gist of it.  For the month of November, I'm going to write at least five quality, substantial blog posts.  This way, I'm not bound to any one narrative (other than the ongoing text that is my life), and I can self-edit until I have something I deem "passable."  Will this experiment work?  It's too early to tell (and, having pushed this very post aside for four days, I already have my doubts).  At any rate, I'll be around throughout the month, with a few more words here or there.  Until next time, have a safe and happy Arbitrary Goal Month!

Man vs the Soap Addiction

I'm not ashamed to admit it.  When I was in college, I was addicted to a soap opera, to the point where I would tape it during morning classes and come back to my room and watch it at lunch (not entirely unlike the oft-repeated "I used to run home after school to catch it" anecdotes)  Of course, since nothing's ever that simple, it was a 30-odd-year-old soap running repeats on a cable channel.  Now, serialized storytelling is one of the most dangerously addictive forms of entertainment known to man (due, no doubt, to the Audience's driving urge to know What Happens Next), but add vampires, ghosts, witches, and other horror elements, and I can't help but watch. Yes, I was hooked on Dark Shadows.

In my previous post, I mentioned catching syndicated repeats in the early evening during the "1897 flashback" storyline (before the timeslot was eaten by the infomercial beast), but I also got to see the film House of Dark Shadows on television as well (so used was I to the Victorian trappings of the episodes I saw, I was surprised to learn of the film's more contemporary setting.)  The film told an accelerated version of the initial "Barnabas" arc of the series, but got to be a bit less stagey and a bit more bloody.  (I didn't get to see the sequel, Night of Dark Shadows, until much later.)

Years passed, and along came college, on-campus housing, and paid cable.  A new multitude of viewing options became available, and I soon zeroed in on one bit of something I remembered from my childhood.  One station had Dark Shadows available, for two episodes daily!  Sure, it was a morning timeslot, while I would be in classes, but that's what VCRs were for, right?  After classes, I came back to my room to watch.  Barnabas Collins, sometime vampire and former heroic figure, had reluctantly become a villain again, acting on behalf of the Leviathan cult, recruiting a local antiques dealer and his wife for the cult's nefarious needs.  Meanwhile, the long-missing, once-believed-dead Paul Stoddard had come back to Collinsport to re-unite with his estranged daughter, and Chris Jennings learns of his Collins ancestry.  (Did I mention Chris was a werewolf?)  Oh yeah, I was hooked all through the Leviathan plot arc, with the return of Quentin and his groovy sideburns, to Angelique the witch on the side of the angels for once.  And then they brought in the abandoned room that lead to the parallel timeline...

Needless to say, I could go on about it.  I loved the idea of arcs in different timelines, giving the actors (many of them from the stage) chances to play different characters, though this wasn't without its strangeness (David Selby played four different characters, all named Quentin Collins!)  True, the production values rivaled those of '70s Doctor Who, but the line flubs, camera bumps, and other technical mishaps added to the show's weird charm.  Its cult status gained it entry into the home video market (to this day, it is the only English language daytime soap with a complete run on DVD), and production company Big Finish, primarily known for their Doctor Who audio adventures (and yes, I do own several of those), also have a range of full cast dramas and audiobooks based on Dark Shadows, featuring original cast members.

However, there is another piece of the story missing.  For that, stay tuned...