Jared Shurin's Blog, page 30

What makes a great villain?

What makes a great villain?

Its a question Ive been pondering a lot lately. Prompted, as these things usually are, by something quite mundane: the realization that I was steadily losing interest in a show Id previously been enjoying.

At first, I struggled to put my finger on why that was. The acting was still good. The heroes still sympathetic. The dialogue was engaging and believable. The only thing that had really changed was the villain. Or, more accurately, the antagonist, since he didnt...

Friday Five: 5 Shakespearean Takes on Cthulhu (or Vice Versa)

Imagine if it had beenWilliam Shakespeare, Englands greatest playwright, who had discovered the truth about the Great Old Ones and the cosmic entity we know asCthulhu, rather than the American horror writerH P Lovecraft. Imagine if Stratfords favourite son had been the one to learn of the dangers of seeking after forbidden knowledge and of the war waged between the Elder Gods in the Outer Darkness, and had passed on that message, to those with eyes to see it, through his plays and poetry Wel...

BRB

We're taking a quick break, and will beback next week with all our (ir)regularly scheduled cool stuff.

On the horizon: there's more from Kuzhali, Stark, Selena, Molly, Becky, Silvia, Jamie and the One Comic team, our DGLA reviews, some veryspecial guest posts, some super-nerdydata stuffand the start of a brand new feature series.

Don't forget, if you're a blogger or reviewer, leave your details in the comments here. And if you're looking for blogs to read, well, look there too.

Period Drama, no Petticoats: Paper Girls #6

Nostalgia hits us in various ways this show, as we take a look at issue six of Paper Girls,written by Brian K Vaughan with art by Cliff Chiang and Matt Wilson, which tells the story of characters from 1988 brought forward into the present. (And some others coming back from the future. Possibly. Exactly whats going on remains tantalisingly intriguing.)

Suffice it to say that Bex and Jon (but not Jared, because hes a child) brought their own experience of living through the 1980s to the part...

Review Policy

We will no longer be taking books for review. From now on, our policy is thatwe buy our books.

We review a tiny fraction of the books we're sent. In parallel,the vast majority of our reviews are of books that we've purchased. We're fortunateto be able to buy the books we want to read, and, as readers in that position, it makes us feel uncomfortable to continue taking free copies - especially since so manyof themgo to waste.

It is also worth noting that Pornokitsch has neverbeen'frontlist' foc...

Weirdness Rodeo: Boardgames, Funk, Amazon

Badlands National Park / Joshua Haunschild

Are board games getting worse? A data analysis of board game ratings shows that the market is absolutely flooded, but 'peak quality' may have passed us by:

The number of extra-special gems released each year is slightly increasing, but its plateauing. Truly great games represent a smaller and smaller part of the years releases.

Sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are mainly responsible for the surge in (questionable quality) board game releases....

Friday Five: 5 Sensational Star Trek Ships

Lets talk shipping.(And no, Im not talking spaceships)

For those of you who dont know, shipping in fandoms refers to supporting/encouraging a relationship between two (or more) characters, even (or especially) if theyll never have a canonical relationship. For example: Percy/Annabeth is popular among the Percy Jackson series and is canon with the books. Johnlock (John Watson/Sherlock Holmes) is very popular among the Sherlock fandom and is obviously not canon (as if thatll ever stop the fans...

Stark Reviews: The Shooting (1966)

Stark says: I dont give a curly-hair, yellow bear, double dog damn if ya did.

If you like your Westerns obscure, oblique and cult then I have four words for you, friend: Monte. Hellman. The. Shooting.

Not to be confused with The Shootist, this is a fine example of a revisionist Western, as well as being one of the first possibly the first real Acid Western, and heck, it drops more acid than a side character in a Philip K. Dick novel. Be warned, though: this isnt the mind-bending, kal...

Readers of Gor: Outlaw of Gor

In whichSilvia Moreno-Garciaof Ka-Na-Da andMolly Tanzerof Ko-Lo-Ra-Do discuss Silvia's re-read and Molly's first read of the first four of John Norman's famous (notorious?) Gor series.

Silvia: Tal, Molly Tanzer of Ko-Lo-Ra-Do. Well, when last we saw our hero Tarl Cabot (what kind of name is that? I still cant say his damn name) he had returned to Earth. But not for long! Soon hes back in the world of Gor, where men are manly men and women are very pretty but like not threatening, like you t...

DGLA: Criteria and Intro!

We're (almost) up and running!As is tradition, I want to set out my list of Special Judging Criteria for this year's reading.

(For newcomers: I read and review the DGLA finalists every year. Here are2015, 2014,2013, 2012.)

For 2016, after much deliberation, I'm not going to tackle all the finalists. I'll be stickingto the Morningstar titles:

Battlemage by Stephen Aryan The Traitor by Seth Dickinson The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig Starborn by Lucy Hounsom The Vagrant by Peter Newman An Emb...