Cranial Gunk Blog

I had fun at last month’s Play NYC Convention. I enjoyed meeting the game makers and playing their games. I… read more My First Play NYC Convention

I needed something to take the weight of Arrival off my mind. Daryl Gregory’s Spoonbenders was a very effective and… read more It doesn’t have to be Greek to us

It’s been months since I finished the stories in Ted Chiang’s Arrival. Before that I had binged Rick Remender’s Black… read more Sensibility and Discovery in Ted Chiang’s Speculative Fiction

WARNING SPOILERS!!! As I read David Almond’s The True Tales of the Monster Billy Dean Telt By Hisself I kept… read more Billy Dean Sounds Out War

WARNING SPOILERS FOR BOTH MIRROR IN THE SKY AND KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NEVER LET ME GO 1928 International Telephone and Telegraph… read more Mirror Reflections

It was hard to read Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Part 1 and 2 without scrambled images from… read more The Gorgeous Dhampir D

WARNING POSSIBLE SPOILERS! Otsuichi’s short story collection, Zoo, starts from the perspective of a killer and ends with the perspective… read more Otsuichi’s Zoo

Jughead is best when his story stops being THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY and attempts to be Degrassi High…. read more Jughead as Thurber Man attending Degrassi High

We Are Robin…, Volume 2: Jokers by Lee Bermejo WARNING! POTENTIAL SPOILERS! It’s the last story in WE ARE ROBIN… read more 3-2-5 Paragraphs on We Are Robin Volume 2: Jokers

Gotham Academy, Vol. 2: Calamity by Becky Cloonan WARNING! POTENTIAL SPOILERS! Waiting for the next volume of your favorite comic… read more 3-2-5 Paragraphs on Gotham Academy Volume 2

My favorite cover of an Elvis Costello song so far: “The Comedians” by Roy Orbison. Malcolm Gladwell spends the first 10… read more Hallelujah Elvis

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor WARNING POSSIBLE SPOILERS! I think the problem is I read the prequel immediately… read more 3-2-5 Paragraphs on Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor This is the third Nnedi Okorafor book I’ve read. The second didn’t really count because it… read more 3-2-5 Paragraphs on Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

When I was a BOY POET in high school I was in love with Sylvia Plath. I didn’t know at… read more #NPM17: Sylvia Plath

Aleksandar Hemon’s book of essays, The Book of My Lives reminded me that when I moved back home after failing to make… read more Hemon’s Book of Lives

In her introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Tara Masih defines flash fiction using… read more Thad Rutkowski’s Ponderous Pops

The Venture Brothers is my favorite Bowie-Non-Bowie comedy performance. I didn’t lose my virginity to David Bowie like Lori Mattix… read more David Bowie

An 80s song for an 80s story. There are two very enigmatic men in Lyddie’s life: Phelps, her botanist husband,… read more Axel Greece

Where ABC and Fox make you wait a week to see the latest episode (unless you have a cable subscription), The CW understands that it’s commercial TV (not subscription) and that its viewers can’t stop their worlds (no matter how much they want to) to sit and watch their favorite show or, as in my case, take a chance on a new one. … ”The Exterminator” is a good episode in my opinion because it got me wondering if Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero-Wright, the show’s creators, would ever make an episode where Liv is frustrated by the stereotypes people have about zombies (like the cavemen in the old GEICO ads ) or write an episode where Liv had to confront own biases towards “Walking Dead” type zombies.

Based on the novel “The Kouga Ninja Scrolls” by Futaro Yamada, “Basilisk” tells a story similar to Romeo and Juliet’s… read more Sequeling Shakespeare