BTW his latest novel The Searching Dead is apparently his first return to Cthulhu mythos stuff in a long time— it has something to do with Daoloth. It just came out in the UK, so I guess it might show up in the US in 3 or 4 years.

Well, he's not at Borders any more is all I know— never heard the details, maybe there was some temporary crisis, but yeah, he's written some stone cold classics and his books were everywhere in the '80s and yet you can still be just getting by if you don't happen to be Stephen King.

The saddest story of this kind that I heard of lately was when I found out why the much-celebrated British horror writer Ramsey Campbell had written a novel in 2004 (The Overnight) about miserable workers at a chain bookstore much like Borders: because his day job at the time was at Borders. This was after he'd been a…

Most writers make virtually no money from doing their thing. Same with most visual artists, and most musicians.

He's had a couple other projects going on - check his Wikipedia article if you really want to know.

Eh, I'm fine with them ignoring it - I mean "It's just him and me" made a great hook for the first movie, but it's easy enough to assume that Kyle just had incomplete information. Or - since the 2nd movie makes a point of suggesting that the future isn't set - the timeline might already have been rejiggered enough by…

Wow, that's the first book trade offer I've gotten here - sorry I can't help though: I don't have David Boring, I just read it when it was being serialized in Eightball.

Ice Haven isn't "slice of life" in the same way as Ghost World, but it's a great mostly-realistic piece about a bunch of people causing problems for each other. Also a good use of a format he also tried out in Wilson (I think - still haven't read that one): even though it's all one story, it's done like an anthology…

I was in college when Terminator 2 came out, and despite being a big Terminator fan I didn't see it— I don't remember why. Then a few years later, I rented it during one of the weirdest and saddest days ever: I had traveled out to a small town to try to help out a friend who was having some problems, only to find out…

Catching up with this late to say that the movie is indeed a ton of fun. And anyone who digs Tardi's work at all should be thrilled—it isn't someone riffing on his work or even a faithful adaptation of any particular comic, it's basically "we love this cartoonist so much we will build a whole movie around whatever he…

If you read his lectures in "On Directing Film" it's clear that he's interested in pretty much just one thing: narrative. Anything that doesn't directly advance the story, including 90% of what actors know how to do, he considers frou-frou garbage (and he gets pretty mean about it too, saying that directors who try…

My friend from Gloucester had the same complaint about the preview, but neither of us has seen the movie. I do remember reading that they shot part of it in Gloucester - don't know if some of it takes place there or if it's standing in for somewhere else.

I know a guy from Gloucester who refuses to think this movie could be good because he says literally everyone in Manchester by the Sea is a bunch of rich assholes; "the Hamptons of Massachusetts" is how he describes it. He's so curmudgeonly though, he'd probably find some other way to hate the movie if not that.

That's an oddly aggro response to someone who ended a sentence with "at least as far as I know it, but OK."

But "an everyday person" isn't the target audience; he's playing to people who want to hear angry scary bullshit all the time, as long as it makes them feel like they have the secret inside scoop. And he doesn't really need the same people to keep listening non-stop for 15 years, it's OK if some of them do get bored…

Maybe I've just missed the "thorough explanations", or maybe it just depends on what you consider to be "great mystery." Based on this page as well as some of Silver's blog posts that I've seen, these are aspects of their system that I think are opaque and hand-wavey:

It doesn't work that way. If Trump wins, Silver isn't "right" just because he said there was a non-zero chance of that; you can't prove anything about the rightness of these statistical models just by looking at whether one thing did or didn't happen. What will make Silver's model (or PEC, or any of
those sites) look…

Well, don't hold your breath until "the loser has conceded" because it's not for sure that Trump could bring himself to make a concession statement, and human beings need air to survive. But whether or not he concedes has no legal meaning; the results are what they are.

I'm lucky enough to live in one of those hoity-toity cities with a bunch of different kinds of theaters: generic multiplex where everything sucks but you can go see blockbusters in IMAX and have a 5 gallon Coke if you feel like it; Sundance-type classed-up chain theater with some big movies and some littler movies;…

I liked how they addressed this early on when she shows him a chakra diagram, an acupuncture text, and an MRI, and says something like "these are just different attempts people have made to understand things," like she considers them all cute but inaccurate.