Tag: Nathan Rabin

Podcasts

2017-11-10, 7:31 am
Categories: Cartoons, Comics, Games, Movies, Politics, Stream of Consciousness, TV

Expanded from a couple of posts at Brontoforumus, 2017-10-08.

I like listening to NPR on the drive to work.

I do not like listening to NPR on the drive home. I have had just about enough of Kai Ryssdahl acting surprised about the Internet.

So I decided to look into some podcasts. I'm not really looking for scripted stuff at the moment (I've got a buttload of Big Finish Doctor Who I haven't listened to yet as it is); I want something where if I lose the thread for a minute to concentrate on the road, I'm not going to miss out on important story details.

So here's what I've been looking at so far:

Brontoforumus regular Niku recommended Talkin Toons with Rob Paulsen; I listened to the Rick and Morty episode and thoroughly enjoyed it. The website hasn't been updated in a couple of years; it has episodes up through Christmas 2015. It went on hiatus after that (Paulsen had throat cancer; he's better now) and came back in January. Tech Jives has episodes up through May. More recently, the show has moved to Nerdist, which has a bunch of short videos but no episodes; there are some articles referring me to a subscription service called Alpha but it's not mentioned on the website and I really have no idea if the show's even available in audio format anymore? It's really not clear and I hope they fix that.

Retronauts is a podcast started by Jeremy Parish and currently hosted by Bob Mackey, about retro games.

Axe of the Blood God is USgamer's RPG podcast. I've only listened to it a couple of times, when my old friend Steve Tramer was a guest; he hasn't been on it recently, but it's still a good group.

Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast is pretty great. So far I've listened to some great interviews there, with Frank Conniff, Rob Paulsen, and Carl Reiner.

And speaking of Frank Conniff, he and Trace Beaulieu have a podcast called Movie Sign with The Mads where, as the name implies, they talk about movies.

I don't listen to a lot of political podcasts at the moment, but I like Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air. Larry's a good interviewer; I'll never understand why he went with a panel format on The Nightly Show, which was easily its weakest component. (It's not an original sentiment, but I do wish he'd gotten to take over The Daily Show and Noah had gotten a chance to do his own thing in Colbert's timeslot.)

I hear good things about Flop House (failed movies), Kevin Smith's Fatman on Batman (comics, movies, the sort of stuff characters in Kevin Smith movies talk about), and WTF. I've mentioned Kumail Nanjiani's X-Files Files before, back in 2015. I've listened to one episode of Talking Simpsons with Bob Mackey (another Niku recommendation) and it was pretty good; I expect I'll check out more.

As for actually-scripted podcasts (not what I'm currently looking for, but there are some good ones!), I enjoyed the one episode of Dead Pilots Society I listened to. It's a podcast where they do read-throughs of TV pilot scripts that never made it into production; the one I listened to and enjoyed was Only Child, a John Hodgman vehicle (the hook was he was playing himself as a teenager; all the other kids would have been played by age-appropriate actors).

And, lastly (for now!), I see that yesterday saw the launch of Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast. I haven't had a chance to listen yet, but I bet it's pretty good!

Early Weird Al Memories

2017-11-01, 6:34 am
Categories: Movies, Music, Stream of Consciousness, TV

As I mentioned last week, I've been avidly following Nathan Rabin's The Weird Accordion to Al (today's entry: Harvey the Wonder Hamster from Alapalooza). As it happens, I've also been reading Nathan Rabin's Weird Al: The Book. All this Nathan Rabin stuff has really got me thinking about Weird Al.

I'm pretty sure the first time I ever saw Weird Al was in UHF, running on HBO a year or two after its release. My grandpa was channel-surfing; we came in right around the time George and Bob get to the TV station. Grandpa mistook Philo for Doc Brown and thought it was Back to the Future, so we kept it there; it wasn't long before we realized it was not in fact Back to the Future, but we liked what we saw enough to stick with it through the end.

I'd have probably been 8 or 9 years old. I didn't even catch the name of the movie; it'd be awhile before I saw it again. It was on its way to becoming a hard-to-find cult hit; I remember by the early '00s, there was like one video place that had a copy on VHS (the DVD wasn't out yet), and we'd rent it sometimes.

After UHF, I next saw Al on the PBS math show Square One TV. He did a song called Patterns, which is sadly not included on the Medium Rarities disc in his new "complete" collection.

He also appeared in the Mathnet segment, playing a sleazy DJ who Frankly and Tuesday suspected of accepting payola. Or possibly flyola.

A few years after that, we got cable, and we'd see Amish Paradise and Gump in regular rotation on MTV. I remember I was in eighth grade when Spy Hard came out; a classmate of mine was telling me about the opening Bond-parody number and said something like "What's that guy's name? Crazy Al?"

The first Weird Al CD I ever bought was the Gump single, which also featured the Spy Hard theme. It wasn't long after that I got the Permanent Record: Al in the Box set. The first Weird Al album I ever bought was Bad Hair Day -- and I think I'll come back to that later. Rabin's just a few songs away from getting to Bad Hair Day, and I expect I'll have some Bad Hair Day-related thoughts as he wends his way through the track list.

Shout-Out to Nathan Rabin

2017-10-26, 7:23 pm
Categories: Books, Music, Stream of Consciousness

A few months back, I tried to start blogging regularly again.

It lasted five days and five posts, at which point I started experiencing some debilitating thumb pain (carpal tunnel?). The thumb pain's not gone but it's under better control, so maybe I'll take another crack at it.

As I noted at the time, there were a couple things that inspired me to give another shot at regular blogging. One was an angry Sonic the Hedgehog fan who was so incensed by a years-old series of blog posts about Ken Penders that he just had to tell me about it when he came across my name in an entirely unrelated conversation. (Since then I've actually toyed with the idea of reposting my old, 1997-era Sonic the Hedgehog comic reviews here, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find them. They were on the same hard drive as KateStory Book IX, which I went to all that trouble to recover nine years ago; I suspect the files are still somewhere in my giant stack of hard drives but I haven't been able to find them.)

But another big inspiration was a blog called Nathan Rabin's Happy Place.

I first became a fan of Nathan Rabin about a decade ago, when he was the head writer of The AV Club and writing a column then called My Year of Flops. Every week for a year, Rabin reviewed a movie that was a commercial failure and evaluated whether it was really as bad as its reputation suggests.

I love bad movies. I love good movies. I love movies that other people don't love. My Year of Flops was right smack-dab in my wheelhouse.

My Year of Flops was eventually completed and released as a book. But the column continued after that first year, under the title My World of Flops; it expanded beyond failed films to include failed books, albums, and recently even a failed presidential campaign.

The AV Club is no longer the kind of site that does features like My World of Flops. So Rabin has started his own, Patreon-supported blog, Nathan Rabin's Happy Place. He's still writing My World of Flops, and other, similar features where he examines lesser-loved media (like Cannon Films). He also talks about other stuff, from politics to brutally honest discussions of his life experiences, including financial hardships and struggles with depression.

But my favorite of his features right now is The Weird Accordion to Al. Rabin literally wrote the book on "Weird Al" Yankovic (it's called Weird Al: The Book), and now he's taking a song-by-song look at Al's entire discography. (As of this writing he's up to Talk Soup from Alapalooza.)

I love Weird Al. I've loved Weird Al for over 25 years. Hell, all this talk about Weird Al has me thinking maybe I'll write some posts about Weird Al. (They won't be as good as Rabin's. But they'll have the added benefit of being about me.)

If you're a "Weird Al" Yankovic fan, you owe it to yourself to read The Weird Accordion to Al. And hey, if you like what you see and can spare a little money for it, kick in on Nathan's Patreon.

It's not just that Nathan's work is enjoyable, insightful, and frequently funny. It's also that his enthusiasm for his blog is infectious. I read a post where he talked about how easy it's turned out to be to write blog posts every day, and I got to thinking, shit, I used to do that for free, I enjoyed it so much. And I thought, y'know, maybe I should start doing that again. I'm going to be writing about whatever the hell's on my mind anyway, whether it's here or on Brontoforumus or The Avocado or the Techdirt comments -- so what the hell, why not here?

So thanks, Nathan Rabin, for giving me the bug again. I don't think I'll manage the same pace I did back in '11-'13 (seven posts a week about Frank Zappa, five posts a week about other stuff), but I'm still going to try and post more often.

And I'm sure those Sonic the Hedgehog comic book reviews are around here somewhere.

Fanmail from Some Flounder

2017-07-08, 10:29 am
Categories: E-Mail, Stream of Consciousness

I've been meaning to blog more.

I like blogging. I like writing about shit. People seem to enjoy reading it. My friends keep telling me I should start blogging again (hi Friday!).

And I've been reading Nathan Rabin's Happy Place and really enjoying what Rabin has to say, and his enthusiasm about just being able to write about whatever he feels like.

But the kicker? Oh man.

The other day, I was checking replies to my Disqus posts.

And -- in response to a post I had written in the AV Club comments section five months ago, concerning the Black Panther: World of Wakanda comic -- some nice young fellow had written this:

Your blog sucks. Go back to sucking Ken Penders' dick.

Sonic the Hedgehog fandom is weird, you guys.

So okay, dude's obviously a troll; a quick gander at his posting history shows basically everything else he's ever written on Disqus has been arguing with atheists.

But the Penders thing? That's not random. It's far too specific.

My most recent Penders post was in 2015. At the time of this writing, it is on page 4 of this blog. So this is not a guy who decided, at random, to troll me, clicked on my name, and picked one of the posts on my blog to talk shit about.

And neither is this a guy who just now saw my Penders posts -- saw a link to them, found them on Google, whatever --, got incensed by them, and decided to write me a nastygram. Even assuming the gentlemen in question failed to notice the "Contact" link at the top of the page and instead, inexplicably, decided to look up my Disqus profile, he would have replied to one of my recent Disqus posts, not one that was five months old.

No. This is a dude who saw my posts about Ken Penders at some earlier date. Maybe as far back as 2013. And remembered them. And remembered my name. And, when he was randomly reading the comments section of an AV Club article, saw my name and felt the need to tell me off because, four years ago, I wrote some blog posts explaining that Ken Penders had a valid legal case against Archie Comics and Sega (or, as it's known in Sonic Fanboy-ese, "sucked Ken Penders' dick").

You know what? That is weirdly fucking flattering. I made an impact on this guy. People read my blog, and it matters to them.

I mean, sure, this guy is a troll and, clearly, a Sonic the Hedgehog fanboy -- those dudes are intense. I am sure he is not a representative member of my audience.

But the thing about writing whatever the hell I feel like is, I never know what's going to resonate with people.

The most attention I've ever gotten was when the online comic book press picked up on my posts about the never-finished-or-published 1990s Final Fantasy comic -- which, at that point, were already more than two years old.

And, in that same vein, my Final Fantasy 7 retrospective series continues to be popular. (Or at least did the last time I looked at my site stats. I've removed Google Analytics from this site -- that's a subject for another post -- but I'd like to get a new stats tool set up, because I like seeing what people are reading, where they're coming from, and what search terms they're using to get here.)

But these creators' rights pieces seem to get a pretty good amount of attention, too. People used to link my post on Marvel v Kirby all the time. And I once got a very nice E-Mail from Marc Tyler Nobleman for my Not My Batman post and its recognition of Bill Finger. (By the way: Batman & Bill is good; you should watch it.)

And so I'd like to get on back to yammering on about just whatever the hell it is I feel like yammering on about at the moment. Because what the hell; if I don't yammer here, I'm just going to yammer somewhere else, and frankly I spend far more time responding to trolls in the Techdirt comments section than a healthy person should.

I don't know if I'll manage 5-day-a-week posting like I used to. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. (Today I am posting on a Saturday. Whee!)

Course, if I do start blogging regularly again now, there's probably something to psychoanalyze in my doing it in response to our good friend Mr. "Your blog sucks" up there. I think humans are wired to notice criticism more than praise, and I suppose I'm no exception.

But what the hell; like I said, I've been planning to get back to blogging for awhile now anyway. And as criticism goes, I'm pretty sure this is the most fun hate mail I've ever gotten. Even better than the last unsolicited hate mail I got from a disgruntled Sonic fan, which was over 20 years ago and, in keeping with the whole "casual homophobia" theme, contained the phrase "You hump Robotnik's ugly butt!"

Sonic the Hedgehog fandom is weird, you guys.