- Zombie Font Generator. Presumably, when the zombie apocalypse comes, all correspondence will be written in this. It’ll be like Dawn of the Dead meets The Postman. [via]
- Clint Eastwood’s family will star in a reality show. And, in other news: Wait, wha–?!
- Willard Asylum Suitcases:
In 1995, the New York State Museum staff were moving items out of The Willard Psychiatric Center. It was being closed by the State Office of Mental Health, and would eventually become a state run drug rehabilitation center. Craig Williams was made aware of an attic full of suitcases in the pathology lab building. The cases were put into storage when their owners were admitted to Willard, and since the facility was set up to help people with chronic mental illness, these folks never left.
I’m really not sure how I feel about this. Are these photographs art? [via]
- Dubai: come for the human rights violations and widespread corruption, stay for the sewage trucks and typhoid and hepatitis!
- And finally, Theodora Goss on H.P. Lovecraft’s racism and the World Fantasy Award:
Did Lovecraft intend that message? I seriously doubt it, and yet it’s there. The story is not the writer. The story is always, if it’s a living story, smarter than the writer.
tv
In which I babble, mostly, about the Walking Dead
I’m writing this now despite a fairly hiccupy internet connection, one that might decide to swallow my post and disappear it into the ether.
Not that much happened here today, beyond some rain in the evening and a presentation about or textbook sales force earlier in the day. Heady stuff, I know. I feel like I have more to say about Sunday’s mid-season finale of The Walking Dead — which I watched last night right before bed — than about my own day at work. I don’t know if that’s sad or not, but I guess I should be grateful that my day was lighter on zombies than it was on sales data.
But as to The Walking Dead… Bear in mind, right now, that this is going to include some enormous spoilers for Sunday’s episode and the series overall. It will also touch upon the comics, which I actually quit reading after the first twelve (to my mind disappointing) issues, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though not extensively. I actually don’t have that much to say about the episode, but I want to get all my cards on the table and keep each of you thoroughly spoiler-free if that’s how you’d prefer to stay.
So the episode. And oh my god. It all comes down to that final, heart-rending scene, to which the episode (and, in retrospect, the season) had been building all along. I don’t know where the series goes from here, exactly; that final gut-punch of zombie-Sophia stumbling from the barn and being shot down leaves the characters in even bleaker straits than last year, but I’m not sure that it excuses all the show’s very real problems with character and pacing. Zach Handlen, who does a good job analyzing the episode and dissecting its faults, is optimistic and thinks that final twist is not just a (hugely effective) shock but a sign the writers actually know what they’re doing. One thing I do know, unequivocally, is this: even if the show can’t resolve the things I often find frustrating about it, even if it relies too often on the comics as source material even when it’s made character decisions that contradict them or go in another direction, even if the second half of this season is just incredibly awful — even then, those final minutes of Sunday’s episode were incredible.
It’s funny, because to a point, I knew it was coming. I knew a confrontation would happen, and that the barn filled with zombies would play a key role in how it unfolded. It was obvious, and not just because I’d read the comics, where the zombie killing on the farm plays out very differently but also along very similar lines. I’ve watched television, and I’ve watched this show, and I know the conventions that both rely on to tell stories. And I even knew, right up until the end, that it was a probably a child that was going to stumble from that barn. Hershel, who’d been keeping the “walkers” in there, had said that his stepson was among the infected.
But I didn’t know it would be Sophia. Even when I saw her feet, and the size of her, I kept thinking, well, it’s Hershel’s little boy. And that’s the terrible choice they’re going to have to make here. That’s what will happen: Shane will almost certainly kill him, and it will be horrible, but that’s where this is headed. Taking Shane further along that dark path and furthering the divide between him and Rick. Not a terrible way to end the episode and mid-season, but also pretty conventional.
But the show blind-sided me, and I think others, distracting us with the ongoing search for Sophia. As Handlen says, “narrative fiction teaches us the longer someone stays missing, the better the chance they’ll turn up alive; otherwise, where would the drama be?” We were distracted, like with any good illusionist or storyteller, so that the show could pull this huge and devastating reveal.
It’s a little like the season 2 finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember watching that episode and thinking, as Buffy fought to save the world from Angel, there are only two ways this can play out: she’ll save him, at the very last minute, and it will be wonderful; or she’ll kill him, and it will be tragic but necessary. And then the show proceeded to do both. At the very last minute, Angel was saved, his soul restored, but it was too late, and Buffy had to kill him anyway — but now not as an evil vampire, but as the man she loved. I remember thinking, then and later, well goddamn. Here’s a show that used my knowledge of television, of the conventions of storytelling and season finales and the show itself — used all of that against me. It made me think I was smart because I’d figured out the two sides of the coin, the two options available. And then it revealed that what it had tossed in the air wasn’t really a coin at all. That’s the moment when I went from being a casual watcher to a die-hard fan, when the show I’d missed for most of its first two seasons became the show I worked out a deal with a friend to have mailed to me during its last two. (This was pre-Web 2.0, and I didn’t have UPN.)
And that’s what The Walking Dead did to me last night. It let me think I’d figured something out, and then it pulled the rug out from under me. And I kind of like that kind of television.
End of the long weekend
A quiet Sunday here at the old homestead, with my sister and brother-in-law heading back home and me mostly just working on the Sunday crossword and getting caught up on The Walking Dead. Doing some reading this evening, then calling it a night. It’s back to work for me in the morning.
Thanksgiving cornucopia
- We live in a country where pizza is a vegetable. I’m just saying. [via]
- Harry Potter director developing all-new Doctor Who movie. Not at all a sure thing, but still, when do we stop remaking things? Maybe when the last remake is still on-going?
- Genevieve Valentine on Immortals, which she describes as “a batch of snickerdoodles with thumbtacks inside.”
The labyrinth and Minotaur are well turned out, and their showdown takes place in a temple mausoleum, where an archway of stairs frames a goddess’s head that’s inset with candles to make it glow from within. It’s the sort of thing where you think, “Man, that’s good looking! I wish this stupid scene would stop so we could just look at it.”
- I really don’t know what to think about actress suing IMDB for revealing her age. They both seem to have a perfectly valid point.
- Massive plagiarism might help your book sales [via]
- Billy Crystal will be hosting the Oscars this year, giving me another reason not to watch. Which is not a dig at Crystal, necessarily, who I generally like…you know, back when he made movies people watched. But it’s such a safe, boring choice. The Academy really missed a golden opportunity to let the Muppets host the Oscars
- Tilt-shift Van Gogh
- Polite Dissent on Forgotten Drugs of the Silver-Age:
The more I think about it, for all intents and purposes, Jor-El was a mad scientist. He espoused scientific theories well outside the accepted norm and performed numerous unauthorized scientific experiments of questionable ethics.
- Mysterious D.C. rampage leaves smashed cars in its wake. Seriously, it looks like the Hulk went through there. [via]
- And finally, the Center for Fiction interviews Margaret Atwood:
I think it’s a human need to name – to tell this from that. On the most basic level, we need to distinguish – as crows do – the dangerous creature from the harmless one, and – as all animals do – the delicious and healthful food object from the rotting, poisonous one. In literary criticism it’s very helpful to know that the Harlequin Romance you sneak into when you think no one is looking is not the same, and is not intended to be the same, as Moby Dick. But stories and fictions have always interbred and hybridized and sent tendrils out into strange spaces.
Wednesday various
- You kind of have to love Umberto Eco’s answer to the question “What’s one thing you’re a fan of that people might not expect?” He said: “My last grandchild.”
- John Seavey pitches Evil Toy Monkey — The Series. I’d watch that.
- “It was nearly toast, but Coney Island Bialys and Bagels is on a roll again after Muslim businessmen Peerzada Shah and Zafaryab Ali recently took over the 91-year-old mainstay of the Jewish noshes.” Now if we could just figure out how the Middle East is like a bialy shop… [via]
- Ken Jennings suggest weaning ourselves from our GPSes:
But as much as I love GPS, I worry that wayfinding is yet another part of our brains that our culture has decided it’s okay to outsource to technology. A famous 2000 study on London cab drivers showed that the hippocampus, the brain’s seat of spatial knowledge, grows physically as our geographic knowledge increases. Many people believe their sense of direction is hopeless, but in reality, that just means they need more practice. In experiment after experiment, researchers have learned that repeating a few simple exercises can turn lousy spatial thinkers into good ones. Without that exercise, our skills get flabby.
- And finally, Firefly the Animated Series. Oh, if only. [via
]