Mongolian Death Worm (2010) – Sean Patrick Flanery (Young Indiana Jones himself) plays, appropriately enough, a slightly scuzzy treasure hunter in present-day Mongolia (as represented semi-convincingly by Texas) searching for Genghis Khan’s lost tomb; he and some Peace Corps-ish doctors run afoul of the giant worm-thingies awakened by a local plant’s attempts at oil shale separation. Compared…
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New book: Ethnic Albanians Need Not Apply
The first print collection of my webcomic CheapCaffeine is now available: Ethnic Albanians Need Not Apply. Plus, if you buy it directly from me at a convention (my next one is Westercon, coming up over the Independence Day weekend), you’ll get the “Special Sketch Edition,” in which I will sketch a doodle of whatever you…
Twenty years ago today…
…our first child Alex, who could not be pried from Michele’s womb with a crowbar on Friday, finally came out on Monday. There’s a paradigm shift that comes with your first child. You are now not living for yourself; you cannot. And it’s very different than a married couple living for each other, because the…
A Response to Dave Butler regarding the recent unpleasantness.
[Note: What follows is Mormon inside baseball. If you don’t know what it refers to, I’m not stopping to catch you up.] This began as a response to a post my friend Dave Butler made on Facebook, which has spawned a thread of ungodly lengths. My own calculus has been that the longer a thread…
New Book Cover: Weird Tales of Horror
Did this one for a friend. He wanted something that wouldn’t look out of place in a collection of vintage Ace paperbacks, complete with the signs of wear. The cover art is by Anton van der Valk, done in 1913. (I love the public domain.) And the creases? They were the most fun. I went…
Same-Sex Marriage: I’ll Just Put This Right Here.
I’ve been trolling archive.org for specific blog posts made long before the server crash that wiped out all that NathanShumate.com had once been. I finally found one that I had been seeking, called “Points of Order in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” which I had originally written March 25, 2004 — just a wild and crazy…
Coming Soon: Ethnic Albanians Need Not Apply
My first collection of cartoons from my CheapCaffeine.net webcomic is almost ready. Here’s the cover: I hope to have it ready for order within a week (unless I don’t like how the proof copy turns out).
Movies Seen Recently: The Music Man, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Poseidon Rex
The Music Man (1962) — My daughter’s junior high recently put on a production of the shortened version of this (she played Amaryllis); we watched this afterward so the best-ever production of it wouldn’t make her feel bad. There’s something about Robert Preston’s iconic performance as Professor Harold Hill; sure, he’s a conman, and sure,…
Movies Seen Recently: Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark, Justice League: Doom, Batman: Year One
Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark (2014) — That’s right, I skipped right over the second entry in the turns-out-to-be-a-trilogy (that’s 2010’s Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus). I’m a rebel that way, and it’s not like I was going to miss something important to the overall story arc or anything. That said, this is a much better…
Movies Seen Recently: Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Ghostbusters, Godzilla
Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009) — It’s instructive to compare this SciFi movie, produced by The Asylum, with Sharktopus (2011), produced by Roger Corman. In the past fifty years, Corman has reduced the production of just barely adequate cinema to a mechanical process: Put twenty bucks in one end, get a made-to-order feature out…