Guest Post: The Ritual & the Ritual

Note: It’s another guest post. It’s still horror-related. We now have ten days to October, aka the Devil’s Month, so this is an appropriate topic for me to keep writing about. Just take my word for it.

I’m normally not the kind of person who consumes different versions of the same story in quick succession. I actually rarely do it at all - if I watch a movie I’ll almost never read the novel it was based on and I tend to choose between an original manga or an anime and then just stick solely with that. There’s no particular reason for this beyond, I guess, having no real need or desire to experience the same story twice.

But I recently picked up Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, a 2011 horror novel that I understand won its author some decent acclaim when it was first released. Just before I started reading it, I happened to notice that there exists a moderately well-reviewed horror movie of the same name that was released last year; wouldn’t you know it, the movie is an adaptation of the novel. Just for a change I decided to read the book and then immediately watch the movie, thinking it might make a good exercise in compare-and-contrast.

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Guest Post: Insane Clown Premise

NOTE: This is a guest post by a friend of The Blogger. There will most likely be more of these, probably on the subject of horror. Think of them as a nice lead-in to the annual Spooktober tradition.

Quite some time ago I attempted to read Stephen King’s IT while working at one of those jobs that are so boring they should by all rights be illegal. The book proved to be a good choice; at this stage in my development as a reader I wasn’t yet tired of King’s fondness for stuffing massive amounts of character backstory into all of his novels, so I had a perfectly fine time reading about the inhabitants of Derry, Maine (of course) in their child and adult forms even before the evil clown showed up.

But then the clown did show up, and…uh.

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Let's Read The Overton Window pt. 10: This is a sneaking mission

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We're back from our hiatus! Unfortunately, posting will still resume on a slower schedule, as I'm experiencing new and exciting Brain Symptoms. I'm planning on tidying up some choice pieces of content from my old site and bringing them over, so that will hopefully plug up the gaps.

In case you've forgotten what's going on in The Overton Window, here's a recap: Noah Gardner, rich young PR executive, has entered the orbit of Molly Ross, a member of the goofily-named Founders Keepers, a "patriot" group convinced that America is sliding towards tyranny. Noah actually knows for a fact that this is the case because he was in the room when his dad offered to help some government employees enact a plan that will end with a new world order taking over the country, but he doesn't seem to have processed this for some reason. When we last left them, they were sneaking into Noah's company to look for evidence of the plot at Molly's urging.

Meanwhile, Danny Bailey, another Trapper Keeper and Youtube sensation, has been recruited by an FBI agent named Stuart Kearns, ostensibly to participate in a sting operation looking to arrest militia members who might be plotting nefarious deeds. In reality, Kearns is working with the evil conspiracy and is duping both Danny and the militia chuds into carrying out a real terrorist attack in order to create a pretext for the new world order plot (this hasn't actually been revealed yet in the part of the book we've covered, but it's incredibly obvious).

All that aside, lets get back into it.

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Let's Read The Overton Window pt. 9: www.stuartkearns.com

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Programming note: updates will be less frequent for the forseeable future, due to Brain Problems

As chapter fifteen opens, Noah brings Molly to his fancy rich-guy apartment, humble-bragging about how he lives near the Met and all the big embassies because he's such a mister fancy pants. It feels like approximately a month in real time since anything interesting has happened.

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Far Cry 5

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Picture this: an underground bunker, stuffed full of military-grade weaponry and bedecked with American flags. A middle-aged man with a beard sits at a table, pouring over maps. Red lines and circles criss-cross the maps; targets, avenues of attack. A radio mutters quietly in the corner.

How do you react to this scene? What kind of emotion does it instill? Fear? Uneasiness? Is the idea unsettling? Or do you identify with the bearded man and his bunker? Does this image fill you with patriotic fervor and resolve?

If your answer is “Who cares, let’s go WRECK SOME SHIT DAWG HELL YEAH” then congratulations on your new role as a Ubisoft employee.

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Historical accuracy in video games

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The first trailer for Battlefield 5 (or V) released yesterday. In case you're not familiar with the series, it's considered to be the somewhat more complex, "realistic" counterpart to the Call of Duty games, emphasizing team and squad-based tactics over personal glory. The last installment in the series, Battlefield 1, went back to WWI. The sequel (Battlefield 5, are you confused yet?) is set in WWII, that conflict which is famously under-represented in video-game shooters.

Cue the trailer, which features four outlandishly-dressed super-soldiers leaping through windows, getting shot multiple times without apparent injury, blowing up a plane with an enemy grenade, and other ludicrous acts of cartoon violence. At the end, a British women with a Furiosa-style prosthetic arm clubs a Nazi to death with a cricket bat wrapped in barbed wire.

Can you guess which part of that has The Gamers all riled up?

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Avengers: Infinity War spoiler hootenanny

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I saw it. I actually liked it! I'm ambivalent at best about a lot of Marvel movies, and I was extremely bored by the first half of the last big cross-over movie they did, but this one kept me entertained. When the end came, I was surprised because I thought there was another forty minutes left; for a movie that's over two and a half hours long, that's impressive.

Below, find some spoiler-filled discussions of specific parts of the movie.

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