'Fin' as in hopefully this is 'the end'?

Yeah, Ellen has a ton of WFAs. Good thing she has a spare bedroom or she'd not have room for them all.

I'm not really familiar with the players either (I've never been to WorldCon and am not an SF person; my realm is horror/weird/supernatural fiction), but I know that Castalia House is operated by Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, who from what I know of him is a pretty repugnant piece of work. My own rule of thumb, which…

And not listening to well-meaning locals, but yeah, the Scouts things was a bad move.

Thanks, Judkins Major! How's life in the wailing well field these days?

As I said, I'd read a lot of weird fiction by the time I came to Lovecraft, including Bierce and Poe on this side of the Atlantic, so had already had my 'Never read anything like this!' moment (probably when I read Algernon Blackwood for the first time; 'The Wendigo' blew me away, for the power of the writing, the…

Um, no, not Le Guin, And not Yarbro either.

"The Dunwich Horror'. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also the first Lovecraft story I ever read.

I thought this was an excellent piece, and have just one quibble:

The one in my neighbourhood when I was a kid (late 60s/early 70s) plated 'Bicycle Built for Two'.

The pause before Paden says his line is priceless.

Well, we know she can do tough, and an American accent. . . .

Last year I was in our local theatre production of My Fair Lady. As I've always believed I can't carry a tune in a paper bag, I auditioned for (and got) the role of Mrs. Pearce, Henry Higgins's housekeeper, who sings one line (at the end of 'I Could Have Danced All Night' she sings 'I understand, dear / It's all been…

The only upside I can see in Penny Dreadful having come to an end is that it almost certainly would not have had coverage here in the AV Club, episode-by-episode, if it had gone to season four. So at least it went out when those of us who loved it could still read the episode coverage and make comments.

I love that this show totally eschews the elements that people seem to think are necessary in reality TV shows of any kind (cooking or otherwise) - a clear 'villain' (or someone who is edited to fill that role), artificial drama, conflict, backstabbing, condescending or grandstanding judges, participants encouraged to…

No Penny Dreadful? You're kidding me. Here, I'll write it for you:

Hard to disagree with Walter Huston as Mr. Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster.

John Scalzi nails it on his blog: "So the math there at least appears pretty obvious from the outside. You can punch down on Twitter and get away with it, but don’t punch up, and punch up enough to make Twitter look bad, or you’ll get in trouble (after more than a day)."

John Williams's score for Dracula (Frank Langella, 1979) is excellent. Williams says he'd never seen a Dracula movie until he was asked to score the film, which enabled him to come fresh to the material. While anyone who listens to a lot of Wiliams scores can detect motifs cropping up again and again, the Dracula…

"He's such a clean old man" in Hard Day's Night is the opposite of what Corbett called him in Steptoe, where he was "such a dirty old man".