Stuff I Like

Jeff Reads Comics: Astonishing X-Men #44

6 December 2011

A digital copy of Astonishing X-Men #44 was provided for review by the author. As a lifelong X-Men fan, I have learned that X-Men fans are, and this is putting it kindly, fickle. On top of this, they have an even more abusive relationship with continuity than most other fans of most other superhero comics [...]

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Things About The Thing (2011)

17 October 2011

1. Every couple of years, a horror creator just flat-out impresses me. The wheel turns, you know, so they always disappoint me eventually, but right now, I am really a fan of Eric Heisserer. He Gets It. He understands the genre, not just in a ‘and then this happens, and then this happens way’, but [...]

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Occupied

10 October 2011

I’ve been thinking about Occupy Wall Street quite a bit over the past three weeks. I’ve been avoiding writing a post about it because I don’t want to ramble on incessantly or get to the spot where I start digressing on a dozen angry tangents. The most interesting thing about the movement – I think [...]

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My Amazing Food Idea of the Day

16 September 2011

Let’s say that you have a skillet. You get some potatoes and you turn them into hash browns. Then you chunk up some Taylor ham or Canadian bacon. and throw that in the skillet. Then throw a few eggs on top of it. But Jeff, you’re saying, that’s basically just a frittata. And you’re right, [...]

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The New Reader Experiment

2 September 2011

I thought that Justice League #1 was not the sort of book that you’d want to use to wow new readers. But I’m not a new reader. I’m a very old reader, having read comics now for nearly 30 years (I started very young). I am not the target demo here, and frankly that’s as [...]

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More Finaler Than Ever

16 August 2011

There are maybe only four modern films that I have ever really enjoyed watching in 3D. Three of them have been horror films – My Bloody Valentine, Piranha 3D and now Final Destination 5. The opening credits alone speak to why that is – a cavalcade of sharp objects, fire and broken glass flying right [...]

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A Chat with Ernest Cline

9 August 2011

Yesterday, I talked about Ernest Cline’s new novel, Ready Player One. I also had the opportunity to talk to the author about the book. I really appreciate his insights, though we will forever disagree about Krull (which I have not actually seen since I was six years old). —– Jeff Stolarcyk: Hi Ernest. Thanks for [...]

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Jefferson Reads: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

8 August 2011

Note: A copy of Ready Player One was provided to the author for review. The past decade has been the Age of the Geek – studios pander to the Comic-Con crowd, Internet buzz can destroy a movie’s opening weekend and nostalgia drives marketing. For every dyed-in-the-wool geek creator or personality, there’s at least two or [...]

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Shields and the Weilding Thereof

26 July 2011

It is incredibly easy to get cynical about fandom. We can, collectively, be utterly joyless bastards about the things we profess to love a lot of the time. There are a lot of things we feel, some rightly and some wrongly, about Our Things – stewardship, ownership, affection, disappointment, even equivalency – but the feeling [...]

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Five Implausible Paranormal Reality Shows

25 July 2011

Longtime readers know that one of my guilty pleasures is the paranormal subculture – not ghosts and demons themselves, but the people that are completely convinced that they are real things that they can interact with and/or the people who live in that world solely to exploit the belief of the others.  I’ve written about [...]

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