#but then I started reading the Warcraft novels and they became two of my favorite characters in the series

[raccooncityriots]

So now that I know there’s a new coin in the Dalaran fountain, I was going through the old ones.

I know it was just a joke, but I’m sure Anduin wishes he was back to being permanently 10 sometimes lol

Man, I know a lot of people feel a certain way about both Turalyon and Alleria, but the three of them are still my favorite trio/friendship/whatever in Warcraft, I don’t care do not @ me.

[lord-squiggletits]

I think I've explained this before on my blog, but for everyone who's new here, I have a massive hate boner for supplementary material and extra lore books/comics/etc that are paired alongside Transformers continuities specifically because of my bad experiences being into Star Wars and Warcraft as my previous fandoms lol.

World of Warcraft was a fucking nightmare because once the franchise got big enough, they started releasing stories in the forms of comics and novels and stuff. And the lore in these supplementary materials would be necessary to understand a lot of plot lines that happened in the video games themselves, so it was really annoying because if you liked Warcraft for the lore (as I did) then you had to either buy all of these novels and comics or go on Youtube and read summaries from people who had. And then ON TOP OF THAT the Warcraft writers regularly did retcons and rewrites to the lore, sometimes multiple times for the same characters/plot points/etc (I'm looking at you, Wrathgate), to the point that they basically released new lore bibles every expansion or every other expansion. And it was just really fucking annoying because while I would have loved the chance to have more lore about WoW that didn't fit within the storytelling medium of a video game, in practice it felt more as if Blizzard was just trying to get WoW lore enthusiasts to shill out more money for supplementary materials, but since their writing was so inconsistent that they made constant retcons anyways, it basically felt like a waste of money because why bother buying the lore bibles and caring about continuity when it would probably get retconned in an expansion or two anyways? And then this practice of publishing vital lore in supplementary materials made it so that if you did nothing but play the video game, you would miss out on a lot of lore that ranged from fun tidbits about fan favorite minor characters to entire fucking plotlines informing the entire premise of the new expansion. So basically you had to shell out money to be able to see the new lore that should've been in the actual game but instead was in some random novel that you probably don't care about reading because you're a WoW fan to play a video game not to read a bunch of random novels. And then the Blizzard writers would probably retcon things later so why bother?

And then Star Wars was infuriating because I became a fan during the Sequel Trilogy, which as we all know is a fucking travesty of shitty writing and lack of continuity. The ST is absolutely RIFE with vital information being contained entirely in supplementary materials with little to no way of inferring it just from watching the movies, which were supposed to be self-contained narratives in themselves. Do you want to know how and why Ben Solo destroyed the Jedi temple and became a Knight of Ren? You have to read a comic. Do you want to know how the fuck the Resistance recovered from being a single spaceship full of people to a functioning army by the start of TROS? Read a novelization. Do you want to know what Kylo Ren's motivations were as the new Supreme Ruler of the bad guys and what he's been up to between movies? Read some comics and novelizations. Do you want to know why there's a random fucking army of dudes keeping Palpatine alive on some planet in the middle of nowhere? Read a tweet from the LucasFilm twitter account explaining it. Like, the writing of the movies made no sense and there are HUGE gaps in the narrative that aren't explained in the movies. Instead of just planning out the storyline of the movies and hiring competent writers/directors who would make tight, well-written movies that explain everything to a casual watcher, they decided to spread out vital lore information in comics, novels, novelizations, and other random bullshit.

Do you see now why I hate supplementary material so much lmao? In my experience, when companies have a main story (be it a cartoon, a movie/movie series, etc) and split up lore into supplementary material, such moves are nothing more than a cash grab attempt at swindling fans of the franchise into shelling out money for story details that would have been shown in the actual main story if handled by competent writers.

It's why I hate stuff like TFA's Allspark Almanac and other supplementary materials so much. Sure, there's some stuff in there that lines up neatly with stuff that was shown in the actual TFA cartoon (I'm thinking of the Autobot prison camps that drove Waspinator insane and the way that the Jettwins were created by experimentation), but a lot of the fan favorite details that fans like to incorporate into TFA fanon don't show up in the cartoon literally at all???? Like how supposedly, the Decepticons used to be warbuilds and the Autobots were workers, and the Decepticons rebelled because they didn't want to be used as fodder for wars. You would have literally no way of knowing that just from watching TFA alone and that's why it feels like such horseshit to me; it doesn't show up in the actual TFA cartoon, so if you went through the trouble of buying/finding this Almanac then the extra knowledge you get from it wouldn't be reflected in the cartoon, so it's basically as if the lore doesn't exist and all you got was a bunch of random trivia to put in your headcanons.

I know some fans really enjoy getting extra material exactly BECAUSE it's headcanon material, but to me it feels more like a compensation for rushed/lazy writing at best and an outright money-grab at worst.

[tlbodine]

Essential Zombie Media

A thing that’s come up over and over again in early reviews for River of Souls is the sentiment that it’s not-like-other-zombie-stories. And that was certainly my intention. But you don’t get to make a good deconstruction without a healthy knowledge and appreciation of the genre you’re twisting around. 

So here is a list of what I would consider essential zombie media -- whether you want to write a story that plays it straight with the tropes, or one that twists everything around, or you just want something new to watch/read. 

Your own suggestions and ideas are more than welcome in the comments! Please reblog with your own favorite zombie book/movie/TV show/comic, I’d love to discover some I haven’t seen. 

The Origins

The generally agreed-upon first zombie movie is White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi, but I think it’s safe to skip it on account of both obscurity and some troubling racism. The Haitian-Voodoo zombi mythos and tradition is something best kept separate from our modern ideas of the walking dead. 

Instead, start your journey with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which starts codifying the tropes that persist well into modern media (including, like most modern stories, never using the word ‘zombie’). 

Then compare and contrast with the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend (1954), which is ostensibly about vampires but I think basically invented the modern zombie genre -- from the post-apocalyptic setting to the spread of undeath by way of disease vectors. 

Follow that up with Dawn of the Dead (1978), where George Romero revisits his Living Dead universe with the help of Dario Argento (if you’re interested, there’s a 2004 remake that’s decent, but unnecessary). And then, just to wrap up the trilogy, skip on ahead to Day of the Dead (1985). 

For extra credit, play the videogame Dead Rising (2006), which draws liberally from Dawn of the Dead and also allows you to beat zombies to death with literally anything you can find in a shopping mall (I can’t speak for the sequels as I’ve never played them). Dead Rising is far from the only game franchise to use zombies (more on that in a bit), but it pays homage directly to the genre in a way that many others don’t. 

The Zombie Renaissance

For a long while, zombies sort of fell out of fashion. Oh, there were some decent takes on the concept, like Re-Animator (1985) and Dead Alive (1992) but by and large zombies in the 1980s and 90s were played for laughs. 

But then they made a great big comeback, stronger maybe than they had ever been before. What happened?

Well, for one, they stayed close to the public conscience thanks to video games. Games and zombies are a perfect fit. Their shambling movement and slow, stupid behavior makes them a great choice for imperfect AI programming. They’re people-shaped, which makes them easy to animate, but they can be gross and deformed and scary, which makes them fun for your art team. And since they’re inhuman and dead, you can kill them in any way you’d like without feeling bad about it. 

Which is probably why zombies have been part-and-parcel of the gaming world since Entombed (1982) was released on the Atari. Doom (1993) was wildly popular, and just a few years later we’d start the Resident Evil franchise, which became both hugely influential as games and films. And lest we forget, Blizzard was giving us undead in Warcraft by the early 2000s, rising to greater prominence by World of Warcraft in its heydey (especially Wrath of the Lich King).  

But I’d argue that the number one single most important ingredient in the horror revival was Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later. 

28 Days Later was huge because it breathed fresh life (pun intended) into a genre that had gone stale. The monsters in 28 Days Later aren’t the walking dead at all -- they’re just people infected with a virus similar to rabies that makes them deadly (compare and contrast with The Crazies, both the 1973 original and 2010 remake, which deals with a similar concept. 

But thanks to being an excellent film with some wonderfully creepy-gross effects, 28 Days Later reignited fearful imaginations. It also introduced the world to the idea of fast zombies as an alternative to the usual shambling monsters. 

A couple years later, zombie content exploded. Aside from the Dawn of the Dead remake in 2004, and some Resident Evil and Doom film interpretations, we got Shaun of the Dead (2004), which is both hilarious and an exceptional zombie film. 

There’s also 28 Weeks Later (2007), a sequel to 28 Days (there is much debate as to which is better, I’m in the Days camp) and Planet Terror (2007), a personal favorite and one of the two films in the special Grindhouse double-feature. I’d also like to shout out Pontypool (2009) and, of course, the horror-comedy Zombieland (2009). 

ZOMBIE MANIA 

Probably nothing has been as influential in drawing zombie discourse into the public as AMC’s hit TV show The Walking Dead (2010), drawing on the graphic novel series of the same name. With a level of gore and violence rarely seen on network TV, a cast of memorable characters and an anyone-can-die narrative, it ignited a zombie fervor greater than anything we’d ever seen. 

The Walking Dead overlapped with a cultural apocalypse zeitgeist. Doomsday prepping started to go mainstream, and people started to plan their own personal zombie apocalypse survival plan. Hell, the CDC adopted zombie apocalypse language as a way to talk about real-world applications of survival knowledge. Zombies and survivalism now go hand-in-hand, for better or worse. 

No discussion of a zombie apocalypse is complete without Max Brooks’ World War Z (2007), which bears little resemblance to the film that shares its name. We should also make a shout-out for his more comedic companion volume, The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), which laid a foundation for what followed. 

For extra credit, play the TellTale Games: The Walking Dead (2012) and compare/contrast with the TV show and graphic novel. Then compare that with Train to Busan (2016), a Korean film that plays some tropes straight while turning others on their heads (it’s also one of my favorite films on this list). 

SYMPATHETIC ZOMBIES 

While the zombie apocalypse narrative took root and captured the imaginations of many, others started to look at things from a different angle. 

What if, they asked, the zombies were the heroes rather than the villains? 

John Ajvide Lindqvist, who you might know for the vampire story Let the Right One In, was ahead of his time with this on: Handling the Undead (2004) is a book that’s simultaneously heartbreaking and deeply unsettling in its portrayal of the dead returning to life and what that might mean to those they’d left behind. Compare and contrast that with the TV show Les Revenants (2004), which deals with a similar premise (there was an American remake, but I can’t speak for it as I didn’t watch it - seriously, just watch the subtitles and enjoy the French show). 

But not every zombie-protagonist story was so heart-wrenching. Look at Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010), and the film adaptation. There’s also Breathers! A Zombie’s Lament by S.G. Browne that is both hilarious and scathing. 

Follow those up with Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie (2012) and the comic book/TV show iZombie (2015), both of which feature pale-haired, witty female medical examiners with a taste for brains. 

And finally, a shout-out to The Santa-Clarita Diet (2016), a hilariously dark and over-the-top gross show featuring Drew Barrymore as a zombie trying to get her life back together.

[starcunning]

3. for X'shasi (can i ask for her?? if not tell me for Mitsu or Qara), 12. & 17. for a warcraft OC of your choice AND 19. for Soly!

Brevity is not my strong suit. Multitudinous answers (3 for all three characters, 12 and 17 for life in general but also Lisenne kinda, 19 for Solyaris) below the cut.

How did you choose their name?

Shasi’s name came late in her development, after I had already decided a few key things about her.

She was of Ala Mhigan descent, but perhaps had never been there.

She was a member of the Immortal Flames.

From the first two, it quickly followed that she was Ul’dahn. I thought about highlander, but settled on Seeker miqo’te as I actually have a Gyr Abanian highlander already (Halcyon Ritter; guess who she’s based on). It could have been M tribe, but I decided on an offshoot of the X tribe that had left the mountains for the Sagolii under Imperial encroachment, and tied her practice of red magic into that heritage. (Other than X’ruhn, I could only find one X tribe NPC, and she also had greyish hair, which is how Shasi’s visual look was developed.)

X is the Lynx tribe, and is pronounced ‘shuh’ or ‘she’. I thought immediately of the name Shoshonna, and liked it (X’shona is actually the first name I wrote down). But I wanted other options, so I looked at basically every name in the BehindTheName database that started Sh-.

Shashi got changed to Shasi because there’s only so many sh- sounds I can tolerate.

Her tribal name is X’shasi Khilo. Khilo is a name I got from the generator in-game but I definitely chose it because it’s pronounced Kylo, as in Ren, which probably illuminates a great deal about the personalities she grew up around.

The name she uses (and the one over her head in-game) is X’shasi Kilntreader. I imagine that tribal names can get sort of complicated or unwieldy in a military environment–it’s entirely possible there’s another Khilo already enlisted, and you can’t call him Lieutenant Tia; there’s dozens of those, so if you call him Lieutenant Khilo, what do you call Shasi?

Thus the adoption of an epithet. She used to have another one, probably, if she was Flames before all this started (I haven’t decided).

What do you call someone who walked through the Bowl of Embers unscathed?

And that’s how she became X’shasi Kilntreader.

Mitsuko is somewhat simpler. She was originally patterned after Solyaris Ashveil, my mage, so it was actually the surname that was chosen first for its lexical similarity. Ashikaga Mitsukane was a real person, as was Ashikaga Mitsusada, though their relationship was different. 光 (mitsu) means “Light,” which suited my purposes (since Solyaris was named for the Stanislaw Lem novel, also and more commonly transliterated Solaris, because solar, the sun, you see where I’m going with this), but I struggled with the second character for a while, and read the few pages I could find about historical names for Japanese women. 子 (ko, meaning “child”) was in use back then, but not as common as today. It had an aristocratic flavor, so I chose it to sort of underline her high birth.

Qara is even simpler; we have fewer historical Mongolian womens’ names than we do for Japanese women. Qara literally just means “black,” so I was staring down this Xaela I made with black scales, dark hair, and dark grey skin like “yeah, alright then.”

What have you found to be most difficult about creating art for your OC (any form of art: writing, drawing, edits, etc.)?

Realest answer: judging who to make it with.Still real but more acceptably so answer: Motivation. This is probably related to the too-real answer above. I do best when there’s a story going on for me to react to, but am very poor at creating that momentum or circumstance myself. This is why you definitely hear more about characters I’m actively playing at the time, because there are things to document and react to and explore. I don’t have that right now for anyone except Kazreth (so you can expect an uptick in bard-related content as her campaign really lets the rubber hit the road). I certainly don’t have it for my Warcraft OCs because after the disastrous incident last winter I pretty much stopped playing. SHRUG EMOJI

Is there some element you regret adding to your OC or their story?

The answer is largely “yes, for as long as it takes me to retcon it.” I find ways to distance characters from people or situations that I no longer wish to be prominent in their narrative. Sometimes this is by filing the serial numbers off (incidents remain largely the same, but names have been changed because I don’t really want to be tied to the other player anymore). Sometimes there’s an in-universe explanation (Valendar doesn’t remember certain traumas because they had a Thalassian re-educator treat him; those memories are the burden of his sister and best friend who hold themselves culpable). “Never happened” is hard because you get used to a character’s mindset and the shape it takes because of events; reverting that change feels impossible and inorganic to me. So I’ve never really used the nuclear option of “never happened,” I just move away from it and don’t let it burden me anymore.

You can still have regrets.

Lisenne used to espouse some pretty nasty homophobic rhetoric (“we need to reproduce; gay couples hinder that and are therefore selfish and immoral”). It seemed to make sense to me given the lore, and also given her self-hatred based on her own infertility. I felt like I was okay, given that they were of course not my OOC views, and that this opinion was put forth only by request. But some friends of mine who deal with comments like that every day in a real-world context mentioned how exhausting it was to also face that in their fantasy escape in a conversation I was privy to, and I felt like a fucking heel for not considering the stakes. So, like, guess what’s never come up again!

What is your favorite fact about your OC?

Solyaris (back when she was Solyaris Vespersong) wrote literary criticism about Thalassian poetry. Usually when she talks about works she’s published it’s in Magisterial journals. The litcrit stuff might actually be the only hobby she pursues for herself, even if her interest in poetry was initially inculcated out of a desire to impress someone else.

[pooktales]

Reflection on Chapter One: Hercule Lecoffret

Some funny notes about the first chapter of “Master Daddy: The Last Nightborne Godfather”. I’ll try hard not to spoil you on what happens, just tease you... but no guarantees. If you absolutely don’t want to be spoiled, then definitely go read it.

Read chapter 1

Not gonna work too hard on this reflection cause I always have a ton of writing projects I’m neglecting, but I’ll sneak and jot it down while it’s fresh, and it’s actually kinda funny, and awesome! to give ya’ll an inside look into what I was thinking for Chapter 1: Hercule Lecoffret of “Master Daddy”. There’s also a little writing advice in here about first chapters, too.

First off, I want to say... Fanfaction makes me feel electric. I love writing anyway and I just cackle when I’m writing fanfiction. I do this really to practice writing and for the joy of it. It’d be nice to get some recognition as a writer but, whatever. So lemme share about how I developed this. I mentioned on my Trixany blog that the initial concept started when I re-watched a Gankutsuou clip (you’ve seen the Count of Monte Christo anime right?) and I was like ‘Okay so... that guy is a Nightborne!’

Chapter One got re-written like, a bajillion times

I did my fangirl thing, became obsessed with the idea... Then it came time to write chapter one. If you write or you’re just starting to write (a lot of us gamer-roleplayers do) you’ll see how this is true... what I started as chapter one actually became chapter three which you’ll see go live on Friday 11/27. (And then I really enjoy writing long-form so I messed with all my chapters again, breaking them into about two parts each. It was a little agonizing when I crafted them so carefully and pay attention to pacing, etc. but it had to be done.)

Influences from the My Life for My Prince series

Originally, I wanted to do something similar to what I did with another fanfiction of mine “My Life for My Prince 4: Fall of Quel’thalas”, which is to have the freedom to leap around to any character and any timeline encompassed in the plot. That was fun and I loved the flexibility, but I learned some hard lessons from that fanfic. Not that it was ‘so successful’ or anything that people really read it or told me what it was like to read it; it’s just a fanfic like I said. Um, but in writing it, and re-reading it plenty of times, I felt like it did not flow well. It didn’t flow as easily as I thought it did. (If you’re curious and new to my stuff, I write a lot of ‘Kael’thas survived Outland and he’s the king of Quel’thalas with badass Blood Knights’ alt-universe fanfiction. In the fourth story I decided to go way back in time to let you meet his mother and show how something that happened to her affected the series timeline in crazy ways.) But, thing is, if you get to a point where you think you need to explain the timeline as a guide, it’s probably not the best setup. Hey, practice makes perfect. That’s why I don’t restrain myself, I’ve learned to write as much throw-away stuff, and as much fanfiction as I like, as long as it isn’t really interfering with other projects (don’t worry, it IS) and then re-read it as much as you can to study and see if you’re really achieving your goals as a storyteller.

I forgot what I was talking about

Oh, my whole point--it went much like this... I wrote chapter one. Then I wrote another chapter one with Thalyssra and later put Lor’themar and Silgryn in it. And then I decided to make sure they were there throughout the fanfic as a result. More on that later. And then, I re-wrote chapter one yet again, to focus on the um... shower scene mainly. There used to be lot of extra text about Lor’themar arriving at the prison and stepping out of a fancy armored carriage drawn by Hawkstriders, and then he talked to the chief investigator Heron Audobon who you’ll meet much later... and then he was thinking about Thalyssra and how much he missed her, and then he had some toast (I’m joking, there was no toast but I love Futurama references), but I cut all of that out because it was taking waaaay long to get to the point. I’ll be recycling Lor’themar’s pensive walk it in Part Two. And it’ll be much different, and feel really new. You’ll like it.

So we’ll be meeting each of the main characters in a fresh way for “Master Daddy” as we go, and then I took a page from The Romancer Turaho. (This fanfic is about a Tauren detective investigating... you guessed it, Kael’thas. Actually, this is holiday-themed and I’m about to pick it back up again so you should read it if you want something funny and messed to read about Kael’thas stealing Winter’s Veil... again.) and decided to enjoy writing things first-person too. But Lucien will always be at the center, and things will progress chronologically, day-by-day in his life at the start of this ‘incident’ he’s been jailed for. And as I said, originally, chapter one was something else. It was one of Lucien’s relatives complaining about him to the authorities. And this kid truly hated his uncle which was really funny.

Advice on writing first chapters: It’s okay to do it over plenty of times, throw it out, get new ideas

What I have now, that first page you’ve read/will read? That came from backtracking and wanting to frame the story a little better. The whole point is that Lucien is in trouble for a crime, big trouble, so we make that clear up front and ‘raise the stakes’ which is another writer’s strategy. That means, add Thalyssra, and we also push that most important part, that he’s in trouble for a crime, up to the tip-top of the story. But it took a long time to figure out that an interrogation scene was how I needed to do it. And he’s a sexy guy so, even though Lucien isn’t there himself, I made sure to do something... that something turned out to be letting the jailor talk about his tattoos and fantasize about him. Usually, I just listen to my gut and eventually several small decisions about how to probably frame a story at the start add up to a brand new presentation.

I’ve read somewhere that the first three chapters of a novel should always let you know two key things. First, what is this story really about? The main conflict should be clear. Second, all those main characters need to be introduced. Maybe they don’t have to actually have to be face-right-up-in-the-camera speaking their lines at the very start... For example, Darken Rahl in Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth series wasn’t sitting there at the reception watching Kahlan hate cheese, but we knew he was going to be there in the plot soon enough in the story. It’s been a while since I’ve read "Wizard’s First Rule”, one of my favorite novels, but it’s a good example of how flexible you can be with introducing main characters, as long as readers at least have a guide, a roadmap. Nothing so jarring that they feel thrown out of the story later or cheated if it turns out the main characters aren’t the main characters after all. I’m a little worried that will happen, but hopefully people are at peace with Lucien being the protagonist and Thalyssra and Lor’themar being more the muses or the chorus who usher us into this grand tale of a Nightborne villain.

What else can I say about the actual chapter one you’ve read or are about to read?

Shower scene. The um... flaming arsehole thing was something I thought about a long while and re-framed a lot before going with the way I presented it. I decided it was too compellingly gruesome an element to leave it out. It is very much the ‘bloody horsehead in the bed’ you encounter in The Godfather.

Thal’remar. I think Thalyssra was just interviewing Lucien’s jailor on her own initially but there were too many excellent connections with Lor’themar, and their romance, and also it occurred to me that he had experienced a rough imprisonment situation so that fit perfectly. Funny thing about that too--I had put this draft together with them ‘dating’ and at this interview because I was aware that the Warcraft fandom shipping them. And then Blizzard put an actual story on their website about them and I was just so pleased!

Silgryn!! Having Silgryn in there as well made me fangirl squeak every time I got to let him say something. Other than quest dialogue we don’t have a lot so I’m going to imagine some consistent character traits for him so he’s consistent, and feels real, breathing, in the fanfic. My favorite part with him in it was him... wait, his heroic comeback is in chapter 2. I won’t spoil that for you.

Goofy mystery story names. In the tradition of other mystery stories out there, some of the character names are ironic. Lecoffret means “coffin” in french I believe. Hercule, Hercules, giant dude... giant coffin? You can see what I felt needed to happen to that guy for how he ran Nighthold, Cell Block E. I also had Hercule Poirot on the brain since it was an investigation, and, well, as Hercule Poirot will tell you, he’s not French, he’s Belgian--but that came into it as well.

What’s up next?

See how the valiant Thalyssra handles Lecroffret and then how Lor’themar encourages her to handle the man himself, named for a saber’s sly grin. Whatever crime Lucien committed to get thrown in prison in the first place, I’m not sure if Thalyssra will ever let him get away with it.

[swipestream]

Sensor Sweep: The Destroyer, Almuric, Galaxy’s Edge, Thomas Burnett Swann

Fiction (Black Gate): There are guilty pleasures, and there are guiltier pleasures, and then there are the pleasures that have you wearing an orange jumpsuit and standing in front of a stone-faced judge with your hands and feet shackled together, wretchedly staring at the floor, unable to look anyone in the eye, so tongue-tied with shame and degradation that all you can do is whisper, “I just can’t help myself, Your Honor… I never meant to hurt anyone, and… I know it’s wrong, and… and, there’s no excuse… but… I just can’t help myself.”

That’s reading The Destroyer.

  Tolkien (The Prancing Pony Podcast): Season 3 is here, and we begin by welcoming Tom Shippey to The Prancing Pony Podcast! We discuss his classic works The Road to Middle-earth and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, and the remarkable story of his personal meeting with Professor Tolkien in 1972. We also talk about his new book Laughing Shall I Die, an exploration of the Viking heroic mindset and their grim (often inappropriate) sense of humor. Plus, the shocking link between Beowulf and a young woman searching for the perfect bowl of porridge.

  Publishing (Injustice Gamer): Galaxy’s Edge does a lot of stuff very much right. They started with a bang, filling a desire with their #starwarsnotstarwars postings on twitter, and marketing that as the overall idea of the series. The money they spend on covers is large, but clearly successful, as they get emails from new readers drawn in by the covers. They’ve even been spotted in a few physical bookstores, something few indie books get, at least before they get signed by a publisher. Their output is about a book a month, and while that’s great, all the books are by them, and start feeling the same after so many.

Fiction (Pulp Catholic): I’m rereading Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. For all my love of Burroughs, I actually have little exposure to his canon. I read Tarzan when I was younger and thoroughly enjoyed it. I finally read A Princess of Mars in the past five years and loved it. Among the pulp commentary I’ve read, it’s always Burroughs who most draws me – I love the idea of planetary romance and his is the granddaddy of the genre with the Barsoom, Venus, and Pellucidar novels (the last is an inner earth novel, but it’s really just planetary romance going in, rather than out, of the planet).

  Comic Books (DMR Books): In 1991 Dark Horse Comics published an adaptation of the Robert E. Howard sword and planet story, Almuric. This one shot graphic novel collects the serial that originally appeared in several issues of the Marvel magazine Epic Illustrated. It was written by longtime Marvel staffer and Howard scribe Roy Thomas and lushly illustrated by Tim Conrad. Later that year, Dark Horse commissioned a four issue follow up entitled Ironhand of Almuric.  Thomas remained on writing duties

        with black and white interiors provided by artist Mark Winchell, while Conrad provided four fully painted covers.

  Tolkien (Alas Not Me): The houses of lamentation just sound so KJV, and Dernhelm’s laughter is like something out of a Viking saga. (See Tom Shippey’s marvelous new book, Laughing Shall I Die: The Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings.) But it’s the juxtaposition of the two, and the Witch-king’s calling her a fool that has long made me wonder if there was something else Tolkien was playing off in this scene besides Macbeth. 

  Fiction (RRHorton): Thomas Burnett Swann was born 12 October 1928. He died in 1976, only 47, of cancer. He was an academic who taught at Florida Atlantic University, and wrote a significant study of the poet H. D. Beginning in the late 1950s he wrote a number of fantasy stories, and eventually a number of novels, including a glut in the last year or two of his life (some published posthumously), most set in a loosely connected alternate history/fantasy of the couple of millenia before Christ.

  Pulps (Rough Edges): This is a pulp that a friend of mine loaned me to read. The scan is from the FictionMags Index, since the copy I have on hand has a loose and considerably damaged cover.

The reason I’m reading this issue of HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE is because it contains a story by Frank Morris, “Location for Murder”, which is suspected of being one of the unidentified stories that Mickey Spillane wrote for the pulps before he became the best-selling novelist in the world. One reason Spillane’s name has been connected to this story is because of the by-line: Frank Morrison Spillane was his real name.

  Gaming (Walker’s Retreat): Late last week, the World of Warcraft team’s leader (Ion Hazziikotas) joined Blizzard Community Manager Josh Allen (aka Lore) for another Q&A livestream. The questions answered were already selected, meaning that answers were also likely prepared beforehand. Of course this community engagement went over with the usual grace and dignity, which means that it was a shitshow- obviously. (h/t to Taliesin & Evitel for the catchphrase).

  Gaming (The Nerd Mag): There are a lot of rumors about the Nintendo 64 Mini. Many of the people believe that ever since the companies started to release old school console like PlayStation 1 by Sony, SEGA also followed the route and announced to re-release the Sega Mega Drive Mini joining the retro miniature market. Nintendo 64 Mini just made its appearance online and which I think are just renders but who knows. You can judge by yourself.

  Cinema (RPG Confessions): I love talking about movies, both what they mean on the surface and what they are not saying deep beneath the crust. Talking about film is one of my favorite things to do. I also read a lot of film history books and try to keep up with the popular scholarship surrounding film studies. I’m not as deep in that as I would like—these past few years have made it difficult—but I consider it more than a hobby for me, and slightly less than an avocation. When I do write about movies (and other popular culture), I have three different approaches that I use.

Sensor Sweep: The Destroyer, Almuric, Galaxy’s Edge, Thomas Burnett Swann published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames