BenSobieck

Any time there is a new horror movie out, I apply The Shining Test to determine whether to see it. It's simple:
          
          "Would I rather see this new movie or re-watch 'The Shining'?"
          
          It's a loaded question, but it still gets a 49-51 split. Horror is getting a lot of wind, and it's not all gore and jumpscares. It's the perfect genre for an anxious, isolated generation of moviegoers. It can also emulsify social commentary.
          
          In case of a tie, the bonus round involves re-reading "The Exorcist" or one of the 10,000 books on my TBR from the bookstore. I DNF'd "Pornography for the End of the World" but only because the dread gave me a terrible stomachache. Great book!

That local bookstore needs your business, yeah, and it also needs your community.

If there is a secret to life, it should involve having a favorite gas station/c-store.

Writing satire for The Hard Times makes me think it really does take a year to figure out how to approach a new genre. It's not the words; it's the tone.
          
          And I don't mean "master" a new genre. I mean how to think about it. It's important to be terrible, and to be so greatly, but to also leave the terribleness as soon as possible.

I still get messages about Glass Eye and the Zandra books, especially about the series’s position on the supernatural. 
          
          First, thank you for reading! And if you made it to the sixth book, add five more tokens of my gratitude. 
          
          Second, the best way to approach supernatural claims is to start at the most extreme skeptical position possible and refuse to budge an inch unless dragged by the hair toward the extraordinary.
          
          There will never be good reasons to believe in psychics. There can only by incredible reasons. 
          
          That doesn’t mean these things can’t exist. It doesn’t even dismiss supernatural claims. It only means there’s nothing heroic in accepting those claims when only one side has anything to lose by doing so.
          
          So that’s the official position.

The ghost in the machine is you and me

Just a lot of noise for the sake of noise, because damn if the silence isn’t terrifying.
          
          —
          
          The dying process must be the least evolved piece of human biology, right? If there’s a quirk somewhere, it wouldn’t proliferate or get ironed out the same way other traits would. There is no survival filter. And this must be true for every species, right?
          
          So maybe the mystery of death isn’t so much a mystery as it is completely alien to us because it’s the same process little sea amoebas used a billion years ago.
          
          Anyway, the Knicks are in the Finals. I like KAT from his time with the Wolves, so I’m going Knicks in 6.

Nothing like a lucid dream about bringing out the trash that’s so realistic you swear up and down you brought out the trash, only to find that you did not bring out the trash. True story.
          
          This is the end game for all paranormal activity: what if it’s true, but it kinda sucks? Like the ghosts who get tired of repeating their names to dorks with voice recorders, or the aliens fascinated by Arby’s, or the medium who conjures the spirits of the most boring people in history. 
          
          The fantastical is superimposed by the observer. The more fantastic, the more imposition, until proven otherwise. 

'Truly, that which makes me believe there is no inhabitant 
          on this sphere, is that it seems to me that no sensible being 
          would be willing to live here.' 
          
          'Well, then!' said Micromegas, 'perhaps the beings that 
          inhabit it do not possess good sense.' 
          
          One alien to another, 
          on approaching the Earth, 
          in Voltaire's Micromegas: 
          A Philosophical History (1752)
          
          
          
          
          Chapter 4 of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" opens with that quote. Sagan draws from "Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" a lot, too.
          
          If there is a starting point to a way out, it's somewhere in those books.

Yeah, I just don't feel like throwing away a generation on a war in the Realm Of Always War is a great idea. We always seem to be one bomb short of peace.