jackguignol.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

I am so going home and writing out of anger after work today

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Wait, you're telling me--you want the buns to be made of steel??

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Two more adventure locations in Piskaro: a Lovecraftian tavern and a boarding house with a witchy secret talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-...

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Film 27 of 2025: Tower of London (1962) This Vincent Price vehicle is like a ninety-minute Shakespeare festival, combining elements of Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet into one potent punch. C'mon, this is Vincent Price scheming for England's throne--you WANT to watch that, right?

submitted 19 hours ago • 1 comment

Rod Serling is a hometown hero for me, and this blog post is a great example of why that will never change. Fantastic read.

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I'm doing different POV chapters in my Gothic fantasy novel. Really wanted to slip another chapter with the bard character in there, and today I realized I have the perfect opportunity to do a chapter where she burns a church down, Norwegian black metal style.

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Film 26 of 2025: The Haunting of Rosalind (1973) A made for tv movie, The Haunting of Rosalind adapts a Henry James short story. The Dark Shadows influence really shows; it has that great vintage "tv gothic" look--and a dewy-faced Susan Sarandon in one of the main roles! Extremely my shit.

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Book 22 of 2025: Alix E. Harrow, Starling House A hard-luck woman gets a job cleaning the local haunted house so she can send her brother away to school. It's a very standard modern Gothic fantasy. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing noteworthy either. I liked that the male love interest was fugly!

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Seriously, everything I was ever told about "grimdark" fiction has been disproved by actually reading the stuff. No humor? Blade Itself is quite funny. No hopeful endings? Broken Empire seems very positive at the end, to me. No magic or monsters? Empire of Dust has got dragons and sorcery, dude.

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It's all just marketing

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Recap of last Friday's secret Warhammer 40k game talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-...

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I can't be weeded out by either criteria. Fear me, gothlords! Know your master!

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I'm about to feast in Valhalla

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Film 25 of 2025: Underworld Evolution (2006) I still think that the original Underworld is the best unofficial Vampire: The Masquerade movie, but watching Evolution it's amazing how quickly the franchise lost steam. Evolution has to retcon so heavily that you're left wondering what the point was.

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The initial premise for last night's one-shot was that they'd be playing young barbarians about to be exiled from their tribe. Little did they know that they'd find themselves in a scenario that was half the Doctor Who episode "Face of Evil" and half them being recruited by the 40k inquisition.

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Did I run an rpg tonight that mashed up old Doctor Who with Warhammer 40k without the players initially knowing that? Yes, yes I did.

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Also I'm surprised how little conversation I've found about how Abercrombie is directly responding to LotR. People talk about GRRM doing an anti-LotR, but c'mon, the wizard here makes trees explode to melt peoples' faces like he's Gandalf drinking Red Bull while pouring napalm on the pine cones.

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Book 21 of 2025: Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself It's funny that this book is a cornerstone of grimdark. I found it lively and funny and not really bleak or bloody or over the top at all. If there is a flaw here it's how focused it is on "getting the party together" over everything else.

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On days where I can't get any serious writing done I at least try to write a little vignette just to get the words flowing. Today's was a very short story about the main character of my novel cockblocking her own daughter and generally being a sneaky weirdo.

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Book 20 of 2025: Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth Going into this, I was concerned that it would be about the character girlbossing her way across Scotland, but in reality this Lady Macbeth is mostly a terrified young girl using what guile she has just to stay alive. Pretty good, but not for purists.

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I had a classmate in high school who was obsessed with two things: Ross Perot and owning an BMW

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Two adventure locations in Piskaro: a Gothic asylum and an orphanage perpetrating horrible psychic experiments talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2025/03/drat...

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Our picks for the best books, music, movies, etc. we indulged in over the year! Shout outs to @sgj.bsky.social and @kateagriffin.bsky.social for killing it on the fiction front

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Film 24 of 2025: Spider (1992) This Latvian film is a combination of dreamlike/nightmarish erotic Euro horror and goopy body horror focused on a young woman's burgeoning sexuality and spidery evil. As a point of comparison, imagine if Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was all in on spider fucking.

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Film 23 of 2025: Cape Fear (1991) We're poorer as a country for not making insane thrillers like this anymore. Upon release, a sadistic rapist targets the family of a lawyer who didn't let him walk away from the charges that landed him in prison. The manic intensity is off the charts throughout!

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A trusted friend tore into my the first chapter of my novel at the sentence level and it was so helpful! Daunting at first, but I was able to incorporate almost all of his feedback. Feels good!

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Film 22 of 2025: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) It was good-ish? This is probably the influence of all the grimdark fantasy I've been reading lately, but the Rohirrim end up looking like chumps for not solving their problems with violence sooner and cutting off the misery that comes later.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

I've never felt more subtweeted in my life. Et tu, Julia?

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

Our tour of Krevborna continues! This time we're stopping at the largest port of call, home of pirates and cultists talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2025/02/pisk...

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Book 19 of 2025: Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon You'd think the alien structure that kills or drives insane anyone exploring it would be the main draw here, but it's really in the grimy human interactions that this novella lives. A bit like a Jim Thompson novel with sci fi bits. A truly amazing book.

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments