WAS1 Productions

The Drabblecast Podcast ran a full-cast recording of Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. It’s an impressive piece of classic, heavier sci-fi with strong and unflinching drama.

I remember seeing an adaptation done on the 1980s incarnation of “The Twilight Zone” and wasn’t aware it was based on an older work, so it was interesting getting to revisit the story.

In the Jurassic Park 3D re-release, the 3D was slightly blurry around the edges in a couple of scenes. It also seemed a little exaggerated in parts, though we were also watching it near the front of the theater. For the most part it worked well and was one of the better non-3D movie transfer to 3D I’ve seen. The technology of the time (“this is a unix system”) looked very dated, but the CGI and puppetry work for the dinosaurs held up very well twenty years later. it was a fun ride and really nice to see the film on the big screen again after all these years.

The characters were pretty standard, which is par for the course, but besides being dumb and reading from the obviously dangerous spell book, nobody was acting like a total douchebag or having to wear the idiot hat which happens far too often in horror movies these days. The film also had a good setup for why the characters were there which also worked well in them not recognizing the danger and discounting things when they first started happening. The final act played out in a slight twist with the characters involved, which I also appreciated.

The original films by Sam Raimi were more enjoyable for their campy horror, but this remake stands well on its own and was satisfying in its own right. If you enjoy the splatter-gore flavor of horror, then it’s worth checking out.

This was another story I wrote back in November. It’s still in its rough draft. I was hoping to get the time to polish it up, but life and work have continued to be extremely busy, and I haven’t had the time or focus to come back to it. So I decided I wanted to post this rough version, as even with the flaws I know are there, it’s still a nice piece of mood reading.

This is a very personal piece for me. It’s not that I have anywhere near the dark thoughts that the protagonist do, and it doesn’t relate directly to anything in my life. Instead it was the result of a stressful time. During the second half of November, my sister was in the hospital due to various complications from what should have been a routine surgery. She was in quite serious condition at times there, and things kept vacillating between good and bad news for a few days. It ended up being an emotional roller coaster and this story was a cathartic synthesis of that mix of emotions.

I’d remembered the song “Hope” by R.E.M. off their album “Up” in the late 1990s and how I’d emotionally connected with it. My mother had been in the hospital recovering from a surgery when I was first listening to the album. I remembered coming home from visiting her, and although she was recovering well the stanza about the medical procedure still struck a chord with me. That seemed much more relevant this time around.

The whole album struck me as beautifully sad, with songs about pain and loss, loneliness and regrets, but there were also some mournfully hopeful songs in there as well. I’d listened to “Hope” several times on the way home from visiting my sister on a good night. I also listened to some other songs on the album “The Apologist” and “Sad Professor” and then “Walk Unafraid” for one of the hopeful songs.

Listening to those songs was so emotional. It conjured up some of the feelings I remembered from listening to the album the first few times. It also tied in to all the stress and angst and worries I’d had over the past week. It was beautiful and moving and I knew I wanted to write a story to capture that mood. Slowly an idea started to gel for me. It’s a little silly, but I think I managed to pull it off as a mood piece and a bit of speculative fantasy. I also really liked the character and name that came to me this one.

I tried an experiment with this story as I wanted to reference all of the lyrics to “Hope,” so I broke it out stanza by stanza. I had the story flow around it, following the mood of the song somewhat, it wasn’t perfect, but I liked how it came out. It’s by no means a literal interpretation of the song, but I think it’s a nice emotional interpretation of it.

Hope and Alligators
by Will A. Sanborn, 11/27/12
Song lyrics quoted from “Hope” by R.E.M.

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Here are a couple holiday episodes of various podcasts I’ve found interesting, as well as two I helped get produced.

I love EscapePod’s holiday SF stories. This year they have an alchemy-powered take on Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” with Marley and Cratchit by David Steffen.

Drabblecast, the weekly weird-fiction podcast, has an interesting story. Postapocalypsemas  by  Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw is a post-apocalyptic Christmas tale about a robotic reindeer, a cross between a toy and a protector, searching to find the little girl he was charged to look after and keep safe and happy.

And for my own publishing efforts, Anthro Dreams has two holiday-themed stories.

Shreddy and the Christmas Ghost by Mary Lowd has a loveable feline curmudgeon having another mishap with technology as well as a run-in with the supernatural.

The Gingerbread Reindeer by Renee Carter Hall brings a new addition to the Christmas mythos, along with wonder and magic of the Yuletide night.

I was looking for some mindless entertainment on Netflix last night and the 1988 horror movie Waxwork came up in my suggestions. It sounded interesting, so I gave it a try. It did have a fresh take on the wax museum horror setting, though unfortunately it was better in inspiration than in execution.
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