Ed Grabianowski is an author and freelance writer. He’s worked as a contributing writer for io9, HowStuffWorks, and Sweethome. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, Shanna Germain’s Geek Love, and David Wellington’s Fear Project, and he’s had non-fiction pieces…
It can be useful to analyze a movie that wasn’t so great not simply from the “worth watching/not worth watching” reviewer’s standpoint, but as a storyteller and film fan who wants to figure out what worked in a movie and…
Why are horror and fantasy themes so influential and powerful in rock and metal music? Why do fans love performers who act like zombies, vampires and witches? In 2013, I went to the traveling metal roadshow known the as the Mayhem Festival to find out.
In Dusk City Outlaws, players form a team of smooth criminals or outlaw vigilantes and pull off impossible capers in a complex fantasy city known as New Dunhaven. That sounds cool, but the real reason I’m so excited? Creator Rodney…
The second and final part of my exploration of The Silmarillion and the ways reading it will make The Lord of the Rings more interesting. Before we dive back into the list, two brief notes. First, some of the things…
I am a huge Tolkien fan. I read The Lord of the Rings every other year or so. I love the books and enjoy the movies. But in all these years I’d never read The Silmarillion. I was about to…
Listening to Josh and Chuck discuss astrology on a recent episode of Stuff You Should Know called up some memories of when I wrote that particular article, so I thought I’d write up a few notes about it for SYSK…
All of the major American sports leagues have had instances of teams “tanking” to reach last place and get a strong draft pick to rebuild the team in the last ten years. There’s an easy way to fix it. If…
I could not miss the limited American showing of Shin Godzilla. I realized this is the first time I’ve seen a proper Toho Godzilla movie in a theater since Godzilla 1985! It was an excellent, albeit very strange kaiju movie….
It’s an interesting mental exercise: can you take Guns N’ Roses’ sprawling, goofy, indulgent conjoined twin records, Use Your Illusion, and reshape them into a single, cohesive album that would stand alone as the undisputed 2nd best thing GNR ever…
A bizarre creature terrorized a town in West Virginia in 1966 and 1967, leering at locals with glowing red eyes, flying over their cars and causing radiation burns and even the collapse of a major bridge over the Ohio River….
A lot of Blade Runner fans like to contemplate the true meaning of the movie, what the origami means, whether or not Deckard himself was a replicant, all of which changes based on which cut of the movie you’re watching….
There’s an archnemesis whose evil conspiracy has been hinted at since the PCs were second level. There’s the current adventure’s story, the seeds of which were sown in the last adventure. There’s the bard, who’s been searching for a family…
If you’re a writer, you probably like to have some background music on while you work, maybe to set the mood, maybe to drown out the other yobs in the coffee shop. Music with lyrics is too distracting, so everyone…
Something’s Bugging Me About Tolkien
I’m working on my roughly biennial rereading of the Lord of the Rings — this is my fourth or fifth time through them, but having just finished Fellowship, something’s started to bother me that I hadn’t noticed before. It isn’t…