Spooky talking cats! Unpleasant right-wing self-help! Haunted trams! Demonic spiders! Donald Trump winning the election! All the scariest things you can imagine and some things you really shouldn’t imagine!
Yes, the spookiest tale of horror, and positive thinking is here as a special download by clicking this link:
Go on – try it! You won’t regret it! Well you might regret it…possibly you will regret it but you’ll have had fun! Maybe.
Wooooooooo!!!!!!! The ideas are only connected by fear and anxiety and not by reason or logic!!!! Wooooooooo!!!!
An American version of a Scotch beer. Not bad, despite the can. http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/moylans-kilt-lifter-scotch-ale/1578/
[A bit late posting this]
Dragon Con replied via twitter to my last post on the odd fluctuations on the Dragon Con Awards website. It is an odd sort of explanation – as if people might get confused by a news article clearly from August.
Anyway, I asked about when nominations might open and…no reply…
As I sat in the south gazebo, hitting refresh on voxopedia’s ‘Recent changes’ page, I noticed from the corner of my eye the household cat walking pensively in circles. Perturbed by this uncharacteristic behaviour I approached him cautiously whilst holding my phone in the forlorn hope of capturing an amusing cat video with which to entertain the Internet.
“There is no point trying to take a video,” said Timothy who was still circling what appeared to be a North Korean bootlegged Surface Pro, “Twitter is closing down Vine.”
I swore in frustration. Once again, I had missed engaging with a social media outlet before it had slid into obsolescence or was cancelled. It was MySpace all over again. If felt cross enough to vent my anger on a Compuserve forum.
“Stop looking so sullen. Your ineptitude at picking social media trends has done wonders for my share portfolio,” bragged the cat, still orbiting the knock-off tablet, “Any social media outlet you aren’t thinking of using is usually a good bet.”
“I’ll use my powers for good and sign up for Gab!” I cried.
“Never mind all that – I need you to think of an ending for my book.” grumbled the cat, who now sat on his haunches in front of the specially cat-adapted keyboard.
“Your book?” I asked. Timothy’s book? I had announced Timothy’s book some weeks ago and it was originally going to be a domestic drama called the “Confusing Walrus” based on unsubtle plagiarism of a John Scalzi space-opera, which had led to some excitement among Timothy’s inexplicable following. The capricious cat had then forced me to retract that announcement because the supposedly “finished” book was now going to be a cook-book called the “Collapsing Souffle”. No sooner had I done that, than it became clear that Timothy had written nothing but an outline which read:
rite book. make flappypants dror cover
Yet, here we were – weeks later – and unless my eyes deceived me, Timothy had a long document open on his Pyon-Yang derived computer.
“Why this is great news!” I said saidingly “I can’t wait to try the recipes!”
Timothy looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses.
“Recipes? Recipes? I don’t write ‘recipes’. Do you think at this time of national crisis, people want recipes? No, no, now is the time for action. Now is the time for me to break silence and intervene in the US election.”
“You already intervened – you were briefly Hillary Clinton’s running mate, remember?”
Timothy dismissed that comment with a wave of his paw. “This book contains a distilled account of my personal philosophy. It explains how Donald Trump also shares my mental powers that allow us to achieve greatness.”
Suspicion grew in my chest. “Let me look at that cover,” I exclaimed in an exclamatory fashion pulling the fake tablet over. “As I thought! You’ve just taken some Castalia House nonsense, scribbled out ‘Mike Cernovich’ and written ‘Tim T Talking Cat’ instead.”
“That is merely a suggestion. The main question is whether I should end the book by saying ‘that is why I am so awesome’ or, and think this over before you answer, ‘that is why I am so great'”
“The second one!” I cried, “Very topical!”
And that dear readers, is how I learnt of Timothy’s new book.
Don’t count the plot holes. Don’t think too much about how the bad guys capacity to fight good wizards seems very situational. Nigh on impossible not to wince at the racist cliches of oriental-exoticness juxtaposed with only one Asian actor. Ignore some slightly stilted dialogue. Don’t concern yourself with Cumberbatch’s odd American accent (is it actually odd or is that it just doesn’t sound like him?) Don’t worry about the new age nonsense – you knew the movie was about magic when you walked in there.
The story isn’t complex. The acting is fine. The humour is less sharp than Iron Man and less frequent than Ant-Man. But…
It does all really work. The fights are tense and the magic is spectacular. The effects are both gratuitous and absolutely necessary. The visuals keep playing with wild symmetries and a psychedelic aesthetic that feels like 2016 technology applied to 1966 imaginings.
It really is everything you might want out of a Doctor Strange movie. Fights occur on astral planes, in Inception-like mirror dimensions, and in invading hell-dimensions. Everything is pompous but in a way that commits to pomposity knowing that this is the right way to achieve the higher sense of being in which ‘fun’ will be achieved.
I really, really liked it.
[To be honest, I’d watch it just for all the reflection symmetry]
Why, I’m glad you asked that question, disembodied voice that writes the blogpost titles. My new favourite Voxopediapage is:
LIST OF ASIAN MEN’S INVENTIONS: http://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_asian_men%27s_inventions
[Update] Sadly, I didn’t webarchive it and then apparently it went off in all sorts of weird directions, redirects and then was removed. The page and the changes don’t appear in Recent Changes but does appear in the Deletion Log http://web.archive.org/web/20161028183909/http://infogalactic.com/info/Special:Log/delete
RIP List of Asian Men’s Inventions! For a brief moment, you forced us evil leftists to mock Voxopedia rather than ignore it.
[Update 2] Here it is http://infogalactic.com/info/User:Rectified/List_of_Asian_men%27s_inventions and archive http://web.archive.org/web/20161028185016/http://infogalactic.com/info/User:Rectified/List_of_Asian_men%27s_inventions
