I’m from Philadelphia, so let’s get this out of the way…
GO PHILLIES! WOOOOOOOO!!!!!
OK! Thank you for your indulgence. In case you didn’t know, or you’re reading this in the future and have forgotten most everything about 2022 (that must be nice), the Phillies are in the World Series! And last night, they took Game 1 from the Astros in an improbable, come-from-behind victory in Houston. Down five runs! With an amazing game-saving catch from Nick Castellanos! So yeah, I’m pretty excited!
Oh shoot, I’m still talking about the Phillies, aren’t I? Once again, I thank you for your indulgence.
All right, moving on for real this time! It’s Halloween, so I thought I’d share a cool article from the Washington Post about why haunted houses are Victorian in so many books and movies.
I haven’t written much horror, other than a kind of silly short story called “The Roommate.” But I’ve always loved the genre. My favorite recent haunted-house thing was The Haunting of Hill House miniseries on Netflix. The Haunting of Bly Manor (Mike Flanagan did both but they’re different stories) was also pretty good. I’m hoping to check out Flanagan’s Midnight Club real soon, once I finish all the other peak-TV shows in my queue.
I’ve been reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. It’s my first Murakami book though I’d been hearing good things for a while. It’s a fairly strange, yet gripping novel. It’s got a little of that David Lynch vibe where a lot of it is dream-like and you’re not entirely sure what’s really happening. If that doesn’t scare you off, I’d recommend giving it a try.
You might know I’m kind of a comic book geek. I found really fascinating a biography of Stan Lee called True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman. It’s not exactly a glowing depiction of Stan The Man, revealing that the guy probably didn’t create the Marvel Universe all by himself as many people think. It also chronicles a lot of truly crazy sh** that happened in Lee’s later years. Even if he didn’t necessarily create all those classic superheroes, though, you definitely get the sense that Lee was a master marketer and that Marvel probably wouldn’t be what it is today without his passionate self-promotion.
On the gaming front, I just picked up Mario+Rabbids Sparks of Hope on Nintendo Switch and am absolutely having a blast playing it.
I loved the original Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle, and I’m happy to say the sequel has the best parts of that game with a whole lot more polish. Seriously, they couldn’t have been 100% confident when developing the original that people would embrace an XCOM-style strategy game teaming gun-wielding (ray guns, but still) Mario characters with weird bunny-things from Ubisoft’s Rayman series. However, it was obviously a winning concept, and the powers-that-be clearly gave the developers a big budget to run away with it in Sparks of Hope. It’s a pretty addictive videogame, and just writing about it makes me want to leave you mid-sentence to—
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