Monday, October 24, 2011

One Week Until Halloween

by Southernfried
There's only a week left until Halloween.  If you're going to celebrate the holiday right, it's time to get things together.  If you've been putting preparation off, it's time to get busy!

Announcements
I've got a couple of special features coming up on the blog to celebrate the season, so be sure and check back through the next week for their arrival.

More Getting Ready
In a perfect world, I would carve some jack-o-lanterns, get a new costume, go to at least one adult Halloween party, and a Halloween game session.  All of these look unlikely this year...again.  Oh the joys of underemployment (adjunct faculty = legal slavery).  I will probably end up just accompanying a couple of nephews on their trick-or-treat round, which is nice, but leaves me a feeling a little bit like someone who has prepared a month for an anti-climactic ending. Enough moaning.

I'm still working my way through my published reading list, and will be adding some updates about it, but in the midst of complaining about American Horror Story, my colleagues have insisted that I watch The Walking Dead.  Zombies (hungry zombies?  lesser ghouls?)  are not my favorite monster, but I watched the first episode since the full-time faculty told me not to show up at lunch today if I failed to do so.  Man, it is grim and gross.  Especially gross.  And while it's not my favorite of the genre, they definitely have some of the methods of good horror story-telling down: not revealing too much at the beginning, withholding information, building tension, and so forth.  While they do end up showing lots of zombies, that is a rule that it would seem especially hard to adhere to in the zombie movie, which depends in its most essential nature on fear of the crowd.  Based on the first episode (and the confidence of its fans), this looks like it has a better chance than AHS.