We are coming to you live from Cross Plains, Texas, where a large number of pale, hirsute men and a smattering of wives, girlfriends, and female fans have gathered to celebrate the life and works of Robert E. Howard. The weather if a balmy 90-odd degrees, with juuuust enough humidity to bring about a ponderous case of swamp ass.

I’ve been showing up a day before the day before the first day of the gathering for a while, now. Thursday used to be the pre-game, but that migrated over to Wednesday some ten or twelve years ago, when everyone said, “Y’all are all in town; why don’t you help set up chairs?” For a two-day event, I usually spend six days between set up, travel, and recovery.

A lot goes into these gatherings; it’s like a grown-up version of “Spanky’s got a barn, Darla’s got some costumes! Let’s put on a show!” The volunteer to organizer ratio is roughly 2:1, and that number flip-flops daily. Being as how I’m still in the middle of it, here’s a few pics from the last few days.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: We’re working on some larger pieces that will appear on the blog; as we are out in the field on assignment we’ll offer this book review instead.

Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil de Grasse Tyson (HC, EPUB, AB)

Astro-physicist and Pluto-Denier Tyson offers up a treatise on how aliens captured our imagination, what we know and don’t know about life on other planets, and whether or not we should shake hands when we meet one.

This light, breezy read covers a lot of ground in short order as Tyson ruminates on the questions we’ve asked ourselves for decades; namely, is there life amongst the stars; if so, what’s up there; and most importantly, what’s their favorite season of Laverne & Shirley. I know he’s not everyone’s cuppa tea, but he’s one of the few people out there pushing a science-positive agenda, including math and physics, that people can relate to in some way.

The book is chock-full of pop culture references (but it’s by no means exhaustive, leading some people to think Tyson doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he didn’t reference X short story in pulp magazine from the 1940s or Y movie or TV show) but a comprehensive examination of John Campbell’s Astounding pulp magazine wasn’t the point, either. Rather, Tyson is using popular culture and familiar references as an on-ramp to the theoretical discussion of the building blocks of life and the various other biophysical tenets that would potentially define or limit our new neighbors.

Tyson is certainly not the first, nor necessarily the best, scientist to write books aimed at the general public, but he does understand the media ecosystem better than most. In this respect, I consider Tyson to be the Electric Company to Bill Nye, the Science Guy’s Sesame Street. I think what I enjoyed best about this book is that, as his own reader for the audio book, he’s a lot easier to understand, since he’s not under a time constraint and not tripping over himself to get ideas out before they go to a commercial break.

Take Me to Your Leader is a quick read with a nice blend of Star Wars aliens and the Square-Cube Law. It’s a great palate cleanser between heavier books and movies in this year to end all years.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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Robert E. Howard Days Are Nigh

Forty years ago, a small group of fans, some of whom came from as far away as Australia (and in 1986, that was basically the moon), descended on the town of Cross Plains, Texas, to celebrate and honor Robert E. Howard on the anniversary of his tragic death by his own hand at the age of 30. Their goal was to see some of the things Howard wrote about in his letters, look at the house where he wrote most of his incredible output of prose and poetry for 11 frantic years, and maybe find something—a connection, an understanding, an appreciation—it differs for every fan.

Oh, how the times have changed. This year, we are honoring the Godfather of Howard Days, Rusty Burke, whose list of credits in the world of REH-dom are voluminous and impressive, and our Special Guest, Indiana Bill Cavalier, affectionately known as “Indy” in his various circles. Indy has been the Official Editor for the Robert E. Hoard Amateur Press Association for over two decades now, and he’s done more to foster fandom and encourage participation in Howard studies than anyone else over the years. These two were part of that initial group of curious, devoted fans, and they’ve been coming back ever since.

This year, there are a few milestone, the largest of which is the celebration of what would grow into Robert E. Howard Days, a two-to-four day event hosted by Project Pride and a ton of volunteers and friends of REH including the Robert E. Howard Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering a better understanding of Robert E. Howard’s life and works. The foundation is celebrating its 20^th anniversary, having first formed back in 2006, during Howard’s Centennial.

Not to be outdone, 30 years ago, there was a quirky little art house movie that appeared for all of three weeks at the end of the year in 1996 starring a then-unknown Renee Zellwegger and a somewhat known Vincent D’Onofrio called The Whole Wide World, based on the memoirs of Novalyne Price Ellis. The movie was held back by the studio in the hopes that Zellwegger’s second movie, Jerry Maguire, would lend some box office cache to this charming drama set in the 1930s. They were quite wrong, but this movie has endured, and for a while, when it was running regularly on the Lifetime channel was responsible for a number of women venturing to Cross Plains to find out more about this gifted poet.

We’re going to celebrate all of that and more this year. Lots going on, as per usual. Not in any particular order, there’s a special postal cancellation that the local Post Office does every year, a one-day thing for people to get postcards and envelopes stamped and processed. Absent fans have delighted in getting these little mementos in the mail over the years. There is a bus tour of Howard’s surrounding “haunts” (hosted by me) and a Walking Tour of the house and grounds (hosted by Rob Roehm). That whole Emerging Writer’s Workshop me and Jason Waltz and Adrian Simmons are running is a new thing, hopefully a meaningful tradition in the making. The Cross Plains Library is open with a number of rare books, pulps, and actual typescripts of various stories for people to gawk at. Panel discussions, round table talks, of course, tours of the house, a silent auction and banquet, all of the proceeds of which go back into maintaining the house (and it’s in need of a major repair right now, so we’re all digging deep to keep it around). Not to mention, poetry readings at sunset at the house, and tons of goodwill and fellowship. I didn’t even talk about the food, the hospitality, the after-hours adult beverages, and so on and so forth.

I’ve always referred to this weekend as a Family Reunion and that’s exactly the vibe. Once you’ve made the trip, you’re in the club; One of Us (gabba gabba) and it’s not at all unusual for some newcomer to show up and then return again and again after seeing the weekend in action and experiencing this unique literary pilgrimage for themselves.

The word on everyone’s lips is going to be Schwarzenegger, after the announcement of a third Conan movie, capping off a trilogy that was always implied but never explicitly stated, and there will be a number of Conan fans in attendance to quiz all of us for nuggets of information they can post online. It’s not harsh to say that every Robert E. Howard fan in a Conan fan, but not every Conan fan is a Robert E. Howard fan. Eh, no matter. I’ve been actively involved in Howard Days events since 2005, having attended for many years prior. It’s been my honor to be a part of the celebration of his life and works, and it’ll be great to publicly thank Rusty and Indy, two people who have been instrumental in my life for so many years.

The following week will see a brand-new online conference hosted by the new editorial board of The Dark Man: the Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies. The publication has enjoyed a colorful past and currently has settled at East Texas A&M University, making this the first iteration of the journal sponsored by a Texas-based university. I can’t wait to see this conference, and I would urge you to check it out, as well. Some interesting folks will be on hand, and a few special surprises, too.

More Podcastery

The fine folks over at the 42Cast keep asking me to be on shows; it would be rude to say no, especially when we’re talking about The Mandalorian series. It’s fun! It’s educational! I may say some stuff that is both cogent and amusing! You don’t know what-all we get up to. Click on the link and add it to your tanning playlist this summer.

The 42cast Episode 283: Saber Rattling

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: New media has been somewhat scarce of late, owing to the dismantling of the entire Division of Media Review and several adjacent Agencies and Bureaus. We are crestfallen at this turn of events and are currently exploring our options for recourse. In the meantime, we will continue apace insofar as we are able to do so.

Good Omens, Season 3 (Prime)

The demon Crowley (David Tennant) and the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) have to make-up and then team up to prevent the apocalypse in the series finale.

This one-and-done movie wraps up the original Good Omens storyline with a minimum of fluff and none of the drama surrounding the series creator, Neil Gaiman. In fact, when all of that first dropped, David Tennant wasted no time in getting on social media platforms and begging fans not to tune out, as hundreds of people worked on the show and they deserved to be paid for it, as well as having their hard work seen and appreciated.

That being said, it still took a while for this to drop. I daresay, it was worth the weight…of the albatross hanging around its neck, the tall, pale kind, wearing a Member’s Only jacket. The series picks up some months after the cliffhanger in Season two, a bit of an abrupt shift, I suspect because some things got cut to shorten the finale. Don’t worry, it’s all there, and a couple of judicious infodumps keeps you up to date on the wherefores and the whatnots.

Both leads are compelling, but honestly, I think this is the coolest part Tennant ever played, and he’s got an impressive list of credits. His fallen angel just oozes rock-and-roll swagger, and it really makes you appreciate the physicality of an actor’s performance, a thing that is frequently overlooked. It’s really hard to talk about the show without giving anything away; part of the fun of the series is watching all of the British-ness pop out when you least expect it.

I’m on the fence about the Gaiman adaptations. I hated the book American Gods, and thought very little of the series, as well. Sandman was decidedly uneven but the second half was far and away better than the first. Good Omens was good right away. I’m not going to suggest that it’s the prose and humor of Terry Pratechett that held the original novel together, but, well, I guess I just did. If you are a fan of Good Omens and you’ve not watched the series, it’s worth a look.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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Crom and Mitra. So many books. You think you have some idea, but most of you don’t. I know a few of you out there are chuckling ruefully, and you’re right. You have a lot, as well. These other people, they’re not like us. They’re different.

Other People’s Movie Theaters

All pop culture is fandom, but not all fandom is pop culture. As aphorisms go, it’s kind of clunky, but it makes the point, I think. I was reminded of this during the initial swirl of conversation around The Mandalorian and Grogu as the usual pundits and pissants wasted no time knocking the movie around because it wasn’t the movie they would have made, if only Dave Filoni had asked them first.

I don’t get it. I really don’t. While I wasn’t quite as enamored with The Book of Boba Fett, I’ve reveled in the glow of The Mandalorian series. It’s a fantastic stone soup of all the unused bits and bobs from Star Wars projects that no one else was doing anything with, made into something that was engaging and new with a huge dollop of fan service for a topper. When the trailers for the movie first hit, it somehow divided the room, but not for the usual bullshit reasons; no, this was real fans making a “Pee-yew” face and declaring they will wait before going to see it.

My suspicion is that the Hutts portrayed in the trailers are moving freely about, which is something that tends to break the brains of older fans, because Jabba was basically a shut-in, and the Special Edition add-on was such a weird and jarring inclusion that it threw us right out of the movie for the second time. Thereafter, whenever we see Hutts moving about on their own and being space slugs, as intended, it still looks weird.

I thought the trailers looked exactly like what I expected it to be—a capper on the overall series. So I made the decision to tamp down my viper’s nest of complicated feelings about movie theaters in general, Cinemark in specific, the last twenty years of my life, and the rest of the random thoughts pinballing around in my cranium, and we traipsed into a big corporate theater, on purpose, to see this movie on opening weekend.

Ugh. I get why many of you don’t go anymore. The thing I miss most about the Vernon Plaza was the way we did things, intentionally so. As the vast majority of you never hurled your bodies out into the void to trek on out to our little slice of North Texas heaven, I’ll give you a concise overview.

Popcorn. We used the traditional oil blend, which is where that great “movie theater popcorn” smell comes from, but we did one thing different: we put real butter on the popcorn. I’ll let that sink in. Real. Butter. We originally bought it in five-gallon buckets from a local dairy, but they unfortunately didn’t last. I used to tell people, “For all you know, you may have tipped the cow this butter came from.” Our popcorn smelled and tasted better in every way, because we didn’t use “buttery topping,” which is a fun way of saying, “this isn’t real butter and we can’t call it that because it’s illegal to do so, and no one would want it if we called it margarine.”

The Pre-Show. I really, really hate ads. I hate the way they are made, the way they distort and manipulate, the way they engender feelings of inadequacy, the way that the industry has commodified and put a dollar sign and assigned a value to every observable metric and demographic, and the fact that they have become the engine upon which our media is delivered.

Despite a number of offers over the years, both local and corporate, and the constant refrain that I was “leaving money on the table,” we never showed ads before the movie. We used to play music, and I’d mix up some movie soundtracks and relevant pop songs on an iPod Shuffle to play before big movies. After we went digital, I even put together a few sizzle reels, Alamo Draft House-style, for movies like the Star Wars sequels, various Marvel movies, and the Jurassic Park sequels, full of clips from other, older, lesser, and hard-to-find movies, TV shows, cartoons, and vintage trailers. It was a lot of work and it really took a toll on me.

The last one I did was for the first Jurassic World do-over. I ran a clip from Land of the Lost and the trailer for The Valley of Gwangi, among other things—there was a fake “news story” they shot as a promo for the movie, like an in-world puff piece, and I threw that on as well. For the Marvel stuff, I would grab snippets from the 1960s Marvel Super Heroes “animated” series, in particular, the intro to Iron Man, with that oh-so-catchy theme song.

If I’m being honest, I did it to try and show my younger patrons that there was, in fact, media prior to the year 2000, and none of this stuff is particularly new and revelatory. I never quite got the sense that people knew what I was doing; they never commented on it one way or the other. But that doesn’t matter. I did it for me.

Gods and Monsters, how have the rest of you managed to not rage quit the theatrical experience? I completely forgot how insultingly bad that crap is. Those vapid talking head people, bleating out these inane, general mishmash of corporate and media buzzwords, so happy that they have staved off getting a job at Chili’s, doing bumpers for “Trivia” and reminders that there’s still time to buy a twelve-dollar hot dog. I guess it’s great that some camera man in Burbank got scale for pointing the lens at Maria Menounos, but come on!

It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t folks in the theater entranced by the whole thing and getting the trivia question wrong, out loud, with no shame or embarrassment. “What Bruce Willis blockbuster features the line, ‘I see dead people?’” Really, Jerry? You guessed The Fifth Element? She should have gone to the bathroom and left your ass there, you knothead.

The People. It always comes down to this, doesn’t it? I know I’m surrounded by a lot of like-minded movie lovers, creative, whip-smart and savvy, and maybe that’s my problem. Who is still talking out loud in the theaters in 2026? Why? SWEET BABY JESUS, WHY?! I’ll never understand it, and I’ll never be nice about it.

I have to mourn the passing of the Alamo Draft House, for they have just leveraged the last scrap of their humanity by moving their ordering system to an App that you download on your phone and use from your seat in the theater, during the movie, to place orders for food you should have gotten before the feature, and oh, yeah, just for a second, let’s see if there’s any new texts, and hey, let’s look at the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes...

Remember when they used to run all of those PSAs that said, “Don’t talk or text during the movie or we’ll throw your ass out,” one of which went viral back when that was a still a new thing that could happen? I miss 2008. You have no idea how much. The PSA that former Governor Ann Richards shot for them was epic in both scale and scope.

We adopted that policy. I used to walk down to the front of the house and announce the theater rules for all of the shows. It was quite a hit; I had a whole bit for it. Even some jokes! I remember one woman telling me, angrily, that she didn’t need me to tell her not to talk; she’s a grown-up and she knows not to talk during the movie. I told her as politely as I could that my recitation of the rules wasn’t for her, but rather the teenagers who had likely never been told that before in their lives.

When we made the leap to digital, we actually recorded a few of these Draft House-esque PSAs ourselves. This one was a crowd-pleaser:

Not so much as the ol’ Cinemark. AMC still runs a brief, easily ignored reminder, but Cinemark has given up completely. Result: idle chitchat, lurking juuuuust under the soundtrack, like a dashboard rattle in a beat-up truck. You can ignore it for a while, but every so often, you will catch part of a word and it pulls you out of the movie for a few seconds trying to decipher what you just heard.

And while there was running commentary from our row-mates in Aisle F, it was nothing compared to the couple behind us, talking about Star Wars before the movie, and Jerry, who looked to be in his mid-30s, was telling his date that he’d never watched a complete Star Wars movie after the first three (he meant The Prequels). He’d seen “clips on YouTube, and, you know, like on Tick Tock and stuff,” so he felt like he had a pretty good idea what was what.

Spoiler alert: he didn’t understand what was going on. His date had to explain it to him. I’m nearly positive she’ll ghost him before the new Spider-Man movie premieres. I was all set to post this interaction on The Socials when longtime Friend of the Bunker Chris Saguisag, one of only two other people I consider to be as big a fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark as myself, posted this and, well, it’s not a contest, but he totally won with this:

Guy sitting next to me during this screening of The Mandalorian and Grogu REALLY made himself at home, taking off his shoes and socks while in the recliner, and talking to his wife the entire time, as if they were at home, exclaiming ‘wow!’ and ‘oh, cool!’ throughout the film.

He kept calling Grogu ‘Yoda’ until the title came up at the end, and he turned to his wife and asked, ‘Grogu? Since when is his name Grogu?’

Cheesus.

At least his feet didn’t stink.

Which brings me back to what I said at the beginning: All pop culture is fandom, but not all fandom is pop culture. There is an informed audience hungrily consuming , and it’s not necessarily the same people who look up from their dinner and say, “Wait, is that a new Star Wars movie? We should take the kids! They’ve never seen a Star Wars movie before, despite them being so widely available as to be downloaded onto a person’s phone, because aren’t all movies self-contained and self-explanatory anyway? And besides, how complicated can it be? It’s Star Wars. I remember seeing The Phantom Menace when I was in middle school, and I loved it! I don’t remember what happened, but I remember it was cool.”

I want to be sympathetic. I want to say, hey, it’s okay. Not everyone has Disney Plus. Everyone’s lives are different. Graduate School. Three point four kids and a mortgage. Debilitating, decades-long coma. Alien abduction. Shit happens. All that being said, just because you’re not literate in this particular area of popular culture (not sub-culture; those days are long gone), I shouldn’t have to listen to you try and wrestle with the nuances of the ongoing Star Wars multi-media universe in real time, like I’m sitting in on a taping of the Worst Episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 Ever.

This is no longer a fringe thing. You don’t have to know every parsec of the Official Canon Timeline from 1977 onward, but howsabout you look the movie up before you plunk down your hard-earned forty-nine dollar for two tickets, a bag of margarine-soaked popcorn, and a medium drink? It might just be something you need to watch after you’ve seen the series that sets the movie up.

And would it kill you to watch the frickin’ The Sixth Sense, Jerry?

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: we are back. That is all.

Spider-Noir (Prime)
World-weary private eye Ben Reilly has hung up the mantle of The Spider, but a rising tide of gangsters, some of which have mysterious powers, are running amok in 1930s New York City, and it’s up to Reilly to come out of retirement to be the hero the city needs.

This series has restored my faith in humanity. In one bold, fell swoop, Sony just tricked a battered and distracted nation into attending a clinic on Film Noir, a once-influential genre that has been folded into a checklist used by other movies to convey mood or bolster a theme. Sony did it by making a Film Noir with the addition of super heroes, rather than doing super heroes with Film Noir accents. As I was watching the series, grinning like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs and giggling like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, I was reminded why Pirates of the Caribbean hit as hard as it did.

Pirates of the Caribbean works because it brings in a weird or fantastic element into an established genre (and this has been done in every other medium except movies), and it also isn’t just a pirate movie—it’s EVERY pirate movie. It’s not just a revenge story, nor a treasure hunt, nor a sweeping romance, nor an age of the fighting sail drama…it’s all of that, held together with a terrible curse. Boom. Done. Pirates are cool again.

Spider-Noir folds in weird science superheroes into an established genre (and this has been done in nearly every other medium except movies) and it’s also every Film Noir subgenre at once. It’s a little easier to do because it’s an 8-part series, but it’s doing a hell of a job, at that. If I were pitching this, I’d say it’s Miller’s Crossing meets Will Eisner’s Spirit with a dash of Frank Capra for banter and Michael Curtiz for melodrama. Citizen Kane. Casablanca. Gilda. Have Gun, Will Travel. Out of the Past. The Big Sleep. So many others, too. It’s all represented, with great affection and respect. It makes me want to ask, “Who are you people and what have you done with the Millennial Executives at Sony?”

I’ve been delighted (as have others of my ilk) to see people posting the references, the homages and the nods.. Not as much discussed is the utilization of every single technique ascribed to what would emerge as the Film Noir style. Chiaroscuro lighting Dutch angles, focus stacking, split screen, dissolves and wipes for scene changes, and sprawling cityscape vistas. It’s all there, along with some of the inventive tricks used to create these beautifully framed shots with two people in close-up, but not themselves very close. My God, it’s glorious.

I think my favorite thing about the series is its commitment to the bit. Yes, there’s some CGI work—it’s inevitable, when you’re dealing with Spider-Man. But the villains, aside from some transformational effects that could’ve been done back in the day with dissolves, a la Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man, the make-up has been wonderfully practical-looking and well within the means of filmmakers in the 1930s. It looks tactile and it sells the idea of a super villain circa 1933.

Nic Cage might’ve seemed like an odd choice at first, but when he starts spitting pithy Chandler-esque dialogue, rapid fire, in a lazy Bogart impression, it becomes clear that no one else could have done this. Especially once The Spider starts working again. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. There’s lots of good character actors, doing good character work; Lamorne Morris playing Robbie Robertson is just perfect, as is Brendan Gleeson in full-on Tammany Hall mob boss fashion playing Silvermane. Jack Huston, too, as Flint Marko—hell, I’ll watch that guy in anything.

Everyone was read in on the project, and they all come loaded for bear. Everyone is clear on the assignment and it shows. No one winks at the camera, either. The buy-in is total on this alternate reality version of the Spider-Man story. I initially thought I don’t want a sequel, but after Cage name-checked Todd Browning in the show, I can clearly see an angle they can take.

It’s not completely authentic, but that’s okay. There’s juuuust enough modern elements and conceits to hook younger (meaning, early 30s) viewers. The music is more modern, while maintaining a timeless feel, and there’s more profanity by far. Some historical elements are accelerated a bit to accommodate the super power stuff. And the cast is a lot more diverse, even as the series makes an effort to depict the early thirties as they were socially. These moments are deftly handled in the story, without slowing anything down.

I love Spider-Man. He was my first Marvel superhero. I’ve been lucky enough to see him transition to the big screen and still be recognizable to me. While I’m not so thrilled with the overall way Sony has handled the character, I think the two Spiderverse movies are the best translation of actually reading a comic book onto the silver screen, and now I think Spider-Noir is my favorite non-Tom Holland Spider-Man version, ever. And how cool would it be if Gen Z suddenly decided that Film Noir is this “Amazing Forgotten Film Genre” that they started talking about on YouTube? We should be so lucky. I’m about to be cool again, I can feel it.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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I Love Nieces to Pieces (with apologies to Pixie and Dixie)

It’s been a big couple of weeks for nieces. Last week, the world got another cutie-patootie, as our niece Zoe had a li’l baby girl, Rosa-Linda Rae. Everyone is doing fine and all that stuff. This would make me a Great Uncle, or, if you will, a Gruncle. I’m hoping when it’s time for the kid to start parroting back words that we can somehow shorten it to “Grunk.” That’s a great goblin name. Also, a great Atlas-era 1950s comic book monster by way of Jack Kirby. You know that kind I mean: “BEWARE THE MENACE OF GRUNK – THE SPACE GORILLA!”

Then this week, we closed another chapter as Auren, aka Feral Niece #2 did the walk to get her high school diploma. It’s awesome, but also bittersweet, because it won’t be too long before I go from being Uncle Monkey to Uncle Mark, and then one day, it’ll be “my uncle, Mark.” Inevitable, sure. Expected, somewhat. Preferable? Absolutely not.

I loved being Uncle Monkey for so many uncivilized girls, who turned into crazy teens, and then stutter-stepped into adulthood. Good thing, too; here, let’s call the roll—in no particular order:

Ayri, Izzy, Ani, Katie, Elezabeth (the O.G. Feral Niece!), Madison, Audry, Auren, Zoe, and now baby Rozy. That’s an awful lot of estrogen. I’m just thankful that they are all, to a person, weird. In the best of ways. Full disclosure: some of that is on me, but by no means the majority of it. I’m referring to their parents: y’all know exactly what you did or didn’t do. Truthfully, the verdict is still out on little Rozy, but Janice is already committed to teaching her to sing the alphabet song, backwards. That kid never had a chance, when you think about it.

Over the years, I have read story books, made up tall tales, performed a quantity of magic that borders on alarming, played with dolls, with action figures, with plastic dinosaurs, went to tea parties, made Play-Doh stuff, took them book shopping, sang goofy songs, played board games, card games, colored in books, cooked grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, cheese sticks—pretty much anything with cheese, watched cool movies like Star Wars and stuff, road trips and more. It was awesome, all of it, and still is. I don’t think I have the legs for fatherhood, but uncle-dom, that’s more of a sprint than a marathon.

All of this was bouncing around my cranium when Feral Niece #2 breezed through the dining room during the post-graduation lunch and introduced her “like, best friend in the whole world” to us. I smiled and said, “Hi, I’m Uncle Monkey!”

Her BFF’s face lit up. “You’re Uncle Monkey, Omigod, I’ve heard so much about you!”

Maybe I’ve got a few more years left, at that.

Are We Not Celebrating Birthdays This Year?

Some 250 years ago, a bunch of rich, privileged landowners decided to try a grand social experiment by giving everyone—make that, every white male—the chance to make their voices heard in the running of their newly-christened country. When asked by a prominent citizen if America had a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” I never thought we’d ever be so close to this question again, especially since roughly half or more of the people in the United States unthinkingly fetishized the sanctity of the tenets of democracy for my whole life.

Let’s back up, some 50 years, to 1976. I was seven years old at the time, and I remember there were specials on TV, cartoons (Schoolhouse Rock), Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles, a surprisingly educational comic book, even a KISS poster that riffed on the familiar image of the fife-and-drum minutemen marching along, bloodied but unbowed. Toys, junk food, classroom lessons, a revival of 1776, pop music…we were stoked, stoked, I tell you, to celebrate the Bicentennial. Everyone was more or less of the same mind, and this was in the midst of inflation, scandal, fallout from the Viet Nam war, a burgeoning energy crisis and all the rest of it.

You would have thought that in the ensuing 50 years, shit would have gotten marginally better. But no matter, hey! We’re 250 and looking not a day over 235. Setting aside all of the “merch” our carnival barker of a chief executive has released into the world this year, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the upcoming milestone. A quietude, even. No mention of big barbecue blowouts. No history specials. No thoughtful assessments from political and presidential historians, waxing passionate about how this bold experiment is doing. It’s like no one is excited to celebrate 250 years of this bold, radical experiment that managed to take hold and, for a time, dominated political thought around the world.

I wonder why that is.

It’s not like we don’t have a lot to celebrate. Not recently, mind you, I’m talking about overall. On the timeline as a whole, there’s been a lot of progress. For instance, some 250 years later, women can now vote! Hey! Cool! Just not when it comes to their own bodies and reproductive rights. Stuff like that.

There’s still more to do and farther to go. And the people that like to wear the American flag as casual outdoor clothing are quick to tout the virtues of this country, repeating those old chestnuts about freedom and democracy and so on and so forth. Just don’t press them for specifics. That’s why it’s so baffling that they seem reluctant to look backwards in an attitude of thoughtful introspection. I get why they might not want to rewatch “No More Kings” from Schoolhouse Rock, but there’s so much other stuff to study. The American Revolution is fascinating all by itself. They love to say that those who don’t follow history are doomed to repeat it, but learning history can also illustrate things that worked out, as well.

We have always been a country that was proud of being contentious. Remember that early American flag, “Don’t Tread on Me”? When pushed, we push back. It might take a while to get our dander up, but we will, if forced into it, throw hands. Historically speaking, of course. I’m not talking about right now, no, no. Violence is never the answer. Except for when we needed to do it. In the past, I mean. I’m not talking about now. Nope. Not at all.

It’s interesting to think about what kicked it off back then. Taxing tea is the popular myth, but there were a lot of other abuses of power, too. It’s as if the British crown was woefully out of touch with the colonies, and having the insane tyrant King George making irrational decisions that affected so many people while he raked in the coins didn’t help, either.

It’s worth considering that maybe we’ve come full circle in 250 years. Ask yourself who really benefits from all this. And what they gain, versus what everyone loses.

Blame It On Dinniman

The 8th Dungeon Crawler Carl book, A Parade of Horribles, dropped two weeks ago and all of the online chatter went quiet as everyone devoured the book like starving Victorian orphans being handed a leg of mutton. Just three days later, the Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG Backer Kit closed at 12 million and pulled another million bucks in during overtime. The only Backerkit campaign that did better was Brandon Sanderson’s 23 mil book publishing gig.

It’s all Dinniman’s fault. He just had to capture a moment in the zeitgeist when there are more adult gamers, lapsed or otherwise, than ever before and simultaneously feeling like they’ve set their entire lives on the “Difficult” setting, and we are all collectively need to put our brains someplace where things make sense. How ironic is it that the Dungeon Crawler Carl series is about an unwilling participant in a situation he has zero control over and finding ways to disrupt the process, sow the seeds of dissent, and figure out the “cheat codes” to get things done?

There’s a lot to like about the books, provided you don’t have an upper limit on gore, profanity, and the creative combination of both in the name of kinky ribaldry. Thankfully, if you’ve ever spent ten minutes playing Fortnight with random 13-year-olds, laughing at you as they rain death from above, this won’t be a problem. I’m pretty sure that non-gamers won’t have too much trouble picking it up. Dinniman does a great job of laying the systems out in the first three books in some detail so that everyone is on the same page when the Forces That Be start trying to cheat and otherwise manipulate the game for their own personal gain.

I’ve written about this series before, but it bears repeating: these are great books, nearly perfect sandwiches of pop culture, stuffed with a dizzying array of references, both oblique and direct, a cheerful irreverence for these various groups and institutions, and some covertly applied social commentary. Some of those comments and asides might feel as if they are shots across your own personal bow, but he’s One of Us, which gives him the pass to point out absurdities, delineate the baked-in assholery of these people and groups, and poke gentle if not genuine fun at some of our own shortcomings. In other words, don’t come at me talking smack about the Jedi Order if you ain’t wearing the Star Wars shirt.

This particular book is a combination of Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Racers and Death Race 2000 with a dash of Cannonball Run spread around for some seasoning. Given that previous books dealt with old school dungeon delving, Pokemon style card games, 8-bit Mario/Link Fetch-Quest console games and Warhammer 40K-style skirmishes, this fits right in with the overall arc of the series. I have no idea what the next two books are going to deal with, but I’m keen to find out. Carl and Donut have to complete an escalating series of deadly races, each one winnowing down the surviving crawlers, as they frantically attempt to complete various quests and tasks before the allotted time runs out. Nearly every failure is lethal in the series and there are no do-overs or restarts for the harried participants.

There are a couple of important takeaways from the series, one of them being the struggle to retain one’s humanity in the face of abject and meaningless chaos. Carl’s mantra for this is “You will not break me. I will break you.” That’s a really comforting thought these days. The other pleasure is watching the way in which Carl goes about this task, and the fact that the powers-that-be know that he’s doing it but can’t figure out a way to stop him. Dinniman doesn’t sugar coat where he’s coming from. The third book in the series is called The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, lest you not pick up on Dinniman’s delicate subtleties.

Since we’re coming into bikini season, consider trying the Dungeon Crawler Carl series as your Geeky Summer Beach Read.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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Bunker Relocation Logistics

It’s been a weird time here at the bunker, fraught with complications and a lot of moving parts. Getting out of the mountain of debt has been slow, nearly non-existent, but incremental. The part time gig is holding steady, even if the back and forth between Vernon and the Metroplex is taking on the tenor of a long haul trucker. We’ve been idly packing and planning, and I’ve been chewing my finger nails down to the second knuckle as the variable plow through my peace of mind. But finally, we have a tentative plan in place.

The theater is currently for sale, and a lot of people are interested, but no serious bites yet. We are planning on finishing packing and heading for Central Texas in July. And I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I’m contemplating the best month to move heavy boxes of books down two flights of concrete stairs, the time period that leaps to mind is “in the middle of summer.” What could possibly go wrong?

Robert E. Howard Days Writing Workshop is Filling Up

There is still time if you want to participate in the Emerging Writers Workshop. If you’re on the fence about attending, let this push you over the line. If you were already coming, consider showing up on Thursday instead of Friday and getting some constructive feedback on your writing. You can get all of the details and payment information here: The 2026 Emerging Writers Workshop

Adding to the Glut of Boxing Fiction in the Marketplace

The Robert E. Howard-y Goodness continues apace over here as we prep for the 40th anniversary of the annual Howard Days gathering at Cross Plains, Texas this year (June 12-13, if you’re interested). One of the most popular events every year is the “Fists at the Ice House” panel, more of a performance, really, wherein myself, Chris Gruber, and Jeff Shanks gather to discuss and read aloud REH’s boxing fiction. It is usually very well attended and it always managed to capture the attention of one or more fans who had no idea REH wrote boxing fiction, much less funny boxing fiction.

Now that the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press is re-releasing the four volume Fists of Iron series in their Ultimate Edition format, me and Grub sat in with John from the REHF to talk about boxing, REH, and the series that we co-edited along with Patrice Louinet. It’s long, but we are very enthusiastic about it and you will get some deep feelings, too. Here’s the link: The Boxing Stories of Robert E. Howard Part 1.

We will gather again when volumes 2 and 3 come out—the Sailor Steve Costigan books!—and I’m nearly positive we’ll have some fun readings and recitations to go along with the chitchat. And if you just can’t wait, here’s the link to Fists of Iron volume 1. If you’ve already read it, but you haven’t yet checked out my own homage to those stories, The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey, you can hit that link, too.

Fists of Iron, Round One

Fists of Iron, Round Two

The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey

Where is the Modern Hipster?

With new keening wails about the death of the music industry, citing Spitofy and other streaming behemoths pushing out all of those sweet little ol’ corporations around when, gosh darn it, all they were trying to do is give a little joy to the unwashed, teeming masses, it got me thinking about how we discover things like movies and books and games and music, both then and also now.

I’m going to try not to talk about this from the place of “these kids today, with their Tiddly Winks and their damned soap box racers, don’t know what it was like having to carve our own records out of thin sheets of shark cartilage that we had to harvest ourselves, and we were thankful for it...” but man, it’s going to be hard. Not because I think we were better off back then (we weren’t), but because I am genuinely concerned for our culture as a, well, a culture.

We used to value intelligence, or at least knowledge. It was certainly valued by the Geek Nation right up into the early aughts. Having read The Silmarillion prior to watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least got you an appreciative nod and maybe a raised eyebrow, as if to say, “Okay, maybe you do know how to pronounce that phrase in high elvish.” It was of paramount importance that you read/watched the source material before going in, so you could be righteously judgmental about every creative choice they made. Then, suddenly, there was a backlash as the word “gatekeeping” wound its way into the Social Media Discourse, right next to “mansplaining.” Often used both in conjunction, and interchangeably, regardless of the accuracy of either term, not quite weaponized, but certainly designed to shut someone down, whether it was a blowhard that had wandered into your feed, or just someone whose opinion you disagreed with. You could just toss a few labels around, like caltrops, and wait for the rest of the gang to show up for a dogpile.

A few years ago, I had a teenage employee confess to everyone that he’d never seen a Star Wars movie at all, not the originals, prequels, or sequels. He’d seen other geeky touchstones, but not that. The other employees were grilling him, and I tried to give them a little room by asking him why. His reply to me was telling. “I don’t like to be told about things like books and movies. I like to find them out for myself.”

Boy, kid, were you born in the wrong era. Your generation does not have hipsters anymore. Had you been born in 1972, you’d have fit right in. Hipsters were the people we wanted to be; they knew the score, where the good comics were, the record shop on the other side of town with the crazygood selection, the diner with the great jukebox, etc. They’d seen Heavy Metal…in a theater…at Midnight…and they thought it was “okay, a little overrated.” Whoa. Dude.

Ask them their opinion on a popular show? The head would loll back and to the left, the lip would curl, and the eyes would narrow. Squint, almost, as if saying the name of the show out loud was painful to them. If you were lucky, they would counter with a British TV show you’d heard about in passing, but had never seen. If you were really lucky, they would hand you an unmarked VHS cassette and tell you to “check it out.” Then they would ring up your comic books and take your money.

At home, you’d slam that cassette into your VHS player and peer into the warped curvature of the TV screen like you were trying to decipher tea leaves. Was it as good as he said it was? Was it better? And how in the hell did he get this in the first place? Maybe the show was good. Maybe even great. Sometimes, though, you’d turn it off and wonder what the hell you’d just watched, and what did they see in it? You’d go think about it, maybe even dig up the old Starlog where you first heard about the show, trying to get some context.

This might start an ongoing conversation. You might end up friends with this person, depending on how much “stuff” you had in common. That guy became your connection, your dealer. Your hook up. You now had a connection into the Underground Tape Railroad. You now “know a guy.” Over half of the hipsters were carriers of the “insufferable asshole virus,” sure, but they were also keepers of lore. Secret knowledge. Not teachers, and hopefully not mentors, but definitely dispensing wisdom right up to the edge of their own experiences.

Many of us would end up passing that knowledge on to someone else who needed it, usually as we were ringing up your purchases. Some of us would undergo a kind of awakening, not unlike when one immortal would cut the head off of another immortal and thus absorb their power; we would transmogrify into a hipster. What form would this Destructor take? Would you be kinder, gentler? Would you be an insufferable asshole? It hinged a lot on how you “came up” in the world and who your hipsters were, and to what extent you wanted to fit in (by not fitting in, of course; it’s very exhausting being above it all). There’s a whole taxonomy and subculture to this—an ecology, a geek-biome, that has largely collapsed thanks to the Interwebs.

Granted, the physical spaces are still in place; comic shops, bookstores, even record shops…any hobby you might have has a place you can go, and someone you can interact with. And for those of us who grew up talking to strangers in public, this isn’t a big ask. That’s the thing about being outside in public; you never know who you’re going to meet. Even in a sub-culture, you weren’t in a closed loop. T-shirts used to be a cultural signifier. Spotting a Star Wars T-shirt at the mall was a sign that you weren’t alone in a boring, uncaring universe. But all of this stuff was still in the background, and considered childish and/or weird, so there was a balancing act between proclaiming your geek-tivities and making yourself a target.

Not so much for these up-and-coming geek larvae. It’s a much different, much larger and much more accepting world now. They have apps. They have an algorithm. Hell, they have algorithms, plural. They have influencers. That’s how they find out about new music, new comics, and so on. And that’s the thing, right there. Influencers aren’t hipsters. They are pitch men, the modern-day version of a cereal mascot. They want to get paid. And if someone gives them enough money, they will cheerfully read over the press release and then turn on the camera and paraphrase what it says, you know, so that it’s in their own voice. It sounds more authentic that way.

As a clerk in so many of the specialty stores mentioned above, there is a monetary component to my recommendations, but it’s different. If you ask me (well, if you asked 27 year old me) for a new comic recommendation, I’ve got two options; I can push whatever we’re overstocked on, or I can try to find something you will really like. So much so that you will come back next week and ask me for another recommendation. So, yeah, we wanted to keep the lights on, but not at the cost of our professional reputation.

How do the kids today find out about good stuff? No idea. Well, yeah, I have an idea, and it gets back to the musical complaints that started this rant off. Here’s my thought, and it’s a work in progress, so feel free to chime in if I’ve overlooked something. This isn’t the only reason, mind you; it’s one drop in a bucket of reasons, but I think it’s a pretty big drop, more like a generous pour.

No one cares about music (or books, or comics, or stories) anymore because it’s been devalued by the relative ease of access on the Internet. There; I said it. Let me ‘splain.

When the Interwebs first started up, it was the wild west, and basically, if you could put it online, you did. That initial crackdown came pretty early when the corporations reminded everyone that piracy is stealing, and oh yeah, we’re getting online too, so we can get some of that sweet sweet “E-money” that the Silicon Valley Bros keep talking about. Why, this one guy wants to sell books online! How stupid is he? That’ll never work.

Then Napster hit, and filesharing gutted their quarterly earnings reports. It became stupidly easy to rip your own CDs, which is what most of my friends did; we already HAD the music. We just wanted to listen to it with a device that didn’t skip whenever we took a step. Really, Sony, the Discman never worked as advertised and you should be ashamed for releasing it into the wild.

Speaking for myself, and by extension, my entire generation, I looked around at the situation and thought, “Okay, this is starting to look like the future I was promised in the Jetsons!” We had this relatively inexpensive new mp3 player that would hold a bunch of the music we’d already bought and spent the effort to rip down, and there was more coming, all the time. It was presumed, assumed, and all but said out loud that the companies were hard at work digitizing their entire libraries, and one day we’d be able to log into a website and download whatever we wanted from the back catalog, a single song or a whole album, which made jazz and blues collectors very happy.

This idea was promised when print-on-demand was introduced; they sold it as a way to preserve the midlist, all of those books by prolific authors that stores were unwilling to stock because it would take up so much shelf space. They were pitching a kiosk that you could access in the store that would dial up a book, print it while you waited, and then you check out and go home and wonder when we were going to get jet packs.

We’re about two decades past that golden age. Let’s check in on things. None of that ever happened. The only stuff online is the stuff the big multi-media conglomerates release, or the stuff Russian and Asian pirates scraped and illegally uploaded, riddled with malware and viruses. Every one of your devices and every one of the websites you visit is constantly fishing, either reminding you about something you want or need, or trying to get you to buy something you don’t want and don’t need. Automated chatbots and corporate-controlled algorithms guide you into increasingly narrow chutes, like how you dip cattle for ticks. There’s nothing for you to see that they don’t want you to see…UNLESS you hope out of the mainstream and into the Indy-Maker spaces, where every transaction is one-on-one, with individual artists and smaller companies. That’s lovely, it really is, but it unintentionally silos a lot of creators and fans who can only Grass Roots it up so much.

The record companies have strangled their artists even as they were busy devaluing their worth by making it too easy to get music. I know how that sounds. But when something on your phone takes all of three seconds to download, whether you bought it or not (ahem), then you’ve invested nearly nothing in it. Shoot a QR code and it takes you right to the album on Apple music or wherever. You don’t need to read up on the band, check out a review, ask your guy at the record store how it sounds compared to their last album, none of that. Point, click, capture. You’ll listen to the first thirty or forty-five seconds of the track, conclude it’s a “banger” and probably forget about it until a week later when it pops up in your workout mix. Maybe you’ll remember where you first heard about; maybe you won’t. That’s music now. That’s a lot of things, now.

Radio stations are increasingly automated now. Who’s picking the hot new hits? The marketing department. Disc jockeys are all but gone. You don’t need to consult an expert when you want a recommendation. The Internet wasn’t trying to democratize Expertise, but it has. How many times have you seen someone come into a conversation, make a gentle correction, and then get challenged by the fan who started the conversation, only to find out that the person who chimed in is the person who did the thing the original poster was talking about, wrongly? Lots. When everyone online is an expert, no one is an expert, and now everything is just an opinion to be discounted if it doesn’t match up with your expectations.

I remember being concerned about eBay years ago (I even wrote about it), and how it’s very likely going to crush that treasure-hunting spirit that is an integral part of collecting. And damned if it didn’t do just that. Have you been to eBay lately? What a shithole. Most of the collectibles there now are “parked,” sitting there until they sell, and at the exorbitant price the person slapped on it. Oh, and everything is RARE. Everything. They have essentially uploaded their whole collection with a Buy it Now price tag that’s three to seven times higher than what you could find out in the real world, because, they think, “Well, someone will buy it. And if they buy it for that much, I can afford to buy another one. Win-Win.” It’s basically bait for a really rich and/or uninformed person to swoop in and pay it without thinking. Lovely. A business model built on tricking people. Welcome to commerce on the Internet.

None of it is worth anything anymore. Not the digital stuff. That can go away; we’ve seen it many times now, from many different companies. They can just turn off your access to the “content” you bought, and their reasons for it are total bullshit. No one thinks that’s a good idea. Maybe that’s why physical, analog media is coming back.

Last week was the Biggest Free Comic Book Day ever. There’s lines around the block to buy Matt Dinneman’s books. Role-playing and board games are thriving as a social pastime. Record stores! Selling used vinyl! And staffed by affable hipsters who can and will talk enthusiastically about bands, stylus needles, colored vinyl, and all that kind of thing.

It’s heartening, but I am concerned that it may be too little, too late. Hopefully Z and Alpha will pick up the torch that the Millennials dropped in favor of convenience and ease of use and start thinking about the real world again, the people in it, and the stuff we care about that helps us find meaning, make connections with others, and lets us escape for a bit.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every

April is for Fools

We celebrated our third anniversary on Wednesday, which was perfect, because we drove into a part of Oklahoma with terrible cell reception, and thus were spared the outpouring of digital pranks ranging from the tried and true “fake out post” to the newfangled digital version of “How do you Keep an Idiot in Suspense?” chestnut, which looks something like this:

Only, you click it and there IS no “continued!” Ah hah hah! I got you to click on a button that does nothing! How funny! How hilarious!

Sick burn, bro. Loki, the Trickster God called; he wants his joke book back.

Isn’t it bad enough that we are all diligently scanning and scrubbing and scrutinizing every post made on social media already? We live in a perpetual quagmire of April Fool’s Day nonsense. Why compound it for the lulz? That’s how we got here in the first place, you know; disaffected and under-parented suburban teenagers online, sniffing each other’s farts and trying to impress everyone with how dark and detached they could be, posting things like “we should burn it all down and start over.” Ten years later, the vice-president finds 4chan and thinks, “My People!” So, yeah, enough’s enough.

I know I’ve advocated for this before, but it’s time to re-iterate: if you can’t do a prank in the real world, on your real friends, family or co-workers, then don’t post an online “prank.” For the people who are using places like FaceBork to self-soothe from all of the impactful bullshit going around, some manufactured nonsense that makes people go, “NOW what?” pisses them off as if it were something real, only instead of relief and laughter as you figure out it’s not true, you think, “Well, it’s only a matter of time, now, isn’t it? I’m positive that’s not the reaction you were looking for, unless, you know, it was. Be funny in Meat-Space.

Robert E. Howard Days Writing Workshop

I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. We are trying a new thing at Robert E. Howard Days, in the hopes of starting a new literary tradition. The Emerging Writers Workshop is a one-day event designed to help provide advice, answers, and encouragement to new and upcoming writers of Howard’s genres — from historical fiction to weird Westerns to sword and sorcery.

When: Thursday June 11^th, 2026

Time: 10:00 am to 3:00 pm

Where: Cottonwood Downtown Café, 240 N Main St, Cross Plains, TX

Cost: $50 for workshop, discussion, and written critique

If you’re on the fence about attending, let this push you over the line. If you were already coming, consider showing up on Thursday instead of Friday and getting some constructive feedback on your writing. You can get all of the details and payment information here: The 2026 Emerging Writers Workshop

Leather, Crystal or Glass?

The list of traditional anniversary gifts has always fascinated me, because no one knows where it came from, who compiled it, or why. It’s just that thing we always consult once a year and go, “Wood? Tin or aluminum? Am I getting something for my wife, or helping her salvage crafting components in Fallout?”

The Modern List by year isn’t much better, but it does replace some of the more esoteric options with things that are a bit more practical, like swapping out linen for salt. And while some people enjoy leather for whatever reason, the modern day third anniversary gift was crystal or glass, and that’s what I went with. Since Janice likes to go places and see things, I thought it would be fun to trek out to Quartz Mountain State Park in Oklahoma and see some nature. Plus, Quartz is a crystal! Boom! Done!

This particular state park was fashioned to be a family fun outdoor experience, with places for camping, tons of hiking, fishing, bird watching and anything else you might want to do that involves boots and flannel. We are not those people. But we do like a good scenic view and we can certainly appreciate nature’s bounty, until we get hot and sweaty, so that is what we did.

We had another mission, as well: there’s a culinary delight native to Oklahoma called an onion burger, one of those regional specialties that others try and fail to recreate in other places, which is why you can get a “Philly cheesesteak” in just about every state, but when you’re in Philadelphia, it’s just called a “cheesesteak” because it doesn’t need a descriptive to try and convince you it’s the real deal. It just is what it is.

Anyway, the onion burger is basically a smash burger patty on top of a pile of thin, caramelized onions, cooked all together at once and served with cheese and mustard. At least, that’s what they tell me, because in 20 years of living inches away from the Oklahoma border, I’ve not heard of this thing until two years ago. I don’t know how this oversight occurred; I have good friends in Oklahoma that I thought had my back. But none of them ever told me about the onion burger, nor offered to take me out for one. I blame them for this.

And that’s how we ended up in Meers, Oklahoma, home of the legendary Meers burger, staring at the Meers Cafe’s sign that says “Closed” because the town of Meers and the nearby community of Medicine Park come alive on the weekends, but not so much in the middle of the week. So no onion burger for me...still.

We were going to the Medicine Park Aquarium and Natural Science Center anyway, because they have otters there and I wanted to see them. I’d never seen an otter in person. I had to fix this. Granted, they also had coyotes, bobcats, and free roaming bison as well, but I’m from Texas, and I’ve been hunting in Texas, and I drive in Texas, so the need to see all of that stuff is way less pressing.

We paid our entrance fees and walked through an impressive collection of fish, most of whom are native or nearly so to Oklahoma. There were a few ringers, like the North Pacific Octopus, preserved in a special case so you could see under the mantle, and an honest-to-Crom electric eel. Mostly, though, it was a plethora of fish, snakes, lizards, turtles, an alligator, a covey of quail, and oh yeah, otters! The shelter rescues animals, too, mostly from other people who think it’s cool to own an alligator. The otters were named Sam and Dean (I’ll wait for y’all to get that joke) and they were rescued. Their enrichment snack was an “otter pop,” a raw shrimp frozen in an ice cube.

We ate dinner in the village portion of Medicine Park, which was a lovely little town which appears to cater to people on retreats. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, so we didn’t get to fully explore everything (and besides, most of the stuff wasn’t open during the week). We had to beat a tornado watch home so we booked it, but not before driving by a herd of these guys by the side of the road.

I’m counting that as “leather” for the purposes of my anniversary gift.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

While you are likely not worrying about closing a business and moving to a new city, we would still urge you to take breaks and seek shelter when you need it, or if you’re just feeling overwhelmed. We get it. We all do. Sometimes, the hardest thing you can do is watch the wheels of the car you’re sitting in fall off, but you also know that if you don’t let them fall off, no one else in the car is going to fix it.

Noir at the Bar

This event was a groovy success no matter how you slice it: getting out of town and driving to a different biome in Texas? Check. Hang time with talented writers and friends, with stories shared and lots of laughs? Check. Doing a reading for a bunch of people who really wanted to hear us, and getting positive feedback from the crowd and selling them some books? Check and check. What’s not to like? Also, you need to visit James’ store, the Nacogdoches T-Shirt Company, when you visit. His original designs are the bee’s knees. He’s got a shirt with John Wayne on it, saying, “Have you ever been to Nacogdoches?” If you get that reference, we can be best friends.

From the Division of Field Assignments, Section 38: Counter-Intelligence

The gang in the basement have been scouring the blogowebs, looking for anything that can be used against the Gilded Age Robber Barons version 2.0 and they came up with a few other Substack posts that you may find useful and illuminating.

Liz Plank is Smart
She’s a writer and a director and a producer and all of that stuff, and she writes from a feminist perspective that is accessible to everyone. Also, and I mean this in the best possible way, she it witty. She dropped some knowledge recently that I wanted to share: You Can Finally Blame Your Screentime on Mark Zuckerberg, talking about a court case that will not get the press coverage it deserves.

So Is Ed Zitron
I’ve mentioned him before here; he’s a tech writer who has done a lot of reading and number crunching around the AI phenomenon and come to a startling conclusion: it’s a shell game wrapped in a ponzi scheme. Here’s a couple of missives from him this week, a little ditty called Why Are We Still Doing This, a numbers and stats-heavy takedown, and The AI Industry is Lying to You, a dense technical read, but don’t worry; Ed is good as summarizing:

Shape-Changing Lizards Stole My Baby
Mi hermano de la Era Hyboria, Jeff Shanks, is an archeologist (for real) and a pop culture historian with an interest in anthropology and archeology in popular culture. Comics, pulps, etc. He’s one of us. And he’s been chasing something down for a while now. He’s recently done a deep dive into something that has become ubiquitous in conspiracy theory sub-cultures and traced it back to its origins. This is long, but really interesting if you want to know where some of the crazy-ass shit your cousin Dennis likes to babble on about after he’s had too much wine at Thanksgiving: The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean and the Origins of the Reptilians

Weekly Briefing Follow-Up
Friend of the Bunker Howard Carter sent me this critique about writing that also managed to take a few shots at the Outrage Pundits, a thing we can’t do enough of, I say. His analysis of character is spot-on, I think, and this relates specifically to some of those fan-discussions I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. Give it a read and see what you think:
Stop Blaming Woke: Movies and TV Are Terrible for a Different Reason

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: we are not spending as much time tracking new movies as before; ask Administration and see if they’ll tell you the truth or give you the runaround. We are still surveying the disparate feeds and streams and networks in search of things you may not have seen, or sometimes, maybe have forgotten.

The Monarch Monsterverse (Apple and elsewhere)

Me and the head of Bunker R&D have been revisiting the more recent Godzilla “Monsterverse” movies, recreating an annual even from our childhood when WFAA Channel 8 in Dallas used to have an afternoon movie at 3:30 during the school year. They would always do a “Godzilla Week” in the Spring or Summer, serving up one Kaiju movie every day for five days. We used to try and teleport so we could get home in time to watch them. It’s a big reason why I’m the way I am. Anyway. We’ve been watching one a night for this whole week, starting with Godzilla (2014) and moving on from there.

The series holds up, and what’s more, there’s some nice abbreviated storytelling shortcuts that allow them to get to the middle of the each person’s crisis point faster. It wasn’t as noticeable when the new movies were spread out every two years, but watching them back to back, it really becomes apparent that they were trying to see how much world building they could cram into the movie and still make it fun to watch.

What the series of films did is take all of the accumulated Godzilla movie history and figure out the commonalities, such as they were, and then go through each film and each era, keeping the best parts of each version, and then tying all of it together cohesively. The result was this big idea that they can use to tell all kinds of stories with, as big or as small as they want.

Naturally, some fans flipped out. They decried the new movies as a travesty, the worst thing to happen since the giant asteroid smashed into the Yucatan and killed off the dinosaurs. This is because some fans are extremely pedantic, and they use that pedantry as a hipster shield, letting them be both knowledgeable and somehow better than all of us for not seeing things the exact same way as they do.

For the rest of us, I’m going to recommend you try them out, and if you’re feeling saucy, watch all five in order before you start on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. Note: this is the real reason for my rewatch, before going on to Season 2. I wanted to remember what I forgot, and again, if you’re watching them back to back, you spot things and through lines and catch dialogue you missed the first time around. If you’re not familiar, let me briefly recap for you, along with my grade for each.

Godzilla (2014)

Resets the whole premise by stating that Godzilla first appeared in 1954, as per the original movie, and then he was gone again...until now. This film was something of scrambled eggs to come together, but that’s okay, because you have to erase the drawing before you can redraw it again. Focusing on the people trying to get out from under the giant monster gave it a disaster movie feel, something I thought was very clever, but not everyone liked. Then again, I thought Cloverfield was a neat idea, too. Rating: 4 stomps

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

This was the movie that had the most to prove to me, especially after the trailer made it seem like a land grab, a la Dino di Laurentis’ 1976 travesty of a King Kong remake. Thanks to a packed cast of all-stars and a really batshit premise, this movie is solid. Big action, cool ideas, and the first mention of this whole wacky “hollow Earth” idea. I am on record as saying that a Kong movie without Skull Island is not a Kong movie, and a Skull Island without dinosaurs is not worth unpacking. This movie changed all of that for me. I love this flick. Rating: 5 stomps.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

The first two movies did a lot of world building, setting blocks up on the table for everyone to see. This movie started snapping it all together. The world expands greatly in this movie, and I think it’s one of the best at getting a lot of older, dated concepts into the “monsterverse” in really interesting ways. The montage during the credits is a delight to sift through. At this point, everything was out, and they were now free to tell any story they wanted. At this point, I was really surprised that they didn’t have comics, novels, games, etc. out, each taking a different angle on this Brave New Kaiju World. Rating: 4.5 stomps.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

It was all building up to this, wasn’t it? This titanic rematch was going to happen. I’m just glad that it ended in a gesture of mutual respect. I was genuinely fearful for Kong throughout most of the movie. Even larger in size, Godzilla was beating him up until he found his...you know what? Watch it yourself and see if you can’t spot the scene where I screamed, “KONG! What is Best in Life!” Rating: 5 stomps.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

Did you like the last movie? Good, because they are going to double down, literally and figuratively. This is the first movie to pull substantially away from the humans and focus on developing the character of the Kaiju, especially Kong, whom they have designated as...you know what? Just watch it. It’s good, but it’s the lightest of the bunch. Rating: 3.5 stomps.

Obviously, if you are not the kind of person who gets excited by big honking monsters, proceed with caution. I’d recommend the first two movies to any fan of big budget action or disaster flicks. If you want the full picture behind Monarch, the first three are paramount. You can for sure watch those and then hop right into the Apple series with no problem. And you’re going to watch to check my math. Just use your own good judgement when you find yourself in some Subreddit, reading GFanzzT&A@zuckerberg.ass’ blistering takedown of the movies by telling you in which hour, minute, and second all of the Wrong Stuff is located.

And to GFanzzT&A, I want to say: dude. Come on. You’re not impressing anyone with this presenting behavior, and what’s more, you’re judging the film by the wrong standards. Instead of looking at how the monsters and concepts have been updated, you’re expecting to feel a wave of nostalgia from a new film, and when it doesn’t happen, you blame the movie instead of your unrealistic mindset. As if a film made in 2014 can recapture that feeling of being seven years old and watching Godzilla vs. Hedora for the first time.

Nothing compares to that feeling of your world suddenly enlarging to hold these massive irradiated prehistoric monsters who were really guys in big-ass suits. You suddenly saw a career path you didn’t know existed, and for two whole weeks, you were going to be a monster when you grew up. That feeling you feel isn’t some standard of quality; it’s pure nostalgia. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, but if you’re setting all of your media-consuming expectations by how you felt as a kid, you won’t ever like anything, and yes, that makes you interestingly hip in some circles, but your fellow geeks are going to tire quickly of the schtick. Instead of hoping the movie won’t suck, like the rest of us, you’ve decided beforehand that it will suck, and you’re looking for all the things that prove it.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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Also, for those of you in Texas who haven’t been disenfranchised and are still able to cast a vote, I urge you to look into the protracted political theater going on right now, one that, I’d say, mirrors a lot of what’s happening on the national stage. It’s interesting to see one crony attacking the other crony for being even more corrupt than their own political misgivings. Ordinarily I would not be the slightest bit interested in seeing sharks devouring each other in a bloody frenzy, but in the case, I just want to offer up the comment that it couldn’t happen to a couple of more deserving shitheads.

REH/HPL

Those of you without deeply geeky roots might not know that H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were friends and maintained a voluminous correspondence that stands as one of the most significant primary document sources in fantasy and science fiction studies, ever. Fans of one author are usually also fans of the other author, though for very different if not disparate reasons. As touchy as Robert E. Howard fans can sometimes be, the H.P. Lovecraft fan community has, conversely, been friendly and supportive for years. This time, however, they went above and beyond. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society recently sponsored a raffle to help raise money for the extensive foundation repairs necessary for the Robert E. Howard House and Museum, and brother, did they come through for us! You can watch the announcement here:

I’m—make that, we’re—so grateful for their help with this daunting task. It’s been a sobering challenge to even get our collective heads around all the steps that need to happen in a specific sequence. Having folks, especially from other fan groups, recognize the scale and scope of the project and agree that it’s not only worth doing, but worth helping to make happen, is a welcome gift in these uncertain times.

Fandom: A Modest Proposal

It’s been a weird few weeks, watching my friends clean house in their social media feeds by punting the people who were loudly kvetching about how bad Starfleet Academy is, or the people who were negging the Spider-Man Brand New Day trailer (which I think looks—forgive me—both amazing and spectacular), saying they didn’t like this, and didn’t like that, all while conveniently forgetting that Marvel movies have habitually made changes to the trailers in an attempt to avoid spoiling key moments in the movie.

The Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan movie announcement and the Firefly reunion announcement have likewise split the party, but not for the same reasons, and as I was watching all of this play out, I realized where the disconnect lies.

The problem is not that fandom has suddenly become toxic, angry, bitter, etc. It’s not that. Well, wait, okay, it IS that, but see, here’s the difference: for as long as fans have been gathering, fans have been carping about something; costume changes, creative team changes, story and plot changes, anything that upsets the delicate Jacob’s Ladder of baby kittens and tinker toys they’ve constructed their head-canon out of. We have always done this. So let it be written. So let it be done. So what changed?

You know what I’m going to say already, don’t you? Unfettered access to everyone’s first thought, blurted out into the void with the unconscious desire to have that thought go viral and funnel thousands of pennies of ad revenue into your passive income slush fund. All of these expressions of the Id, slamming into us all the time, all day, every day, has made us justifiably punchy.

My solution is simple: move that shit back behind the paywall. Or rather, behind the friend wall. You want to complain about some perceived transgression? Cool; tell someone who cares, specifically, about you, so they can extend you a modicum of grace and consideration because they know more about you than just the front facing persona you present on Social Media.

When all we know about you is your shitty opinions, guess what? We tend to think you’re shitty. Because, and I say this with love, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one, and they all stink. And unless I know something about you that I got from us hanging out in Meat-Space, I am going to judge you by every stupid “hot take” you post.

No one cares, except for the people you came up with. Tell them why you hate the Gen Z kids in the space academy, or whatever perceived transgressions you think the MCU is making, or whatever it is you’re on about. You don’t need to count digital coup anymore. You’re not an influencer. If you just want to vent, I get it. How’s about we all go back to venting to people we know instead of abject and utter strangers, none of whom you know personally?

There are some folks who have gone to the trouble of curating their feed, cultivating an audience, and made an effort to think before they type. Some people, like friend of the Bunker Larry Young (of Astronauts in Trouble fame), have made their Facebook feed their clubhouse, and we’re all okay in there to say what we need to say, because if nothing else, you know Larry and you know what he’s about. I’d like to think I’ve done enough of that to at least keep you all from rage-quitting if I say something you don’t like, because you know where my head’s at.

In other words: back when we all met up face-to-face to game, buy comics, see a movie, or whatever fan activity we were collectively doing, there was always some topic that you avoided talking about because it would always set (fill in the blank) off. You can’t mention Star Trek: Voyager to them because they’d immediately start ranting about Seven of Nine’s impractical costume. You couldn’t say anything about Spider-Man’s black costume, because someone else would start lecturing everyone about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. There are a zillion other examples.

And even if it did come up, either by accident or if you were screwing with your buddy and set him off intentionally, you’d let them have the lane, because, even though he’s wrong—dead wrong—about which Green Lantern is the one true Green Lantern, he also helped you move when you had to bail in a hurry. He covered your grocery bill during that month you were laid off. He got you that first edition Fight Club hardcover you wanted for Christmas. He’s your friend, and you let it go because of that.

See, when it’s your buddy, you are understanding, if not forgiving, of his or her occasional lapse in judgement. When it’s strangers, on the Internet, that you know nothing about except for their obviously shitty taste, well, you can’t let that aggression stand, man. This aggression will not stand. And this is why we fight.

That’s my proposal. Stop looking online for validation of a thing you like. And if you’re the person that keeps getting drummed out of fan groups for “speaking your truth,” go monetize it, if you think you can.

For the rest of us, we need to step back from the feed. If you have some sources, either friends or professionals who have knowledge and the ability to articulate it to others, that’s one thing. Expecting BobaFett69xxx@zuckerberg.ass to know what you know, think what you think, and see things your way, is folly and we need to stop pretending that those people are doing anything worth commenting about. Take it outside, you Negative Nellies of the Internet, and preach to your own damn choir.

But seriously, the rest of you, come over this weekend and we’ll play D&D and talk about which Trek series has the single worst episode of all time, and why. It’ll be fun, and we’ll dunk on this thing we both mutually love. But it won’t be held against us if it’s just us.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: we think fans are fine, as-is, and we would never request changes to the way we all receive and enjoy various media.

Scrubs (Hulu)

The gang reunites at Sacred Heart to teach a new generation of doctors about the power of friendship and appletinis.

I wasn’t going to talk about this. Hell, I wasn’t going to even watch it, but the series popped up when I was having a low blood sugar moment and I thought, “Eh, it’s going to suck, anyway. I might as well be validated in my unsubstantiated opinion.”

Okay, so, I was wrong. It didn’t suck. In fact, I think it’s probably the most successful “bring back” series I’ve ever seen. It’s maybe the first time that the do-over captured the same feel as the original while managing to update the premise for a modern audience. I do not say that lightly, and what’s more, I don’t expect that it’ll happen again anytime soon. Scrubs may well go down in history as the exception that proves the rule.

Even as we were all throwing our hands up at the announcement that CBS is relaunching The Rockford Files, Scrubs quietly dropped the first three episodes at once (really smart), to get everyone a chance to see what they had done.

I don’t know why it worked where so many others had failed. Perhaps it was the low stakes of bringing back what amounted to a gag sitcom (I know, they dealt with death and stuff, too), but the main players all brought their A-game to the party. The jokes come fast and furious with lovely asides for little fantasy sequences and daydreams—look, if you’ve seen the original, that’s what they did. No foolin’.

There are updates, of course. Dr. Cox has always been an H.R. nightmare, and they leaned into that. J.D. isn’t the new doofus anymore; they have spread that out to a clutch of new med students who are genuinely damaged by their own existence. And they advanced everyone’s personal stories in a way that made sense, and also, gives the writers and actors more to work with. No one likes stories where everyone is happy and there’s nothing to overcome.

I’m not telling you this in the hopes that more reboots get greenlit, because the ratio is already pretty high, but I do think Hollywood is going to look at the success of the show and think, “Finally! Those plebes in flyover country have come around to our way of thinking!” Because no, we haven’t. In this one, singular, particular instance, someone stumbled across the elements that could still play in a modern show and they did them through a Scrubs filter. It feels less like a brand new day and more like when your nephew actually manages to perform a magic trick from the beginner set you gave him for Christmas and you think, “Oh, wow, it’s not all just plastic junk and there may be hope for him, yet.”

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

On an unrelated note, what’s your favorite kind of beer? And pizza? Asking for a friend.

Talking ‘Bout Breck

Nothing to be alarmed about; it’s just me and my friends and fellow Howard-Heads, John Bullard and Paul Herman, talking about Robert E. Howard’s hillbilly western character Breckinridge Elkins. The new, Ultimate Editions of these books are out, sporting incredible covers by Mark Wheately, and we talk about these stories for...well, not as long as we could have. We tried to keep it to an hour and failed, but it’s a fun hang, regardless.

Impending Field Excursions

Saturday, March 21st: Noir at the Bar
I’ll be one of the authors in attendance at Noir at the Bar 2.0 in Nacogdoches, Texas. You can get more information here if you’re in the area and want to swing by and hear us read from our various works. I’ll be reading one of the Larsen & Co. stories, probably the one from Swords & Larceny, but we’ll see what we see.

June 10th: Robert E. Howard Days
We’re doing something different this year, in addition to all of the other fun stuff. On Thursday, June 11th, we’ll be hosting a one-day writing workshop for new and aspiring authors. If you’re planning on coming to Howard Days or maybe you’re on the fence about it, let this be the thing that gets you over the hump. But hurry! Spots are limited! Emerging Writer’s Sword and Sorcery Workshop

Coalmine Canaries

[[Massive Spoilers Ahead]] I was throwing season 2 of Paradise into my eyeholes when something struck me as significant about the subtextual messaging. From the birth of the atomic bomb, right up to about 1990, some forty-odd years, the vast majority of Apocalypse films and fiction was devoted to The Bomb and who would drop it. Spoiler alert: it was usually the Soviet Union. The Military-Industrial Complex was the source of everyone’s strife. There were plenty of examples of what comes next, and those are all over the place, and also, nearly always choosing to focus on a few characters in the wasteland’s here and now and not on whodunnit. The Road Warrior is closer to a Conan movie than a “Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?” kind of thing. Even the exploitation and horror genres chose to imply government cover-ups whilst flinging zombies and mohawked mutants after hapless kids. Radioactive/toxic/experimental nerve gas/chemical goo for the win, I guess.

Post-Cold War, we had a number of movies dealing with ecological disasters of all kinds, and the who’s to blame question was way less important than the hero’s inability to warn people of the dangers of the tidal wave, or the cold snap, or the volcano, or dead bees, genetic tampering, the perils of Artificial Intelligence (remember The Matrix?) and even alien invasions. All sorts of things that were various degrees of Force Majeure. We sent a drilling crew up to an asteroid, for crying out loud.

Then the last dozen or so years happened and suddenly, we’re a lot more concerned about how we survive when the instruments of control are laid bare and shown to be broken. When the people we are entrusting our life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to are the people directly responsible for where things sit in the After Times, what recourse do we have?

Anyone else seeing this, or is it just me?

[[The Fallout franchise has been skirting around it for a while now, but now they’ve confirmed it in the TV series—Vault-Tec dropped the bombs so that they could experiment on people. Silo? The people in charge are keeping survivors in the dark by lying to them about who, about what, about all of it. Paradise is another series where the corporate interests are trying to maintain control by squirreling away a bunch of billionaires in a secret underground bunker. Um... And then there’s the aptly named Billionaire Bunker that shows us the people making us miserable can be made miserable if you trick them like they’ve been tricking us.]]

I’ve talked about most of these shows in previous newsletters, but when you line them up side-by-side, they all seem to be saying the same thing about excessive wealth, corporate greed, and human nature.

We have hit full-blown Cyberpunk territory now. By that I mean we’re living in it. We’re not jacked directly into the mainframe just yet, but oh, boy, do they want us to be—despite the fact that everyone says it’s a terrible idea. The corporations have gradually subsumed the role of government, offering us housing, a car, full insurance, a pension plan, and legal coverage for corporate malfeasance, you name it. We give it all up to them—make that, to THEM. Brand loyalty was always a thing, but now, you can align your politics and your values with a company you want to work for. You can choose to spend your money with them (or not) as you see fit.

The government and most billionaires have been banging the drum of Free Market Capitalism for a while now, insisting that the private sector can do what the government can’t. And we’ve gone along with it, willingly or otherwise, shrugging and throwing up our hands, saying. “Well, what can you do?”

The thing about corporations is this; they are not people and shouldn’t be given any rights. Thanks to the guardrails coming off fifteen years ago, corporations have only one obligation, and that is to make as much money for its shareholders as possible. Not ethically. Not even legally, but that can easily be spun into begging forgiveness rather than asking permission. Not morally. Just economically. Anything is permitted as long as it adds to the bottom line in a positive way. That’s how come the power grid in deregulated Texas failed. That’s how come they keep having to recall food with e. Coli and salmonella. This is exactly what profits over people looks like. And I’m certain that before the recall was issued, someone said in a closed door meeting, “Wait, are these people dying-dying, or are they just getting really sick?”

Science Fiction has always been best and most meaningful when it wasn’t trying to predict the future but instead create an allegory for the present. All of the best Science Fiction works from that premise. And right now, we have two genres of science fiction, cyberpunk, and post-apocalypse, and they are saying the same thing. They are showing us that when push comes to shove, corporations will protect their bottom line if it means they make more money than last year.

And the verdict is in: these corporations won’t help us. They can’t. They never could. From the Tech-Bros to the Assholes and all points in between, these people selling us distraction and the illusion of security don’t care past the point of fishing money out of our wallets. Digitally, of course, they’ve made it clear they all want us online, doing as much as we possibly can, in the cyberspace equivalent of a digital hazmat suit so the ick from the Dark Web doesn’t get on us. They aren’t going to fix what we’ve got. They will just create a new pill for us to swallow. They’ll release a patch, with notes. They will drop a new season of some damn thing we profess to care about more than our own health and happiness and buy themselves some peace and quiet for 72 hours in the news cycle.

And don’t worry about he next disaster, either. They’ve got an app for that. Some new gadget you can buy to offset whatever’s making everyone sick. Oh, and best of all: the filters are only good for about three months, so they have to come back to us for more filters! See, that’s building wealth by creating repeat customers.

It took Presidential action to bring the cost of Insulin back down to $35. Funny, because it was the corporations that crammed our food full of crap to keep it on the shelves longer, make it sweeter, saltier, and so forth, and now they want to sell us the cure, and then hike up the price. I know we’re talking about completely different industries over many years’ time, and it’s untoward to suggest that maybe they were colluding to do this. It’s just in their nature to do so, because have no rules for them to follow.

If only there was some sort of agency that would, I don’t know, monitor these companies, maybe with laws prohibiting them from certain actions against the public, and enforced various safety measures, that they could use to govern these sociopaths...if only...

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: despite the above article not being issued by this department, the Division of Media Review would like to apologize for the massive spoilers, even though we personally had nothing to do with its creation. We know better than to spoil series endings. The Department of Administration isn’t so self-aware at times.

The Bluff (Prime)

Karl Urban and Priyanka Chopra Jonas cross swords in this back-to-basics pirate flick.

This was a welcome surprise: a stripped-down revenge survival thriller that takes pieces and parts of other pirate movies and makes the most out of it. The Bluff is pretty straightforward and doesn’t try to tart up the pirate motif—and that may sound like I’m dunking on Pirates of the Caribbean, but I’m not. I’m on the record as liking pirate movies uncritically and it would take a real stinker to get me to pass one up. Rather, this is a simple plot, well-executed, set in the last days of the Age of Piracy, and a fantastic Karl Urban delivery system, to boot.

I don’t want to talk too much about the set-up because you’re supposed to be surprised at the Act I reveal. If you’re not a pirate movie connoisseur, you’ll like the pay off, but the rest of us have already spotted the critical creative DNA. Basically, someone really wanted to do Cutthroat Island meets Nate & Hays with a dash of The Long Kiss Goodnight thrown in for extra spice.

The thing this most reminds me up is Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, at least in terms of tone, but it’s really a lot better than I just made it sound. Most of you will appreciate Karl Urban, chewing every bit of scenery he leans rakishly across. Priyanka Chopra is great, having previously tackled some action roles and proving that she’s up for whatever. There’s not much else here but watching the various elements bang into each other with impressive swordplay and wonderfully bloody violence. The fights are worth showing up for, utilizing as much of the Hong Kong Cinema stuntwork as possible without actually getting Jackie Chan into the movie. Things look like they really hurt. And while the technology on display (and Chopra’s sweet skills) stretch the outer limits of credibility, it’s not any worse than asking people to believe in cursed gold, undead pirates and Davy Jones played by a D&D mind flayer.

The Bluff is a great little Revenge/Survival movie that doesn’t break any new ground but shows what an expert landscaper can do to that old, tired plot with just a dash of ingenuity. It’s the best pirate movie that’s been seen in a while, and if that’s your idea of a good time, be sure to stock up on the rum.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

I remember the fear they instilled in the hearts of all Americans just two years later when they took hostages and obligingly rattled their sabers long enough for Ronnie Ray-Gun to be sworn in. And they were merely weeks away from developing nuclear weapons! They were so close that they developed them in secret for the next ten years. It was so secret, they didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even the people in their own government or the scientists who were supposed to be working on that. Suuuuper secret. Double-Naught Spy secret.

Once we found out about it, we took a look at their oil reserves and decided to use diplomacy to attack Iraq instead. But—and let me be very clear about this—they didn’t stop developing nuclear capabilities! They were a few weeks away. It was coming. And when we confronted them about it they agreed to back off and turn their program into piles of pipes and water tanks instead. This tense situation played out privately, behind closed doors, all with the avowed intention of keeping nuclear power out of the hands of the Iranians, who were now no longer our best friends because they said some things behind our back in homeroom. We still kept an eye on them, because they were mere weeks away from a burgeoning, robust nuclear arms program. I mean, when you look at it like that? It was only a matter of time.

2026 Social Engagement Calendar: UPDATED!

Noir at the Bar

Saturday, March 21st, I’ll be one of the authors in attendance at Noir at the Bar 2.0 in Nacogdoches, Texas. You can get more information here if you’re in the area and want to swing by and hear us read from our various works. I’ll be reading one of the Larsen & Co. stories, probably the one from Swords & Larceny, but we’ll see what we see.

REH Days 2026: Emerging Writer’s Sword and Sorcery Workshop

It’s the 40th anniversary of Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains and we’re doing something different this year, in addition to all of the other fun stuff. On Thursday, June 11th, we’ll be hosting a one-day writing workshop for new and aspiring authors. It’s a chance for professional writers and editors to read your work and give you honest and thoughtful critiques. There’ll be some short lectures and discussions and a group feedback session, and here’s the deal: you’re doing all of that in Robert E. Howard’s hometown, walking distance from the Robert E. Howard House and Museum. In addition to myself, Jason M. Waltz of Rogue Blades and Adrian Simmons of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly will be your instructors. Between us, we have decades of editing, proofreading, conference attending, and writing and we’re just giving it away—not for free, mind you. This is a fundraiser to help raise money for the Howard House Foundation repair job. If you’re planning on coming to Howard Days or maybe you’re on the fence about it, let this be the thing that gets you over the hump. But hurry! Spots are limited!

Quit Jamming Me

A few weeks back, I stumbled across the Church of the Subgenius again. I seem to be reminded of them every few years. This time, it was a video discussing the Rev. Ivan Stang’s relationship with Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and it reawakened something I had let go dormant. The term “culture jamming” refers to any art or commentary that sets out to disrupt the normalcy of everyday life in some way. Flash mobs were an example of this, before it became a gimmick. The idea is to try and shake up the people who are numbed by the mundanity of every day, or more to the point, inundated to the point of stupefaction with media, advertising, and other tools of mass control.

One of the many benefits of being educated and having access to a full range of humorous techniques is being able to recognize satire at a glance. I have always liked a good snarky aside, and it’s even better when the aside is implied by sharp writing, creating the snark by writing around it so that it leaves an aside-shaped hole in the paragraph.

Devo. The Church of the Subgenius. The Gorillaz. Gene Sheppard’s “I, Libertine.” Adbusters magazine. John Carpenter’s They Live. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. The Onion. Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. The Street Sign Art Project in Amarillo, Texas. Come to think of it, the Subgenius started in Dallas. I know a great many of you have nothing but scorn for Texas right now (and I get it), but this state is not the sum of its politicians and there is a thriving counterculture here that is one part outlaw, two parts artist, and three parts contrarian. Down here, we call them Texas artists.

But anyway. There are a lot more that come to mind, but you see where I’m going with this. In a very real, kinder and gentler sense, this whole Apocalypse Bunker thing is a really light-handed, playful culture jam.

I’ve always been a fan of this as a form of entertainment and a strong proponent of this as a form of protest. Even when I didn’t fully understand what, in fact, the point of the protest was. Initially, Devo was just a weird, cool, interesting band to me, until I read some of their song lyrics, and more importantly, watched a couple of their music videos, like the one for “Beautiful World.” Classic. Even in the thick of the 1980s and my teenage self-disenfranchisement, I didn’t get it. Not at first. That’s the thing about satire and subversive wit. You can come back to it later and catch things you didn’t initially notice. Or maybe it’s just that we’re still dealing with the same shit as in the mass-consumption 1980s, only amplified with ecclesiastical fervor, thanks to the Internet and Social Media.

We’re at the point now where, in the absence of a monoculture—real or imagined—certain bad actors have figured out a way to use the tools of culture jamming to disrupt subcultures. I still can’t decide if it was willfully intentional or a happy accident they stumbled upon, but boy, the Internet has made it really easy to ruin someone’s day, hasn’t it?

Those scamps, those little ankle-biters, those under-parented, misunderstood and undiagnosed fledging serial killers and sociopaths, lurking in gaming subreddits and 4chan and 8chan and 16chan or wherever else the digital redcaps congregate, have made it so easy to give voice to the most horrifying, dark, inhuman and unempathetic thoughts and ideas, accompanied by an inexpertly photoshopped image, the 21st century equivalent of passing a note around that says “You Suck” with a picture of the shy kid’s face on it.

We’ve now seen the full range of the Cancel Culture Phenomenon from its best moments to its worst. Online protests, done correctly, can really get the word out in an efficient manner, allowing people to mobilize in real time. But that same attack strategy has been used to tar and feather a number of people who were later proven to not have done the things they were accused of doing, and in several cases, the follow-up investigations revealed that a targeted campaign of attack was orchestrated specifically to “take down” someone. And the finishing move on this shitty Mortal Combat combo is this; if the person is already an asshole, it’s a lot easier to set the hook for the made-up bullshit and nearly impossible to remove it.

It’s bad enough that the science is settled on this—the effects of too much online usage, screen time, the harm of self-dissociating from the real world in favor of a digital one, and so forth—has been field tested to death with criteria that is both repeatable and observable. In other words, they know exactly what they are doing. But it’s worse when they use propaganda, advertising techniques, and yes, even culture jamming tactics, against us as a means of control.

What do they want to control? The narrative. The flow of information. The optics. Whatever you want to call it. The groups that would seek to remake American Society and Culture into a phantasmagorical Norman Rockwell tableau that never really existed to begin with is using all of the tools for communicating ideas and stories against us. And in doing so, they have scrambled what is real and factual to more closely resemble the things that aren’t real and factual. By making us distrust the medium, it’s having a parallel effect on the message.

People can tell that the guardrails are off. One of the news outlets has been crying wolf for decades, making it part of their brand. But now the institutions that we have always relied upon as a society are crumbling, no one is shoring them up, and our idea of a solution is to change the channel over to the political equivalent of professional wrestling.

The way to fix it is to reinstate those standards and practices that govern the broadcasting of information and stick to them with draconian diligence. Free speech is protected, and always should be. But that shouldn’t give someone in authority carte blanche to vomit up lies and bullshit in the same space that we rely upon to explain in clear and plain English what happened today in the world. I remember when the only liar on television was the local weatherman—it was a joke, a cliché. How odd and deeply unsatisfying that the weather has become the only thing on television that you can actually believe.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

I must beg your pardon. I am still trying to sort out feelings and thoughts about stepping away from the theater and closing a book on the past two decades. I’m sure all of this will take a number of fascinating turns and end up at some inspirational metaphors or winsome analogies, but right now, it’s too big and I’m still a little too close.

Also, I may be resuming my crime fighting career. Oh, Blue Menace, how I’ve missed you.

Noir at the Bar

Saturday, March 21st, I’ll be one of the authors in attendance at Noir at the Bar 2.0 in Nacogdoches, Texas. You can get more information here if you’re in the area and want to swing by and hear us read from our various works. I’ll be reading one of the Larsen & Co. stories, probably the one from Swords & Larceny, but we’ll see what we see.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: if the actions of one or more current hockey teams has you questioning everything about the sport, here’s something you can watch to ameliorate that anxiety.

Shoresy (HULU)

Season 5 of the Letterkenny spin-off finds Shoresy defending the honor of North American hockey from the EU hockey team.

I’ve been trying to get my head around what Jared Keeso was doing with his foul-mouthed chirp-meister for a while now. The show is fantastic, full of the rapid-fire dialogue and verbal quirks that made Letterkenny so much fun to watch. And focusing solely on the hockey side of his Canadian small-town slice of life Oeuvre doubles down on something he’s obviously passionate about, which informs to the point of saturation the stories and plots in Shoresy.

After watching Season 5, it suddenly hit me like a Hanson brother’s forearm: This is Keeso’s love note to the sport. It’s everything about Hockey—the good, the bad, and the ugly—all wrapped up in an unapologetic smorgasbord of positive masculinity. How rare is that in today’s uncertain times? Scarcer than hen’s teeth, I’ll tell you what.

This attitude of “being a man” without being an asshole was a key component of Wayne’s overall storyline in Letterkenny. Keeso states (multiple times within multiple episodes) what being a man means to him: speak honestly and plainly, take responsibility for your actions, do what you say you’re going to do, keep your word, help your friends and neighbors...I can go on, but you get the point.

Shoresy reframes that idea within the culture of hockey, and here’s where the sports metaphor in fiction doesn’t ever seem to go far enough. The simpler plot is always the “will the underdogs triumph over adversity” but the more complex and useful plot is “will these man-children get their shit together and become better versions of themselves?”

It’s rare when successive seasons of a series get better as they go. Shoresy is one of those instances where we get to see the story widen and deepen as each season’s stakes increase, but the show never loses sight of what it’s there to do; chirp, throw hands, and dazzle us with sublime wordplay.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

Howard Days 2026

It’s going to be a year of milestones in Cross Plains this June: the 40th anniversary of Howard Days, and our Guest of Honor will be Rusty Burke with Special Guest Bill Cavalier—two of the people who first made the trip back in 1986. It’s also the 30th anniversary of the film The Whole Wide World, based on the book One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis. It’s also the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Robert E. Howard Foundation, who has, among other things, helped shepherd all of REH’s fiction and poetry into print in handsome books with all of the bells and whistles.

We are all currently trying to raise money to repair the foundation on the Robert E. Howard house, and it’s been going pretty well so far. Myself, Jason Waltz, and Adrian Simmons are trying something new this year—an emerging authors workshop for fantasy and sword and sorcery writers. It’ll be a one-day workshop held on the Thursday before Howard Days, and will be a hands-on endeavor, with seminars, Q&A, and critiques from three people who have been writing and editing and publishing sword and sorcery fiction for decades. If you’re interested, shoot me a note. I’ll have more details soon.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO)

This mini-series is a stirring adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight” set in Westeros a century before the events in A Song of Ice and Fire.

I initially thought this was just a desperate attempt to stave off the interminable criticism for Martin not finishing his series in what others believe to be a timely manner, and maybe it still is, but this gore-spattered series pulls no punches and reminds us in nearly every episode that yes, it’s still Game of Thrones adjacent, so of course, everyone is an asshole and a shithead. I do not mean that in a bad way.

It’s nearly impossible to not compare the first two episodes of this series to Heath Ledger’s movie “A Knight’s Tale,” which is, of course, just a modern-day retelling of the eponymous chapter from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In all fairness, there’s not a lot of ways for this kind of story to start that doesn’t involve the newly-knighted person trying to prove themselves to an uncaring world full of terrible people. And in true form, the Game of Thrones-ness reasserts itself pretty quickly, so don’t expect a clever dance sequence to Bowie’s “Golden Years.”

Our main characters, Sir Dunc, and his newly-acquired squire, Egg, are well-delineated enough that you don’t mind waiting a couple of episodes before the fighting starts. The show makes it clear that it’s building up to The Tournament, wherein all of the plot threads will be resolved, but that’s not quite what happens. And the results are sufficiently epic and gory, not quite in that order. Frankly, it was the most realistic, most lived-in version of medieval combat I’ve ever seen.

The usual suspects are also present, those Noble Houses of Westeros. Will the Targaryens be assholes? Will the Baratheons be fun-loving louts? Oh, you betcha. Knowing what we do of those lovely, stable families actually adds a layer of intrigue and complexity that would otherwise not resonate. I think it’s a little odd that we (collectively) know more about the imaginary families of this made-up place than the families involved in actual Hundred Years War, but that’s a subject for a different essay.

If this is your first foray into Game of Thrones territory, it’ll probably be a decent introduction. Not too much politics. A good example of the kinds of stories the shows tell, and more importantly, the way they are told. If you’re still steaming about how the big show ended, eh, you know, don’t let that stop you from checking this out. The stakes are a lot lower and the story moves at a good clip. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is worth a watch if you want a story that is all swords and no sorcery.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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I’m only sorry that you’re coming in after I’ve announced I’m stepping away from the cinema business after twenty years. This is going to be a weird year, and as a result, this weekly missive is going to swerve all over the road until I can pick a lane. Buckle up, y’all. We’re going on a beer run.

Fan-Rants II: Electric Boogaloo

The Superbowl came and went and nothing much happened, except for that whole Alternate-Facts Superbowl Halftime Show and that Mandalorian/Budweiser commercial that had so many people scratching their heads, regardless of where you sit on the Sports Spectrum.

I didn’t say anything at the time because I kept thinking the controversy would blow over. I thought it was too stupid to engage with. But they did it! They really did it! They built a second Superbowl halftime show and turned it into political theater. Granted, it wasn’t a stump speech, but the fact of its very existence was enough. But Oh My Gort, they have kicked open the door on a whole new revenue stream for the NFL. Choose-Your-Own-Halftimes! For an extra $20 Pay-per-view, you can select from one of three different—no, five different Halftime shows! We already have G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17...it’s all right there! I mean, if you really wanted to be efficient, you would just film one Halftime show with everyone buck naked and then use black bars and blurs to block the boobs and bits. The more you pay, the less “interference” you get. Hey, that’s a football term! I’d like my million dollars for that idea in small bills, please.

I remember a time when everyone would get up at halftime, stretch, grab a quick smoke, get new snacks, crack a beer, go to the bathroom, change out the laundry, etc. etc. Suddenly, the political pundits and Christian Nationalist Tastemakers all felt upset enough over this to spend tens of millions to put Kid Rock back onstage. They felt attacked, betrayed, outraged. They didn’t want to get up off the couch during the Superbowl, for any reason. Never mind that we’ve all gotten up during Superbowl halftime, whenever there was a show with someone we didn’t know, or knew and didn’t like. What makes them such special sno—oh, yeah, right.

In my lifetime, I’ve watched the Superbowl go from being the Sports Event of the Year to this pop cultural Kaiju that everyone projects themselves onto in a FOMO kind of way. The commercials! The office pools! The communal bafflement at trying to figure out who that person singing the national anthem is! It was always good for a friend-hang, an excuse to make Velvetta dip, and critique the various commercials and movie trailers with the pomp and circumstance of Caesar sentencing Christians to die by lions.

I love this for them, and by “them” I mean the Christian Nationalists who have never understood contemporary culture (because it’s inherently Satanic, you see) and yet profess to enjoy it so much and care so deeply about it that they would throw their own halftime show in an attempt to safeguard the people from all of the pulchritude and lasciviousness.

We’re talking about a Superbowl halftime show that, for years, pushed any number of boundaries you’d care to identify. Whether it was Brittany Spears bad-school-girling it up with Aerosmith as they sang “Walk This Way” or Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” the halftime show stopped being a chance for the teams to catch their breath and more about vomiting up a mélange of pop culture buzzwords and flavors of the month in a desperate attempt to covet the so-called “youth demographic.” Family friendly? Since when?

It’s great that the NFL always touts those family values and that community engagement, until their star Center gets pinched in a club with two grams of cocaine and an unregistered Glock, Michael Vick’s dogfighting ring makes the news or Ray Rice clocks his fiancée and knocks her out. Then they close ranks, and only the most fervent community outrage will get them to suspend a player. But not for too long. Because that would affect revenues, and we can’t have that, now, can we?

I say this as someone who loves football, but hates the current state of the game. As soon as money starts changing hands, the fix is in. These are billionaires who own these teams, and yet, they are too broke to build a stadium and require taxpayers to pony up for something they can’t afford to enjoy. Nice.

Concussions. Multiple arrests. Pay offs and bribes. An industry propped up on selling beer and Axe body spray to dopey teenagers. Bookmaking. Back room deals. Unscrupulous behavior all around. But yeah, no, let’s talk about who’s doing a medley of their greatest hits this year. What kind of outrage can we manufacture to ensure that people are talking about the Superbowl for a whole month?

It’s not even good pop culture anymore. It’s too processed, too controlled. It feels focus-grouped for maximum market penetration. Weaponized, especially if it will distract the people from, oh, I don’t know, the Pre-Apocalyptic Transformation of America. The commercials suck now, for the same reasons:

Carson: “What we need is a chimp in an office cubicle! Our research shows, scientifically, that all men like chimps!”

Skidmore: “Carson, you fool, we did chimps for the last ten years. We need something else. Work with me people; what’s better than a chimp in a cubicle? Come on, there’s no bad ideas here.”

(beat)

Carson: “Um...what about two chimps? At a conference table?”

Skidmore: “Carson, you dopey bastard, you’re a genius!”

I don’t know if the Superbowl was the beginning of the pop culturing of pop culture, but it was the first time I noticed, back in my late 20s, that all of the commercials seemed to have elements designed to go viral. Babies talking about the stock market. Puppies playing. Chimps in suits. Cavemen. Celebrity endorsements that never quite land, like Steve Carell admonishing a waitress for asking her customer, “Is Pepsi okay?” Rock stars you kinda forgot about riffing on when Bro-culture uses “Rock Star” as an adjective of approval. Heh. See, it’s funny because they are rock stars, talking about other people being Rock Stars...you get it? Kids love rock stars. Who’s that guy...? Phil Collins! Is he available? Can we get Billy Idol?

And for what? Car insurance, beer, the upcoming tent pole movie of the summer, stocks trading, although now I’m sure it’s legalized gambling in its place, which amounts to the same thing, whatever new drug they want us to subsidize, and snacks. Nothing we don’t already see, ad infinitum, already. That’s a great pun, by the way, if you’re keeping score.

I don’t like being “sold to.” I really don’t like it when giant corporations try to manipulate me with stuff that I like, like rock stars and chimps and Steve Carell. I’ll wager you don’t like it, either. This stuff means more to us than it does to them. Part of being a fan of something, whether it’s Star Trek or the Dallas Cowboys, is that you love it in a way that is both proprietary and personal. We take this stuff in more deeply than anyone originally intended. We create a sense of ownership around it, as part of our identity. To use this stuff incorrectly, as a pitch for some product or service, or as a political prop in a grasping at straws attempt to look like you are “hep to that jive,” should be derided for the bullshit that it is, and properly mocked and ignored in turn.

I said all of that to say this: a pox on your manufactured outrage over Bad Bunny. Your attempts to co-opt a corporate-mandated pop cultural “event” were laughable. The fact that we all care this much about that Billionare Circle-Jerk called the NFL will always baffle me to my core. And when this all cultural purity swings the other way (because it will), can one of the first things we re-instate be satire?

One last thing. I thought the Mando-Weiser commercial was clever, bordering on genius. The fact that football fans did not get it was only overshadowed by the fact that the Geek Nation didn’t get it, either. It was, in the parlance of our time, a “thinker.” And the fact that it was a joke-grenade that people couldn’t wait to write about just speaks volumes about Modern Internet Culture and the fact that it’s all monetized for pennies in an attempt to count coup and scoop the other online wags who are chasing the same pittance.

Podcastery: Trek Edition

Over on the 42cast, a lost episode from a few years back has emerged: We’re talking about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. How fortuitous is that? I’m not on the program at the very beginning, but I show up about fifteen minutes in and you’ll just have to pretend you hear me beam in. It goes long and we end up getting philosophical and stuff. Ep. 273: Boldly Going Nowhere

That’s all for now. It’s going to be a weird year.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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Bundle of Holding Heists Offer is Live!

If you’ve been on the fence about checking out the RPG stuff I’ve been writing these last few years, here’s your chance to grab nearly all of it at one great low price!

All of my fantasy heists gaming zines and books are currently featured in a Bundle of Holding offer that is too good to pass up. You can grab pdfs of Tools of the Trade: A GM’s Guide to Creating & Running Fantasy Heists, Ogre’s 11: 13 System-Neutral Audacious Heists for your Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Polite Society: the Zine for Thieves, Rogues and Scoundrels #1 – 4, and a few extra files and interesting things to round out the set, for only $9.95. But wait! There’s more!

Also included in the bundle is a new thing I’ve been working on, called Unusual Suspects. I’ve put bits and pieces of it in other games and zines in the past, but this is the full-on system in one place. With just a pair of six sided dice, you can generate an interesting and unique NPC for your game in under a minute! Personalities, quirks, and motivations can be generated while your players are arguing over their marching order. All of the information fits on a 3 x 5 index card for easy tracking, and no two NPCs will be alike. The Unusual Suspects Omnibus contains all of the material from Volume 1: Modern NPCs, Volume 2: Fantasy NPCs and Volume 3: Sci-Fi NPCs, updated and slightly reworked, with a few extra bits and bobs thrown in for good measure.

Sometime after the Bundle ends (on Feb 11th), the print-on-demand file for the physical book will be available. Volume 3 has already become a Copper Best Seller with zero marketing effort on my part, which tells me that people need help working up NPCs for Mothership, Alien, and Cyberpunk Red. This pdf costs $10 all by itself. Buy the whole Bundle for $9.95 and grab all of the above and get ready to break bard…bad, I mean! It’s a hell of an offer, you must admit.

The Human Gorilla Heists Bundle will only be up for one week, so don’t dawdle. You will not see its like again, unless, of course, you go ahead and subscribe to the Bundle of Holding, where you will be regularly updated on new bundles full of great indy games both large and small. Seriously, this is the best deal in tabletop gaming.

Fan-Rants and the Inter-Nuts

Here’s an old joke:

Bob: Hey, have you seen the new Batman movie yet?

Doug: Yeah, I saw it. What a train wreak! Michael Keaton was a terrible Batman, the suit looked weird, the Joker never had a first name, and they messed up the origin story completely!

Bob: Man, I’m sorry you didn’t like the movie.

Doug: Who said I didn’t like it?

Nerd-Humor! Get it? If that joke were rewritten in 2017, it would go like this:

Bob: Hey, have you seen the new Batman movie yet?

Doug: Yeah, I saw it. What a train wreak! Michael Keaton was a terrible Batman, the suit looked weird, the Joker never had a first name, and they messed up the origin story completely!

Bob: What’s wrong with you? That was the single greatest movie of all time, ever, full stop, and I’m already ‘shipping Jack Napier and Bruce Wayne, so kindly shut your cake hole.

Doug: Wait, what? All I’m saying is that the story had some obvious misfires, and…

Bob: No Spoilers, Doug! LET PEOPLE ENJOY THINGS!

I was checking out the latest and newest round of fan complaints about Starfleet Academy, followed by the media’s “coverage” of fan complaints, while speculating what this means for the studio, who they reached out to for comment, and the subsequent press release that addressed a concern or two, and on and on and here we go ‘round the mulberry bush.

It’s tiresome. The first thing I have to do is a forensic analysis of whoever posted the nonsense in question and ask, “Is this an agenda-pushing post?” Are they complaining about how “woke” Star Trek suddenly is, and by extension, the entirety of the entertainment industry, as if this were some sort of new development we should all be concerned about. Then I have to discern if the post is a defensive posture, an uncritical eructation of effusive adjectives designed to overwhelm anyone complaining about this new, dangerous, Liberal bent in science fiction television.

These things cancel each other out, of course, but then the “entertainment press,” in a desperate bid for clicks, writes a shit-on-a-shingle post about fans being divided or the reaction being uneven. Let’s ignore the fact that the majority of those “woke” posts care less about informing and instructing and more about getting in on that two-cents-a-click action. That’s still the stuff that gets the most attention, and the most likes, and the most reposts, which invites all groups to circle the wagon to defend their honor from the online bullies. This is what passes for “fan activity” these days. Where’s the Starfleet Fan Club when you really need them?

Fan anger is a natural response to anything in their world that threatens the architecture of their belief system, which is usually about as solidly-constructed as a blanket fort. As such, it doesn’t need to be “reported on,” and it doesn’t need to be treated as some kind of open-air focus group. For starters, it’s the exact opposite of “focused.” Using the stuff people post on the Internet as some kind of quality barometer is, well, it’s par for the course now, because people still value what the Internet used to be, back in the late 1990s, and they don’t really appreciate what a shit-show they have let the place become.

I’ve talked around this before, but now that Trek is the current political hockey puck, let me restate it clearly: fans complain. It’s our birthright. We have to do it. It’s part of our lifestyle. We discuss, debate, and dissect these movies and shows and books and video games because we love them on a microscopic level not visible to the naked eye. We love it (whatever “it” is) way more than you do. And for any fan over the age of forty-five, all of our formative years were spent sitting around, complaining about the stuff Hollywood got wrong.

This streaming thing? It’s still brand-new. For most of the history of film and television, we were stuck with whatever Hollywood was currently offering up. In those all-too brief intervals where there was actually more than two science fiction television shows on at the same time, we were beyond elated, because it was so rare. It got better after cable was a thing—not good, mind you. But better. Those new channels needed new stuff to broadcast and it was all thrown together with the same abandon as usual. As long as there was a hot blonde in a Lycra body suit, doing something at a control panel, they could call it “sci-fi” and we’d dutifully watch it, and then we’d gather with our friends and try to make some sense out of whatever that was.

We had no options, not really. All of this (gestures wildly) wasn’t here, you see? And we knew we were no kind of demographic for these ad execs. Sci-fi TV has always felt tacked on, an afterthought. Kiddie fare. So we watched it, all of it, because we wanted it, even if it was Shiii-it. And we complained to each other, while also trying to find some kind of silver lining. Something to redeem it.

I still talk about Return of the Jedi like this: “I never liked the Ewoks. They made no sense, and that whole forest battle where the soldiers in riot gear designed to protect them against rocks and sticks are cut down like sheaves of wheat by Teddy bears armed with, wait for it…rocks and sticks…is the height of stupidity. But oh God, the space battle above the forest moon? Epic!”

I recognize that the Ewoks weren’t directed at me, but rather my brother and sister, who were five and seven years younger than I was. Ewoks are great, if you’re ten years old eating sugary cereal on a Saturday morning. When you’re thinking about girls and your body is betraying you daily at every turn, it’s embarrassing, and back in 1983, it was SUPER embarrassing, because liking that stuff was still firmly in the sub-culture. Star Wars was slightly better, because it was so omnipresent that it didn’t feel AS nerdy as Star Trek or Doctor Who.

Later, the Ewoks would be revered by the next generation of fans who were watching all three movies at once on VHS cassettes in their living room at the age of 10, eating sugar cereal on Saturday morning. You can figure out how old Star Wars fans are by asking them what their favorite and least favorite movie is.

I told you that to tell you this: none of that stuff matters now, of course, because of the ease of access to all of this material, past and present, but old habits die hard. Older fans are going to say, “Star Fleet Academy sucks! I don’t want to see some teeny-boppers cutting class, I want Kirk and Spock punching stuff in space!” You can choose to be offended by that if you like, but instead, I’d rather throw shade at the “influencers” in their late 30s who take every single genre movie and TV show being released and actively hunt for something they can hang a political rant on. They make this giant performative sandwich with identity politics smeared all over it and they serve it up. And damned if we all don’t take a big ol’ bite.

Those people aren’t fans. If they were real fans, they would put their love of Star Trek, or Star Wars, or whatever above the petty concerns of whether or not Worf was a diversity hire on Deep Space Nine. Real fans push that stuff to the side, because it gets in the way of liking Holly Hunter as the space hippie or trying to find stuff to enjoy about the last three Star Wars movies in the Skywalker Dysfunctional Family Drama.

No, those online scamps with their weaponized platforms are no longer fans, if they ever were to begin with; they are Content Creators. It’s their job. They get paid for whatever Content they Create. And like the Dark Side of the Force, it’s quicker, and more seductive, especially when the first YouTube check hits your bank account. That quick path to success is all about fear and anger and hatred, and well, you saw what it did to Palpatine.

I’m bringing this up now, because there are a lot of older fans who don’t want to watch Starfleet Academy because they have aged out of it, not because it’s a sign of the times. But it’s getting harder to talk about it online because any dissention in the ranks is assumed to be some hate-filled screed, rather than an acknowledgement that we aren’t the people this show is aimed at. Moreover, it’s unlikely we’re going to get another Trek aimed at that vitally important “empty nester/early retirement” demographic that the kids are all jazzed about. We had our Trek, already. We watched our parent’s Trek, and then we got The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager (well, y’all did. I bailed on Voyager.) That, and all of the movies, got me to the age of 30. I can’t expect Paramount to keep sending me more of the same thing for the next thirty years. Other people get to play with this stuff, too. It’d be nice is we could all enjoy it, but that’s not my put-in. Talk to the showrunners.

For a while now, my desire to watch Trek shows goes hand-in-hand with my willingness to take whatever they are dishing up at face value instead of looking for things that validate my experiences. I’ve been a Trek fan for longer than some of the new Trek fans watching Starfleet Academy have been alive. When do they get a Trek to obsess over?

I’d offer up some tips and advice, but you know what I’m going to say, don’t you? We are now at a place where all of our interactions are monetized. The only way to get them to stop doing that is to quit looking at it. Do Not Engage. At All. You won’t learn anything new, and they have no interest in rebutting your brilliant points. See, they already got your dough. And I say this as someone who routinely mocked and belittled these pop culture pundits myself for far longer than I’d care to admit. When it was one or two of the little creeps, it wasn’t such a big deal. Now the stakes are a lot higher. Taking my two pennies back won’t solve anything, but if we all take our pennies back...

Bottom line: as bad as the Content Creators are, they are easily handled by ignoring them. But the news outlets? They are goading us all to fight. How about instead of beating dead horses, we take a few swings at the people who want to start the fight and comment on the fight, but don’t want to be in the fight themselves. We need a show of strength. Solidarity. You know, Buda-style.

The Lede, and How to Bury It

I didn’t want to start the newsletter off this way. But we’ve decided to effectively close the theater. It’s not closed-closed; we are still operating as a venue for field trips, parties, special events, gatherings, and so on. We just won’t be showing first run movies after this weekend.

The decision has been agonizing because I don’t want anyone to use this as the excuse to say, “You see? The industry’s dying!” or any of that bullshit. Hollywood and movies aren’t going anywhere. But I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and they were two decades of nearly constant change and upheaval, brought on by a number of outside forces. Ah, you’ll hear more about it later, in great detail, I’m sure.

This year will one of massive changes. There will be disruptions of regular services here at the Bunker. But we remain committed to you, our devoted bunker population, so please watch this space for updates.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: we regret nothing.

Wonder Man (Disney)

Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery are an unlikely duo trying to navigate the morays of Hollywood and keep their secrets from each other and everyone else, too.

I keep seeing people saying that Wonder Man does for the MCU what Andor did for the Star Wars franchise. What does that mean? Can anyone tell me? Here, I’ll translate. “This apple does for that basket of peaches what this golf club does for that sack of tennis balls.” Perfect. Hey, Internet pundits: if you’re going to write cleverly, you must also write cogently if not coherently. Anyway.

Wonder Man follows a struggling actor who is meticulous and something of a control freak, and with good reason: he’s powered up. We don’t know how or exactly what, but he can’t be involved in the industry if he fails to disclose his condition, so he doesn’t, keeping himself emotionally walled off from others, lest they find out.

Trevor, that beloved Train Wreak who was introduced as a sly way of getting around a now-problematic old comic book villain Iron Man 3, and who seemed like tacked on comic relief in Shang Chi, has found his groove in this series as the hapless everyman who can’t seem to catch a break. I had this weird flash of an idea that Trevor might end up as the MCU’s Rick Jones, seeing as how we don’t currently have one.

This is one of those instances where the MCU shines. They take a concept or a genre of film, in this case, the romantic comedy, and completely subvert it. There’s even a meet-cute. They are both invested in this new relationship, but once the secrets come out, there’s no way they’ll be able to patch things up, right? Cue that scene in every rom-com where the dumbass is running through the airport.

That’s not what happens in Wonder Man, but those beats are right there underneath the melody, driving the story forward in short, punchy chapters. It’s a breeze to watch and doesn’t really waver. It’s weird, too, because, if this had been made in the 1980s, I would have been frothing mad at how much they changed from the core concept. The problem with that is, Simon Williams isn’t an A-Lister, and his origins (plural) are so inextricably tied to the complicated and convoluted history of the Avengers, it’s not possible to use Wonder Man without changing the approach to the character completely. And yet, there’s a lot of intentional nods to the character’s legacy that do not go unnoticed.

Also, we are on the other side of the Infinity War saga, so I’m far less concerned about “getting it right” and far more concerned with “making it good.” Wonder Man is good, even with the Aw, COME ON!” cliffhanger ending.

The Wrecking Crew (Amazon)

Two estranged brothers reunite in Hawaii to find out who killed their father and maybe mend a few fences, if they can stay alive long enough.

This buddy movie stars Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa, two guys that everyone forgets can act, when the moon is right and the stars are aligned. And let’s get something straight, right off the bat: this is nothing new. The plot may be one of the most overworked things in all of media. You can spot it from orbit. The set-up, too, is nothing you haven’t seen before. So why are we talking about it?

Sometimes, you need a really good burger. A good burger is comforting, and this movie is a Bear Hug.

You watch this movie for the stars. Bautista and Momoa both have presence and charisma, and their nearly constant banter and bickering and smart-assery is only outpaced by the fast, HK-style stunt work (it’s amazing how everyone is a bad ass with improvised weaponry). And that’s what you get with The Wrecking Crew. A great release, good for a few big guffaws and a couple of “Oh Shit!” moments as you watch things blow up and people go flying through the air. It’s cathartic, watching flawed heroes fight actual criminals, rather than the cosplay reenactments coming out of our nation’s capital. How is it that actors are better trained with firearms than the Jackbooted thugs parading around under the cloak of law?

But I digress. It’s a nice touch, too, that these two monster-sized guys (the “wreck” in the name) are both smart...stubborn and direct, but they also know how to do their job, being a cop and a Navy SEAL. This allows the story to progress without devolving into a series of increasingly improbable coincidences. There’s great chemistry between everyone and it stops just short of being all jokey and smirky with each other. We’re all going to freak out later this year when Momoa plays Lobo, so now’s your chance to check him out being way less over-the-top in The Wrecking Crew. It’s the perfect movie to watch while you’re folding clothes. The bad guys get what’s coming to them, and that’s all we really want, along with a few sweet stunts.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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Remember: if you’re engaging in civil disobedience, whether there is a picket sign involved or not, to keep your hands off of your cell phone and please don’t bring said cell phone up to your chest, lest it be considered a target for shitasses who don’t have access to a firing range and/or their own psychological and emotional damage. Evidently, they are out of tin cans and bottles to shoot and are tired of running around in their backyard playing “War.”

Game Bloggery

On the eve of Zinequest 2026 please find this new thought-provoking article on the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker blog, discussing the various levels of game play with an eye towards immersion and engagement. I’ve been thinking about it after seeing a spate of those A.I.T.A. posts about bad gaming sessions and campaigns. I think I’ve identified the source of the problem. Let me know what you think: The Five Levels of Game Play. And if you aren’t subscribed to the blog, please consider doing so. I’ve got a cool announcement coming up next week you will want to know about, particularly if you are the kind of person who really wants to read my blog post about Five Levels of Game Play.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: the staff has been under the weather of late, and have been unable to access our full list of things to be analyzed. Hopefully this pairing of science fiction series will suffice while we right the ship over here.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (Paramount)

Over a hundred years since The Burn has passed, and the remnants of Starfleet have finally gotten it together enough to reopen Starfleet Academy. This is the new class of cadets.

I was watching the first episode play out, and I immediately noticed the love triangle developing between Saturn Girl, Lighting Lad, and Cosmic Boy, or, if you prefer, Scott, Jean, and Logan. Then when the second episode dropped, the final puzzle pieces fell into place. See that’s when the Veronica joined Riverdale in Space, and there’s the premise, in a nutshell. The Riverdale Legion of Super-Heroes. There’s an Archie, a Reggie, a Betty, a Veronica, a couple of Jugheads, even a Moose and a Midge. Welcome to Starfleet Academy.

Every alien has something: super strength, empathy detection, adaptive resistance, or, if you’re just a human, a couple of sweet skills like genius-level hacking or total ship’s manual and schematics recall, allowing you to exploit Starfleet Regulations in the service of the plot. There’s even a holographic cadet—no, not the Doctor from Voyager, another one—that will serve as the Data/Tilly hybrid, and there is a 100% certainty that this character will, at some point, be (a) possessed by a rogue intelligence; (b) go rogue herownself and become a murderous AI; and (c) get uploaded into a ship so she can fix it from inside the systems, even though it will be really, really dangerous, you guys.

I’m a Star Trek fan, even when I don’t like Trek. And I’m not alone, either. Lots of fans my age (and some younger and some older) grew up in an imperfect world. We argued about science fiction television being bad because a lot of it was. Maybe “bad” is too strong a word; it was hackery. It was made with a certain contempt for the audience. Movies, too. You could tell, especially back then, when someone was just phoning it in. After all, it’s all just Kid’s Stuff anyway, right? And kids are dumb, so this stuff doesn’t have to be very smart. It has always pissed me off, especially when I was a dumb kid.

I think Starfleet Academy is being written with real intention: they want to move the setting forward, and they’ve set up a scenario that pushes this show hundreds of years past “canon,” a word that increasingly makes my eye twitch, to this place where they can redefine and update old concepts, like the Klingons. A huge part of that intentionality is aiming the franchise at younger fans—no, not mid-thirties, younger than that. Twentysomethings.

Simply put, this ain’t my Trek show. It was never supposed to be; I’m in my mid-fifties, for crying out loud. This is a show about high school kids in space. Please. I’m watching it because dammit, I’ve had Trek in my life since I was a wee lad, playing with my Mego figures and beaming the gorillas from Planet of the Apes onto the bridge of the Enterprise playset. I always used that transporter on the vinyl playset like a magician’s cabinet, turning Kirk into the Mugatu in the worst transporter accident ever. That’s when he’d get sworn in as a Gorilla footsoldier and made to fight the astronauts in arena battles. But I digress. Most of those shows were aimed at me in my teenage and early adult years, too. I’ve had my Trek, and it was good. Time to hand it off, I guess.

The poster should have clued people in. Look at this. What part of this makes you think, “Cool! Sociological problems disguised as interstellar diplomacy, and Kirk is shirtless!”

If you want to watch this show and get something out of it, the character interaction is a lot of fun; dialogue and banter have a nice bounce to them. Everyone is fully committed to the bit, and Holly Hunter is playing a mischievous space hippie. What’s not to love? The plots will devolve into love triangles and melodrama, like any good teenage soap opera. I only hope we can see enough of the show that will come after this one to hold my interest going forward.

The point is, if Starfleet Academy isn’t to your liking for whatever reason, there’s a shit-ton of other science fiction out there to immerse yourself in, like the one mentioned below. We don’t have to all watch the same mediocre stuff anymore.

Silo (Apple)

In a post-apocalyptic future, humans live in a mysterious, self-sustaining silo extending deep underground. To go outside is death, but after 140 years, people are asking questions about how and why the silo exists.

This series, based on the books by Hugh Howey, grabbed me quickly and shook me like a terrier with a squeaker toy. The first three episodes set up the world, the premise, and the main characters, all without spoiling anything and keeping it moving at the same time. After that, it’s a lot of little mysteries as you try to figure out the history and nature of the silo in real time, right alongside the characters.

Rebecca Ferguson manages to carry the show well, but there are other solid actors doing good work, including Tim Robbins as his most asshole-ish, which says a lot. There’s even a little stunt casting, but it works really well. Who doesn’t want to watch Rashida Jones, even if it’s just for one episode?

If you watch the show with another science fiction person, it will be impossible to not speculate with each new development what’s Really Going On Here. Thankfully the show seems to anticipate that, because so far, it’s playing fair with the audience. An interesting tidbit is introduced, prompting a question like “What the hell is that all about?” and then within a scene or two, they provide you the answer.

The main plot is still largely up in the air, but the last scene at the end of season two makes it clear that the story will pick up in the past to explain how everyone ended up deep in the bowels of the earth.

Apple continues to be the place for thoughtful and engaging science fiction TV. Silo has two seasons in the can, comprising the first book. It’s been renewed for two more seasons, presumably covering the second book. Season three isn’t set to drop until later this year, so if you haven’t checked Silo out, now is the perfect opportunity.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist here, but pardon me while I reach for a roll of tinfoil. For the past 30-odd years (or more) education has been gradually chipped away, tinkered with, and denigrated by Christian Nationalists and others in that particular demographic, leading to a rise in homeschooling and falling literacy. Test scores are lower than ever. Christian Nationalists and Evangelicals have also managed to pack the Texas State Board of Education with ringers, leading to no more sex education, science textbooks that are required to teach the book of Genesis alongside the theory of evolution, and a complete and total erosion of trust in public schools in general. Texas is in crisis at the moment, and because the state buys so many textbooks, the TSBoE sets the pace and tone for what books get published and approved, leading textbook publishers to try and appease a bunch of people who think sex education is the Devil’s Business. They also complain about the high rate of teen pregnancy, and always have; it was my first and still best example of cognitive dissonance.

Also, in other news, for the past 30 years other people who have no connection to Texas or the Southern Baptist Church have been pushing the march to get us all online, where everything we could ever want is at our fingertips, for the asking. All books, all music, all of everything will be online for us to interact with. Heh. Right. While we know that’s patently not true and never has been, there has been enough of a push to ensure that people are downloading audio books, skimming articles—or letting AI summarize them—and a barrage of social media platforms that encourage people to condense their thoughts into a blurt, or a bumper sticker, or better yet, pictograms that can communicate a thought, but just not a deep one.

So much the better. That way, when they start cutting pieces out of the United States Constitution on the government website (the parts that make it easier for ICE to kick doors open and drag people into the gulag without due process), no one under the age of 30 will know, or care, or pay much attention, because they can’t, or won’t, read anything that isn’t an emoji or uses punctuation or doesn’t. And why be curious? When they typed “Constitution” into the Microsoft algorithm, the first thing that came up was the “official” Constitution, courtesy of the US government. Yeah. Those guys.

What that all means is, when people say, “Do your own research!” they mean, “look up stuff online.” Online. Where it’s easier than ever to edit, or cut, or remove altogether anything on your website that you don’t want people to see or read. I know, there’s ways around that, but you’re a goddamn nuclear genius, aren’t you? Not so much your racist uncle, who still quotes from a QAnon video he watched back in 2019.

I’m sure the two things are not related nor coordinated in any way. But I am not so sure that one group didn’t see what the other group was doing and take full advantage of the developing situation to make sure that certain things weren’t available, or were just missing from the “official record,” which mean, whatever shit the Google algorithm returns to you in a eyeblink.

This is the year of the analog revolution. They can’t edit a book that’s already been published. They can’t edit the millions of copies of the Constitution that are out in the world as we speak. The more things we can pull offline, like ourselves and our need for a bonobo monkey dopamine hit, the better we’re all going to feel. Then maybe we can start educating our kids again.

Robert E. Howard: 120 Years Old

He doesn’t look a day over 30. Too soon? Doesn’t matter. Here’s the deal: the REH fan community is pretty fierce and very passionate about Our Favorite Author.

John over at the REH Foundation YouTube channel thought it might be nice to record some of the tried and true, the stalwarts of the community, saying something nice to REH’s shade and reading something in honor of the day. Which is what we did. I’m in there, as are many of my good friends. If you want to hear me read the first part of one of my all-time favorite Conan stories, go give this a perusal:

Also: the Official Conan YouTube channel kicks off its second season with this guy:

We’re doing some mythbusting, spiking some of those pesky salacious and crazy-sounding stories that have been puffed up and inflated by supposed fans and professionals who should have known better, frankly. Shawn did a great job of making me look and sound great.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: this was going to be a scathing rebuke of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but I’m waiting for three episodes so no one can say, “But you didn’t give it a chance!” In the meantime, watch something that’s good for your soul.

Dispatches from Elsewhere (Netflix)

Four disparate, desperate strangers are drawn into a live-action game, but what is it? And why? And how? Oh, look, Sally Field is in it!

Forgive me this flippant and unhelpful log line, but I don’t want to talk about what it is or isn’t, because the show itself is an unfolding and ongoing rumination on that very question.

Jason Segal wrote this series, based on a documentary about the actual game that was played in the early aughts, and if that sounds awfully meta, let Jason hold your beer. Just a cursory websearch will show that the game/documentary/TV show was a kind of smart mob/art installation...I think you should trust me and watch the show. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more meta-fictional/existential thing, especially on television, ever in my life.

Segal plays one of his typical characters he writes for himself; that guy who’s pretty helpless and at the end of his rope. That’s not a dig, either. He does one little thing different in his daily routine and that random act unspools into this communal game experience, and that’s when he meets his fellow-game players and teammates: an older woman with a very sick husband, a tortured genius who is a little bit on the spectrum, and a trans woman who is struggling with fully embracing herself. It sounds like a downer, but here’s the thing about it; all four of these people want to do something different. They want to change, to grow, to move on, to open up, and that’s what this fascinating, visually interesting series does, boy I tell you what.

Dispatches From Elsewhere came out in 2020, but everyone was too busy baking bread to pay attention, I guess. That or not as many people are watching AMC as I thought. I sure missed it the first time around. That’s a real shame, because I could have used it in 2020. We all could have.

It’s an arctic winter weekend for half of the country. Those of you who are sheltering in place and are fresh out of sour dough starter might want to give this ten-episode show a shot. Dispatches From Elsewhere is surreal little gem that hits all the right notes and has something to say and it’s something we all really need to hear.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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It sure as shit wasn’t this.

I think now’s the time to start reaching out to some of those people you blocked a few years back and ask them, “Was this what you were hoping for?” I’d love to know the answer to that question.

The Stories We Tell (and Hear)

It’s a bit ironic that the thing doing the most damage to our collective psyche is a thing we willingly let into our lives and consume it in voluminous quantities. I’m talking about Media, in all of its clever forms; Big, Social, Alternative, Legacy, and so on. It doesn’t matter what you stick in front of it. We’re talking about the same thing: a crafted narrative to convey facts, information, feelings, in such a way as to entertain and instruct. For so long, from Boomer to Millennial, we thought of “media” as The TV, maybe The Radio, and of course, The Newspapers. There were books, comics, magazines, etc., but they were secondary to the institutions of Print Journalism and Television Journalism. They were undoubtedly the “Big” in “Big Media.”

One of the things about these outlets was that they were all self-contained enterprises that had standards and practices in place. There were certain words you couldn’t say on the radio. News stories had to have verified sources, the more, the better. Some things could not be shown on TV. There were regulations in place and fines for infractions.

I may have lost some of you with the word “regulations.” It’s a trigger word for a certain type of Old School Republican that has always advocated for making the government more efficient and fiscally responsible, and Regulations have always been the single greatest sin to ever be foisted upon the hapless entrepreneurs who were only trying to make the world a better place through market domination by way of reckless and unchecked capitalism.

I think these people are, at their core, idealists. Libertarians and Communists have one thing in common: their entire political philosophy relies on people behaving the exact same way to one another, all of the time. It’s a better thought experiment than a practical system of government. Communists have never managed to solve the “But what happens when the people handing out bread in the bread lines decide to start skimming?” problem that has always seemed to follow such regimes. Corruption seems to be a baked-in component. And Libertarians think that if there are no real laws, we’ll all just decide, out of the blue (because we aren’t teaching people; that costs money) to just Do the Right Thing and we’ll be fine.

Quick question: you’re driving on the highway. You pass a sign that says Speed Limit 75. It’s a straight stretch of road. What do you set the Cruise Control to? 75? Or do you know that you can drive as much as ten percent over the posted speed limit and the highway patrol won’t stop you because the fine isn’t large enough? If we can’t even adhere to a posted speed limit, what do you think a minor government official will do with a lot of money in stacks on the table (in a room where there are no cameras) if given the chance?

Anyway. Media is omnipresent in our lives. We are walking around with a flatscreen TV in our pocket right now. The hit song of the week is just a pleasantly worded command away. When you’re bored, there’s podcasts. To blow off steam, we play Fallout 4. For that long daily commute, there’s audio books. Twitch. Instagram. Facebook. We never have to have an original thought ever again, thanks to the proliferation of media.

There was a time, prior to 2001, when overexposure to Media was a concern. Kids, they felt, were too susceptible to its siren’s song. They thought comics were a contributor to “juvenile delinquency.” Parents groups were particularly worried about the effects of images of violence on young impressionable minds. So, they did what people used to do: they started studying the problem as they understood it. And scrutinize, they did. They ran experiments. They looked at recent historical phenomenon, such as the use of propaganda during wartime.

And the children! Oh, GOD, the Children! I can’t confirm this, but I’m willing to bet there have been more clinical studies about media and the effects of media consumption on humanity than any other modern convention, except maybe warfare. It’s a close second if it’s not number one.

We know what consuming too much media can do to an adult brain and a child’s brain. TV, movies, video games, the Internet, social media, etc. We have all of this data, backed up, fact checked, peer reviewed, hundreds of thousands of pages. It’s been written about in academic journals, spun out into self-help parenting books, regularly covered in magazine articles, and taught in colleges. And it’s still being studied. We’ve boiled it down to a key observation: too much media, regardless of form or function, is bad for us.

Kids brains are undeveloped until they reach puberty, when their brains rewire themselves in the process of growing up. Those rewired brains don’t snap back to normal until the early twenties. Ever look back on some dumb stunt you pulled in high school and say to yourself, “Dear God, what was I thinking?” You weren’t. None of us were. Not with a normal brain.

That’s why we gotta protect the kids! They need wholesome entertainment! With messages and social studies! And no more advertising directly to the kids, because they are young and easy to trick. And movie ratings, so they don’t accidently see a boob and become a serial killer. TV ratings, too. Can’t have anything too adult-y on until they are in bed. That was standard practice in the 1970s.

Where are those watchdog groups now? Not the ones the government appointed; they are long gone. I mean, there’s all this hew and cry about child trafficking and baby eating and Right to Life, and people are protesting, marching, and banging away on social media in an effort to convince us that this is a problem and we should all be paying attention to it. And then they give their six year old a cell phone and tell them to play a game while Mommy talks to her hipster friend at the coffee shop.

You know this is bad for you. But, then again, some of you still smoke, so maybe that’s not the right angle to take, either. I do want to offer this up: all of the studies, the information, and the data, all of that is available to the assholes in power, and guess what? They know how to use it, too. They’ve weaponized that very thing that was a selling point when they first introduced “smart phones” and simultaneously removed all of the guardrails that kept corporations from doing, well, pretty much what they’ve all been doing for fifteen years now. Consider that it’s well-documented (again) that people need to hear a thing repeated ten times before they will retain it. We used to have to memorize the multiplication tables in school. I still have to sing some of the Schoolhouse Rock songs when I’m multiplying by 7 or by 8.

That’s just a fact of how our brains work and create neural pathways. Now, I know that you know that, but you know who else knows it? Everyone who has a job in media. That’s why commercials repeat incessantly, why jingles are short and catchy, and it’s why there’s always a set of talking points that gets distributed by people when they want to change a narrative. Like, for instance, a situation involving a government official and an unprovoked shooting that resulted in the death of an American Citizen. It’s funny to me how quickly the same phrases and invented vocabulary get tossed around by everyone in media, online, and in social media. It’s almost as if they want you to see that message ten times from ten different sources, huh? All the better to thumbtack that shit in your mind, forget about the video and the audio evidence to the contrary. For instance.

It’s time to start making some better choices for our health. We know the effects of long-term exposure to media on the human brain. It’s one of the most studied things on the planet. We especially know what it does to children’s brains. We have hard data to back it up. And yet, parents come to my movie theater and take their six year old into an R-rated horror movie, saying, “Oh, he watches worse than that at home all the time.” That’s not the flex you think it is, Ma’am.

But God forbid a somewhat-famous boob should hit the screen; oh no, that’s obscene! How can you enjoy all of that bloody violence, swordfights and bullet time shootouts when there’s a naked boob loose in the world? They won’t hesitate to shove a phone into their kid’s hands to keep them quiet. And never mind those parental controls; your middle-schooler is protected from Pornhub only as much as the least-parented child in their homeroom.

Either there’s stuff we want to protect children from experiencing until they are developmentally able to handle it, or there’s not. Either we find a way to accept the truth, if not the reality, of a given situation, or we don’t. Either we figure out a way how to obtain and agree upon good information we can use to make informed decisions with, or we give up more and more of our core identity to the notion that we are better off talking to ourselves and our thoughtfully-curated and algorithmically-engineered media feeds and idly wondering why things feel so wrong and off-kilter that it must be magical shape-changing lizard men and not the human assholes currently dismantling our government.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: We’re still playing catch up here, so please be patient.

The Last Frontier (AppleTV+)

A US Marshall in Alaska finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place when a plane crashes, releasing Federal inmates into the wilderness, threatening his town and the citizens, even as one particular bad guy is being hunted by the CIA in the middle of the chaos.

I put this one off for a while because of Apple’s One Episode a Week policy, and also because the guy behind this show also created The Black List, a series that only works if you think of the FBI as the Keystone Cops by way of Chief Inspector Clouseau. I’m happy to report that this series seems to have corrected that oversight.

The Last Frontier takes a comforting chestnut of a story (escaped convict has to be found before he kills again) and bends it neatly on its ear. The familiar characters are present, like the boring local cop that everyone likes, the dumb kid, the alcoholic world weary agent who’s seen too much, and so forth. All characters we’ve seen in an incalculable number of procedurals and cop shows. It’s that familiarity that draws you into the first two episodes and it provides a neat shorthand to get us all up to speed. We know these characters already, right? We’re watching this to see what happens next.

What happens is, one by one, our expectations are dashed as each character reveals their true nature and we find out no one is who they seem to be, except maybe for the rogue CIA asset that is imbedded within the larger plane crash and mass escape. We learn pretty quickly not to take anything at face value, especially what we think we know about the characters.

There is also a lack of veneer on this show that feels like they are trying to compete with True Detective in some ways. While lacking some of the bleak tone and nearly-mystical bullshit, the violence is handled without cinematic flourish. There’s a fight in the first episode that is riveting because the guns don’t make majestic, echoing explosions when they fire; they go pop-pop-pop and you can see stray bullets firing wild, because these people are panic firing, and with good reason. It’s a terrifying brawl because it looks and feels real.

I’ll repeat it for the umpteenth time; Apple is the best streaming service for the money right now. Their content feels more like HBO circa early 21st century, before the mis-merger-machinations. You won’t miss it if you cancel it and subscribe to Apple instead. Then you could binge The Last Frontier.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

All is not lost. We think we’ve found the perfect solution to our problems. As a resource, there’s few things more precious than land. And, as Lex Luthor cannily pointed out, “people will pay through the nose to get it.” Especially if it’s beach front property. Therefore, the NTAB is officially declaring war on the Independent Commonwealth of Papua New Guinea. There’s a ton of oceanside real estate, just begging for development, and after we’ve razzle-dazzled up the place, we can establish a forward landing to push on to our next land expansion target: Australia! But I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first. You are officially on notice, Governor-General Bob Dadae, we’re coming for you. After all, if America can do it, why can’t everyone else, too?

Birthday Week

Not only was Thursday Elvis’ Birthday (see last week’s newsletter) but Tuesday night found me in Dallas (doing my side-hustle) and hanging out with my other brother from another other mother, Weldon, and his birthday was something of a to-do. That’s how I ended up in a bar called The Nines in Deep Ellum, during their regular Karaoke night, with the whole bar wishing “Uncle Dub” happy birthday. This week’s proof of life features a barrel-chested middle aged man singing one of his three and only three go-to songs when he finds himself in a sudden Karaoke situation. I’m only sorry we didn’t get any footage of me singing The Gourd’s version of “Gin & Juice.”

If you are a Friend of Weldon, feel free to wish him a belated happy birthday—he’s 63 now!

Here’s photo of us at the Heritage Auction’s Christmas Soiree. We wore hats. That’s how you know it’s fancy.

In between all of the birthdays, we found ourselves in Plano, at a Tex-Mex place called El Norte. This is their Pork Montana, so named because it’s the same size as the actual state. Look at that Flintstones bone sticking up—that’s a pound of pork shank in a chipotle barbecue glaze that is sweet and hot and smoky and OH GOD I get the meat-sweats just thinking about it. It’s the kind of thing I can only have once a year, under special circumstances, because, just look at that damn thing.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: I wrote this article last year but for some reason decided not to run it. Probably because I had written so much about it in days gone by that I didn’t want to beat an already dead horse. It’s also really long, which isn’t surprising but my hesitation was borne out of the feeling that I’d talked about this stuff recently...then I remembered that it was six years ago because time has very little meaning for me these days.

I think it’s a pretty good observation about last Summers’ Fantastic Four movie, which is now on the streaming for those of you who have been waiting. We could all use a distraction from the North American Pre-Apocalypse, however brief and nonsensical.

Intentionality and The Fantastic Four

Janice and I were watching the documentary of the Roger Corman Fantastic Four movie, Doomed!, as it seemed very prescient, considering we had recently watched the latest and best Fantastic Four movie. It’s a good documentary, because it gets into the sordid details, talking about what happened with the film and why. They don’t come right out and say it was a leveraged bargaining chip, affixed to a larger deal, but you can read easily between the lines. Everyone stops just short of saying something actionable.

I was struck by the actors, all of whom went on to do other things, lamenting that the movie never got released. With straight faces, they all alleged it would “sell like hotcakes” if they only would release the film, maybe with some new CGI effects...you know...a DVD release... They all seem like very nice people so I will simply emphatically disagree with no acrimony whatsoever.

That film, that dodge, that hustle, wasn’t the worst super hero movie ever made, because it couldn’t be. They all admit they were doing the absolute best they could within the constraints of the budget. And I believe that they were all working to the outer edges of their craft and their talent, for a comic book movie made in 1993, and if nothing else, they were sincere and they really tried their best. For that alone, it’s not the worst.

But it’s not a good movie. And it would have been another failure of Marvel had it come out during the early 90s. It would have followed on the heels of the Incredible Hulk TV movies (with Thor and Daredevil) , the Hasselhoff vehicle Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, and the films that did get a theatrical release, The Punisher, and Captain America. All of which sucked, by the way.

Dolph Lundgren as the Punisher wasn’t terrible insofar as his acting abilities went (especially at that time, with what they were doing in the comics). It’s just that when you take the Punisher skull off of the Punisher, you have made a new Death Wish movie, basically nothing more than yet another “grieving guy with a gun” movie that was a grindhouse staple since the 1970s. How hard would it have been to put a skull on his T-shirt? Or how about Captain America, with his big ol’ frisbee shield, and rubber ears on his rubber cowl, and that Italian Red Skull, and all the rest of that terribleness? I know that we’ve all heard by now about this mythic director’s cut that somehow suddenly gives the movie so much more depth and gravitas and meaning. That may well be true, but considering the movie that did make it out of that production, it would have to be depth equaling the Grand Canyon and weight comparable to our own moon.

It was embarrassing. If you were reading comics in the 1980s or 1990s and you drove yourself to the comic store to get them, you had to contend with someone in your life giving you shit about liking “that kid’s stuff.” Maybe you didn’t get pushed into a locker, but either your friends, or the girl you were dating, or your mom’s new boyfriend Chuck, or whoever it was, whenever they caught you watching a TV show or reading a comic, they felt the need to get a little jab in.

By the 1990s there was ’78 Superman and ’89 Batman, and not much else. It was bad enough having to sit through Richard Pryor in a Superman sequel, but at least everyone knew who Superman was. Between the years of 1966 and 1990, the default setting for super hero movies was “campy.” You all know why.

To make matters worse, movies and TV shows were always hampered by the technical demands of a comic book movie. To make Superman fly in 1978, they pulled him up into the air about 30 feet or so, on really thin wires. No CGI. All practical shots (not counting the bluescreen shots, of course). Thankfully, Hollywood has been trying to fly in movies since the beginning of motion pictures, so there was no starting from scratch for the special effects department working on Superman.

But wall crawling? Web swinging? Multiple mechanical arms capable of supporting a man’s weight? It’s so easy now to envision a computer-generated solution for any super-heroic challenge, but prior to The Matrix, we had no idea what a super hero movie could look like. There was no cinematic language in place, which is why most super hero movies from 1940 to 1998 were really hit and (mostly) miss. We only knew what we didn’t want it to look like. We had lots of bad examples to choose from.

In the sub-culture of Comic Books, the 1980s and half of the 1990s were all about us taking ourselves way too seriously. Comics were suddenly “relevant,” and “mature,” and they were talking mostly to people who’d grown up reading them. Batman: the Dark Knight Returns is a great story, but if you were appropriately steeped in the world of the Batman Family, it hits really hard, and intentionally so. Watchmen relied on us readers being in on the joke, knowing the cliches and conventions, etc. Moore comes right out and says as much with the climax of the story, going so far as to reference Republic serials.

There were others, too: Love & Rockets, Concrete, Epic Illustrated, American Flagg! and so many more, all trying to say something different, take the focus off of brightly colored capes and cartoonish villainy, you know. It was the age of the graphic novel, and how mature and grown-up did that sound? Some of those didn’t even have super heroes in them! Dear God, what’s next? Bubble gum in our schools?

Meanwhile, in the real world, every time the Ramada Inn out on Loop 340 had a two day comic book swap meet, the local news would send the reporter who was least likely to “get it” out to interview the one guy who showed up in homemade Klingon armor, with a lobster tail scotch-taped to his forehead, because that’s good TV, right there. The lead-in would always be some variation of “Pow! Zap! Comics aren’t for kids anymore! This weekend, our roving weather girl Cicily Windblown went to see if any of those comic books in your basement are worth a fortune. Cicily?” Cut to Cicily in her rain gear, inside the banquet hall, smiling with panic-filled eyes as she stands in front of a horde of dorks making goo-goo eyes at her...you get the idea.

It’s into this environment that the money-grubbing executives looked at Corman’s Fantastic Four movie and decided to shelve it. If it had been good enough, they would have released it somewhere even if it was a straight to VHS situation. The problem was that it looked like a fan film. I think considering the guerilla tactics they used to make it, that’s a fair assessment.

I hate that it was made under false pretenses, and that some folks had to put their own money in to finish it. That sucks. It should never have progressed that far. But if that movie had been released at that time, with Tim Burton’s Batman movies in the Zeitgeist, just after Jurassic Park was released, it would have been the butt of every joke at San Diego Comicon. It would have destroyed Marvels’ chances at making any other future movies.

That’s why the three 20th Century Fox FF movies were such a disappointment. Technically, yes, they were better, even if I didn’t like either version of the Thing (but I loved Chiklis as Ben Grimm). The Human Torch’s fire wasn’t great, but it was fire. Every other special effect was doable thanks to CGI, morphing, and so forth. No, the look was fine. It was the story that was the problem.

Super hero movies, back in the day, were risky. They were expensive to make and they were perceived as kiddie fare, unless you were talking about a handful of characters who, even then, had been around for so long that they were a part of the larger culture, i.e. Batman and Superman. Every other character had to stand or fall on their own merits, and despite some people insisting that Marvel characters were just as well known, Hollywood wasn’t convinced.

I won’t go so far as to suggest that all of Hollywood is a Superstitious and Cowardly Lot, but I will say that, in aggregate, Hollywood is conservative, feckless, and risk-adverse when it comes to trying something new, and they always have been. So, when they have a chance to make a movie about an untested property that also comes with a hefty price tag, they like to hedge their bets. Don’t plan for three movies. Plan for one movie, and make it a good one, because you may not get a chance to make another. That’s how Doctor Doom ended up in the ship with the Fantastic Four when they go into space. That’s why we got a whole movie about the Silver Surfer, who is quite possibly the most banal and boring character in the Marvel Universe, and Galactus was reduced to a menacing space cloud. Or any of the other seemingly-random shortcuts, cheats, and checklist beats that Fox routinely used for all of their super hero movies.

The Fantastic Four isn’t the easiest Marvel property to work with. They have a different structure and dynamic to their stories, and it doesn’t line up exactly with modern super hero movies. They were always more rooted in pulpy science fiction adventure, and the best of those stories embraced that idea; big Kirby-Kaiju monsters, subhuman molemen under the city, cosmic entities from space, and all that kind of thing. Great for comics, I promise you, but challenging as hell prior to 2000 if you want to make it into a movie.

There’s so much comic book baggage attached to the FF that trying to figure out what to show to a willing, but uneducated audience can be overwhelming. The instinct might well be to default to what you know works. In Hollywood, this is a tried and true tactic, one we see all of the time in every genre of film. Put all of the eggs in one basket. And get a romance in there, by any means necessary. Gotta have a happy ending, after all. Have everything be self-contained within the confines of the single film. If the hero and the villain can share an origin, it’ll give them a reason to fight, and make the audience thing the story is more profound. It’s Super Hero Movie Formula Template. Just plug in the proper names like a really expensive Mad Lib and voila! Movie script!

That’s not to say that a more accurate FF movie couldn’t be done, because they just did it, with minimal tweaks and adjustments, certainly no more egregious than anything else in the MCU. And I would submit that I don’t think it could have happened without twenty years of super hero movies before it, and not just “super hero” films like Darkman and Conderman, but in the earlier sentiment from Kevin Feige, a science fiction disaster movie with super heroes in it, kinda like how Ant-Man was a caper with super heroes, and Guardians of the Galaxy was space pirates with super powers, and so on.

It’s true that we’ve seen an outsized emphasis on Marvel movies and DCEU movies in the 21st century. If you’re sick of hearing about it, I get it. For what it’s worth, I don’t want to keep seeing these multi-year build ups to these grand events, either. That one time that they did it was good enough for me. No need to try and repeat it, or worse, top it. I’d rather see some new stuff set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that looks and feels different each time. I also want to see team-ups and cameos like they’ve already been doing, only more so—with the right movies and characters.

You all know (because you’re wise beyond your years) that not every Marvel character is a headliner. There’s ranks. A-List, B-list, and so on. And all comic book fans know, Moon Knight ain’t no Batman, but he is pretty damn cool, in small doses. I’m ready to see them do some mixing and matching. I want smaller projects to come out as a series, and the bigger characters, like the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men, get a movie or two so we can see them larger than life. Marvel Team-Up. Marvel Two-in-One. Only, you know, with Tom Holland and Ebon Moss Bachrach.

The key is always story. It comes down to telling a good story, with characters you recognize and presumably like, in such a way as to convey a sense of wonder. I’d argue that the Marvel movies, by and large, have done just that.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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If you’re just joining us, welcome to the Bunker! Pull up a seat and enjoy clean, filtered water as we watch the collapse our beloved institutions at the hands of mutants, brigands, thieves, and assholes. If you’re a returning contestant, welcome back! Hope you survived the holidays. Let’s all keep our collective heads on a communal swivel as we see what fresh, new, piping hot indignities our Political Heroes foist on us next.

Making No Promises

I’ve been advocating for blowing off New Year’s Day in favor of Elvis’ Birthday (January 8) for some years, now, but it’s never quite taken off. The biggest selling point for this idea was to swap out New Year’s Resolutions for making a Promise to the King because, psychologically speaking, you’d lie to yourself every single day of your life, but you would have to be some kind of monster to break a promise to Elvis. And all of this worked very well, until around 2017 or so when the wheels came off and all that we’d come to hold dear in the 21st century turned on us like feral cats. It’s real hard to “focus on myself” when the world is on fire.

Not that self-care should go out the window, and that’s where I’m coming from. This year, I’m making one change for myself and you should, as well: consume less social media. We are miserable and tired and amped up and scared and angry and all of the blame for that can be laid at the feet of these apps on our phones. A lot less of that can only make things better.

We don’t have any time or space to think for ourselves anymore; it’s by design, you know. Algorithms that keep us engaged and try to hold our attention for as long as possible. You know, for the ad revenue. That’s why inciting and inflammatory content is constantly shoved at us, whether we want it or not. And you’ll eventually click on something; you know you will. We all do. And ten minutes later, you don’t feel any better. You probably feel worse, not the least of which is because you knew better than to click on click bait, but here we all are.

Do you know what those eyeballs of yours are worth to a content creator? Ten cents. Wait, not quite. YouTube takes 45% of the ad revenue. Your vague discomfort and slightly elevated blood pressure from the rage the video induces is worth five and a half cents. That’s what we are reduced to. For ads.

If I gave you a nickel—hell, if a gave you a dime—would you let me punch you in the stomach? It’s just a quick punch. It’ll be over with soon, and you really won’t feel it after the first minute or so. Wait, where are you going? Come back! If you let me hit you in the mouth, I’ll give you a dollar!

You’re going to do what you’re going to do, no matter what I say. And you are (theoretically) a grown-up with your own ideas of how much social media you really need to survive in the modern world. All I’m suggesting is that you take a minute to really think about where the stress in your life in coming from. It’s probably hitting you from more than one direction, and some of those things are hard-wired in and you can’t fix them. But Social Media? That you can fix. Consider it, is all I’m saying. What do you have to lose, aside from 5.5 cents?

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: this report is one, giant, spoiler-filled rumination on the ending of Stranger Things and Welcome to Derry. If you are planning on seeing either and haven’t yet, please don’t keep reading.

There’s a lot of people heaping praise on Stranger Things for a successful conclusion and I would count myself as one of them.

Back in the Twenty-Teens, no one was doing Stephen King adaptations, at least, none that anyone cared to watch or talk about. Then came the Duffer Brothers with their accurate depiction of Kids On Bikes in the 1980s, an experience most of us still vividly remember. But that wasn’t all Stranger Things did; the whole series is a big, wet, sloppy, open mouthed kiss on the lips of Stephen King’s literary corpus.

It’s weirdly meta; there were a lot of Stephen King movies in the 1980s, and they run the gamut from the sacred (Stand By Me) to the profane (Firestarter) But for every good movie we got, there were three or four stinkers, or worse, middle-of-the-road films, neutered by the studios for content or expense (or both), rewritten by multiple screenwriters, and sent to market quickly because of the ongoing horror boom at the time.

So it’s odd that so much of the structure of Stranger Things uses so much of the film language of those movies. It sets the tone right away with the opening credits, an homage to director John Carpenter. Some of the shots, the lighting, and even the set-up (kids on bikes, trying to figure out what was going on and avoiding clueless adults) are pure 1980s nostalgia (more on that later).

Now with thirty-something years’ worth of filmmaking in the rearview mirror, we are (again, theoretically) a more evolved audience member. Long form storytelling is a thing. We aren’t hampered by the MPAA. TV was enjoying its own Renaissance of sorts, if we count The Sopranos as the singularity we didn’t know was coming. Nothing was off the table.

It’s as if the Duffer Brothers had a big box of Lego’s from the Vintage Stephen King Collection and they dumped them all out on the table and said, “Okay, now what can we make out of this?” While it may not have been their sole intention, Stranger Things managed to redress some wrongs perpetrated on us who initially lived through the decade, reading Stephen King novels and sneaking R-rated movies on HBO.

We got a lot of craptastic Stephen King movies back in the day. I won’t list them all, nor their myriad of sins, for they are legion. A quick skim shows this to be true: George C. Scott playing a Native American CIA operative in Firestarter; a not-scary Pet Sematery movie that drags in the middle; the God-awful Maximum Overdrive (directed by King at his most cocaine-riddled); so many bad endings, bad special effects, and blasé adaptations. When the King adaptations were good, they were…as good as they could be given the day and age. When they were bad...oh Jesus take a knee. Never mind when people would pay King for the rights to a story and then make their own script anyway using only names from the novel. You know what I’m talking about. Not that The Shining isn’t good; it’s just not the same story, nor is it told the same way, with no attempt at fidelity. Kubrick fans love it. King readers, eh, not so much..

Stranger Things, then, was one giant “proof of concept” for a Stephen King style of storytelling in a long-form narrative. Nothing King ever played with was that original to begin with. Vampires, werewolves, space monsters, ghosts, creepy kids; he invented none of that. It was easy as pie to just file off the serial numbers to make “Girl with Psychic powers” and “On the run from the military-industrial complex.” No one gets hurt that way and no one brings their pre-conceived notions to their viewing of the series. Maybe it’s not fair to compare this show to other King projects, because it’s not a one-to-one equivalent. There’s other creative DNA in Stranger Things, too; lots of Spielberg, for instance, if we want to include The Goonies and Poltergeist.

I can’t prove it but I suspect that the finale of Stranger Things came about because King is famous for not being able to write satisfactory endings to his novels. Characters we like die, viciously and capriciously, in the service of the story. Again, not always a bad thing, but something of a signature finishing movie for King. The bigger the story (as in The Stand) the greater the chance that characters you like are going to get it in the neck before it’s all over. The various and sundry movies from the 1970s and 1980s, to their credit, tried to get that right. Bullies were punished, and the main characters left more or less intact, which was better than everyone dying, but after sitting through a butchered version of Children of the Corn, it was just heaping insult onto injury.

Be honest now, you were handicapping the final line-up, weren’t you? I had Steve, Eleven, and Hopper down as all making heroic sacrifices to save the others and getting cut down for the effort. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Steve didn’t hit the pavement. I may have cheered, despite that rescue scene looking EXACTLY like the kind of scene that would have been added in post because a focus group said his death made them sad. The thing is, we like these characters. They are nearly perfect encapsulations of who we were (or thought we were) in the 1980s. You might have been friends with a Mike, or you may have been a Dustin. You were probably a Dustin, weren’t you? Given all they had been through, it just didn’t seem right to have a total party kill, did it?

We got those multiple endings, think, because it not only shows them growing up, maturing, becoming other people, but it also put a period on sentence. The End. Over and done. I’m not saying we won’t get another series, maybe even set in the Hawkinsverse, it won’t be the continuation of this story. I really like that, given how much they managed to pack into five seasons of 8 or 9 one hour shows each. And to go out as we came in? Perfect. The whole series was unapologetically rpg-adjacent from the beginning. The campaign is over. Time for a new game with new players.

One final note about the nostalgia. Yeah, it’s an 80’s love letter. But you know what it also was? As accurate as it could have been, and then some. Fewer things piss me off more than modern-day language being uttered in the period piece. That throws me right out of the story you’re telling, along with people reading made-up comic books that don’t exist and having details in the background that are wrong at a glance. If they were making a show set in the 1980s, it needed to be the actual, wood-paneled 1980s, and it’s not that hard to do. I get it if you want to use your own stuff for whatever reason, but whatever you decide to do, don’t half-ass it, because it will disrupt every Gen-Xer’s brainwaves when they see a thing that didn’t exist back then. We have creaking bones, but our minds are still sharp on all matters popular culture.

Which leads me to IT: Welcome to Derry. My God, what a pain in the ass. These two series are a study in opposites, made all the more galling since it was a prequel that seemed to avoid all of the old mistakes in order to make new ones.

Both of these TV series are structurally very similar. Something is abducting children and the town (and the police, and the government) want to know what’s happening. And both black ops government agencies are dreaming of using a monster to combat the evils of Communism. The kids in Welcome to Derry are trying to out-maneuver the adults, on bikes, and trying not to get eaten. Both establish very quickly who the hero kids are, as well as the bullies, and so on and so on. We know this.

See, there’s a thing about the novel IT. It’s my least favorite King book by a considerable margin. I liked The Tommyknockers better than IT, okay? If you know what I am talking about, then you know what I mean. IT was supposed to be an ambitious triumph. King just swung for the fences, at a time when he was on top of the world, and evidently, his editors were afraid to rein him in. That’s why the damn thing is a thousand pages long and contains in the middle of book with two narratives separated by 27 years, a third narrative, a massive and rambling overview of the history of Derry, Maine, that is, well, it’s a lot, especially for what turns out to be a space spider by way of John Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”

The novel IT was published in 1986. It was about adults who were kids in the late 1950s, when they came together and fought the monster the first time. The movie IT came out in 2017, which means that the kids in the story were running around fighting the monster in the late 1980s. How self-referential! And also, it worked like a charm. The first IT movie, anyway, was a watershed moment because they managed to make the book work by taking it completely apart and reorganizing it into two separate movies. That town history stuff in the middle of the novel got seeded into the two movies in unequal portions to give people just enough context to understand why that clown had so damn many teeth. Oh, and they rewrote the ending. I told you, King is bad at them, and this may have been his worst one yet.

Where, then, does that leave Welcome to Derry? Playing catch-up, is where. Both IT and Stranger Things are using the 1980s for a backdrop, so if you want to make a TV series about the history of Derry, you can’t use the nostalgia of the day. Why not take back into the early 1960s? And we can have kids! On bikes! Sigh.

Some of the historical townsite stuff in the novel wouldn’t do (for some unfathomable reason), so they made a checklist of elements that King liked to include in his books (bullies, injustices, terrible treatment of women and minorities, and so on), but instead of focusing on the grown-ups, we are back to dealing with the NOT-Losers club as they navigate the social politics of school bullies and assholes by being less of an asshole than their tormentors.

Kids die left and right, often in a spray of blood. Gore fountains out of severed appendages with regular frequency. We should care about this, but we don’t because we’re in a prequel, where all of the endings have been pre-determined. I was holding out hope that this series was somehow not connected to the new movies, but I was wrong. There’s a specific reference to IT: Chapter One for those of you who weren’t quite sure what you were watching. A reverse Easter Egg that doesn’t land because it feels shoehorned in.

Speaking of Easter eggs. Okay, I understand the appeal of putting movie posters on the walls of your monster kids. Mike had on in Stranger Things. One of the kids here has a couple. He’s got an original Creature from the Black Lagoon one sheet on one wall, and something else on the other. Let’s forget that the odds of that kid getting a Creature from the Black Lagoon poster in the 1950s were slim—it’s a small town, anything is possible, right? But then the other poster is a 1950s classic, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers…only, it’s not really that poster. It’s either a modern ‘tribute’ poster or it’s something the production team whipped up, but either way, what the hell, man?! Did the website you got the Creature poster from not have a poster for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers? I find that categorically impossible to believe.

THAT, right THERE, is the shit that makes my brain explode. Anyway.

I didn’t care about these kids. There was no buy in, apart from their initial identities, which were nearly identical to the Losers from the novel. Some substitutions were made that were largely cosmetic and served nearly the same purpose in the story. Instead of the girl being a “loose woman” she’s “nut house crazy.” Either way, adults don’t believe her when she says things, so it’s all good.

I didn’t care about the grown-ups. The series make the point, over and over again, that Derry is not like those cities in the South, but then they go and terrorize the black families anyway. The military brass takes a dim view of racism, but the town sheriff is all in. No N-bombs are dropped, but lynching is mentioned more than once. It really feels like they are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. All the more galling to note that Lovecraft Country, the Watchmen TV series and Sinners all covered this same cultural material, and did it much better .

One thing they managed to get right was the horrific elements. The monster and his nightmares are visually upsetting. They are intense and bloody and for what it’s worth, the horror parts is really well done. It would have landed a lot harder if anyone in the series was likeable in some way. Say what you will about King, but he at least made the effort to get you to like his characters before he killed them in a spectacularly indignant fashion.

The entire series is GNDN: It Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing. They beat back the darkness, sure, but it doesn’t feel like a victory. It doesn’t feel complete. If you’re going to bring the military to Derry on a monster hunt, make those stakes count for something. I think their biggest mistake was deciding to do an IT prequel in the first place. That paper boat has sailed, unless you’re going to tell a story set in Derry that has fuck-all to do with the thing in the sewers.

Welcome to Derry feels mean and dirty, and it’s not just because the Duffer Brothers already showed us how to use King’s novels and make a more resonant and meaningful story. As a prequel, set in the 1960s, there’s nothing to do but wait out the carnage until the monster gluts itself and goes back to sleep. And oh, yeah, let’s use young Dick Halloran from The Shining. Let’s put him danger, even though we know he lives to a ripe old age until he meets the Torrence family. It’s like they wanted to use all of this stuff, these building blocks of King’s storytelling, but they didn’t do anything new with it. It feels like Stephen King fan fiction, and not in a good way.

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Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

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On the Nature of Chickens Coming Home to Roost

I’ve been in a curiously uplifted mood ever since two of the loudest, most criminally insecure tough guys to ever open a Twitter account, Jake Paul and Andrew Tate, got the ever-loving-shit beat out of them in public, on TV, in the boxing ring. There are few things more satisfying than watching a pair of bloviating assholes get their clocks cleaned (and in one case, their mouth shut). In this age of Social Media, where the Id, Ego, and Superego are all conflated into “Hot Takes” on the Internet, it’s nice to know that some truisms remain intact; namely, if you keep making the kinds of claims these two nincompoops made a lot of money espousing, and if you keep running your mouth about it, you will eventually be called upon to test the veracity of those claims and statements, and a kind of Darwinian Justice reasserts itself. That’s not to say that a fair fight should be the sole arbiter of an argument, intellectual or otherwise, but presenting oneself as a He-Man Woman Hater of Strength and Cunning is just begging for a challenger to call bullshit on that.

I’d like to think that such an abject display of the lack of power and ability would be enough to cause a number of Angry Young Men in their sway to quit in disgust. I’d like to think that. Really I would. Hopefully the highlights reels will make the rounds in perpetuity, so that they are ubiquitous and easy to access. Then, every time they’re names are mentioned, someone not very connected to the Internet will say, “Who, you mean that dumbass that got his ass kicked after bragging for years about what a fighter he was? Or do you mean the guy who got his jaw broke in the ring after mocking an actual boxer?”

Traditions and How to Have Them

I was thinking about some of the cool stuff we used to do at the house in anticipation of Christmas. My mother, in particular, was particularly inventive and I enjoyed whatever new project we were tackling that year. Usually it was home-made Christmas ornaments; my preferred medium at the age of 7 was Baker’s clay, that flour-salt-water mixture that made a Play-Doh like mixture that could be molded and cut with cookie cutters, and then mom would bake them and they’d come out harder than bricks. Some slapdash tempura paint and voila! Ornaments!

Once all of us kids grew up, we pivoted away from stuff like that. Stocking presents were still a thing; usually small presents, little toys, snacks like red licorice and pistachios (if you were me). Some of those traditions came back once my sister had a kid, but by then we had different family dynamics. But some traditions have stood the test of time.

Food

My mom is a great cook; so much so that I always felt a little sorry for friends and girlfriends I would bring home that had mothers who weren’t particularly adept in the kitchen. I could see it in their eyes whenever they’d sit down to dinner. The star of the show was always the kolaches; my mother grew up with Czech relatives and she learned the dough recipe as a girl and it has served her well over the years. Mom’s kolaches are home-made, and once you eat a kolache that didn’t come out of the giant mixer at the donut shop, you will know that those aren’t really kolaches you’ve been eating, but a poor substitute. Mom’s talent is baking, but that’s not to say that the other stuff isn’t good, either. I learned how to cook from her.

Family Humor

I’m not talking about “all ages friendly.” I’m talking about the wildly personal and inappropriate shit we’ve been cracking each other up with all these years; the in-jokes and call backs to storied events that were three or more decades in the rearview mirror. I’d offer some examples, but you won’t think it’s funny; it’s completely situational and geographic in that you really had to be there. One of the family jokes we say so much that the origin was lost (not to me) was gleaned from this Long John Silver’s holiday TV commercial from the 1980s. It’s only thirty seconds; watch it.

To this very day, whenever someone compliments my mom on a good meal or whatever, they will say, “What did you do to this?” And my mom inevitably answers, deadpan, “I cooked it.” It always gets an appreciative chuckle.

Fun and Games

We always try to do something together, like family games, or themed gift-giving. This year was a White Elephant Gift Exchange, because there’s a point in your life when anything you could ever want for Christmas is either something you’re just gonna buy for yourself, or it’s too expensive for anyone else to buy for you. Sometimes both. There were only eight of us so it was pretty easy to manage and we all made an effort to try and crack each other up.

This was a huge get, right here. Paul’s father (whom we called Pappa) liked clowns and had a small collection of ceramics and dolls and what-all. This particular model was very much like one Pappa got for a Christmas present one year. The thing was this: squeeze the hand and the voice box in the chest would erupt in raucous, frenetic, nearly deranged laughter that ran for about thirty seconds, but due to the intensity (and volume) of the laugh, it seemed much, much longer, like half an hour.

Side bar: mom had her own noisemaker; a silver filigree noisemaker the size of a racquet ball, designed to stuff into your Christmas tree that would incessantly and loudly chirp—I don’t know if it was supposed to be the sound of turtle doves or French hens or what, but dear God, I sometimes still hear that thing in my sleep. BeeEEEEEeeeerrrrr ric-chick-ricricricricrickety REEEEEEEEK! Silence. Pause. “Is it over?” you’d think. And then it would start anew. I can’t do the sound any kind of onomatopoeic justice; you’ll have to trust me that this was the bane of the family for years. Mom took to hiding it and moving it around so we couldn’t get a fix on its location.

Anyway, Paul found a reasonable facsimile of the very thing his father used to use as an alarm clock on Christmas day. When he got it, the voice box didn’t work, but he found a tinkerer online who was actually able to get it going again.

Pappa worked the railroad as a career, so he was used to being fully dressed and ready to boogie at 5:30 in the morning. He’d wait until about 6:30 AM, and then it would get the better of him and he’d go from room to room, using the clown as a form of Reveille, pointing that clown right at us, sleeping soundly, and fire. I’m pretty sure it was the first time he ever heard me say “holy shit.” The niece and my sister’s husband missed out on all of that fun, so we had to recreate it, with stories and anecdotes.

We got into a card party game called Moose Master, and it was great fun, full of laughs and cheerful invective. We decreed that this would be in the rotation for next year. In the past, I’d brought board games to play with my brother and my niece, and I’m happy to note that now my niece is bringing me games to play during the holiday.

I wish we were photograph people; we don’t usually take pictures of these things, now that the niece is old enough to buy her own booze. I’m not sure why that’s not a real priority for us; my father was a semi-professional photographer, and he kept a camera around his neck nearly always. After mom remarried, we had a much bigger family, I had instant siblings, kindly grandparents who were all too happy to adopt me as one of their own, but we usually only took a picture or two if someone thought to mention it. Even now, with everyone having cameras on their person all the time, we are usually too busy having fun to reach for a smart phone.

If Christmas was four times a year, it wouldn’t be special. I do think we should all try to find some of the grace and charity and kindness that we seem to have an abundance of for two days in December and apply that to mid-July when tempers are flaring and the world is on fire.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

With only one episode of Fallout Season 2 available, it behooves us to pivot over to the other streaming service that starts with an A to talk about their latest offering. We, too, have noticed the trend towards apocalyptic and bleak science fiction stories in the last couple of years. It’s not fair to call that a canary in the coalmine, but it is worth mentioning that popular culture always holds a mirror up to the present day. Make of that what you will.

Pluribus (Apple TV)

A woman finds herself in a world where everyone is connected to one another telepathically, except for her. New from Vince Gilligan!

As post-apocalyptic premises go, this one is pretty interesting. Without revealing any details you wouldn’t have seen in the trailer, most of the planet enters a state similar to a hive mind (we think) where all of each person’s experiences and knowledge are shared with everyone else’s rendering conversation, art, drugs, and crime largely unnecessary. The florist can now perform open heart surgery because, well, everyone can, thanks to having access to every heart surgeon’s memories and knowledge.

There’s always some collateral damage, though; a number of people just died as a result, and there are a handful of folks for whom this wonderful gift didn’t take. That’s our POV character, a woman who is...you know what? Just see for yourself.

I love shows like this; conversation starters, the kind of television that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a human, the nature of identity, and who we are, not only to one another but also to ourselves. Bunker Ops and I had to pause the show once or twice, mid-episode, to discuss how we felt about the questions being raised. That’s good stuff, right there.

One of the things I like best about Pluribus is that it gets right into it; the premise is set up in the first two episodes. The storytelling is straightforward and also elevated. You don’t get spoon-fed anything outside of the set-up. Everything else is yours to make of it what you will. The hive-mind, for instance, is particularly sensitive to the energy from negative emotions. Is that a metaphor? It sure seems like one, but the jury is still out. As with most good science fiction and post-apocalyptic fare, it’s never really about the future, but rather the here and now, even as we are exploring the new world through the eyes of our POV character,

Based entirely on the strength of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, I will watch anything that Vince Gilligan wants to produce. Pluribus is a fascinating premise, one I’m happy to explore with the characters as they try to make sense of it all.

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Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”

Subscribe now