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Kiana Khansmith
Sade Olutola
Acquired Stardust
PR's Tumblrdome
Sweet Seals For You, Always
trying on a metaphor
Love Begins
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
i don't do bad sauce passes
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DEAR READER
Keni
Three Goblin Art
hello vonnie
Stranger Things
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
occasionally subtle
Misplaced Lens Cap
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
seen from Taiwan
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seen from United States
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seen from United Kingdom
seen from Singapore
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
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seen from United States
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seen from Israel
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@cranialgunk
Back Into the Light
SPOILERS On a rainy night a bus suffers a mechanical error and goes careening off a bridge into the river below. The driver and the passengers on that bus wake from unconsciousness to a city of perpetual night. Only a very few of the people on that bus realize where they have been taken. I rewatched Light Shop recently. I was in the mood for something haunting and thought provoking but nothing…
The Sound of Blackened Teeth
I needed to be told the story to fully appreciate it. I wasn’t a fan of Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth when I first read it. The audiobook changed my mind. Its narrator, Suehyla El Attar gave Cassandra’s words a rhythm and an “oomph” that the voice in my head could not. Listening. I developed an appreciation for the poetry in Cassandra’s writing. Her descriptions do more than…
The Tsundokuist
I learned a new word: Tsundoku. It’s a portmanteau (another new word I learned) of the Japanese words tsunde-oku (to let things pile up) and dukosho (to read). Tsundoku is the act of buying books and letting them just pile up without reading them. According to Tanner Garrity, it’s supposed to be an expression of the individual’s healthy relationship with continued learning as well as an admission…
My Last Otakon
Pre-registration for Otakon 2026 started on December 1st . I had already decided by the time I set foot in Union Station that this would be my last Otakon (at least for the time being). Otakon has been fun for me but it’s expensive – even more so when lumped in with the cost of groceries, home repairs, and the small random unplanned expenses that quickly grow humongous and grotesque when you…
The Life List on Netflix was fun and it got me thinking about stuff.
Dementia 21 might be my Steppenwolf
SPOILERS! There may be spoilers in this post. Do not read further, if it concerns you. It is definitely my age that gives Shintaro Kago’s Dementia 21 a little more bite. A little more darkness. A little more sadness. And a little more humor. A friend once told me that Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf tells an entirely different story when read as a 30-year-old than the one a high schooler reads when…
Grotesquerie in the Twilight
I wrote a new blog post.
THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS POST. DON’T READ FURTHER IF IT MATTERS TO YOU. I finally binged Grotesquerie on Hulu. I had no idea of what the show was about before starting it. I was drawn in by the “gothy” color scheme and religious imaginary, deep reds and purple hues over Christian crosses hung over a nun in a white habit, running into frame. I did know, however, that it was a Ryan Murphy show.…
Apologies
Apologies for sharing old posts. My Wordpress blog was in dire need of an update and I must have accidentally turned on or forgot to turn off a setting that reposted old posts whenever there is an edit. Sorry.
Thad Rutkowski's Ponderous Pops
In her introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tara Masih defines flash fiction using Stuart Dybek’s description of rain from his short story, “Nighthawks”: “Each drop encases its own separate note, the way each drop engulfs its own blue pearl of light.” She explains: A successful flash enchants us, each small story successfully rendered engulfing for a brief…
The Gorgeous Dhampir D
It was hard to read Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Part 1 and 2 without scrambled images from the hero’s 1980s anime popping up in my head. Doris with the giant saucer-shaped, anime-eyes and ample cleavage, hunting dinosaurs at midnight in a little skirt and a laser rifle. Speaking quickly when she encounters D to relay her story without taxing the dub constraints of her animated…
Mirror Reflections
WARNING SPOILERS FOR BOTH MIRROR IN THE SKY AND KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NEVER LET ME GO! I didn’t need Aditi Khorana’s Mirror in the Sky to be the familiar science fiction story with alien Doppelganger cyborgs speaking pages from a high school Physics textbooks. The doses of physics she provided helped clarify the existence of the “mirror Earth” Terra Nova and I didn’t need to know any more than what…
Sensibility and Discovery in Ted Chiang’s Speculative Fiction
It’s been months since I finished the stories in Ted Chiang’s Arrival. Before that I had binged Rick Remender’s Black Science comic book series. It was a struggle to get through the opening story in Ted’s book. After the kinetic shootouts and chases of Black Science, it was a challenge adjusting to the slower pacing and methodically presented details of “Tower of Babylon.” I should mention that…
It doesn’t have to be Greek to us
I needed something to take the weight of Arrival off my mind. Daryl Gregory’s Spoonbenders was a very effective and enjoyable salve. It’s Daryl’s clever observations about life and the poesy he wraps it in that makes Spoonbenders such potent medicine. When we are introduced to Teddy Telemachus, he is cruising for women in the aisles of an upscale supermarket. He spies an attractive 40ish woman –…
Godzilla
PLEASE NOTE – There may be spoilers in this post. Don’t read if this concerns you. Cool and imaginative Godzilla and Mothra cosplay from Otakon 2024. Thank you to the cosplayers for stopping for a photo. MePri’s Otakon panel, “Godzilla: Just A Giant Lizard?” gave me a new perspective of Godzilla as barometer of the social acceptance of atomic or nuclear energy. The two women that form MePri…
Blog Out
Sometimes it is not a matter of what is said (or being the first to say it) but a matter not being the only one saying it. I began blogging with the hope that it would reacquaint me with writing. I had taken a long hiatus – Almost 10 years! – from writing, frustrated with my life and my aspirations in poetry and fiction. My first posts were very personal (at least as personal as I was comfortable…
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Bitter Tea
Recently Turner Classic Movies played The Good Earth and The Bitter Tea of General Yen back to back. I caught the former as the locusts descended upon the crops and continued to the latter as a “Chinked up” Nils Asther rode away in “Yellow Face” without care or concern for the rickshaw driver his car had just hit. I grimaced as I watched Nils Asther’s exaggerated Yellow Face – painfully narrowed…
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Arbejdsglaede
http://video.tedxcopenhagen.dk/v.swf Hamlet was my introduction to the Danes; Him and Danny Kaye prancing around a Hollywood set as Hans Christian Andersen. According to the Gallup World Poll Denmark is the “happiest place on earth.” Forbes says this is because “good times probably have more to do with the size of your wallet…” and quotes the developer of the happiness poll at Gallup: “The…
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