Does it say “Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding”? No, that’s what the fox says, apparently. The frog mostly says things that nobody can understand. But at least the subtitles are there to clarify things, so we can definitively answer this question. What does the frog say when she meets the Mandalorian? She speaks frog.
So this week I reached into my vast trove of rejection letters, as directed by the Gods of Randomness, and pulled out this short rejection, from the old magazine Epitaph, a division of Pirate Writings:
Continue reading “Random Rejection: Epitaph, “Trailblazing””So this week I was reading A Scanner Darkly, a shortish dystopian novel by some guy named Philip K. Dick. Maybe you’ve heard of him. If not, you’ve almost certainly heard of the movie Blade Runner, which was based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*
So a few weeks ago I mentioned that my wife had been watching the Disney+ superhero series WandaVision with me. Sadly, this only lasted for the first three-and-a-half episodes; in episode four, the action shifted to what was going on outside of the retro, sometimes black-and-white world of Westview, starting off with … Oh, wait, hang on. For those who haven’t seen Infinity War and Endgame or, for that matter, all of WandaVision:
Not to the tune of the original commercial, but to the tune of this scene in Scrubs:
So those who have been around here for a while may recall that I published my most recent novel, Father’s Books, with a “temporary limited edition” cover while I was waiting for the final cover artwork from Émilie Léger, who has provided the cover art for each of my books since Shards. For most of those books I selected an existing piece from Émilie‘s oeuvre*, but in the case of Father’s Books I couldn’t find one that seemed quite right, and so Émilie created a new one for me, which can now be revealed:
Continue reading ““Father’s Books”: The Non-Limited Edition Cover!”So this week I was reading The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, which is a “sequel”, of sorts, to Hyperion.
So this being a holiday weekend (although this post should appear the week after Memorial Day, assuming I don’t screw up the scheduling, it was actually prepared the week before), I was feeling kind of lazy, and decided to dip back into the giant cache of my elementary school papers that my folks excavated from the house where I grew up. This week, I grabbed a mimeograph of an old assignment about the senses:
Continue reading “The Early Years: Senses+”So recently, mainly as a result of a series of mixups about changing out hardware, we became aware that our local cable company had altered their pricing bundles:
Meaning that it was now possible to cancel the cable portion without having the price of the Internet and land line* portions jacked up so high that the price was basically the same as if we hadn’t canceled cable. Given that we don’t actually watch very much cable—many of the shows I used to watch, such as Into the Badlands and Preacher, have been canceled or died of natural causes, while others, such as Doctor Who, Resident Alien, and Battlebots, are on hiatus—we decided to go ahead and cut that particular cord, thus freeing up close to $200 a month. (Yes, I know, everyone else did this five or ten years ago.)
Continue reading “Not A Review Of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision””So as I’ve mentioned before, ever since, in his old age, Dennis the Vizsla took to noisily exhorting the humans to go to bed already in the evenings, we’ve been watching television with the subtitles on. In addition to helping with sometimes unclear dialog, subtitles can be humorous, grammatically horrifying, or subtly (or not-so-subtly) different from the actual spoken dialog.
Then there’s this, from Fear the Walking Dead:
Continue reading “Fear the Wonky Subtitles”
