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Scuttlebutt is that Apple TV+’s “Monsterverse” series is being filmed in their new Vision Pro-compatible format, which got me imagining, aside from the possibilities like experiencing scale within the peripheral, about how they might (not) expand the franchise with characters other than the two main attractions from their last outing. Why not a more humanoid giant, maybe with a different origin since we’ve already dispensed with Mechagodzilla, even an extraterrestrial one like the 特撮 heroes they were originally trying to emulate?

Reason I dug Jet Jaguar as a kid was that grin of his resembled the one on Marvel’s short-lived Scarecrow in another artifact from my past, who would leap out of existence and bother impressionable minds without today’s resources.

Update: Fuck, this is a rehash of a 20-year-old entry (plus more future-proof links). AI writing assistants can’t come soon enough, and not the striking kind.

Wasn’t going to let go without a look back at some of my remaining memories from the series, those weird aliens with bowler hats, the kid in the mirror world saying he doesn’t have a reflection to break (which I really could’ve sworn wasn’t from the Black-and-White season), and the awesome way they’d abruptly lead into the next episode after an almost disappointing lack of epilogue at the end. Lesson I should’ve learned was that you’re never lost when you’ve got each other? And apparently some of the From showrunners worked on Lost, but I stick by what I recently said that whatever it is they’ve put together so far and dangle for as long as their budget lasts reminds me less of it and more of Land of the Lost.

I looked through the doorway and saw a young person’s bare arm suspended unnaturally high above the room, undulating slightly and the fingers wiggling to show that someone unseen was behind it. Suddenly I was attacked by a dozen gray fists, but I fought them back, defiant and insistent that they weren’t getting to me, even as the image of my aggressor in the back changed shape and color.

In quite the change of setting to an anime convention, my friend and I (I think it was Frank Hsu, because he was tall, thin and decked out in motorcycling leathers) were admiring the life-sized mechs on display, and when we learned we could actually climb inside one for photos, queued up thinking that we were first in line. Turned out it already stretched around the display and the others were full-on cosplaying as sentai pilots, so the Shoei or Arai helmet and riding gear looked philistine in comparison. Nearing the end of our wait, a woman with a baby approached and we let her cut ahead of us, but she then tried chaining in a fat relative who waddled up and we objected vehemently. I don’t remember taking any pictures because the very next thing, my buddy looked more like that fucker Steve Bannon and was thanking me; such an abrupt edit in my timeline frightened me that Alzheimer’s had struck and this was how my perception would continue, jumping from one moment to another, unaware of what happened between them.

It’s how I reconcile Severance and Navillera. (Although the former will probably be revealed to be mad science like Dr. Brain, the Trojan Horse implant that has to be “macrodata’d” to override memory or willpower conflicts.) Bread-winning aside, what good are we to our loved ones if we don’t know who they are anymore? What good are we to ourselves?

What kept me watching this low-budget no-fanfare new series wasn’t so much the prospect of Lovecraftian horror (which no, doesn’t just mean the spooks are invincible), but my fascination with the main character’s video restoration work. Plus, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which is Lovecraftian. I wish they went somewhere with that, beyond the use of found-footage simply to switch perspective, maybe that’s what they were getting at with playback of all the recordings recreating reality. Why not make that the “other world”—a realm run by a being not unlike the Doom Patrol “Telephone Avatar“—instead of yet another Nexus, or even the surface of a comet, since we now have a good idea what one looks like? Still waiting for the genre smörgåsbord to top John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, however.

Following a harrowing hearing in front of the Supreme Court, I was returning home on a train dogged by two detectives who suspected me of being the masked vigilante. They tried outing me by watching my reaction to the last page of a nondescript graphic novel where the Bat symbol appears, but I didn’t flinch and kept up my identity hunching over as I walked. I could take them all, I thought, but decided to play it out until we arrived at a London station. There I would meet and greet my neighbor Madonna with a baby in pram, then tried ditching my pursuers by a dirt path into the park. A sting in my left leg as I mounted a knee-high mound alerted me that I had stepped into an ant hill, and though most of them seemed inert when I kicked it open, many had climbed onto me and left bites as far as my right forearm. However, as Batman, I was unfazed.

unless i’m mistaken (studied tieng viet in the army) “tran” is pronounced “chan”, so “trump” would be “chump”.
alrighty, then.

Wife asked me about the bar (which I refuse to take unless I am allowed to in the afterlife) and I told her it was just the right amount of ambition, not too little that I threw my life away or so much that I made many times what her company might have paid, to put me on a career path to her, like the book—or was it an episode of the Twilight Zone—I remember from my youth with pictures of the earth freezing and burning if it were only the slightest bit further from or closer to the sun. Roots of Intelligent Design for some, perhaps. She looked flustered by my response, which I still felt was such a brilliant one that when 남재 woke up in a bed in the room, I had to tell him he missed out on it. He’d be my first choice on LINE when I woke up at 3am.

An obvious by-product of the son’s interest in Scooby Doo and our recent viewings of live-action adaptations, the proprietor had been conducting some ghastly rituals, and once I learned of them, I returned with a sample leech the shape and size of an orange slice under a form-fitting plastic case and explained to her, squeezing it to reveal its jaws, that he was reviving the dead whose souls had been sucked out of them. She turned and quite effortlessly removed a giant specimen hanging on the towel rack like a lei and tossed it aside.

We congregated in the hall where the madness was at work, and saw an animated scene that seemed to depict his machinations, while staying safe in shower-like alcoves. The wooden floors were giving way, I surmised, as a result of the damage being done to reality. My cousin and Rebecca looked on as my indiscernible companion began choking, her mouth ballooned and I desperately tried compressing her chest from behind. Her ribs converged to a single bilateral ridge and her lips pursed as I continued helplessly, regretting my past decisions.

This was a form of torture to which I was to be subjected—for what or by whom I don’t think was ever identified—but it caused me very little dread, even if my toes were completely removed, maybe because running is blackening each nail and flip-flops have all but ravaged the soles of my feet to where they no longer seem part of my body proper. (Speaking of which, losing those Reefs on the curb and never being able to replace them was one of my many experiences teaching me to stock backups against discontinued product. Latest example are wired headphones, but soon it might be the Lightning adapters for them.) Like the universe is taking me back starting at the borders.

Update: Legs felt heavier than ever, and made it an effort to lift each one, like my heart wasn’t getting the bonus coordinating the work anymore. There’s barely anything left to my stride. Could the safe zone be closing in on my extremities?