[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…
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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…
A Personal Dictionary: “Morality” vs. “Ethics”
Very often, when I discuss weighty topics online as one does, I find that a large part of any disagreement stems from unspoken assumptions about nuances of definition in the terms being bandied about. Spoken or written language is a terribly imprecise medium of communication, its sole redeeming quality being that it’s better than any…
Movies Seen Recently: Iron Man 3, X-Men: First Class, Sharktopus
Iron Man 3 (2013) — Why yes, I am catching up on all the superhero movies that passed me by. IM3 pulls back away from the disjointed narrative direction of the second one and gives us a focused story which concentrates, rightly, on Tony Stark rather than Iron Man. Of special note is the PTSD…