kaleidotrope

Tuesday, huh?

Last night, I watched Die Hard: With a Vengeance. Tonight, I watched Cowboys & Aliens. Not exactly what you’d call a real feast for the brain on either count, but both movies had their (scattered) moments. The third Die Hard movie isn’t going to replace the first one on my list of favorites anytime soon, though I was amused by some of the casting. Particularly musician Sam Phillips as mute terrorist Katya. Her presence — plus that of Aldis Hodge (from Leverage) as a young boy — makes the movie seem a lot more interesting on paper than it actually is.

(Then again, Die Hard itself was based on a novel, which was a sequel to a book adapted to film in 1968…a film starring Frank Sinatra. So, on paper at least, Frank Sinatra starred in the prequel to Die Hard.)

As for the other movie…well, it does exactly what it says on the tin. There are cowboys, and there are aliens, and there’s a whole lot of stuff getting blowed up real good.

I spent almost all of a very rainy Tuesday working on the Kaleidotrope website. I think I’ll be ready to launch next Monday, with the first of four issues for the year, but I still need to do some work in the background to make it all hang together.

This day just makes me sixth

Today I watched the first episode of American Horror Story and The Hangover, both of which were rather disappointing. The difference, of course, is that I basically expected AHS to be bad, since the batcrap insanity of its awfulness was the main (and maybe only) selling point of the whole endeavor. I have co-workers who watch it religiously, but I don’t know that any of them would argue that the show is good. Tonally, the pilot episode was a little like if David Lynch had decided to direct a sitcom. Then again, I started to deeply appreciate the awfulness of last year’s Happy Town, so maybe I’ll continue watching. And rumor has it that when the show returns next year, it will be with all new stories and characters — some played by the same actors this year. So even if I absolutely hate hate it…

This is what I’m telling myself, anyway.

The Hangover, on the other hand, was just disappointing. For such a big hit, full of ostensibly funny people, it’s kind of a shambling, only sporadically amusing mess. I wouldn’t call it bad, but partly because it never really works itself up to be much of anything.

I also did a little work on the Kaleidotrope website, but I’m still trying to figure that out.

Wednesday is the new Friday

I went to work early this morning, which is something I like to do on those rare mornings when I can convince myself to wake up in time. An early arrival, to a quiet — and, this morning, still mostly dark — office, with a semi-leisurely breakfast in the break room with a good book, before getting down to the work day itself. And today, it was a shorter workday, with the office closing early for the Thanksgiving holiday, which is always a nice bonus.

Meanwhile, I also stumbled across this review of Kaleidotrope‘s fall issue. Lois Tilton of Locus didn’t love all of the stories — some she genuinely disliked — but she called the issue overall “surreal, fantastic, imaginative. Worth reading.” Which, y’know, is pretty much what I’m going for with every issue.

So, anyway, that was my…I want to say Friday, since that’s what it feels like, with a four-day weekend and Thanksgiving with family ahead of me. But I realize it’s still just Wednesday. Which makes the fact that it feels like Friday feel even nicer.

“This is too much madness to fit into one text!”

Let’s see, what did I do today?

I got a haircut. My standard practice of just letting it grow until it gets annoying stands. I could be wrong — I wasn’t wearing my glasses and didn’t do a thorough inspection — but I may have spotted some small amount of gray in the clippings. Hairs of dubious shades show up in my beard all the time, but I can never quite tell if what I’m looking at is some weird anomaly or a precursor of aging to come. Going gray doesn’t bother me — not quite, but almost, the opposite. Going bald, on the other hand, which I think is probably also in the cards for me — if I take an honest look at both family history and my existing hairline — well, I have to admit, the little bit of vanity I have towards my hair gets a little twinge at the thought. But I’m not quite there yet, and the mop I do have was in need of a trim.

So I did that. And I mailed several dozen copies of Kaleidotrope to contributors and subscribers. You really don’t want to know how much that sort of thing costs. Mailing to Canada is relatively cheap; mailing to the UK is remarkably not so. If you’d like to support the zine, and you’d like a copy of the current issue, can I suggest the slightly cheaper (for all of us) e-book copy? It’s a no-frills PDF, but for $2.99 you get almost 100 pages of fantasy and science fiction stories and poems. You can check out the table of contents, along with the cover art and story samples, here. And all the money goes to keeping me from going bankrupt in 2012…when everything I save by not photocopying and not mailing may just get eaten back up by the one cent a word I’m paying contributors.

I also bought some pants. Sometimes, you need pants.

I went for a walk. I watched the latest episode of Fringe. And tonight I watched Attack the Block, a genuinely entertaining monsters-from-outer-space movie.

And that was Saturday, in a nutshell.

Snow? In October?!

It snowed today, the first time this season, and supposedly the snowiest October on record in New York. We had no real accumulation, just a heavy white dusting on the lawn and disgusting and cold slush in the streets. It really did turn brutishly nasty almost overnight, right from very early fall — or even late summer; most of the trees still have green leaves on them — straight into winter.

I spent the day almost entirely inside. I finished reading Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, which was okay, I guess, although I don’t think it’s her best work. Maybe her best character development; she spends an awful long time introducing us to people before anything really nefarious gets underway. But as a fun whodunit? I guessed who the killer was relatively early — well, as early as you can when the murder doesn’t happen until halfway through the book — but I didn’t do so on any evidence in the book. And, in the end, it seemed like that’s how Hercule Poirot solved the mystery too, unfortunately. Still, it was entertaining enough.

I also re-watched The Silence of the Lambs, which a recent episode of Judge John Hodgman (and last night’s brief capping of it) made me want to see again. It really holds up remarkably well for a twenty-year-old thriller I’ve seen more than once. (The book’s not terrible either, although Red Dragon is better. I never made it more than a couple of chapters into Hannibal.)

I watched a few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise and the most recent episode of The Walking Dead.

I updated the Kaleidotrope website. Check it out: the cover art for the new fall issue, the last one in print, is up now, along with a quick taste of each of the twenty — count ’em, twenty! — stories contained within.

And this evening, I watched the 1972 horror anthology Asylum. It’s got a great cast, that includes such stars as Peter Cushing, Charlotte Rampling, and Britt Ekland. And some of the stories — written by horror legend Robert Bloch — aren’t bad. But ultimately the movie’s more than a little silly. Some good fun, but not remotely scary.

Well, that more or less was my Saturday, such as it was.