The Fantastic Three and Some Girl

Everyone's buzzing about the latest Fantastic Four movie that was supposed to eradicate the stink of Stretch Armstrong Dancing. You know what I'm talking about.

Instead, we've got Miles Teller (Reed Richards) proclaiming the critics don't understand how amazingly his shit fails to stink and the director blaming the studio for everything wrong with this movie because he can't use Alan Smithee anymore. With a Rotten Tomatoes rating somewhere in the Negative Zone, you guys sure were right about critics failing to understand the intricacies of your all boys club.

Now, perhaps you were under the impression that there were three guys and one woman in the Fantastic Four. There was dickbag rubber man, mopey rock guy, tinder match who would one day become Captain America dude, and someone else. Some lady who could turn invisible. I think her name was Violet.

Well, you're partially right.

Put on your spoiler goggles.

Because girls can't be trusted around sciencey stuff and action lest their wombs will fall out, Sue Storm doesn't go on the trip into whatever the hell Trank is calling the Negative Zone now. No, instead our little lady gets her special powers from trying to save those silly boys that actually went on the trip when the computer somehow zaps her because Trank couldn't fully write her out of the script. Though lord knows he tried.

Ladies, when will you learn that men don't need your help? If you try to help them then you just have to get punished with the ability to turn even more invisible. Now go back to baking in the kitchen instead of trying to be all superheroey.

Don't believe me?

Watch the clip Fox released to prime us all for this epic broness of testosterone.


There is nary a woman in sight.

The Fantastic Four movie in 2015 is more retro bullshit womenz can't handle all this scary stuff than the one from 2005!

Sure, it was all about Jessica Alba being a toy between Doom and Richards (seriously girl, just go bang Namor for fun and not look back), but at least she actually went on the fucking mission in the first place! 2015 and those girls are back to sitting at home waiting for the men to come back with a mammoth so they can cook up dinner for them.

I summon from the depths of my black, unable to understand your genius, heart a massive Fucketh You.

Fucketh You Josh Trank.

Fucketh You Fox Studios.

Fucketh You MRA, Sad Puppies, Gamer Gators and everyone else trying to drag women back to the fucking dark ages. I hope you all catch bubonic plague and bleed from the groin.

Building a Little Sister

While wandering around an antique store I saw the creepiest thing I've ever seen.

Great way to start a story, eh? If it's not train robbing ghosts haunting a rusting rake, it's the vengeful spirit of Abraham Lincoln ordering you from a tea cup to kill Dracula. Pretty sure Stephen King just wrote 1000 pages for both those stories. But not even he will touch the terrors swirling off the Teddy Ruxbin. It reads your own story to you, predicting your untimely and gruesome death. 

This was just a doll, a three foot tall doll that can stand on its own. There's nothing really creepy about that...

AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Let's go back to the days before Fontaine Futuristics flourished, crashed, then pulled a Lazarus because he liked convoluted almost sure to fail plans.

The doll seems sweet enough. Hair's been cut by Freddy Kruger but nothing too out of the ordinary.

 

I also got an old cattle injector syringe to act as the ADAM collector because I wasn't sinking that much money into this project. Getting to creepy and kind of recognizable is close enough for me. (Because I live in Nebraska, old farming equipment is 99% of our antiques. Excavating abandoned farm houses before a tornado drops them on witch's heads is our state pastime.)

The first thing to go are those eyes, dearie.

Have you ever removed the eyes from a doll's head? Of course not, you're a well adjusted person. It's not easy. That head is sopping wet because I tried dunking it in a hot bath to make the face pliable. But that still wasn't enough, so, with an exacto knife, I cut around the eye slicing into the retina area.

After chopping up the back of the head and making a skull flap, I pushed and shoved until the eyeball finally popped out. I'm certain this is how all Little Sisters are made.

I got the eyeball lights from Amazon. Getting a pair of LEDs is relatively cheap and easy, but without a Radio Shack I figured I'd just buy one already hooked up instead of getting all the components and doing it myself.

After positioning the LEDs in the back of her skull, I realized I needed something more to cover the gaping holes in her eye sockets. 

Then I got a grinchy idea. A wonderful, awful idea. This year, Rapture will be ours! Wax paper! 

This isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, so anticipate burns and cursing. That's how you know you're really prop making.

Cutting out small circles for the wax paper, I worked them to fit in front of her eyes and then hot glued the outside. But to act as extra protection, I also covered over the wax paper with more hot glue. I thought about re-adding translucent balls into her eyes but I wasn't certain if my deodorant balls would fit or where they were. There are a lot of missing eyes in my house.

The next step, after screwing the head back on, was clothing. Again, I wasn't going to pull out a fancy sewing machine and make something perfect. This was just supposed to be close enough. Goodwill it is!

That dress used to be bright white with little blue stripes running down it. Like the infant version of a tennis uniform from the 50s. At first I tried burying it in the dirt, but frankly, I've always found that version of aging to only work if you have a few decades to kill.

Since I'm not a vampire, I dug it up and used the old coffee staining method. This is a good one if you don't have time and don't mind a universal color change.

Into a small ziploc bag went the dress and enough instant coffee to power twenty radioactive writers facing a deadline. I only added enough water to soak in but not completely submerge the dress.

After sitting in the coffee mixture for a day, I dropped it out on the line and it dried in twenty minutes thanks to summer.

But there was something missing. What's a Little Sister without ADAM staining her clothes and fingers?

Blood is an art for haunters. Some pride themselves on their blood recipes and horde them like Aunt Petunias and potato salads. I'm not one of them. For clothing stains, I use my acrylic paint. I have some enamel crimson that's seen me through a lot of blood. But for a base I use a dab or two of black.

But how to get the paint onto the dress? Brushes leave too obvious of a mark. Then I had a crazy idea and picked up an old toothbrush. Working from the bottom up, I streaked paint upwards and it blended perfectly. I didn't want too much, just a streak here or there and a few globs around the hems and on her stomach where little hands would wipe away excess ADAM.

The final step was gluing on the syringe, which I also painted with my red enamel. Now to send her out into the world to gather ADAM.

Get him Mister Bubbles!

First Pic of New Doctor Who Season

The BBC has released our first look at the new season of Doctor Who. In an exclusive, I've obtained the direction from behind the camera:

Clara, ignore the explosion behind you. It's not important. Your own life means nothing compared to the charismatic power that is the man dragging you out of the death he just caused. Stare at the Doctor as if he's not just your messiah, guardian angel, and titan rolled into one; he's the sexiest man you've ever seen. Your love sickness is so tragic, if he let go of your hand you'd fall to your knees and instantly die out of heartbreak. But you know he'd never do that, because he is truly the greatest man to ever walk the galaxy. And you, Clara, are hopelessly in love with Steven Moffat. I mean the Doctor. You're in love with the doctor. There is no man that can compete with your love for....the Doctor.

Doctor, you're a douchebag with a god complex who thinks he can be a complete ass to everyone he meets and still have them love him. Good, great job!

Dwarves in Space 4 - Homeache

*trumpet blare*

Thirty four days and 101K words later I finished the fourth full length novel for the Dwarves in Space series (6th overall).

To celebrate here's a quick excerpt including the sort of newest addiction to the ship, a female orc named Zail.

_____________________________

 

Variel didn’t look up from the crate as she waved her PALM over the scan port. Numbers in a holographic blue flashed before her. “Of course Ferra knows, I’m not stupid.”

“I ain’t afraid of her,” Zail said as she flexed her bicep and kissed it.

Variel rolled her eyes at the orc, “Sure, just keep telling yourself that.” Zail laughed and flexed her other arm before bringing both together in a shattering slap. Neither Taliesin nor Variel flinched from the display though for a brief moment her eyes met his and she smirked.

But it dropped in a blink and she returned to her paperwork. After a heartbeat, she sighed, “Shit, Zail. This damn thing says there’s supposed to be seven crates, not six.”

“Nu uh, that’s impossible. That dock was clear. I checked like…” Zail paused and held up her fingers, touching each tip, “three times.”

“An orc’s assurance that she looked really really hard doesn’t change the official paperwork.”

“Let me guess, you want me to head all the way back there and find this missing case.”

Variel gestured to a data stream poring off the crate, “Or you could stay here and deal with this while I pick up a blue box. Actually,” she pushed Zail back and moved to step towards the exit.

“Nah, nah, nah,” the orc interrupted, “I’ll do it. It’s what you pay me for. Oh, wait!” Zail clomped up the stairs now groaning from her borderline anger and weight.

“And don’t forget to look for an Exo-Gen sticker!” Variel called out to the retreating orc.

Michaels Halloween

It's the first weekend in August and we all know what that means! I would be going to Yankee Candle's halloween preview if they didn't move it to the end of the freaking month! AAAHHHH!!!!

Luckily, Michaels is here to satiate my incurable thirst!

Their Lemax stand it looking more and more anemic with each passing year.

The eatery was kinda cute:

And it's hard to screw up a creepy old barn:

But my favorite was the pair of skeletons having a little grill:

So much so I brought one home:

There's an aisle of the same old stuff from last year: bottles covered in puns and glitter, skulls covered in glitter, severed arms (surprisingly not covered in glitter). But this also seems to be the year of skeleton. YES!

We are not drinkers and mostly use our wine rack to store lego figurines, but god damn do I want this thing:

Even this giant skull has a more macabre feel than normal. And look, no glitter!

There's a nice understatement to the raven atop some books under glass. It's not something I can use, but I can see a lot of other people wanting one. It looks classy with a gothic Poe style:

Okay, what really made the snow globe is that it's full of tiny black bats. How cute is that?

There are also some beakers filled with candles. The candles stink like lip smackers melted in a glass, but if you need a lab setting and don't want to place a Fisher order, here ya go:

Now we come to the absolute highlight of the store. FROG SKELETON!

FROG SKELETON!

FROG SKELETON!

They're not even $3 and are pretty sturdy for that cheap a price. Nothing as fancy as my new dog, but god damn do I love my frog skeleton. I love it so much I got two, and may get some more.

In fact, I can't stop screaming frog skeleton at the top of my lungs. FROG SKELETON!

So that's a sampling of what I found cool at Michaels. It's a bit less of the classic stuff so far. More than likely more will appear somewhere post labor day, but it's not bad. Go on and check out the bones section.

FROG SKELETON!