That's a fair assessment of Lovecraft, I think. He's definitely a descendant of Poe—great imagination, good with atmospheric effects, not a great writer. Neil Gaiman wrote a pretty funny short story called "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" that does a good job of criticizing Lovecraft's writing style.

Good call (heh) on the Cthulhu videogame, WitchFinder. It really does a great job of adapting Lovecraft's stories and atmosphere into another medium. I do wish they'd done a better job incorporating the themes of insanity into the game—a la "Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem" (which, although not a straight…

S.T. Joshi is a great Lovecraft apologist, and one of the only people to approach his work as a critic. Plenty of other writers admire Lovecraft and trumpet his influence on them, but Joshi's the only one I've seen analyze his work extensively. His critical capacities are pretty questionable, but his scholarship's…

… aaaand I guess this was noted IN THE POST DIRECTLY BELOW MINE. Man, I need to get out of work, right now.

Weirdly, it was a featured film at the Chicago International Film Festival, either opening it or closing it (I can't remember which). I remember thinking that was weird when I saw it on the schedule, as it looks roughly on par with the average rom-com. I wonder what the festival programmers were thinking.

lexicondevil - A lot depends on your religious sensitivity, I think. If you're an atheist inclined to roll his eyes at extremely earnest people of faith, The Passion probably will leave you cold. It's a movie whose meaning is very much bound up with what attitudes toward Christ you bring to it. The point isn't the…

Agreed. Blue man FTW.

Gravy Robber, did you just reference that Weird Al interview with Eminem. If so, we should be friends. Or maybe form a crime-solving duo.

Leave Them All Behind
The perfect song to hear at 7 am on a Saturday morning as you're pulling out of your driveway is "Leave Them All Behind" by Ride. Something about the first few seconds of it, followed by the swirling guitars and the lyric about, well, "leave them all behind," just make it a great way to kick off…

So apparently this was already covered halfway up the comments. That'll teach me not to hastily post.

So, basically
… they made a movie about Stewie from Family Guy? Big whoop.

I knew a guy in college whose name was—no joke—Max Paradise.

If you think the "dying in a fire" draft was great, you should've seen Frank Darabont's version. CancerAIDS galore, I'll tell you what!

::plunges gardening shears into Scuba Dew's throat::

Your fear is making me strengthful?

My theory is that it's just typical hipster backlash, i.e.: "These posts are pretty obviously of above-average quality, so I will look cool by saying it's dumb. I am a unique snowflake for hating something!"

Shit Fuckers 2: Shit-Fuck Harder

Yeah, I figured out fairly quickly that you had to hit an office chair occasionally just to slow down, but even with that trick, there are some jumps that are just plain impossible due to the positioning of the windows at a bad angle: either you're moving too fast to prepare for when it comes, or you're moving too…

And by "them" I meant "jumps." Oh, Mondays.

Really? It's not a bad game or anything, but I got bored with it really fast and quit after my first decently long run. The problem is that the randomly generated buildings often make some levels impossible, because in order to make them you'd have to be able to plan farther ahead than the scrolling screen allows you…