I have a lot of bitchier ways I've thought about saying this over the last few months but let me try saying this the Nice Way:

I got out to a big zine fest here in Seattle today! It was great! one of my favorite things is getting art direct from people just producing small scale, small print run works of art. we ended up spending quite a bit of money, kind of splurging in a way I just don't normally do. but here's the thing about that: I don't think we ended up spending more than, say, two AAA games cost. and just now I was like ok so a night at the movies, though, surely that's still, like, less than a AAA game, right? ha ha oh man. not if Sarah and I wanted to go to our local AMC! forget about "dinner and a movie" lol. but ok, so, two AAA games or two nights out at a mainstream (not second run or arthouse) movie theater. I leave comparing this to the price of Netflix or Disney Plus to your imagination.

I've seen some... weird assertions on here that it just doesn't matter where you spend your money. that money's not going to be life changing for either, say, JK Rowling or for the independent artist you'd give that money to instead, right?

where on earth do people get this idea from?

it kinda seems when you say something like that that you just don't... understand how money works? or the disproportional positive impact that even some portion of the cost of a AAA game or blockbuster theatergoing experience can have on the life of a working artist? cause let me tell you, what we spent today is a real significant percentage of the money we have coming in. should I also compare that money to what groceries cost now? I just... yeah I guess it's not going to matter that much to Scott Cawthorn if you decide to give your money to Scott Cawthorn instead of me or Sarah or any of our friends who rely on day jobs and/or! welfare to support their art. but uh! it matters to us, actually!

and, I don't know, is it really so totally morally neutral to spend all your money on giant corporations that union bust and lay off their workers? or rich shitheads who funnel their wealth into oppressing queer people? there's all these alternatives out here, people whose work IS actually pretty consistently under threat, in a real way, from censorship both organized (i.e. book bannings) and structural (having to give up on art because it just doesn't pay unless you're approaching it like a venture capitalist with existing seed capital). and it's good art too, god dammit. don't try to tell me someone's weird zine art is harder on the eyes than the unfinished, out of focus special effects Marvel is shoving into their movies now because they believe they have a perpetual captive audience!

anyway we got several works of queer erotica, a short book about a christian anarchist immigrant sect in Canada, a free newsprint magazine (Scarfff! they have a patreon!), the first two issues of an ongoing adaptation of a Russian fairy tale, an imported and translated collection of an indie manga author's sort sci fi stories, experimental horror shorts based off the author's experience in a highly regimented religious school, and a few things I genuinely don't know how to describe or categorize. oh and some stickers and bookmarks too. it's a really good and exciting haul!

to me, that's money well spent.

just some food for thought.

The new Hellraiser replaces the kink of the original with a new metaphor of drug addiction. One problem: if drugs were all this boring and sad, no one would ever do them. What else gets lost when "Elevated Horror" loses the visceral allure of transgression?

A new full length Halloween review, free to everyone, live on my Patreon

Eroticism, sexual menace, and masochism all play a part in this film, but I'm not sure that the protagonist Kirsty experiences, on screen, the comingled desire and terror the Cenobites represent. The Cenobites are not even necessarily directly erotic monsters (though apparently the film was developed under the title Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave, which rules). Some of the eroticism was apparently in part taken out due to MPAA censorship. Go figure. And yet, what remains is a kind of eroticism of texture. It's looking at these practical effects, these monster designs, and being repulsed but also wishing to see more of them. What makes it read that way for me is not necessarily in the story itself, but in the sensory imaginary of Chatterer putting its fingers in Kirsty's mouth and going [clickclickclickclick] next to her ear. The first time I saw that I recoiled from the screen!

...But I also kept looking, and over the years have returned again and again.

Maybe it's this dynamic that inspires the drug (or more broadly "mental health" or "cycles of trauma") metaphor increasingly popular in contemporary Elevated Horror. The possibility of relapse certainly hangs over everything in Hellraiser 2022. Protagonist Riley is treated with constant suspicion from everyone from her brother to his friends to paramedics over the possibility she's relapsing, something I could get if the film seemed to understand "substances" as offering something appealing to the user. Something seems to have gotten lost in stylistic translation, though. The metaphor is suggested by the stylistic allure of the genre, then the metaphor becomes sort of heightened by the modern vogue for horror films to not just mean something but Mean Something (Elevated), and in the gloomy ponderousness of the style the original aesthetic that carried the meaning gets lost.

Every cursed relic is a drug. Every drug is fentanyl.

Here's a question though: if the puzzle box the Lament Configuration represents drug addiction, why would anyone ever fucking start? The whole thing seems viscerally unappealing. You move a couple parts around (this is actually pretty cool and appealing in an autistic kinda way) then a blade snaps out and jabs you. The original puzzle box was content to summon a bunch of demonic angels to pierce your flesh with meathooks, but this has an added Drug Metaphor Effect. Which... mostly constitutes making you kinda droopy, before sending you screaming to hell.

I may not act like it but I've smoked a drug or two in my day and idk man I'm sorry but if this is what they did, no one would fucking do them.

Shout out to all the girls who see people writing novels or refusing to shave or doing whatever and go "eh. Sounds hard, no thanks" and just keep eating ice cream straight from the container

An hour and a half on the last like 4 pages of The Grapes of Wrath. I trace the changing critical opinion on the infamous final scene down the decades and try to make sense of the book's Weird Gender Shit.

This is the end of the main line ROOB S.1 but I have some more bonus episodes planned, including some stuff you can already listen to on my Patreon, so stay tuned!