zombies

Wednesday various

  • Warren Ellis on the 2012 Olympics’ closing ceremonies:

    It was as conservative, hidebound and bland as the Opening Ceremony was ambitious, demented and eccentric. It played almost as an attempt to zero out what Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce achieved and said in the Opening.

    I have to admit, I didn’t watch it. By that point, my Olympic fever had waned a bit, and I didn’t really feel like putting up with NBC’s ridiculous editing and inane chatter to watch the closing. (“Our viewers may not know this, Meredith, but the Pet Shop Boys are in fact actually now grown men!”)

    But the opening ceremonies were mad and brilliant.

  • It’s bad enough they’re planning an Expendables 3 — shouldn’t last hurrahs, y’know, end? — but now they have to talk about dragging Clint Eastwood and others into it?

    “We’ve already begun reaching out to the bones of Steve McQueen and the John Wayne hologram”—Avi Lerner, The Expendables 4 interview, 2014

    Although, honestly, that might finally get me to watch one of these things.

  • Amazingly enough, a campaign to turn an abandoned Detroit neighborhood into a zombie apocalypse theme park has fallen through. [via]
  • Are young people really using “yo” as a gender-neutral pronoun? Fascinating.
  • And finally, the Best Scenes From Insane Old Star Trek Coloring Books:

Monday various

Tuesday various

  • “The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over…” Creating a new language for A Game of Thrones
  • Along the same lines, 20 awesomely untranslatable words from around the world. I particularly like

    Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start” [via]

  • Are we truly living in the age of fanfiction?

    What’s been truly bizarre, though, is the way the mainstream has slowly headed in the same direction, and without anyone noticing it, we seem to have handed over our entire industry to the creation of fanfiction on a corporate level, and at this point, I’m not sure how we’re expecting the pendulum to ever swing back. I know people love to blame Spielberg and Lucas for creating the modern blockbuster age, but at least when they decided to pay tribute to their inspirations, they did so in interesting ways. Spielberg has talked about how his frustrations at hearing that only English filmmakers could direct James Bond movies led to the creation of Indiana Jones, and Lucas was working out his love of Flash Gordon when he created “Star Wars.” Those are healthy ways to work through your love of something, and absolutely make sense as important pieces in the creative process. What’s scary is how these days, filmmakers wouldn’t bother with that last step, the part where you take your inspirations and run them through your own filter. Now, instead, we live in an age where we are simply doing the source material again and again and again, and where original creation seems to be almost frowned upon as a “risk.” [via]

  • See also: they’re re-making Starship Troopers. And The Munsters. As a “dramatic re-imagining.”
  • It’s so sad to see Monty Python members fight among themselves.
  • Blackwater is changing its name. This is like if the Devil started asking us to call him Gus.[via]
  • David Milch to adapt William Faulkner? I am so there.
  • They’re coming to crowd-fund you, Barbara… ‘Living Dead’ Fans Digging Up Funds to Keep Chapel from Going Under
  • Bruce Wayne’s medical records [via]
  • And finally, I haven’t seen the new Tintin movie, but this fan-made opening sequence is really quite wonderful. [via]

    The Adventures of Tintin from James Curran on Vimeo.

Monday various

  • 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.

Monday various