Better to be a rock, timeless, ageless, shaped only by the wind and rain.  A rock feels no pain, no terror, no shame.  A rock is content. It’s not driven by an urge to procreate or a need to find food or shelter.  It simply is.  It exists, and needs no one and nothing to prove that existence to itself or to the world.  Yes, much better to be a rock, hardened and solid, than this fleshy chaos.

But a rock cannot feel the wind upon it, and certainly cannot stop it from blowing.  It can’t feel the cold touch of rain or the slow expansion of ice as it cleaves it ever so slowly in twain.  A rock has to control over itself or over its environment, and is at the mercy of the world.  It is naked, alone, and forever without the means to express itself against its oppressors, wind and rain.

Perhaps a tree would be better?  Not so immortal as the stone, but still a constant for much longer than a human lifetime.  A tree with gnarled bark and strong limbs reaching to the sun, yes, and still a slave to wind and rain but able to feel and grow.  Still mute to the world, and yet the tree slows the wind and soaks in the rain.  The tree uses the wind to sow its seed and the rain to help it grow.  It scrubs the carbon from the air and returns oxygen, its quiet protest against the very nature of the atmosphere itself.

Ah, but a tree will never see another forest save its own.  It will never know what the sunset over the ocean looks like, never lay eyes upon the great glaciers of the frozen north.  It will see only the world around it, and nothing more, and in so doing will be limited in its scope.  It knows only what it can see, only what it can feel, never realizing the larger world beyond it.

Then a bird, yes, a bird, that is what we should be.  A bird that rides the winds and weathers the rains, a bird that can see the snowy tundra and the placid seas.  A bird that soars and dips and dives without a care in the world.  Did not the dinosaurs choose this path?  Did they not become the feathered freewheelers in the skies over our heads?  What more does man envy than the bird, so much so we invented metal wings of our own?

Yet birds have their follies.  They have to eat, and must avoid the weather.  They mate, yes, and have to sing to find their partners.  How many end up alone?  They perhaps have their own sort of sadness, and while it may be more balanced than our own, it is still there.  And their lifespans, so much shorter than ours, as if they were given the freedom to fly at the cost of their longevity.

And so we are stuck, trapped in the only form that fits for us.  We are human, after all, because we must be.  We have no choice, no means of changing this one destiny.  You cannot choose to be a rock or a tree or a bird.  You can only choose to life your life in a way that balances the scales a little better in your favor.  That is the truest lesson of life, that it is only as fair as you allow it to be.

Today I remembered what I had forgotten.  I love to write.  I miss it.  I haven’t turned out a complete story in months.  I’ve distracted myself, told myself it was no big deal, made myself busy with work or friends or games.  But today something happened, something stupid, and it tripped the memory circuits.  My company is locking down flash drive ports on laptops – they’re concerned someone will run off with sensitive data.  This means I can’t listen to my music on a flash drive any more.  I went out and bought a cheap MP3 player and decided to load a bunch of stuff onto it, including audio books.

I was happily bopping along to The Art of Noise, not thinking much about how much I’ve closed myself off from the part of my life I really enjoy, when all the sudden my audiobook of Stephen King’s IT came on.  Oh god…I’d forgotten.  I’d completely forgotten about how much I loved that story, how much I loved HEARING stories.  And how much I loved telling stories.  I’m listening to it as I write this, and resolving that I WILL write more.  I’ve cut myself off from my creative side and it has to stop.

It has to stop because I know this is one of the signs of my depression returning.  I’ve talked about it before, about the sometimes crippling feelings of emptiness and uselessness I have.  I realize now, I’ve been having those sorts of feelings a lot lately.  I’ve ascribed it as stress, but it’s not…it’s that dark shadow inside trying to cut me off again.  So here I am, not letting it.  I’m rambling, but you’ll forgive the crazy guy his babbling when he’s trying to break through the mental walls he’s put on himself.

There are times I look back and I realize how empty my life has been, always because of this darkness, this emptiness.  I’ve been fighting it a little at a time, but it’s very, very hard, and of course I’d love to be able to stop for a while.  That’s not possible, however, or I fall right back into the depression cycle again.  But once in a while I have to realize that my mind is really good at fucking me over.  I’d like to say this breakthrough means I can put it behind me forever, but I can’t.  I will fail again – I’m only human.  Just so long as I never give up.

Oh well!  Break’s over!!!

Ok, so I’ve seen the remake.  I wanted to like it.  I really, really did.  It’s Evil Dead.  I love Evil Dead.  So why did I not like this movie?  Why did I leave feeling let down?

It certainly wasn’t the effects, which are gory, over the top and definitely in keeping with the original’s oceans of arterial spray.  It wasn’t the story, which is similar to the original with a group of friends going to a cabin in the woods for a weekend.  It certainly wasn’t the little elements that were throwbacks to the original, such as the “tree rape”, the invisible force running through the woods, the rusted out car, even keeping the book named the same (even though we all know it’s the Necronomicon).  And the chainsaw…and the…well, you get the idea.

No, the movie was just lacking something that has always made Evil Dead the kind of movie you can just pop in and enjoy any time.  The movie is lacking charm.

Charm is a hard thing to quantify.  The original movie had it because of the low budget, the genius of the director, and the powerful jaw-line of the leading man.  Let’s focus in on that last one.  I had heard this movie didn’t have an Ash, or that there was a female Ash, but it wasn’t Ash exactly.  Well, that was correct.  None of the characters was Ash.  None of them had a tenth of his charm.  And a big chunk of the movie seemed to be the plot trying to decide who was going to be the Ash in this film.  First the brother is the protagonist, and then for a short time you think it might be his girlfriend, and then it’s the sister…but none of them are Ash.

So does there have to be an Ash?  No, not really.  But there does have to be a hero.  See, Evil Dead is not a horror film about a bunch of victims.  That’s Halloween or Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but Evil Dead is a story about a transformation from man to superman, from victim to hero.  Ash begins as a normal guy, but by the end of the movie, and certainly in the sequels, he becomes a true hero (albeit a bumbling one).  It’s not dissimilar to Aliens – Ripley starts as a victim and becomes a hero, and that’s why Aliens is a great movie and its followups were all horrible.

The movie also lacked just about any humor at all.  I chuckled a tiny bit during the “deadite lesbian scene”, but it clearly wasn’t meant to be funny.  There could have been humor in the movie, and there SHOULD have been considering the source, but it was deadpan all the way through.  And here’s where we come to the inevitable conclusion and comparison that I had hoped wouldn’t need to be made, but clearly does:

Cabin in the Woods is a better Evil Dead remake than this.

Why?  Cabin in the Woods had charm.  It had humor, but was still serious.  It had a victim become a hero.  It has practically the same premise (and it should…that was the point of Cabin in the Woods), and pulled off the story ten times better than the Evil Dead remake.  Cabin in the Woods had an Ash.

In the end, I think this film will not be well remembered, and deservedly so.  It simply isn’t Evil Dead.  Here’s to hoping Raimi and Campbell can pull off the rumored Army of Darkness II.

P.S., for those who have seen the remake, who in the hell was the girl supposed to be?  I mean, seriously…who was it?  It didn’t make any sense to show this big imposing guy in the Necronomicon and then have the big bad be a woman who looks like she needs to eat a sammich or two before the wind blows her away.  This is just one of those things that logically didn’t make sense to me, and I think it jarred me almost as much as the lack of humor and charm did.  I had no reason to care, whatsoever, who that witch was.

It’s that film and two others that I’d like to talk about, the three films that make up Carpenter’s unofficial “Apocalypse Trilogy”.

The first film is The Thing.  Released in 1982, The Thing is actually a remake of an earlier film, The Thing From Another World (1951).  The movie is based on a short story, Who Goes There, by John W. Campbell Jr., written in 1938 and published in Astounding Science-Fiction.  The story is about a remote base in Antarctica and a shapeshifting alien that can absorb and take over a life form.  It’s a great mix of both science fiction and horror.  The reason it’s part of an “apocalypse” is that during the film, Blair, the team biologist (played by DIABEETUS…er…Wilford Brimley) calculates the time it would take for the alien to take over all human life on Earth if it escapes – it’s just about three years.

The primary protagonist of the film is MacReady (Kurt Russell), who is a rough edged chopper pilot.  By the end of the film, we can’t be sure if MacReady is actually human or not, nor if Childs, the only other survivor, might not be the alien. Either way, there’s no escape.  Both are doomed, though one might simply go into hibernation again, to be found by a rescue crew.  It’s this undefined, unknown consequence that really defines these three films.  None of them end on a happy note.

The second film in the trilogy, which are not connected storywise, is 1987′s Prince of Darkness.  This film also mixes science fiction with horror, this time presenting a secret that the Catholic church has kept hidden for millennia. Essentially, the Devil is a self-organizing abstract equation kept in a special glass container.  A team of students from a local university are brought in to study the device after its caretaker dies and it begins to become active.

As the movie progresses, the evil in the container escapes, possessing several of the students.  In the end, a sacrifice by the protagonist’s love interest stops Lucifer from bringing his father (the “anti-god”) into the world.  The movie’s hero is played by Jameson Parker, mostly known for his work on Simon and Simon.  He’s really not a good fit for this role, but that’s ok because the movie also features the late Victor Wong (Egg Chen in Big Trouble in Little China) and Dennis Dun (also from Big Trouble in Little China), plus a cameo of Alice Cooper as a crazed homeless man under the devil’s influence.  The movie ends with a suitably creepy scene that makes you wonder if they really stopped the anti-god or not.

The final film is 1995′s In The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter’s love note to the Cthulhu Mythos by way of Stephen King. The story is about an insurance adjustor who investigates the appearance of the world’s most popular author, who happens to write Cthulhlian stories that are so popular, people actually start to become part of them.  He is revealed to be in a small town that exists only in his books, and the insurance agent, played perfectly by Sam Neill, becomes the unwitting prophet that delivers the final book, the book that will drive the world into madness, to the publisher.

The movie plays with the concept of shared reality, and how much of our perception of the world is based on the rules we all agree to.  Madness is more abstract here, with Neill’s character slowly slipping into insanity as the rules of reality seem to crumble around him.  Carpenter has said the movie is more Stephen King that Lovecraft, but there are parts lifted directly from The Haunter of the Dark, and the Old Ones are clearly Lovecraftian.  This film is probably the most successful mythos film, while not being directly connected to the mythos.

The three films together form the “apocalypse trilogy” because in the end, in all three, the world may be doomed, though only in the third, In The Mouth of Madness, is the world specifically threatened.  These three films, viewed together, are very bleak.  They’re a perfect rainy Sunday companion if you want to get your horror geek on.

One casualty of this, unfortunately, is Star Wars 1313, which looked to be a pretty damn good game.  It’s been scrapped along with all other current Lucasarts projects.

All is not lost, however, as this may mean that Disney will license the properties to other developers.  It’s actually MORE likely now to see some of the classic Lucasarts games rebooted.  Additionally, it’s highly unlikely there won’t be more Star Wars games, and quite honestly, Lucasarts has sat on some properties, like the X-Wing and TIE Fighter space combat sims, for FAR too long.

It’s never good to see people lose their jobs, but perhaps something good will come of this.

Look, I have a pretty low opinion of most Republicans as it is, but I’ve always believed that they at least were down with the Constitution of the United States and weren’t, you know, cartoon villains despite their various attempts to prove me wrong.  This, though, is beyond the pale.  This is literally evil.  There’s no other word for it.  This is the sort of stuff Lex Luthor or Mumm-Ra would be pulling.

These legislators need to not just be removed from their seats, but banned from ever holding public office again.  The level of stupidity and hubris they are exhibiting is nearly unthinkable.  This is the sort of thing that, should it pass (and I hope it does not), Washington should roll tanks into North Carolina and forcibly remove the state government.  And quite honestly, if the people of North Carolina are too damned stupid to not vote for mustache twirling villains, perhaps a decade or two as a territory managed by the federal government might straighten them out.

Or maybe we just need to clone William Tecumseh Sherman and let him deal with it.  Seriously, people, it’s 2013…we CANNOT be this stupid.

The One Ring, the golden ring of Sauron found (stolen) by Bilbo Baggins and eventually destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom by Frodo, Sam and (unintentionally) Gollum, was inspired by a real ring.

This ancient ring was found in a farmer’s field in 1785.  The inscriptions are in Latin and it bears the image of the goddess Venus.  It’s linked to a curse tablet from the temple of Nodens.  Tolkien, who was researching Nodens at the time, was shown the ring by a friend and it apparently inspired him to make the Macguffin of his epic story a magic ring, but one that was also cursed.

The real ring, however, passed out of mind for an age, lingering in the vaults of a library for years after Tolkien’s visit.  Now it’s being displayed in the Vyne museum in a “ring room” that discusses the connection between this real ring and Tolkein’s fictional One Ring.

Read more here.

I experienced a moment a pure happiness today.  It’s been quite some time really, since I’ve had that feeling.  It’s like all the weight dropping from your shoulders, just for an instant, and the world feels like for at least a little while like it will spin on.  It’s not a physical sensation, like a orgasm, but rather a spiritual or emotional renewal.

It happened in my car, which I just bought a month ago and have had issues with.  I love it dearly, but it has had various minor mechanical issues and the check engine light has been on since I bought it.  Despite a mechanic telling me it’s nothing, it worries me, and sounds and shakes and other things the car does always worries me. I love it so, I don’t want it to not work right.

I had just gotten home from a very unsuccessful shopping run.  I’d gotten my groceries and a video game I’d wanted to try, but two other ventures, one looking for some steampunky goggles at a costume store and the other some leather from a craft store, both ended in failure.  But sitting there, in my space, the car still running, warm sunlight spilling in after what’s seemed like an eternal winter, the light on the dash went out.  The check engine light turned off.  I know it will come back on, but it was like the car, no, the whole world was telling me everything was going to be ok, at least for a little while.

And in that instant, I had a moment of bliss.  The world was right on its axis, there were things to do, stuff to see, new friends to make.  The winter was ending, spring and summer were coming.  The dark clouds were turning silver and for just one moment I knew everything would be ok.

A minute later I was worrying about the car again, and mentally calculating how much I needed to put aside for any possible emergency car issues, and reminding myself to do laundry and that I needed to do this, that, and the other, but I felt better, so very much better.  I still feel it, hours later, that maybe things will be ok.  And maybe the world will spin onward.  And even if bad things happen, I will be ok.

I wish you all, anyone who ever reads this, the best of luck in having such a moment, because we all sorely need them in our lives.  They are too few, and too far between, but when they come, cherish them and hold on to them as long as you can.

I did have a wonderful time with the people there.  I cannot stress that enough – I had an AMAZING time, but not because of the con.  In fact, almost in spite of it.

Three things really hurt Marcon this year: 1) very poor programming, 2) confusing information and 3) very low turn out due to the scheduling of the con.  Let’s talk about the last one first – next year, Marcon is moving back to May, which is when it traditionally took place.  It won’t be on Memorial Day weekend, due mostly to the hotel not wanting it scheduled then, but it will be on a better weekend than Easter weekend.  I’m not sure what the idea was with moving it to Easter weekend – most folks will entirely skip Sunday (I will) because it’s a family holiday, and practically no one gets any work holidays for it.  It’s just a really DUMB move to have the con then.  A random weekend in May is MUCH better than on a holiday that’s not a goof off holiday.

Ok, now lets talk about the confusing info – there was precious little signage at the con, and to get info on cancelled panels you had to go to the art show (and not the info booth).  As usual, some of the listed times, like when registration would open, was…well to call them embellishments is a stretch.  Registration of Friday was supposed to start at 11am…it didn’t get going till 12:30.  But that didn’t really matter because…

…the programming sucked and nothing really started until 4pm.  I get not having enough panelists – see the first point about horrible con scheduling.  However, that doesn’t excuse things like scheduling the two costuming panels AT THE SAME TIME.  Or putting  one of the Dottore Who skits against Rocky Horror.  I also understand wanting to do adult panels late…but 11:30?  The people in the Kink 101 panel were yawning and falling asleep because duh, they were tired as fuck.

An honorable mention on stuff the con failed at was the dealer room.  There were fewer stands there this year than last, and honestly most of the folks there were raking people over the coals for cash.  There was, for example, a single sword dealer there, and they were selling katanas that go for $30 on BudK.com for $150.  Now I get “con prices” on some stuff – but seeing Party City steampunk goggles that sell for $6 marked at $35? Even the t-shirts were expensive.  I bought a con shirt, as I always do, and it was $28 this year.  Last year I believe I only paid $20.  Again, the move to May might help attract more vendors and competition might drive down some prices, but I have to say, I walked through the dealers room so many times and I honestly either found nothing I wanted or what I did want was terribly overpriced.

Marcon has so much potential to be awesome.  It used to be – it was on its way to becoming the SDCC or Dragoncon of the midwest.  Then something happened, I don’t know what (though if I find out, I’ll write about it), and it’s been headed down hill ever since.  I sincerely hope that the move back to May brings more people.  I plan to volunteer to be a panelist next year, since I can definitely speak to writing and blogging, as well as other geek topics that I’m an expert on (Star Wars, Transformers, Stephen King, Lovecraft, etc.).  I might also offer to help them with their horrible web page – you can’t find shit on it and the gallery link has been broken for literally a year now.

Again, the people there, the friends I got to hang out with and the wonderful folks I met, they were definitely reasons I will come back again, but this con needs help.  Perhaps someone (me, maybe, and my friends) should start a “help Marcon shine again” effort.  But I can honestly say, the con didn’t feel worth the $60 I paid this year.