Musings from the basement...

News & Media Overload: Living in fear is no way to live

December 8, 2015 0 Comments

Read the comments on any news story involving a violent crime or follow any active news feed, and you will see comment after comment lamenting the state of the world and talking about how fearful we have to be of, well, pretty much everyone. If the comments at your local news site are anything to go by, you could be the victim of a home invasion at any moment. Your children are in danger of being snatched up 24 hours a day. That guy in your neighborhood taking a walk is probably a rapist. And so on. The problem with all this fear is that it’s largely baseless. Unless you live in a community like Camden, NJ or St. Louis, MO, chances are that you’re…
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Rants, Uncategorized

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Why without George Romero, there is no The Walking Dead

December 7, 2015 4 Comments

The following is an excerpt from Dissecting The Walking Dead: Slicing Into The Guts of Television’s Hottest Show, available in paperback and for Kindle. Without George Romero, there is no The Walking Dead. His 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, invented the modern zombie genre. Robert Kirkman himself has said on many occasions that his comic series and television show is essentially an extended take on Romero’s legendary film, borrowing all its core elements and reimagining them as an ongoing story rather than a single night of terror. In other words, if you want to understand where The Walking Dead comes from, you must understand Night of the Living Dead and the Romero mythos. As I examined in a previous post, Romero didn’t create the…
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Films, Geek Stuff, Television, Works by Eric

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Daryl Dixon and the Making of a Fan Favorite in #TheWalkingDead

December 4, 2015 0 Comments

The following is an excerpt from Dissecting The Walking Dead: Slicing Into The Guts of Television’s Hottest Show, available in paperback and for Kindle. Robert Kirkman insists no one is safe on The Walking Dead, but we know better than that. Rick Grimes isn’t going anywhere any time soon. It is, after all, Rick’s show. But there is a second exception to the unspoken “no one is safe” rule: Daryl Dixon. While it’s entirely possible the show’s writers can make this author look like an idiot before the ink on this book is even dry, it’s safe to say it’s a longshot. Daryl is such a fan favorite, a character who boasts fierce loyalty from his legion of fans, that the show runners surely must realize…
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Television

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Zombies, Mythology, and the Origins of the Zombie Genre

November 29, 2015 4 Comments

The following is an excerpt from Dissecting The Walking Dead: Slicing Into The Guts of Television’s Hottest Show, available in paperback and for Kindle. Shambling corpses with ragged clothing still clinging to their grey, rotting bodies. An unsteady, drunken walk. Long, pitiful moans and an aching hunger for human flesh. The image is by now so familiar even people with no interest in the genre know it inside and out. These are zombies. But zombies weren’t always depicted this way. Once upon a time, the zombie was something much different, a creature linked with black magic and Voodoo and having nothing to do with eating flesh. It seems as if they’ve been around forever, but our modern view of zombies is actually a relatively new creation. The first recorded use of the term “zombie”…
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Geek Stuff, Television

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Twitter hashtags are (still) not news

November 23, 2015 2 Comments

A few weeks back, I ranted a bit about Twitter hashtags being mined for shitty “news” by shitty websites. It’s more than a pet peeve. Pet peeves are minor annoyances. This isn’t a minor annoyance. This is a form of Internet cancer. Today, thanks to the wonders of Farking, I came across a great blog post by someone whose Tweet became the “THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!” social media story of the day, a minor nothing that was turned into yet another misleading and false tale of Internet anger thanks to shitty news on shitty websites. You might remember a story from earlier in the year about a lipstick color that had people up in arms. This blogger saw a lipstick called “Underage Red,” Tweeted about…
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Rants

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