New mistress of Halloween
Turn back time far enough, and there was an era where Elvira was everywhere once the spooky season got into swing. Especially Halloween-based commercials. By the end of the 90s, we’d transitioned over to Neve Campbell, first with The Craft and then with a million...
Sand Battery
You can store power in just about anything if you try hard enough. Including sand, not just for beaches and making glass. When you think about sand, two things you don’t generally consider are cutting-edge technology and the nation of Finland, yet here we are....
WandaVision trilogy
Witches and warped reality, but which witch watches who? The WandaVision TV show didn’t seem likely to spawn a trilogy, but it caught the imagination in a delightfully oddball way. From its cornball 1950s black and white to its psychological horror, it...
Slay the Princess
Slay the Princess is a weird game. We’re going to start with that right from the opening. You are in the woods, on a path, and a narrator tells you to go into a cabin, grab a dagger, head down into the basement, and slay the princess held captive there. What...
Color-changing glasses
Photochromic lenses, the ones that change from clear to dark in sunlight, have been around for decades. While the quality of the effects have been refined, the basic operation remains the same: expose the clear lens to sunlight and it will darken, then when exposure...
Darkest book in all of fiction
A common thread running through the various Black Ocean series is the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts. It’s a cursed book that afflicts its few survivors with power and a gnawing madness they must constantly resist. Or, you know, give in to. Is it the darkest book in all of...
Donnie Darko
The movie that set the bar for weird movies Donnie Darko is a story about a highschool boy who doesn’t die when a jet engine crashes into his house. He was warned. He got a second chance. In the process, he got an imaginary friend/enemy/mentor/guide/psychotic...
Oxenfree
Choices echo through time in this game Oxenfree is a narrative choice game where you play as Alex, a highschooler from a small town, going to an island with some friends for an overnight beach party. The setup has a sort of Spielberg/Hughes vibe, with a bunch of...
RobotCop
Robot unemployment hits all-time high...Maybe it did TOO good a job? The town of Dublin, Ohio has fired a police officer. This particular officer had no recourse. They weren’t a union member, had no political connections, and nobody seems to be stepping in to look out...
Dark Crystal
The Dark Crystal got a somehow darker prequel In an era of increasingly rare practical effects, it’s a small miracle that Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance even got made. But getting to work on a beloved classic with Jim Henson Company muppets as opposed to CGI...