Pornokitsch

"The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" first aired May 21, 1945, on The Weird Circle.

Thoughts Before Listening

Ok seriously though, how can this not be good, it’s called "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" for heck’s sake, at the very least this should be about a disembodied ghost toe that comes back to haunt people and that is just rad as fuck. I am scared though.

We live in marvellous times.

Where once we nerds, geeks and fanfolk needed to haunt thrift stores and charity shops, comic book stores (which could be very unfriendly places for young women), bead shops and the local counter-cultural neighbourhoods of our nearest cities to find clothes and jewellery that proclaimed our love for Star Trek/TaleSpin/Squirrel Girl, we now have Etsy, Society 6, Redbubble, Amazon, Bay and ten thousand million specialist websites.

And, where we once worried about getting weird looks or teasing comments on our fashion choices, we now have Forever 21 selling Wonder Woman t-shirts. 

Basically, it's a great time to be a nerd, a geek, or a fan. 

So let's celebrate by highlighting some awesome nerdy clothes and accessories! 

We're going to kick things off with that staple of modern geekiness: the d20. 

Stark says: “Obliged.”

Monte Hellman’s Westerns are a strange breed. For one thing, it’s hard to talk about one without talking about the other. The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind were shot back to back, after the film’s financier reckoned that, if you’re making one film, why the hell not make two? And while both are considered to be prime examples of revisionist, acid Westerns, they’re also very different films. As a Western, The Shooting, written by Carole Eastman, is female-led, abstract, uncompromising and hallucinogenic. Ride in the Whirlwind, on the other hand, is defiantly realistic; more conventional and plot-driven. It was also written, produced and acted in by Jack Nicholson.

X-Men: Apocalypse opens in cinemas here in the UK and its reviews are, let’s be generous and say ‘not great’. Will an Apocalypse-related comic - arguably the Apocalypse-related comic - be any better?

This episode, we check out X-Men: Alpha - Age of Apocalypse; the comic that started the original Age of Apocalypse story. This issue kicks off of the saga that replaced the entire X-Men comic book line for four months.

X-Men: Alpha plunged all our intrepid mutant teams into a world where Professor X died years earlier and Apocalypse arose unchallenged. Magneto and his X-Men are at the vanguard of the resistance. It’s a famous epic; the source of many stories since. But is it any good?

And have we ever before spent as much time discussing the rendering of various characters’ junk?

And alternate universes being all the rage, it’s also time to dip into some others for this show’s 3&1, courtesy of Jon.

This past spring a humble museum in a small Dutch city mounted the largest Hieronymus Bosch exhibition in history. Along with nearly half a million other acolytes, I made the pilgrimage to ‘s-Hertogenbosch, birthplace of the father of monsters. My way was snared with perils (I neglected to book tickets far enough in advance) but Providence cleared my path (the museum extended their hours, so I flew back to the Netherlands), and in the end I was given the keys to a garden of earthly delights (just not a key to the original Garden of Earthly Delights; the Prado won’t loan out Bosch’s most famous triptych, not even for an event of this magnitude). It was quite literally the event of a lifetime.

I've finished my first pass for the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off!

I've read 3 chapters and/or 20% (whichever comes last) of 30 self-published books. I've picked six of those books for further reading and proper reviews. One of those will then go on to the FINAL ROUND in the BLOGGERDOME. It'll be awesome.

Below, you'll find a quick introduction, a not-so-quick spiel about reviewing self-published books and 24 short reviews.

Caution - this post is loooong.

As humans living in the twenty-first century, I’d like to think we’ve come a long way towards achieving equality between the sexes and rejecting established notions of gender. But is it far enough? After all, we’re still having these debates, highlighting prejudice, challenging ourselves to ‘think outside the box’. If gender equality truly existed, there’d be no need to stage this conversation.

In fiction, men write women and women write men on a regular basis, some more or less successfully. Both genders ought to be able to relate to each other at the very least on an intuitive level without resorting to dangerous and unhealthy stereotypes. But, as Emma Newman recently discussed, there are still male readers who are hesitant to pick up a book authored by a woman, or featuring a female protagonist.

Why is that? Personally, I’ve never had a problem reading a book written from a male perspective; in fact the majority of epic fantasy I read growing up featured male protagonists. Why then are some readers unable or unwilling to relate to women?

The Winds of Wniterr

Automated Fanfic generator! If you're tired of waiting for The Winds of Winter, here's my algorithmically generated conclusion:

Tyrion felt really dperessed one day. She had been slitting her wrists even more then normal. She had just found out that she was adopted. Her real parents turned out to be nobels from Europe. They had a upper class tower and were mighty richt! But she had none of that richness around. It made her feel pretty bad about herself so she listened to some good music.

But long she did not have to be depressed as Jon came in and kissed her in her special place (they had falled in love at the end of the story see). And she said: "I love oyu so much, it hurts.But fortunately I like pain, as I am into that stuff. But I know you are hurt now and not in the sexy way. What is wrong with you? If you feel bad then I feel bad.But not in the sexy way"

So Tyrion told her the whole story. She was shocked to hear this and said "I'm really shocked to hear this! Your parents are monsters!"

"Which ones?"

"All four of them, I don't like them. As much as I don't like Sam!"

And that was a lot because Tyrion knew that Jon hated Sam because she was unbelievably stupid and fat.

But Jon took out a letter, "this had just arrived," said Jon.

Tyrion openend the envolupe and inside was an invitation:

"Most Esteemed Tyrion said the message"

"You are condord invited to the royal ball of your parents. Your real parents, miss."

"We hope to see you soon. Most esteamly yours, dutchess!"

Oh my, said Tyrion this is rad!. But Jon was a little sceptic: "Maybe it's a trick."

"Why?" said Tyrion

"Because there are.... rumours. Of Danaerys still being around!"

"Surely she could not come all the way to Europe!?" said Tyrion confidently because she didn't think that Danaerys could travel that far.

"Hurm," said Jon contagiously, "we just have to be careful."

And there's more where that came from! (Not sure why Tyrion is female, maybe I missed something in Dance wid Dlagons?)

More fun stuff below.

DGLA season has begun! Woohoo! 

The nominations are out, but they are not complete. Try to resist the urge to vote until after 27 May, as the DGLA have said they're still taking (and adding) crowd-sourced nominations until that date. Those folks will be at a pretty substantial disadvantage already. When you are ready, vote here.

The (current) nominees list and my predictions below.

April may be the cruellest month, but May is the one that has traditionally been given a bad press.

Perhaps it suits the English temperament to look around at spring-time - the rebirth and fresh growth of the lush green land, with rough winds shaking the darling buds - and come up with a list of possible unfortunate happenings that might ruin everything. Or perhaps there's good advice lurking somewhere beneath the surface; I leave it you to decide. So here are five superstitions about May, four of which are warnings, and the final one is more in the way of skincare advice:

1. Don't wash blankets.

The belief that you shouldn't wash blankets in May seems to belong to Southern England in particular, and to be fairly new, from the turn of the twentieth century. Why shouldn't you wash blankets? It's all a bit vague really, attracting a range of warnings from the possibility of blanket shrinkage to imminent death. A proverb from the 1920s states:

Wash blankets in May
You'll soon be under clay.

Removing warm layers from the bed before the weather is reliable leads to feeling chilly, which leads to getting a cold, which leads to death. The same thought lies behind the next superstition on the list.