Check it out, I got a blog award! Me! Not the animals, for once! It’s the Sunshine Blogger award, and I was given it by Thomas Wikman of Leonberger Life and Superfactful:
The Sunshine Blogger Award
The Early Years: The Slayers, Part 2 ― Menta As Anything
So here we are this week with the second and final post involving Thunderbolt and his sidekicks, as we present the final four members of the Slayers. These are the nominally more important ones, insofar as when the team got adapted for the Marvel Mania storyboard in college, they’re the four who didn’t get killed off pretty quickly; in fact, one of them eventually switched sides and joined the good guys. Read on to find out who!
Continue reading “The Early Years: The Slayers, Part 2 ― Menta As Anything”The Early Years: The Slayers, Part 1 ― Mmm, Fruit Chews
So as previously threatened promised, this week, I reached into the pile of old papers from my younger days and pulled out the Villains & Vigilantes character sheets for The Slayers. There are a lot of them (seven in all), so I decided to split them across two weeks*, starting this week with Starburst** (a flying energy projector and the leader of the group at first), Throttle (the speedster), and Monstrus (the brick).
The Early Years: You’ll Be Hearing From Magneto’s Attorneys
So this week I decided to dip into my big pile of old papers that aren’t rejection letters, and as it happens, I’m still in the section that’s full of old Villains & Vigilantes NPC character sheets, and there at the top was a fellow will be familiar to anyone who used to participate in those games I ran, or who was writing on “Marvel Mania” at college back in the day: Magneto! Thunderbolt!
Not A Review Of “The Pitt”
So recently, we (meaning me) have been watching a new show on HBO MAX called The Pitt, in which Noah Wyle plays an older, wiser Dr. John Carter, who has moved on from County General to take charge of the busy ER of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. No, I’m kidding.* He actually plays Dr. Perry Cox, who mentors/torments young physician J.D. … No, I’m kidding again. But there is a resemblance, don’t you think?
That Crazy Bokep, Always Oversharing in the Spam Folder
So a while back I set up an automatic rule to look for any comment with the name “Bokep” in it and send those directly to trash, because I was getting inundated with spam comments from that name, all with the same structure. After setting that rule I kinda just forgot about it, but then the other day I noticed that I had well over 400,000(!) messages sitting in trash, so I figured I would go take a look, and there was Bokep, still trying to get my attention with fake posts about playing football, going to his mom’s house, cooking dinner, and … OH MYYYYYY.
Continue reading “That Crazy Bokep, Always Oversharing in the Spam Folder”Teaser Tuesday: “The Guns Above”
So this week I was reading The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis, a low-technology steampunk adventure where they fly around in zeppelins, but shoot at each other with muzzle-load muskets, cannons, and flintlock rifles. Because why not?
Continue reading “Teaser Tuesday: “The Guns Above””
Not A Review Of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”
So this week we (meaning I) watched Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which, as you may have guessed from the name, is the sequel to Beetlejuice. Presumably in another 30 years or so there will be a threequel called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and then we’ll really be in for it.
The Twelve Steps of Discovering a Song is a Cover
1. While waiting for your wife to sit down so you can watch an episode of Shrinking, noodle around on YouTube and have it suggest “Breathless” by The Corrs. This is an entirely reasonable suggestion since you already like The Corrs (you have their greatest hits album, which incudes “Breathless”), so you play the video:
2. Have your wife wander in while the video is playing and tell her that you’re not sure why an Irish band is hanging around an old air strip in the California desert, but you’re just going with it. She will say something to the effect of she doesn’t hear their Irish accents while they’re singing (sometimes you can hear an accent when somebody sings, sometimes not) and will speculate on what they sound like when they talk.
3. Find an interview with the Corrs so your wife can hear them talking, and discover that even though they do have a little bit of an Irish lilt to their voices, it’s not nearly as pronounced as, say, a former Irish coworker’s:
4. In order to convince your wife that The Corrs are a legit Irish band, pull up a video of their playing the traditional Irish reel “Toss the Feathers“:
5. Now that you’ve clicked on several Corrs videos in quick succession, have YouTube show you one of them singing “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime”, which as far as you know is a Dream Academy song*. You find it plausible that a member of The Corrs would cover a Dream Academy song, even though The Corrs have sold millions more records than The Dream Academy, because, hey, it’s The Dream Academy. You decide to give their version a listen:
6. Decide that much as you like the Corrs, this version of the song isn’t for you, and search for “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” on YouTube, expecting to find The Dream Academy. Instead, find a few dozen versions by other people, including Beck, whose version was used in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
7. Say to yourself, “Self, what are the odds that Beck covered a Dream Academy song?”, and decide that the odds are approximately zero.
8. Go to Wikipedia to find out whose song it actually is, and discover that it’s by some band you never heard of called The Korgis.
9. Find the Korgis version and listen to it:
10. Say to your wife (who has long since lost interest in this entire investigation**), “Well, that version isn’t bad, but I like The Dream Academy’s version better. It has an oboe in it.”
11. So now you know that a song that for the past 40 years you thought was a Dream Academy original is, in fact, a cover, but that just goes to show you that what they say is true.
12. Everybody’s gotta learn sometime.
* Spoiler alert: It’s not.
** Not that she was very interested in the first place.
Teaser Tuesday: “Valley of the Lesser Evil”
So this week I was reading Valley of the Lesser Evil, by Carl Dane, which is not (gasp!) SF, fantasy, or (despite the title) horror, but is, in fact, an honest-to-God Western. It’s even set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, as Westerns should be.
Viscosity 