I got a new toaster recently as a gift. Before I tell you about it, I need to give you a little backstory on my relationship with toasters. A couple of years, when I was living with Mike and Joe, Mike and I figured we needed a toaster to fill our occasional toasting needs. So we went to Target or something and bought the cheapest toaster we could for $6.
It was piece of shit.
This is some shit. I bought a Burger King milk shake the other day on the PA turnpike. I got a medium. It was fucking enormous of course. So big they didn’t give me a regular straw for it. I got a straw so big it had it’s own branding. The BK Pipe™. Apparently the product of “Have it your way technology.”
In Dwain Esper’s 1934 Maniac, a man eats a cat eyeball, while commenting, “Why, not unlike an oyster or a grape,” another man deals in cat pelts, there is a bunch of montage, possibly intentionally or possibly not, suggesting that women are cats, random nudity (probably has something to do with the cats), countless hodgepodge Poe references, one of the strangest Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde transformations ever committed to celluloid, and a bunch of other stuff I am fairly sure I have failed to mention. I will not try to give a plot summary of the film, but exploitation historian Eric Schaefer does, and after doing so writes, “The ‘story’ of Maniac may sound odd, but a synopsis of the film cannot begin to convey the disjointed, confusing experience of an actual viewing of it.“1
Basically, this is a great slice of entertainment to put on at the office while you are taking lunch today.
Schaefer, Eric. “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1999. ↩
Shore Leave is an annual SF convention held in the Hunt Valley area during the second week of July. It is a con that is geared towards Star Trek but all other branches of fandom are welcomed. It is also a “media” con (i.e. the main draw are actors from SF shows). The DeLorean is an operating vehicle with a valid tag.
Wesband is a modification of The Battle for Wesnoth that I’ve been making. It is a dungeon-crawler, loosely based on ZAngband, but with features unique to the genre.
Wesnoth is a mutli-platform, open source, turn-based strategy (TBS), fantasy game. Originally made as a single player game, Wesnoth has expanded its mod-ability to the point of allowing multiple players to play co-op in a continuous series of scenarios. Wesband makes use of the newest modding functionality that Wesnoth has to offer.
