Yeah, I don’t think King was just high or otherwise out of control of what he was doing. It doesn’t do what he wanted it to— that is, I think he wanted to lead readers into a space he knew was disturbing but have them see it as a strange magic thing like the characters saw it, and obviously that didn’t work at all for…

Really nice piece. It’s probably time for me to read the book again too. Reading later about King basing it on the rottenness he saw in Bangor gave me vivid flashbacks to my own small town, and when I read It the first time I hadn’t really realized how constantly terrified I’d been as a kid despite barely having any…

When I first heard that that was an ad lib, I thought Hoffman was from New York so I figured “Sure, that makes sense”-- but on second thought it makes even more sense that he was from LA. A New Yorker wouldn’t necessarily think that that behavior was noteworthy or entertaining, but I can imagine Hoffman was like…

Breihan’s comment was brief so I don’t know if this was his exact take on it, but... you can be kinky and still think that that scene plays more uncomfortably now than it did in 1969, given that you don’t start out knowing that it’s a fantasy. For me it’s a pretty rough whiplash from “Oh God this is going to be awful”…

Disqualification from what? My point was just that when people use the word “predicting” in the context of articles like we’re talking, where the idea is that someone was uncannily prescient— how did he do it? what are the odds?— it’s worth pointing out that he was talking about stuff that was on everyone’s lips then.…

I grew up in the ‘80s and wearing shirts with pockets was not really a thing at my school, let alone putting pens in pockets. Maybe a few years earlier, but as soon as it became common to carry around backpacks, you would just put the pen in your bag.

I think you meant well, but you’re over-generalizing from an experience you had and assuming that that’s what would happen for people if only they would think to do what you did. I think you were lucky, and I’m happy for teenage you, but... you were lucky.

That reminds me of one of my favorite what do you call it... reverse-dated-future, maybe?... gags, from the Daniel Clowes time-travel comic Patience. This guy from a few decades in the future has been running around causing trouble with a very vaguely drawn gadget that does whatever he needs to do at the time,…

I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, but the book isn’t “synonymous with prescient sci-fi” in the sense of there being any consensus like that in science fiction circles. The BBC story that you linked to more or less created the modern phenomenon of saying so; every similar story and comment I’ve seen about Stand…

Leaving aside that the “mucker” attacks in Stand on Zanzibar usually aren’t with guns, and are more common in big cities because the premise is that they’re caused by overcrowding... Brunner predicted the mass shooting epidemic only in the sense that everyone was already freaking out about Charles Whitman’s murder…

Four seasons? Isn’t this movie set in Los Angeles?

There are some regular slo-mo shots in the movie too, plus some stuff that’s just CGI, and probably people sometimes call those “bullet time” too because, like, it has bullets in the shot, and it’s messing with time. So that’s confusing. But what the term is for is the stuff where everything actually freezes for a…

Slow motion is slow motion - you’re still filming a series of moments in time, you’re just not showing them as fast. Bullet time is where you take a whole lot of still pictures from a whole lot of cameras at different angles *at the exact same time*, and then show those in sequence so it looks like you’re moving…

Oh my God, Moonstruck! I really have to see this again, so that I can appreciate it more on its own terms... instead of just as part of my most disappointing yet also awesome high-school experience ever. Here’s the story.

It’s true that it wasn’t a “hack” that required any skill at all, or that even circumvented any protections that Facebook had put in place. They simply took data that Facebook was not supposed to be giving them (your friends’ data rather than just yours, you being the person who took the quiz) but that Facebook was…

Is it too late to request a Marshal Law show instead?

Most of that is a continuation of how those things had already been revived in Swamp Thing. Alan Moore brought back Cain and Abel, made them officially part of DC continuity and said they were also the original Cain and Abel and appeared to people in dreams. The same goes for Eve. Etrigan was pretty big in Swamp…

Almost, not quite. Gaiman originally proposed to do his own take on a different Sandman: the Simon/Kirby one, which was much weirder than Wesley Dodds and actually involved dreams. That fell through, but DC commissioned him to do something new called Sandman that would specifically *not* be based on existing…

Being a big Fessenden fan and having recently rewatched his first four features (the box set is worthwhile if you like this stuff), I’m happy that Depraved sounds interesting and I’m also completely prepared for some long-winded political commentary. For instance I love 98% of Habit, but I still have to grit my teeth…

Although my memories of being a teenage Fangoria reader in the 80s are blurred by depression and relatively tiny amounts of alcohol, I’m doubtful as to whether the paper really fell apart in one’s hands. I know it was mostly black & white with a color insert section, but was it really such cheap newsprint?