I just watched Ghostbusters again, for the umpteenth time. It’s just as funny as it ever was, but now there is a hint of sadness mixed in as well. Harold Ramis had an astounding career beside Ghostbusters, but that is the movie I will always go back to. I always identified with Egon. It is strange to see him on the screen, to hear his deadpan voice and to also know he’s passed on. It doesn’t seem right.
The following is the latest in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy and assorted geekery – from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway.
In 1938, Raymond Chandler published a short detective story called “The King in Yellow.” It takes its name from the victim, a musician named King Leopardi. When the hotel dick, Steve Grayce, finds the man shot to death in his bed, clothed in yellow silk pajamas, he remarks, “The King in Yellow. I read a book with that title once.”
It’s a shame that women can’t go to conventions without being harassed in this day and age. The idea of a lady going to SDCC in a Batman t-shirt to seem “cool” has been thoroughly debunked by people smarter than me, so I won’t dwell on it here. But geek culture didn’t come up with this blatantly misogynistic stereotype because it inherently hates women. Have you read anything Gail Simone’s ever written? Do you watch Tara Long’s stuff over at Revision3? Women and nerdy things combine pretty well, as it turns out.
As a kid I was always fascinated by weird things. Like a lot of the children of the 80s, I was exposed to a wide variety of cinema at a young age, thanks to the proliferation of video stores. Most of this stuff we probably shouldn’t have been watching but we did anyway, often because it was a science fiction and/or fantasy film, or even a horror film if we managed to get an older kid to rent it (although the guy behind the counter usually didn’t care who was renting what).
After a somewhat misspent youth experimenting with drugs, my biggest disappointment was that I didn’t see a pink elephant. Or blurry demon. Or a talking hot dog. The time I tried acid was mellow: I felt like I was in a sound bubble moving through the Florida night. And, truth be told, I was inside a pick up truck with Aphex Twin on the stereo. The best thing I can come up with was the time we were in an after-hours club by our house, high on ecstasy. It was well into the morning, so we kept our trip rolling
