Live, from Abilene...

Little update: remember that "10 hour journey," which would be closer to 16 accounting for other flights and transitions to other flights?  Turned out to be - and I counted - 24 hours.

Just about everything that could go wrong barring actual disaster - flight delays, unexpected turbulence, irritable jackasses behind me in the queue for the scanner, beaurocratic rigmarole leading to nearly missing the Abilene flight because there were only 8 offices out of 56 attended at Dallas, having our toothpaste and a small bottle of water confiscated (seriously, a sealed tube of toothpaste!?!) the clerk at the car rental place refusing to accept Scotland was part of the United Kingdom, not getting our luggage for the final leg of the trip, my new shoes were somehow starting to fall apart - Mitra wept.

The flights themselves were fine barring a bawling baby (and it's hard to blame a poor infant trapped on a plame) and a small child practising his future drumming career in the seat behind me (again, he was a wean, so just bless 'im), and the stewards were fantastically helpful folk, but overall, this is by far the most stressful journey I've ever undertaken.

Add in the heat - remember that scene from Total Recall when the atmospheric change caused Arnie's eyes to bulge out and his face to distend horrifically?  It's kinda like that: I'm a boreal creature, and just incapable of really adapting to the heat - and I barely know how I'm going to make it to Baird, let alone Cross Plains.

Well, wish me luck!  I'm sure gonna need it.

Leaving on a Jet Plane...

T-minus 1 hour before me & the gang drive to the airport. Stopping at London, Dallas, and Abilene.  Over 10 hour journey, and that's just the flights.

I'll be sure to take lots of photos for you fine folks.

See y'all later!

Vindication!

A while back, Jonathan Moeller posted something on romance novels as female wish-fulfillment.  It was an interesting thing, but then I read this passage:

“On the other hand, Conan of Cimmeria boinks a different wench every story, usually after rescuing her from the bloodstained altar a depraved centuries-old sorcerer. So, male wish fulfillment, I guess.”

I see this quite a lot, and given the sheer amount of horrible Conan novels and comics out there, I think there's a definite possibility that the "boink" ratio is considerably high.  What's disturbing is that not only detractors, but fans of Conan cite the old "gets the girl at the end of every story" idea. Nonetheless, I felt the need to defend Howard's original stories. 

The Pages that Time Forgot

Well, folks, here we go, the first of a few ideas I have for The Blog That Time Forgot.  The titles are works-in-progress, though some might remain.  Some may be moved over to the formative Shieldwall, others will stick around.  If I do move them to Shieldwall, then TBTTF will have its own pages based around my favourite things that aren't Howard or Tolkien, though based on one particular thing.

Triangulation: The Final Week

This is it, the penultimate Triangulation post.  It's been fun, lads & lasses.

Sunday has two: my sort-of Farewell to The Cimmerian blog, and a bit of news on The Hobbit situation (I'm sure fans of JotR will want Jackson to just step in, but given my general antipathy, I'm not really that bothered about who replaces Billy of the Bull). I might put up a second "goodbye" post closer to the blog's closing, but really, I think I've said all I could say.  I recommend everyone check out my Venarium buddy's farewell, too.

There was a gap of a few days, before I embarked on my last series: a history of The Cimmerian blog.  Thursday was Year One, Friday was Year Two, Saturday was Year Three.  Years Four and Five will naturally follow today and on Monday.  I wasn't sure whether to add a cute subtitle, but they're already long enough.

So, one more week until the end of The Cimmerian blog, and Howard Days.  In between getting my final four posts up (I'll just give you some clues: Barbarians of Middle-earth, Hyborian Age Gazetteer, a Howard review, and a non-Howard review), I'll be making sure everything's ready for Cross Plains.  I'm taking my laptop on the flight, so I can spend the ten+ hours productively working on stuff before I arrive in Abilene.  I'll be taking a video camera with me, which I might put up on my youtube account after some jiggery-pokery.  "The Scottish Invasion: Al Harron at Cross Plains" or some such.  Hey, if Leo can be in a video...

Solomon Kane Review Reviews: Superhero Cinema

The frustrating thing about Michael Bassett’s Solomon Kane film is that it comes so close to getting it right. The cinematography and gloomy atmosphere capture the somber tone of Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane tales very well, and there is a scene in the film where Kane encounters a mad priest who keeps a “congregation” of gibbering cannibals locked in the basement of his ruined church that feels like it could have been directly adapted from one of the original stories.

The frustrating thing about Jefferson’s Solomon Kane review is that it comes so close to getting it right. The article clearly knows enough about Conan creator Robert E. Howard's tales to understand how profoundly wrong Bassett's characterisation is, and there are some very salient points...

Nah, I feel mean. After all, this is a pretty good review.  I just feel I have to comment on some things.

David Bishop Doon the Watter, and the Dark Age of Conan Comics

Something I'd been meaning to talk about was when I saw David Bishop in Greenock.  That's him on the right, next to Sam Kelly.

Back in May, part of the Greenock Library's initiative to get young people using them again was buying a vast pile of comics. The usual suspects were there: Maus, Watchmen, Transmetropolitan, V for Vendetta, Preacher, The Invisibles, 300, The Dark Knight Returns, Sandman, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth,  even things like Robert Crumb's Old Testament. Absolutely fantastic range, even if it does lack some Thomas adaptations (in an ideal world, I'd have a "Best of Roy Thomas & Robert E. Howard" collection with Worms of the Earth, Red Nails, Black Colossus, Wings in the Night et al), it's about the best possible collection I could think of.

Michael Bay turns his monstrous gaze to another childhood property

I have a complicated relationship with Michael Bay.  I never saw Bad Boys, and am not particularly interested in changing that, since Martin Lawrence irritates me, and Will Smith in anything other than Men in Black or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has been worthless to me. I vaguely liked The Rock, but that was basically because Sean Connery and Ed Harris never fail to deliver.  Armageddon was entertaining because... actually I don't know why, but I do recall that there was a lot of meteoric action therein.  I loved the scenes on the meteor, simply because I love that sort of science-fictiony sort of thing.  Pearl Harbor was ungodly, and I'm glad I didn't see it in theatres.  I never saw The Island, but I haven't heard good things.

And then there's Transformers. Truth be told, Bay is disturbingly good at making his films (apart from Pearl Harbor) an enjoyable experience for me.  I had a good time at the films I went to see at the cinema - and Primus forgive me, that includes Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I think in the case of Transformers, the power of nostalgia completely overwhelmed me: I was just so happy to hear Pete Cullen's voice, to see giant robots on screen, and generally excited about everything that I was in an incredibly cheerful state.  So it's very bizarre that while I immensely enjoyed the two Transformers films when I watched them, I don't think it was the films themselves that I enjoyed.

The Boxleitner Connection

I've been doing research for an upcoming series of posts on TC charting the blog's history, when I came across this little gem: who would have thought there to be common ground between Robert E. Howard and Babylon 5?

101,355

That's the final number of page views for the month of May, and the best page-visits-per-month The Cimmerian's ever achieved. Obviously a lot of it was due to Miguel's Conan scoop and the Frazetta news/tributes (many thanks to John J. Miller in particular), but even without those, analysis of the site's growth indicates it would've been a pretty comfortable 60-70,000.  Our best day was 8,812, on 17th May. Total views as of this writing are 797,469: I'm positive we would've hit 1 million by at least the end of the year.

All things considered, I think it's a fine swan song for the site to breach the 100,000 mark, however much those two news items may have contributed.  We still have another ten days to wrap up loose ends (appropriately, the site closes up shop on 11th June), but I'm immensely proud that we broke that milestone.  I can't thank everyone who read the site enough.

Not bad for a niche blog.