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I’ve been reading Lovecraft lately (well, mostly Alan Moore and reminders what happened in the original stories on Wiki, which are fabulous sleep aids), so while waiting for HBO’s Scientology documentary to be seeded, I opted for this, the finale in Carpenter’s “apocalypse” trilogy. The Thing is a fucking masterpiece, and I loved that dream sequence in Prince of Darkness, but I couldn’t find anything redeeming here, not even a lewd screenshot to accompany this post. For horror to overcome rational man surely it has to be indescribably overwhelming, like the global scale of an alien threat or those nightmares I’d get with a fever, not the nonsensical frustration of a spook who keeps coming back.

Let’s settle for this groovy title instead, because Gabrielle Drake again would’ve been gratuitous. Seeing the you-foes behind you like that, now that’s scary.

I really ought to have bookended each binged season of the universally lauded series with an episode of Police Squad!, because then I might have made it through the last. Because the best way to get past the reality that human beings suck, and the world is run by the worst of us, is by laughing it off.

I wonder, was Peter Lupus’ Norberg character one of the first to be African-Americanized—Colbert’s definition of “blackwashing” probably doesn’t describe the same practice—for newer audiences, like the 2015 Johnny Storm, movie Ford Prefect, Iris West on the Flash and Will Smith as James West (and soon, Deadshot). If early cancellation also must befall Constantine, then I hope it follows the same course with a successful film trilogy. There are already Blacks in the cast, too.

I was preparing to leave with some acquaintances, but through a door looking out into the distance from our highrise we could see the monster himself approaching. Was more the Japanese original than the recent movie version, which, even though it was the first time in a theater for me this year, I honestly can’t remember anything about. Don’t catch his eye, I warned, but it was too late; he saw me and made a beeline towards us. Within moments the room was shaking violently, and as it tipped to one side, I wondered how we were possibly going to live through hitting the ground. My perspective turned to allow me to witness the building topple from the outside and hundreds of tiny stewardesses shaken out as it slid through the streets. I vowed revenge.

The TV execs up there have kindly scheduled the Walking Dead to wrap up the week before the Game of Thrones to resume, and despite having fast-forwarded through much of the last season, I think I’ve come to realize that this was the destined medium for the story, and the books were an unnecessary slog. Of course, that could be said about all the game—Joffrey’s douchebaggery, Arya’s badassery, every new character’s entry—none of it will really matter in the inevitable clash between elemental forces, now will it? Talk about bad pacing!

The story progress so far: porting the game onto the Sub-Etha Internet causes not only the inevitable server connection issues, but lags the interface so that it always thinks you’ve pressed enter a second time, and advances the tiny window twice with each command, requiring you to scroll back constantly to make sure you’ve fully mined the last major paragraph. I can only hope there’s a vibrant community of text-adventure fan-fic’ers who still make the most of this lost art, because my experiment with it was humbling, to say the least: it doesn’t make sense to allow the player to snooze out of bed, not to the same response.

GW2’s vertical trend has alienated me, Arrow’s on hiatus and well, there hasn’t been much of anything else to keep me occupied lately (a slew of 2013 releases on the flight back from Boston, comped because of the delay, and I still watched Man of Steel again), so I took a chance on my first new アニメ since, what, FLCL, with this popular hit whose Fantastic Planet-like premise is undeniably intriguing. And as wonderfully creative the Spiderman gear that’s used to combat the eponymous titans is as well, I’m just not sure it’s capable of a satisfying resolution—see The Walking Dead—and may only be fit to tell the story of much the same characters. Hell of a setting for a videogame, too.

Time-delayed from the actual 50th anniversary of the show—referring, of course, to the time a broadcast takes to be uploaded to a PB torrent, then for me to get around to it—which meant so much in middle school, but now seems like any other Hollywood hokum. (This, from a middle-ager who digs what they’re doing on Arrow. It’s all Alan Moore’s fault.) Still, it’s nice to see Tom Baker acknowledged for his contribution, not only to the character’s universal appeal, but in the end, to my childhood imagination. “Who knows?” he asks.

Was always curious why this Davison finale had received the accolades it does, so I gave it a go instead of looking for the Stargate SG-1 episode that followed up the one I watched on 5.3 earlier in the evening (seems Netflix took them all down, anyway; they’re unpredictable like that). And I still get nothing out of his era, with or without Tegan. This serial in particular struck me as poorly made: laughably bad villains, including the head of a corporation, a Phantom and a guy in a monster suit, I’m not sure which was worst; set design and special effects that really stand out as examples of budget casualties where they already didn’t need any more; and painful scenes, of mercenaries who can’t hit their fleeing target with automatic weapons from a few yards away, much less the whole tawdry premise that the Doctor and his companion are doomed from the beginning by toxic illness, the lone legacy of this being Peri’s cleavage.This compares to “Pyramids of Mars” and “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” how?

Some kindly soul’s been putting up every Doctor Who episode ever (which doesn’t remind me in the least of what a pirate might actually do, so we know where that particular epithet came from), so I got all of Tom Baker’s and Peter Davison’s eras as quickly as the handful of seeders allowed. The latter, of course, only to relive my infatuation with the comely companion for almost the entire run, because by then all other appeal from the Sarah Jane and Leela serials truly was gone. And it’s still not there, even in today’s popular incarnation. Sure, everything’s packaged better—including Jenna-Louise Coleman—as one would hope after forty years, but for all the accelerated storytelling and outrageous performances, hi-res audio-visuals and overarching plans for cosmic significance, there’s none of the simmering dread that something horrible was about to happen within 25 minutes… ushered in by any combination of thud, unearthly gurgling sound and excruciating scream. Often the Doctor’s very own.

Oldboy lives on in DCUO (for as long as the game lasts, or I do), and as impressed as I was with Guild Wars 2, I’m reluctant to return to the elves and giant rats, especially without the name, so maybe some reinvention is in order, you know, the kind the comics do when the original concept just won’t cut it anymore.

This weekend is the second of their open betas, and I’ll give it a go again, this time with Xpadder because there’s no way I’d continue with one hand over the 1-7 ability keys on top of the other moving WASD-style. Either way, I doubt it’ll be an easy transition from the responsiveness and fluidity of animation I’ve come to take for granted—despite the utter lack of anything to do with them.