Author Archives: Kier

About Kier

I've been on the web since about 1994. I have a background in a lot of things, including a five year stint as a journalist and over a decade of helping people get their message out to the world. I write on a number of subjects--everything from relationships to personal development to politics and every day life. I hope you get something worthwhile out of it.

Howlin’ at the Moon

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Werewolves. That’s what I vlog about today.

I kind of dig werewolves. But more the “adventure” style werewolves than the pure horror ones.

Why?

Because talking dogs are awesome.

Okay, that’s not the main reason. (It is a reason, though.) The main reason is because smart werewolves–ones that maintain control and aspects of the person they were–are fantastic characters. That inner conflict, that mixing of raw animal power and civilization, there are so many different ways that can play out.

Can there still be horror elements in that? Yep. But it’s often a completely different flavor of horror than you get with the human dreading the full moon and trying desperately to “remove the curse” from his life.

Don’t get me wrong, werewolves make great straight up monsters. They’re terribly hard to kill or otherwise dissuade from gnawing on your internal organs, and that’s always good for some “excitement.” But if you put a “good” werewolf against a “bad” werewolf… that’s some darn good conflict right there. Especially if you’ve got humans stuck in the middle of all that. (It’s worked really well for the Teen Wolf TV series. )

I haven’t managed to get too much farther ahead than I was yesterday… so I don’t have much of a safety net going vlog-wise. This is going to make things interesting over the next few days since I have a packed schedule without a lot of video-making time.

But, for now, you can check out my ramblings on werewolves.

Don’t forget that you have some say over what goes on for the next 100 days… click the big green button below here to get to the page where you can submit topic suggestions and questions (so I know what kinds of things you want to see go on in these videos).

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Monsters & Meaning

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Looking at my calendar for the week (let alone the month!) I’ve got some busy days ahead of me. Thursday I’ll be checking out the opening night of the Spooky Movie Film Fest right down the street at AFI Silver Spring.

Then Friday I have to choose between the second night of that and the monthly game night I usually go to–which this month coincides with one of the host’s birthdays. (Plus another event going on down in DC, which I’d probably go to if nothing else was going on…)

So that’s two days where I won’t have time for the normal production schedule here.

Which is why I’m diving into this “Monsters & Meaning” series of things. A little more unprepared than I’d like, but it divides up into easy chunks nicely. I shot the first three and edited one today, so I should be able to edit the other two Wednesday and be covered until the weekend.

Not that I have a lot more time this weekend–at least not if I do everything I want to do–but it’s a small window of breathing room.

Yeah… daily vlogging… not exactly something that’s easy. At least not if you’re doing it like I am, I guess. Maybe it would be easier if I wasn’t so wordy. So very few of these have been five minutes or less (which was the original target).

Ah, well. Check out the first installment of Monsters & Meaning today. The intro and closing will likely be reused for the next few days… or I may decide to reshoot those tomorrow and then reuse those versions.

(Oh! I’ll also be running this series over at Hat From Hell, probably with some more relevant commentary… when I have a chance to write that.)

Don’t forget that you have some say over what goes on for the next 100 days… click the big green button below here to get to the page where you can submit topic suggestions and questions (so I know what kinds of things you want to see go on in these videos).

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Lessons I Learned from Monsters

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I’m a long time horror fan. It’s a genre that’s been really influential in my life… mostly in positive ways. (Contrary to what some people would have you think about horror.)

Today I talk a bit about some of the lessons I learned from the classic Universal horror films I grew up on. Sometime down the road, I’ll probably do a few more like this, touching on some of the other big influences from the horror genre.

Odd things in today’s process:

  • Used a different mic, a lapel one, because there was too much noise coming from various neighbors. Not sure I’m completely digging how it sounds. One of these days, I’ll do some post-production on the audio… maybe…
  • When I went to write this, I discovered all of my websites were down. Apparently my entire hosting account was having some undocumented issue. An issue that resolved itself (after at least 20 minutes of me checking, double-checking, and triple checking things) by the time I got into a tech support chat (only a couple minute wait time). That was annoying.
  • The image of the monsters in the YouTube preview was grabbed some somewhere random online. It’s actually a crop of the cover of the Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection [Blu-ray] (which I own and is awesome).

I didn’t get ahead like it’d planned over the weekend, so I’m, once again, flying by the seat of my pants, day to day. This may be a problem in a couple of days… we’ll see if I can crank out some extra content tomorrow and Wednesday.

For now, though, check out what I have to say about horror films making me a better person.

Don’t forget that you have some say over what goes on for the next 100 days… click the big green button below here to get to the page where you can submit topic suggestions and questions (so I know what kinds of things you want to see go on in these videos).

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Time… It Gets Away from You

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Really, I had a plan to get more done today.

But… I felt compelled to watch three out of four of the Scream movies last night, starting around 11 p.m. and, well… there went the rest of my day. (Especially considering I had to watch the fourth one, too, just to be complete.)

So now I’m nowhere near as far ahead on things as I’d planned on being. And I still have to figure out how I’m going to do the more complex bits of vlogging that I have ideas for without those getting in the way of the daily schedule. (And without giving into the temptation to buy a whole lot of neat toys to maybe use in the process…)

So, here’s today’s vlog, a quick look at Blood & Oil, a show I’ll definitely be tuning in for the second episode of, but don’t plan on watching regularly.

Don’t forget that you have some say over what goes on for the next 100 days… click the big green button below here to get to the page where you can submit topic suggestions and questions (so I know what kinds of things you want to see go on in these videos).

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Poking Fun the Right Way

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When it comes to TV–and entertainment in general–I tend to have a problem with mean-spiritedness. Sadly, that seems to be the baseline for “comedy” for a while now.

Every now and then, though, something comes along and does a really good job of poking fun at things. Galavant did a good job last season making fun of the musical and fantasy adventure tropes. Now, Scream Queens does that with everything horror.

This is more or less the successor to the classic Scream films (which leads me to wonder a little about the new Scream series I haven’t caught yet) and does a flat-out fantastic job of blending satire, trope-bending, comedy, and utter farce into a murder mystery plot full of characters that are fun to hate and would fit right in to a bunch of films I’ve seen over the years (few of which created such stereotypes–and humor–on purpose).

I held on to this review for a while, since I wanted it to be part of October’s spooky stuff… and it struck me as a good lead-in to talking about horror films in general. I think I’ll do a little of that tomorrow.

For now, though, check out today’s vlog.

Don’t forget that you have some say over what goes on for the next 100 days… click the big green button below here to get to the page where you can submit topic suggestions and questions (so I know what kinds of things you want to see go on in these videos).

[jbutton size=”xxlarge” color=”green” link=”http://durosia.com/vlog-questions” newpage=”yes”]Come Ask a Question Here[/jbutton]