No other tabletop RPG experience could ever match the obsessive bliss of my junior high self flipping through the copy of Fiend Folio he’d found marked down to $3.95 at the local Kay*Bee Toys store. It didn’t matter than I was a neophyte Basic Set player who had no idea what most of the statlines […]

My love of Atom Age sci-fi horror — specifically, flicks where radiation makes shit turn BIG — comes from my late mother, who adored the stuff and would tune into Channel 56’s Creature Double Feature whenever those movies were aired. The Deadly Mantis was her favorite, though she also gave high marks to The Amazing […]

Miss Velvet was supposed to be my daughter’s cat, a graduation present acquired (along with a mustachioed tuxedo littermate dubbed Henri) from a friend of Maura’s sister-in-law. She was stunningly adorable orange, black, and white calico kitten full of purrs and absurd antics, and I vowed I would not get attached to her because I […]

From the days of old, when T’Pau was in the Top 10 charts and Games Workshop was a weirdly cool alternative to TSR’s stodginess instead of a punchline attached to its most profitably prominent IP comes White Dwarf #91 (July 1987), which featured the following house ad for its line of “Gothic Horror” miniatures. Why […]

What a time to be a junior high geek whose family just bought their first VCR. And that’s on top of it being around the same time a direct market comic shop opened within biking distance of my house. And the local pool hall and bowling alley added arcade games to their floor space. And […]

The House That Dripped Blood was a 1971 British horror anthology film, one of many such releases from Amicus during the period. It’s big selling points were the fact its various segments were adaptations of Robert Bloch tales and its cast included an all-star lineup featuring not only Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, but also […]

At my elementary school, it was a thing to send the entire sixth grade class off to a campground in the Nashoba Valley for an entire week to learn about nature and shit from a bunch of earthy crunchy undergrads. I absolutely dreaded the experience — not just because the prospect of being with trapped […]

I have not been idle during my long hiatus from Armagideon Time. In fact, a good part of my free time has been spent dabbling in a form of digital necromancy, pulling and salvaging interesting and otherwise “lost” bits from a stream of block VHS-to-digital transfers that have been getting dumped onto the Internet Archive. […]

Confession time: I cannot stand having makeup or any form of goop applied to my face. It’s one of my odd sensory tics and got me into loads of trouble when I was a young tyke and would scream and hide behind the plaid orange sofa when my artist mom wanted to apply the finishing […]

“I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were […]