Last year (har har har obligatory New Year's Joke done) I'd started talking about Found Family, one of my favorite tropes in pretty much any narrative work, from movies to novels to comics and webcomics. Found family is when a bunch of characters, usually unrelated and mismatched, end ...

what if there was a creepy basement…

Barbarian was one of the new movies I enjoyed last year. As far as I know, it got good reviews, and a mostly-positive reception. Some people criticized it for making no sense. It's a fair point - although like I said, I enjoyed ...

As we approach the end of another year, I had a few ideas about topics related to endings.

If you've read my articles for awhile, you may remember discussions about wants and needs - the plot objective that is more ‘physical’ is the want, and the emotional or thematic pursuit ...

This is gonna be yet another rambling kind of post and a long one at that–so be warned. In the recent month I’ve been doing some soul searching that ties into this personal Christmas shopping spree of sorts that I’ve had recently. To be more specific, I ...

It's been said by…someone that a character WANTS something. It's one of the ingredients that makes a compelling character. It's also something that makes a character relatable, even one who's very different from the reader/audience.

Most of us aren't centuries-old robots, but we ...

Photo: (clockwise from upper left) nightmarelunatic’s gift for Andreas_Helixfinger; sleeping_gorilla’s for Tantz_Aerine; lothar’s gift for usedbooks; kawaiidaigakusei’s gift for davidxolukoga; and Tantz_Aerine’s gift for hushicho.

There are less than three weeks until the time of gift-giving. The planning for this year’s Secret Santa Gift ...

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Doppelgängers was the subject of our Quackcast today. What are they? Generally they're evil duplicates of people. Originally if you saw one it was supposed to ...

Photo: (clockwise from upper left) UndertheBlackHat’s gift for cdmalcolm1; usedbook’s gift for UndertheBlackHat; Hushicho’s gift for nightmarelunatic; cdmalcolm1’s gift for theRedDeath; Andreas_Helixfinger’s gift for lothar; and theRedDeath’s gift for sleeping_gorilla.


There are less than four weeks until the time of gift-giving. The time to ...

So this line has become famous lately since Elon Musk has been using it to reinstate banned Twitter accounts in the latest episode of the Birdsite Drama.

I'm not going to get into any opinion piece on what I think of this development but if you haven't joined ...

Another site redesign update
Alexey has almost finished work on the front page of the new front page and is wondering what to start on next!
Both him and I thought that perhaps the news pages would be a good option because they're a front facing site that are ...