Geek and Greet! #geekpastiche

Trying a little something here today. Think of it as a blog party. I’ve dubbed it “Geek and Greet” because most of us here are geeks, and we like to meet bloggers. Here’s how it works. You don’t have to be a geek or have a geeky blog to join the fun.

1. Take a post you’ve written. Any post, but must be safe for work. Or a front page link (not both) and share it on the thread.
2. Visit one other person, or if you’re first, one of our contributors’ blogs. Or visit more.
3. I’ll do my best to visit the blogs shared here between now and 6 pm ET on Friday and either leave a comment or share a link for you on Twitter over the weekend.

Weekend Music: Sultans of Swing

Thie song makes me happy, but the video makes me feel old.

Happy Weekend!

Blogging A to Z Day 30: Zombies!

As Sourcerer’s resident horror blogger, it should be no surprise that I am a zombie fanatic. I watch zombie films, I read zombie books, I keep up with The Walking Dead and iZombie and virtually every other zombie show or flick out there, and I sometimes play zombie games.

There are, of course, a host of things that help to account for our fascination with zombies:

Click here for the A to Z list Art by Jeremy of Hollywood Nuts!

fear of disease, fear of death, fear of losing our mental faculties, etc. We seem at once aware of the zombie as a fictional character and concerned about the plausibility of a zombie outbreak. And the result of our fascination is that zombies have become a multi-million dollar industry.

As for me, there are three simple but terribly true reasons that I find zombie stories compelling. The first is the world that gets created when everything fails-the government, and by extension education, social welfare, prison systems, road maintenance, etc.; and modern inventions, including electricity, the Internet, GPS, running water, and telecommunications.

The second is the failure of modern notions of childhood, morality, and socioeconomic status to hold up under the pressures of a post apocalyptic world. In Zombieland, one of most disturbing erosions of culture is the loss of names; in The Walking Dead, it’s the loss of childhood embodied by Carl, Judith, and Carol’s decision to teach the children about knife safety and zombie killing during story-time; in 28 Days Later, it’s ownership of the female body. These conversations mirror conversations that we have daily, that we rehearse in our arguments about these concepts.

And the third thing is the complexities that arise when we see something human that isn’t human. Or that we don’t think is human. In Shaun of the Dead, the undead are able to be trained to perform simple tasks. In Warm Bodies, they retain something of their prior selves and can think and feel. And there is a repeated scene in which someone must kill a loved-one-turned-zombie, one that turns up in virtually every piece of zombie fiction ever.

And so, here at the end of A to Z, and on a Thursday, no less, I give you a Thursday 13 of my favorite zombie flicks:

This post is by @parttimemonster of Part Time Monster and Sourcerer contributor. For more A to Z geekery, check out Part Time Monster!

Blogging A to Z Day 23: Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892 and lived part of his childhood in India. He served as an infantry officer during World War I and went on to become one of the leading philologists of his time. He held professorships at Pembroke and Merton Colleges, Oxford. He died in 1973.

Tolkien is far and away my favorite author, and I doubt I’ll ever let an April go by without writing at least one post about him. This year I did three – I also wrote about The Lord of the Rings for L and the One Ring for O. I read The Hobbit, LOTR, and The Silmarillion at least every three years. I blog about Tolkien’s work often at Part Time Monster, and my ongoing series for that blog is so long I have it collected on a page for easy reference.

If my mother hadn’t read me The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was a child, I might still have become a writer. But I doubt I would have developed a passion for fantasy fiction nor become a world-builder. I enjoy Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien almost as much as I enjoy the books themselves, and I’m glad the adaptations weren’t made until the special effects were good enough to make Middle Earth live and breathe.

Click here for the A to Z list Art by Jeremy of Hollywood Nuts!

A few years ago I had the pleasure of talking to a professor who actually met Tolkien on a trip to England. He said Tolkien had the manuscripts and notes for The Lord of the Rings in his office, and it was several six-foot-high stacks of paper. How cool would it be to have actually seen those manuscripts and talked to the man himself?

I recommend giving Tolkien a try if you’ve never read him. He’s equally good at humor and tradgedy.  He is Victorian and Modern at the same time, somehow. His descriptions and characterizations are excellent, and he has much to say about the nature of evil as well as the nature of good.

If you’re on the hunt for great Tolkien-related internet content, you might want to check out Sweating to Mordor, A Tolkienist’s Perspective, The Leather Library, and Middle Earth News. I follow them all and check in with them as often as I can.