Bran the Blessed
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Posts posted by Bran the Blessed
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Still, original Hellblazer was around since before the Simpsons. For a run of 300 issues.
This is kinda embarassing for DC to be honest, and I never read any of the relaunches.....and even if I'd want to, the fact they relaunched it three times would make that a very confusing prospect.
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The Fatal Move and Other Stories by F. W. O'Connell, Irish language preservationist, clergyman and radio personality. The title story is about a fatal chess duel using metal restraints and an electrified chess board. If only it wasn't so brief and underwhelming.
The rest is even less impressive.
Posting a link to my full review in the somewhat naivé hope that some of you may actually read it and won't relegate me to having to just copy post it here every time : P
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/09/the-fatal-move-and-other-stories-by.html
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Finished Forty Years with the Damned or Life Inside the Earth by Charles Aikin.
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/09/forty-years-with-damned-or-life-inside.html
The Utopian subterranean sections of this book are so tedious they made me realise how Dystopias give you incident and adversity whereas Utopias give you people wallowing in their contentedness and pleasentry.
The Martian section of this book is the best, but the writing brings up a lot of weird, questionably or just plain silly things, apart from the fact that the main character, a run-away slave, turns out to not be black but an Arab and it's treated as a big revelation, which coupled with the guy going on about black people's "inherent sloth" and how even in the after life Black people are forced by universal law to make them want to serve white people.
It's just.....very weird and bad in a lot of places.
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Are you just starting with the New 52 era, John? Are you just talking about the main title?
Justice League Dark say John redebut in the DC Universe, starting with Peter Milligan also writing that book, with Milligan being followed by Jeff Lemire, and then J.M. DeMatteis finishing the book up.
New 52 series was Jeff Lemire (doing perhaps a career worst) followed shortly thereafter by Ray Fawkes.
Convergence series was next with Ming Doyle co-writing the book with James Tynion IV.
Rebirth series has been all Simon Oliver, so far.
How many bloody iterations has this gone through since the original book was canned ?
Seriously.
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If you want to know what life on Mars was really like, you should check out From India to the Planet Mars by Theodore Flournoy (1900). Flournoy was a psychologist who worked with Helene Smith. Smith was also a medium who was convinced that her visions of Mars were true. The book is written about the accounts of Smith. Smith was so famous that she was considered a hero by the Surrealists.
I'm more irritate that no one bothered to archive Avis Hekking's A King of Mars yet, as that seems to have at least some action going on in it.
Interesting suggestion though. Is it, to be frank, not shit ? Because all the spiritualist/medium fiction I've read thus far is either terribly slow paced, or drowned in an endless cesspool of spiritist jargon and gobbledygook.
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Finished reading Decimon Huydas (1906) by Sara Weiss, a narrative jotted down by a Medium convinced it was a real story of life on Mars by all accounts.
It's a bit too flawed for me to go into fully here, so a bit of shameless self promotion
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/08/decimon-huydas-romance-of-mars-1906-by.html
However I can say this: it's really not good, but has occasional glimpses of good that flare up only to be buried under tedium.
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The date on the copyright page is '82, so perhaps expecting him to have mentioned Throne of Blood or The Seven Samurai isn't completely unreasonable...
Is it a translation though ? I assume it would be.
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Akira Kuwasara's Something Like An Autobiography. Great read (he goes into a lot of often fascinating detail about how the Japanese film industry worked during the era of Imperial expansion and the second world war), but stunningly incomplete. He stops with a discussion of Rashamon and 1950, which seems a bit odd from a director who's probably best known for his films from the 'Fifties...
When was it written ?
Alternatively maybe he doesn't like talking about them ?
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Just read The North Wing by Lionel Sparrow. He's a somewhat forgotten Australian writer of Gothic short stories.
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.cz/2014/07/lionel-sparrow-1867-1936-unknown.html
Sadly most of these stories were never reprinted from their original magazine installments, aside from 3. The magazines themselves are also not digitised, which makes finding these things all the more complicated.
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Just finished the Famous Fantastic Mysteries edition of Richard Tooker's The Day of the Brown Horde. Am normally very reluctant to touch FFM reprints after buying an issue on the strength of it containing Even a Worm by J S Bradford, a novel I've wanted to read for years as the plot sounds intriguing, and one seems compelled to take other sources for granted given, well
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/even-a-worm/author/j-s-bradford/
However upon arrival I discovered that
A) The Bradford was only a very few scant pages, being whittled down to the length of a short story and even at double columns per page nowhere near approximating even a slight majority of the novel. I've not actually read the thing as I want to read the actual damn story some day and reading this abstract would take all the fun out of it.
B) The issue was easily found online for free.
After that spell of derpery, I only very hesitatingly turned to FFM again when I found that their publication of Tooker's novel runs at double columns for close to 100 long-ish pages, which I felt would be the most reasonable approximation I could get to the original. Of course I now find that there are some more or less affordable copies of the original, but I don't think a lot could have been left out given the amount of text present.
After finally getting all of that out of the way, it's an enjoyable enough novel I suppose. Am a sucker for a good prehistoric novel and this one was mostly good, though it never reached such pinnacles as my favourites of the genre (Wolf, the Memoirs of a Cave Dweller or even Longhead, the Story of the First Fire). Three quarters in, when the main character accomplishes his revenge, it feels a bit aimless and when the volcano erupts, Tooker seems to spend a bit too long describing the catastrophy, or prolonging the duration of the calamity a bit overmuch, but the grimmer turn the story takes in not giving you an unrealistic happy end at least helps to make this feel more believable.
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of course
Mind you she's always had a very short memory when it comes to herself.
And an extremely faulty memory as concerning most things, coupled with a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the possibility that someone who is 80 years old and has been taking medication to improve memory is misremembering something.
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And just like that everything's forgotten as soon as she needs help buying a new phone.
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Thanks. That's a philosophical text, then? Not heard of that one.
Well they are historical annals of an obscure period of Chinese history, at least obscure in the west.
However they also contain the momentously far reaching commentaries that have become sort of a sport, wherein the later commentators try to find the most startling and far reaching nuance between the lines of the most mundane and clear cut statements.
I had an example of this but forgot.
Oh and I think the Dionysiaca would fit the bill as an epic then too. Haven't gotten around to it yet, sadly.
Same goes for the Abai Geser, but I read some of it.
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If Christian's having the Baroque Cycle as a fantasy epic (rather than the historical SF epic it clearly is), I wonder if anybody would object to me putting in a big fat review (a la the one about Richard Morgan, above) about the Romance Of Three Kingdoms? This is, I believe, entirely free of the fantasy elements that bubble away just offstage in The Water Margins, but it's a huge fat four volumes of swordplay and huge battles in one of the most blatantly feudal of all history's feudal societies, so it might qualify.
I've a few other things to go through before starting in on that, though.
Would you be interested in an english translation of the Spring and Autumn Annals ? It's basically more just the dry annal sort of thing but with some amusing bits, and hard to find in english.
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i mean what you are describing is abuse by her.
Yes it is.
Didn't stop her from demanding I be the one to apologise yesterday.
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Just don't do anything for her anymore. It's a pretty simple solution.
You'd think. But it's not that easy.
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By the way, this is the movie I found by accident, It's only 47 minutes and it's subtitled in mostly legible English and how many other Soviet Sci Fi Animated films does one normally get to see anyway ?
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Just the first page, mate. When I went through the rest of the list I've seen about thirty of those, including several of the real stinkers. (I'm also wondering why Eve of Destruction isn't on the list, but let's not go there, eh?)
Never heard of that so I don't know how bad that one is.
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I've seen four of those on the first page.
That doesn't make me feel good, if I'm honest. (Though Hardware is pretty great, if we're honest...)
Four of out fifty is still good : P
And not all of these are bad.
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The Dolph Lundgren flick is called Dark Angel (or I Come In Peace if you're American), but the other doesn't ring a single bell, and it really does sound like something I'd remember if I'd seen any of it.
I found out about that movie via a 50 Forgotten Sci Fi Movies from the 90's list.S
Some interesting stuff there
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/forgotten-sci-fi/247782/50-forgotten-sci-fi-movies-from-the-1990s
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Grannie had me chucked out of her apartment today via police because I dared to come vacuum the place.
She'll try to pretend like everything's ok this time tomorrow, but I'm getting annoyed at her duplicity. I won't go into all that me and my immediate family do for her, as opposed to her other son and grandson who do exactly nothing but yeah, it still irritates me.
And for the record the argument started because I told her off for sneakily grabbing hold of and browsing the contents of my cellphone. That started her canning and whipping me with power cables in an effort to try and get me to leave, which I refused on the grounds that I had come to clean the place so she would not complain how no one ever goes to help her. That isn't true but she has a remarkably and suspiciously bad memory when it comes to what we do for her, as opposed to what she does for us.
She then used this accursed old people button to call the cops and have them tell me to leave, all the while playing up the "I'm a frail little lady" act. I wonder if she can find some other personal unpaid manservant to go and fetch her her perscriptions, go fetch her meds, make her shopping, clean her apartment, hang her laundry and go out in thirty plus weather on foot to get her cheap tomatoes out of Tesco.
Bloody ungratefull woman.
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Finished Cloud-Pictures by Francis Henry Underwood and decided to celebrate the occasion by bringing back from the grave my book blog.
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/08/cloud-pictures-1872-by-francis-henry.html
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I've decided to resurrect my book blog, in the hopes of finding some more attention than it did previously.
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/
The blog consists of two sections. One are the book reviews, the other being my associated project to catalogue weird and fantastic fiction out of copyright but not yet easily available online.
The following is the latest review:
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/08/cloud-pictures-1872-by-francis-henry.html
List of Supernatural and Fantastic Literature out of copyright but not yet available
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2014/07/list-of-supernatural-and-fantasic.html
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I guess this doesn't quite count but it's still interesting reading nonetheless.
Librarians, Liberals and Lesbians*
in Bring the Noise
Posted
Finished Paul Scheerbart's Na Prost today. Scheerbart is the weird German guy who kept writing bizarre science fiction and who was big into glass architecture.
It begins promisingly enough with three people launched into space in a giant bottle after the Earth gets destroyed by a meteor. But it goes down from there and becomes a collection of parables, allegories and essays that the people inside the bottle spend all their time trying to de-code.
Here's the full review if anyone is interested. Hint hint >: P
http://theweirdandwonderfulblog.blogspot.cz/2017/09/na-prost-phantastischer-konigsroman-by.html