Dobes Zone

 It's been a busy October and I'm realizing that I have not shared anything to my blog in a while. At a friend's suggestion, I'm cross-posting some of my letterboxd reviews of some of my favorite new watches as well as rewatches from this month. I watched in total, 42 feature length films and 5 short films , some on my own, some in streams I hosted or in streams hosted by others. Everything I watched this month was horror or a thriller dealing with horror themes.   Here's a couple of my favorite new watches from this month. It's not all of them, but these felt like the reviews most worth sharing.   Eyes of Fire (1983) A lovely dark fairy tale set in pre-revolutionary war colonial America. An arrogant preacher has seduced a married woman and when the townsfolk try to have him hanged for it, he and his followers set out into the woods to start a new settlement- which they are wholly unprepared for. Also to be fair, hanging a guy for witchcraft and devilry bec...

 Some years ago I thrifted a load of pulp horror and SF/F paperbacks in Idaho while visiting family. The Cats by Nick Sharman (an alias for Scott Grønmark) is a book I picked up based on the cover alone- the old adage about judging a book by its cover be damned, I love a cool illustration on a book cover. I will always buy editions of books with the best possible cover art. This shit is like catnip to me, pun intended.      The book cover for The Cats is by none other than Don Ivan Punchatz, the illustrator perhaps best known for his iconic Doom box art . A fun fact is that his son Gregor Punchatz worked on the monster models for Doom as well. In Don's prolific career he also illustrated for Heavy Metal, National Lampoon, Playboy, Time, as well as cover illustrations for Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison novels. Appropriately enough, here's a photo of Punchatz with a cat.     As for the novel itself, I'll start off by saying it's not high art, but it's a...

 I'd reviewed this series briefly on my Letterboxd already, but I wanted to talk a little more in depth about the show.         In late 00's (or perhaps it was 2010?) a couple fansubbed episodes of Stop! Hibari-kun popped up on Youtube. I'd discovered them quite accidentally, I think via someone on twitter mentioning the show, and right then and there I was hooked. At that time, I wasn't really encountering a lot of trans media and hadn't yet started to think of myself as trans, but it definitely caught my interest. Sadly, it was only a few episodes and the updates stopped. I'd also found the manga, but it was also in a state of only partial fan translation. Flash forward to the present day, where I was happy to learn that not only was a full fansub completed, but the whole series is now available in a good crisp quality. It looks gorgeous and I'm so glad this odd little slice of queer anime history has been preserved. I'd love for there to be an offici...

       As most of you probably know, I ended up getting covid, as have the other members of my household. The three of us are doing well but we were laid up for about a week forcing ourselves to take things as easy as possible. In that time, I tried to mostly occupy myself with drawing, reading, and watching films. As it happens, I'd just acquired both the Day of the Triffids DVD as well as the novel it was based on. My copy of Day of the Triffids, with a beautiful dust jacket cover by Gary Viskupik       When I was a child, I was absolutely terrified by and obsessed with Day of the Triffids. My family had it on VHS and I think I was about at the age where I liked to scare myself with movies. I had a highly active imagination and it didn't take a lot to scare me- just a good concept was enough and my brain would connect the dots. The movie of course, to an adult, is a pretty tame affair, but the concept of it all is still compelling. The book illu...

Pen Tree Cat Seven Tuna Tuesday What exactly counts as an intrusive thought? Connell remembered seeing an online argument years ago about the phrasing but couldn’t recall who’d won. There was someone insisting that intrusive thoughts strictly involved thoughts that were violent, upsetting, and unbidden. Drive your car off a bridge, drop the baby on his head, dice your finger like a carrot on the cutting board. Others suggested that this also included random annoying ideas, absurd notions. Shitposts, jokes. Well, that’s just having thoughts isn’t it? A lot of thought comes unprompted, unconscious. The phrase stuck in Connell’s head, intrusive thought or not, was definitely unasked for and not caused by any stimuli in his environment. In the 8 th grade during a science lesson, Connell’s teacher had provided the class with a memory exercise. They were learning about the brain, the different lobes and the areas that controlled bodily functions like appetite, breathing, fear. Thin...