Let's Read World War Z pt. 1: When zombies were cool

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Who's ready for a new let's read series?

Yes, The Overton Window remains unfinished. My fun neurological condition has fluctuated to the point where I feel like I can work on something, but I'm still not able to handle Glenn Beck's prose or the somewhat complicated political hot takes that responding to it entails. Instead we're going to sink our teeth into the lean, nutrition-free corpse that is Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of The Zombie War.

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The crimes of The Crimes Of Grindelwald


The narrative crimes, that is. Of the movie.

I have this odd tendency to get swept up in pop cultural "moments" in a way that's divorced from my actual appreciation for the pop cultural work in question. I can't resist clicking on Marvel theory clickbait articles despite not really giving a shit about the actual movies. I'm fervently awaiting the ending of Game of Thrones even though I've spent the last few seasons mostly being annoyed or uninterested in it. I went along with the pre-Force Awakens hype train even though I was never a fan of the original movies.

So a few years ago, when Warner Bros cleared some space in their bank account and said "Harry Potter is back , y'all!", I couldn't resist.

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Grindelwald.mp3 (feat. unannounced guest appearance by my cat)

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Merry Christmas, everyone! Please enjoy this extra bonus content, which I recorded on my phone and put very little effort into.

Trying something a little different for the dawning of a new year. Writing blog posts is great, but I rarely have the energy for it these days. So what if sometimes, I could just deliver my opinions directly from my brain to your face? Over the internet?

Let me know if you enjoyed this and I'll do more like it. Maybe I'll even get a real microphone! And a camera! 

Spoilers for The Crimes of Grindelwald by the way.

Let's Read The Kingkiller Chronicle sex comic

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No, this is not a joke.

I check in occasionally on r/KingkillerChronicle to see if there's been any news on the third book, or if that big ambitious multimedia adaptation is any closer to being an actual thing (it isn't). Usually it's just the dedicated fans becoming collectively more and more fed up with the failure of Doors of Stone to materialize, but today I found something different. Something both terrible and wondrous.

I found a sex toy review/sex ed webcomic featuring a strip written by Patrick Rothfuss, in which he interviews his characters about their sexual identities.

Reminder: still not joking. This is real. Link is NSFW, in case it wasn't obvious.

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The State of Ronan's Brain 2018

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Whoooooooo's ready to get an in-depth update on the state of the neurological disorder that prevents me from posting on this blog as much as I want to????

As I've detailed several times on this blog and my old blog and my twitter, I've spent the last two years dealing with a complicated and not very exciting Brain Problem brought on by a relatively minor traffic oopsie (which was not my fault, in case anyone's wondering). I've been out of work since March of last year and lost my income earlier this year, although neither of these were the disaster they could have been thanks to an unusually generous manager and the fact that I live in a  corrupt socialist European welfare state and not the glorious land of productive industry and rugged individualism that is the USA, where I would most likely be homeless or dead by now.

Man, that got kind of dark. 

Anyway, I spent most of this year on medication that didn't do a whole lot for me, but did make me super lethargic and tired and unable to really put effort into anything. Back in October, I went into the hospital for treatment that I hoped might lead to a dramatic improvement. It...did the exact opposite, in that I came out significantly worse off in terms of basic functioning and quality of life than I was before I went in. So that was kind of a bummer.

Just like in the movies, this experience has led me to several important realizations about, like, life and stuff. Such as the fact that cars are really  fast and that chronic migraine conditions are a way bigger deal than most people realize. Humans are wobbly sentient jelly piles encased in brittle robots, and we're all one confluence of bad luck away from breaking down or malfunctioning catastrophically. 

This is getting depressing now. Why did I start writing this post? 

Oh, yeah. So 2019 is just around the corner, and I'm determined to make it another Year of Accomplishments. Here are the things you can look forward to, in rough chronological order:

  • A few people have asked me if I'm doing a post on Fantastic Beasts and The Criminals of Grundelwall, aka the new Harry Potter movie that's apparently bad. I said I wasn't going to see it in the cinema because of Johnny Depp; I have attained the means to see it without financially supporting it, and thus will be writing a review sometimes before the new year (hopefully). 
  • Did you know that in addition to writing this blog, I also write novels? Several of you read one of them a few years ago! It was awful. I have another one sitting on my hard drive right now that's less awful. You may get a chance to read the first chapter and give me feedback on it, at absolutely no additional cost. This is a deal you can't afford to miss.
  • Maybe I'll put other writings on here? I'm paying for this domain, I might as well use it. 
  • My dissection of the Overton Window is not cancelled and will resume some time in the early new year. I also have tentative plans to re-formulate and re-write my thoughts on everyone's favourite lute-focused fantasy duology, as I started doing back when this site first launched, although that will take more time because it involves reading the damn things again and my symptoms make it hard enough to get through books I actually like.

Who knows what other fun things will come along? Not even I know! Literally, my creative output is dependant entirely on the vagaries of an ever-shifting medical condition over which I have no control oh God help me

 

Only these sharks understand me

Only these sharks understand me

Voxing about Vox

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You may not remember this, but 2016 was kind of a wild time. The US election in November, which was expected to be a mere formality before the inauguration of the first female president, instead saw the nomination go to a former reality TV show host who had been repeatedly caught bragging about committing sexual assault. The juxtaposition of these events led to what political scientists refer to as a Big Mood.

Two years later, enough time has passed for the arrival of post-Trump literature, and the first one I laid my hands on was Christina Dalcher’s Vox, a much-ballyhooed bestseller described somewhat confusingly on a front cover endorsement as a “re-imagining of the Handmaid’s Tale”, implying some sort of direct connection between the two works (there isn’t one).

In case my use of the word “ballyhooed” didn’t give it away, I did not like it very much.

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Winter housekeeping

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Just a quick note on upcoming blog content.

I had intended to resume Overton Window posts last month, but unfortunately the hospital stay back in October that I mentioned here didn’t go the way I was hoping… in the sense that I’ve been feeling significantly worse ever since (this was not the intended outcome, needless to say).

I’m slowly getting my strength back, but until then I’ll be sticking to one-off reviews and the like. I’ve already got a post about a very bad book lined up for later in the week/early next week so please look forward to that.

The best of Crisiswear

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Four score and one year ago, I gazed into the mysterious abyss of late capitalism to bring you the best of WallpaperStore*, a baffling online marketplace serving an audience that I'm not sure actually exists. 

Since then, I've been thinking of doing a sequel to that post, waiting for the right target to come into my crosshairs. Last week, someone in a random twitter thread linked to a website called Crisiswear, and I knew I had found my next muse. It was the section for cowls that sealed the deal.

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The existential horror of CG Pokemon

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It was more or less inevitable that someone, one day, would make a live action Pokemon movie. Talk of such a thing has been doing the rounds since the late 90s when the franchise was at its cultural peak, but now it’s finally happening.

And it’s taking the form of…a loose adaptation of a 3DS spin-off where Pikachu is a detective. Voiced by the Deadpool guy.

Huh.

I’ll say this for it, the Pokemon designs don’t look nearly as horrifying in motion as they do in the still images that have been doing the rounds on Twitter. That isn’t going to stop me from making fun of them.

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Let's Read The Overton Window pt. 15: The World According To Glenn Beck (edited version)

Note: this is an alternate version of the original blog post, edited to remove a long discussion of extremely unpleasant topics like rape and abuse. Click here to read the original.

Chapter 31 opens with Noah and Arthur facing off in Arthur’s office. Noah tries to apologize for his subterfuge, but Arthur is suspiciously laid-back about the whole thing, saying that there's no way Noah could have seen through Molly's seductive wiles.

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Let's Read The Overton Window pt. 15: The World According To Glenn Beck

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Content Warning for rape and child abuse. You can read an edited version of this post that doesn’t deal as heavily with those topics here.

Chapter 31 opens with Noah and Arthur facing off in Arthur’s office. Noah tries to apologize for his subterfuge, but Arthur is suspiciously laid-back about the whole thing, saying that there's no way Noah could have seen through Molly's seductive wiles.

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Ding Dong, the blogger is dead

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And by “dead” I mean temporarily indisposed, which is to say, not actually dead at all.

So remember that big Overton Window post I wanted to get out in a timely fashion? Yeah, that’s not happening any time soon. It’s a big one and requires actual research, which I just don’t have the energy for right now.

Also, I will be going into the hospital for about a week on Friday (relax, it’s nothing serious) and probably won’t be doing any writing during that time. I will, however, have another Ferretbrain post going up at some point this month or shortly after, so please look forward to that. It’s about a very good horror game.

Ronan Wills x Ferretbrain

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Ferretbrain has been one of my favourite websites for a long time. Hosting an absolute treasure trove of reviews and opinions, it’s seen me through a lot of boring commutes (and lately, time spent resting in bed).

Last year, I wrote most of a review on the Purge series, which I had to abandon due to Brain Issues. I managed to pull together enough energy to finish it off following the release of The First Purge a few weeks ago, and I decided to submit it to Ferretbrain in order to give back to the site.

You can find the post here. I’d like to contribute more content in future, so keep a close eye on the latest article feed for more of yours truly.

In which I over-analyse two seconds of a Harry Potter trailer

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The final trailer for Warner Bros Presents JK Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (a Wizarding World™ Product) has landed, and it shockingly features a slimy, hideous creature whose inclusion in the movie is both capital-P problematic and a dubious decision from a creative standpoint.

But as well as Johnny Depp, it’s also got a big snake in it. In keeping with the strange and inexplicable-even-to-myself fascination I have with this spin-off franchise, I immediately gave it a look.

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Guest Post: The Ritual & the Ritual

Note: It’s another guest post. It’s still horror-related. We now have ten days to October, aka the Devil’s Month, so this is an appropriate topic for me to keep writing about. Just take my word for it.

I’m normally not the kind of person who consumes different versions of the same story in quick succession. I actually rarely do it at all - if I watch a movie I’ll almost never read the novel it was based on and I tend to choose between an original manga or an anime and then just stick solely with that. There’s no particular reason for this beyond, I guess, having no real need or desire to experience the same story twice.

But I recently picked up Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, a 2011 horror novel that I understand won its author some decent acclaim when it was first released. Just before I started reading it, I happened to notice that there exists a moderately well-reviewed horror movie of the same name that was released last year; wouldn’t you know it, the movie is an adaptation of the novel. Just for a change I decided to read the book and then immediately watch the movie, thinking it might make a good exercise in compare-and-contrast.

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Guest Post: Insane Clown Premise

NOTE: This is a guest post by a friend of The Blogger. There will most likely be more of these, probably on the subject of horror. Think of them as a nice lead-in to the annual Spooktober tradition.

Quite some time ago I attempted to read Stephen King’s IT while working at one of those jobs that are so boring they should by all rights be illegal. The book proved to be a good choice; at this stage in my development as a reader I wasn’t yet tired of King’s fondness for stuffing massive amounts of character backstory into all of his novels, so I had a perfectly fine time reading about the inhabitants of Derry, Maine (of course) in their child and adult forms even before the evil clown showed up.

But then the clown did show up, and…uh.

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Let's Read The Overton Window pt. 10: This is a sneaking mission

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We're back from our hiatus! Unfortunately, posting will still resume on a slower schedule, as I'm experiencing new and exciting Brain Symptoms. I'm planning on tidying up some choice pieces of content from my old site and bringing them over, so that will hopefully plug up the gaps.

In case you've forgotten what's going on in The Overton Window, here's a recap: Noah Gardner, rich young PR executive, has entered the orbit of Molly Ross, a member of the goofily-named Founders Keepers, a "patriot" group convinced that America is sliding towards tyranny. Noah actually knows for a fact that this is the case because he was in the room when his dad offered to help some government employees enact a plan that will end with a new world order taking over the country, but he doesn't seem to have processed this for some reason. When we last left them, they were sneaking into Noah's company to look for evidence of the plot at Molly's urging.

Meanwhile, Danny Bailey, another Trapper Keeper and Youtube sensation, has been recruited by an FBI agent named Stuart Kearns, ostensibly to participate in a sting operation looking to arrest militia members who might be plotting nefarious deeds. In reality, Kearns is working with the evil conspiracy and is duping both Danny and the militia chuds into carrying out a real terrorist attack in order to create a pretext for the new world order plot (this hasn't actually been revealed yet in the part of the book we've covered, but it's incredibly obvious).

All that aside, lets get back into it.

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