Journalists are Not the Enemy

There are two sides in this.

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There’s Something Going Very Wrong in Parts of Fandom, and Not Just the Obvious Places

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First, and I know this is asking a lot of you because of how much longer than usual this piece is, I’d like to ask you to go here and read this. It’s the May 17, 2018 Needless Things article I wrote. Something was happening in fandom at the time, something impacting a convention and creating a great deal of hassles and headaches. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an isolated incident. As a courtesy, I didn’t exactly address it directly back then, but I made my basic feelings about something known. If you read the piece back then and weren’t quite sure what to make of it, this is the article that’s going to make at least a little sense out of it. If you didn’t read it back then, well… You don’t have to now, but it might make references in the back end of this article make more sense. So, anyhow…

“It’s our turn now!”

Okay, now that I’ve gotten to laugh my ass off about Huckabee and crew’s hypocrisy for the weekend… Some (mostly) more seriously constructed thoughts.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders got requested to leave a restaurant called Red Hen this weekend because the owner felt that she wasn’t simply an average person with opposing points of view, but rather a public figure and representative of an administration that has been hostile to various minority groups that included her staff and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders worked in the service of an “inhumane and unethical” administration.

In a Land Without Dragons, Some Turn Lizards into Dragons

 

This is certainly going to be one of the more… different… pieces I’ve ever written for Needless Things. I’m usually fairly direct when it comes to things I’m writing about, but, at least right now, I’m being courteous about the matter. I’m not going to risk stirring up a hornets nest for someone/a group of people by addressing the matter directly and in detail. I will, it’s just going to have to wait a half dozen or so Thursdays before I can. In the meantime, I’m going to comment on various groups of people out there, sadly some in fandom, by discussing their mindset. Well, discussing might be the wrong word…

Don’t Be a Donald

The Intruder (1962)

By 1962, Roger Corman was well on his way to creating the film resume that unfortunately earned him such nicknames as “The King of Schlock.” He’d found low budget success with such films as The Wasp Woman, A Bucket of Blood, Little Shop of Horrors, It Conquered the World, Sorority Girl, and Teenage Doll among others.

How much success had he found? It depends on what you consider successful. After being burned by the nature of the studio system, Corman struck out on his own to make the movies he wanted to make. None of them were the comparative financial successes that Star Wars, Jaws, or Avatar would be for others in later years. You certainly won’t find them regularly listed in the top ten or top twenty box office winners for the years in which his films were released. But, one thing Roger Corman could for longest time say about his films is that they earned a profit at the box office. For decades, Roger Corman could make a claim that few others in the business could; even those who had made far less than the 400+ films Roger Corman has directed and/or produced at this point. He could for a very long time say that he had made hundreds of films and never lost a dime on any of them.

Well, except for one film in 1962. It’s something of a shame that The Intruder was for decades the only film Roger Corman lost money on, because, in some ways, it was one of the best films he’d made at that point in his career.

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Freaked Out Friday: Guest Commentator

Well, here’s something I never thought I’d be doing. Today’s blogging and commentary duties included a last minute fill-in as a guest commentator on Peter David’s website for the weekly Freak Out Friday piece. For those unfamiliar with the regular commentary he started a while back, it’s basically a look at the week in Trump.

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