Category: Miscellaneous

Birthday Aquisitions #3: Films

March 15, 2017

We’ve got a massive collection of DVDs and Blu-rays, and I’d estimate easily 95% of them are genre films (sci-fi, fantasy, horror). They run the gamut from classics to trash but I’ve watched them all, and now we no longer have cable find ourselves watching DVDs far more than ever!

It’s a good thing therefore there’s always something new, like this haul I got for my birthday…

The Dr Who serial is the last release for original series material and I have to say I enjoyed it quite a lot. Sherlock season 4 we haven’t watched yet, but I think it’ll be good. Florry gave me pause though…

Street Fighter is a terrible film and we saw it at the movies (!) when it came out. I wanted to rewatch it though and KLS found it for dirt cheap! The 4-pack on the right was bought for Kull (which we also saw at the movies and is just a wretched film…) but for the low cost and both Conan films included who can resist?

And the Argento? Another film I’ve been curious about for years that hasn’t been on Hulu, Netflix or (free) Prime. It’s apparently not great, but I think I may like it. Besides, I’m this || close to going on a full-on euro-vampire movie bender and just spending a fortune on Jean Rollin and Jess Franco stuff so the Argento is maybe to scratch that itch.

I still watch a lot of anime and since I’m too stubborn to use Crunchyroll that means I do my bit to keep the DVD collection market alive! Gantz should be fun if it’s anything like the recent film. Desert Punk I know nothing about but was cheap and Highschool DxD is the third collection of the funny harem comedy.

The top two are no surprise to anyone that knows me. I’ll just say thank god Chinese Odyssey finally got a western release! The bottom two are because I can no longer ignore those that claim these two are better than Chows films. We shall see…

So I’m on a little Hammer high. At the risk of sounding old, ‘they don’t make horror like they used to’ and I’ve always been a bigger fan of the (literally) theatric and creepy Hammer style than US horror (like Halloween or Friday the 13th). I’ve watched loads of Hammer already on streaming, but the best ones (from the 70s) are unavailable free do it was time to step to the next level. Hammer House Of Horror is the anthology TV show from 1980 that I remember watching as a kid. It’s creepy and the plots are unpredictable and we’re really enjoying it!

Now that I’m making these posts and documenting the stuff I got it seems like too much doesn’t it? Remember I bought much of this myself (or put it on a list) so it may be a stretch to call them birthday gifts. But I did get some surprises, which you’ll start seeing tomorrow…

Birthday Aquisitions #1: Books

March 13, 2017

I used to semi-regularly post about stuff I’d recently bought (or received as gifts) but haven’t for a very long time.

But I watch a lot of streaming on YouTube (and that’s a blog post right there…) and I enjoy when the streamers show off new loot they’ve obtained and how proud and happy they are to have it.

So, for one week only (?), a return to those types of posts! It was my birthday recently and I pulled in quite a haul! I’ll go over much of it this week in five posts starting today with the books.

And even though I bought much of this stuff for myself, I’m still calling them birthday gifts 🙂

There’s the ‘normal’ books. An eclectic selection perhaps. Sin-A-Rama is the updated and reprinted version of a book I bought two years ago and haven’t read yet (it’s an art book of pulp covers essentially). The book on the bottom is an anthology of lurid men’s adventure magazines from post-WW2.

The manga. Obviously I’m a big fan of Fairy Tail (yes I own 57 volumes…) but of this pile the Junjo Ito books would be my favourites. He’s a master of horror manga and almost everything he has done is a classic.

Two art books and an RPG monster manual. The Fire Emblem book was surprisingly inexpensive (<$20) and will be worth owning for Tharja alone! Thanks to AJW for informing me of Tome Of Beasts (which now has entered my siseable ‘monster manual’ collection).

An unusual gift (from KLS) you may think? It’s an art book of women from Hammer Horror films. I’ll get back to this on Wednesday…

Loads of pulp! Almost all of the above cost only $0.01 (plus $3.99 P&H) from Amazon and after buying a few like this in Oz I’m now on a ‘1970s Conan ripoff’ binge! Keen-eyed observers may note the Kothar and Brak series are both incomplete in this photo… but I already had the other volumes 🙂

Speaking of Conan, and possibly stretching the ‘book’ definition, I got this old AD&D module as well. If anyone is interested, I’ll review this on the blog.

And last but not least some Guy N Smith books. I’ve wanted to read The Sucking Pit for years and now I am I can reveal it most certainly wasn’t worth the wait. From the same author of the ‘crab series’ books, this is about as pulpy a horror novel as you can imagine and was probably written faster than most would read it! The Walking Dead is the sequel from ten years later (1985) and will likely be equally trashy. But you don’t read Smith expecting high literature, so I’m satisfied.

The above are all now put into my sorted-by-category ‘to read’ pile, which has now grown to fill five shelves of a bookcase. When will I read them all? Who knows!

But read them I will, one day. And I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy them all 🙂

Like A Champ

February 28, 2017

Last Saturday we took a drive up north. It was unseasonably warm in Albany, and my birthday is approaching so I wanted to do something fun. Besides, for aeons I have lived here and ignored something significant that has been calling me. From up north.

The drive took us through the Adirondacks and up into higher elevations where the snow was still everywhere, and where Albany with its 70F temperatures seemed a world away. I had dressed for warmth, and keenly felt the freeze. We pressed on.

About two hours after leaving home we were close to our destination, but the final leg took us along what must have been an old logging or mining road. Eleven-plus miles through an ancient pine forest on a very poor road full of blind turns, icy surfaces and near-zero visibility fog. It was hair-raising in the daylight and would have been a nightmare at night. Would the trip be worth it after completing this trial? We would soon find out…

That’s Lake Champlain, taken from a (literally) frozen beach in the town of Port Henry. The lake was massive and quiet and still. The air was cold and the water colder. It was too early in the season for boats, and too early in the day for fishermen. Aside from a few gulls, there wasn’t much life around.

We came here to see a monster.

Lake Champlain is world-famous for its resident: Champ, the lake monster. Second only to Nessie (of Loch Ness) with regards to fame, the first verifiable sighting of Champ was almost exactly 200 years ago (1819) though legends of a monster in this lake date back further still. Over the years there have been hundreds of sightings and even a few photographs, most notable the ‘Sansi’ photograph of 1977 (or was it 1981?). He’s America’s own monster, famous throughout the world.

I’ve known about Champ forever. I should be ashamed it had taken me so many years to come up and see him.

The town of Port Henry, on the southwest shore of the lake, adopted Champ as it’s official mascot in 1981. For a time America went Champ-mad, and there were more than one conferences debating his origin (and existence). Champ souvenirs were a-plenty, and both Vermont and New York (the lake is the border) signed bills protecting Champ as an endangered species. Even today – as you can see above – there is evidence of Champ in tiny Port Henry, including on the Chamber of Commerce sign.

That’s an impressively large sign posted just on the side of the main road into Port Henry. It lists every Champ sighting up until 1990, when apparently they stopped updating it. We drove past this sign on our way to cross the Lake Champlain bridge into Vermont, continuing our hunt for Champ souvenirs.

We found a cute gift shop in Vermont (called ‘Champs’) but it was closed so we headed back. Had we the motivation we could have continued all the way to Burlington where they built a Champ statue some years back and (apparently) there’s a few other monuments to him. Even though they can see New York across the lake, to them I’m sure Champ lives in Vermont.

It was easy, as I stood on the lake shore and looked out, to imagine something deep under that still, cold surface. Lake Champlaign is a massive lake – over 250 km in length and 250 meters deep at it’s deepest. It is (much!) longer, wider and deeper than Loch Ness, and if Nessie can survive there?

As I turned to leave, with Kristin watching me from afar, I heard a splash and a roar some distance away very close to the shore. I quickly turned, and had time enough to snap only a single photo before whatever it was disappeared below the surface. I still can hardly believe what I saw, but as they say, the camera doesn’t lie:

Robot Claw