Thanks to all you readers who voted, MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD has, for the second year in a row, received an "Honorable Mention" in the Best Blog category in the annual RONDO AWARDS. I want to thank each and every one of you who voted for my blog and for continuing to support my efforts.

As I have mentioned before, my mission here is to share with you my experiences from bygone Monster Craze days that have left a lasting impression, as well as provide comments and opinion regarding the current state of affairs with this very active industry.

You also spoke loud and clear with the last Reader's Survey when you said you liked the format and length of the postings here just the way they are. Accordingly, I will give you what you like best.

I also reminded you that MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD is available in a reader-friendly mobile phone version for all you monsters on the go.

I recently offered for sale the first-ever MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD 2011 BLOG BOOK that includes an entire year's worth of posts. It is still available at the ridiculous price of only 99 cents (order info on the sidebar).

Plus, I have a few more surprises up my sleeve that I will spring on you in the coming months.

So, once again for your readership and support. Please take the time to comment once in a while or use the reaction buttons to let me know you're out there. I REALLY APPRECIATE the time you spend here at MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD. I will do my best to give you a reason to keep coming back.

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DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF WIRELESS SHEEP?

I downloaded my first app today. This has come about three weeks into owning my Samsung Galaxy II Skyrocket "smartphone". It came complete with 4G and LTE technology for "lightning fast" use. I soon found out, though, that my provider, AT&T, doesn't at the moment have a huge network of 4G cell towers in the Seattle area. Oh, and the "lightning fast" LTE technology? Well, that's not even available yet. Now, I've heard about taking products out for a beta test drive but this is ridiculous. Talk about over-hype and over selling. Oh well, I've got it now, and I'm not about to let them take 35 of my hard-earned bucks for a "re-stock" fee just for the pleasure of returning it.

I've been living up 'til now in that fertile plot of mobile phoneland known as BlackBerry. The company that owns it, Research In Motion, has tanked as of late. With only 10% of the market share, they've got a new CEO who has big plans to revitalize their interest in this very competitive field. My Skyrocket operates with Google's Android software, and much of the gizmo's inner workings are based on Google's ever-expanding pallet of . . . apps. So, if you want one of these and have it be fully functional, you're gonna have to give up your heart and soul to a Google account.

Also, everything's app driven. Mine came with a number of default programs already loaded. But, while the BlackBerry comes ready to use as a phone, I'm going to have to download an app to enable voice dialing. Ultimately, I guess the Skyrocket is more of a hand-held, multi-functional computer that doubles as a phone instead of the other way around.

Why did I buy one in the first place, you might ask? Well, the story's longer than I care to relate here on a MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD blog post, but I can tell you that my wife played a major part in it. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not blaming her -- just that she had a lot to do with the 400 dollar purchase of two phones that retail for over a thousand. Plus, I think I'm starting to like it.

Anyway, I was taking a look at the latest UK horror 'zine, SCREAM, when I spotted one of those increasingly familiar pixelated Rohrshach squares that seem to be popping up all over the place these days on an ad for a free horror app. So, I launched the pre-loaded app that allows me to read these things, lined the viewfinder up with the image on the magazine and clicked away. The screen prompt asked me if I wanted to either go to the app's website or the "market" folder on my smartphone. It was then that the singular thought occurred to me that I could have just gone to the website in the first place. For that I could have used the really cool Google voice-activated search app to go to the website (that's not entirely correct -- it will prompt you to click "yes" to go to the website if it's recognized your voice command properly).

I'm not a techno fuddy-duddy, and while the app itself doesn't exactly blow my skirt up, I can see these things have promise, and I can't honestly judge the concept without first trying out a few. This one was free, but a lot of them you have to pay for.

This all has got me wondering about the use of apps when it comes to my beloved monster 'zines. I know RUE MORGUE's got one, but I'll have to check -- I recall it only being available for iPhones. I have downloaded some of their RUE MORGUE RADIO shows on mp3. Those are fun to listen to with the Skyrocket's ample built-in speaker.

Samsung is known for their marvelous screen displays, and I have to say that the MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD blog looks pretty good on the Skyrocket, which has a screensize that's about 2 1/2 times the size of my BlackBerry's.

More and more I think you'll see this market forcing down our throats stuff that we think we need. Some of it's really cool and some of it is a big WTF. I also think that exclusively digital monster magazine content -- that is, monster 'zines that will someday only be available on smartphones -- is a long way away. I won't be surprised, though, to see the envelope being pushed from now on. Kindles, Nooks, and tablets are all the latest craze, offering the user the ability to read and browse content like never before. Frankly, I'm thinking how much is enough? It has me wondering about the phrase that Jeff Goldblum so sagely put in the film, JURASSIC PARK, that goes something like: "Maybe it's better to think about why we should have instead of that we could." Somehow I don't think that advice carries much weight with technology.

In the meantime, I'll still be pining a bit for my BlackBerry, sitting quietly in its holster and waiting for me to reactivate it. But, as I said, I'm beginning to like my 4G, LTE Samsung Skyrocket running on Google's Android. And, in order to fully answer the question as to these so-called "smartphones" being as "smart" as they say they are, I guess I'll have to buy another app that will tell me that.

Read More → DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF WIRELESS SHEEP?

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY AND I'LL BLOG IF I WANT TO!

Hi, everybody! Today is my birthday. I don’t have to tell any of you original Monster Kids what another year feels like – physically, that is. What I can tell you is how weird it is having a body that’s turning into the likes of a cousin to Kharis with a mind that’s as sharp as a werewolf when the autumn moon is bright. It wouldn’t seem any fairer if it were the other way around, either. Consequently, it makes me wonder about the importance of that proverbial phrase: “make the most out of life while you can.”

This has all got me thinking about why I spend time on things like this blog. Well, I’ll tell you why.

First, it allows me to participate in leaving something behind in the way of a legacy, historical or otherwise, of a moment in time that influenced not only me, but popular culture as a whole in a significant way. Pop culture, if you haven’t guessed, is a huge influence on how people think, act, and, most importantly, spend their time and money. Remember, many Monster Kids from the day went on to shape the style and substance of the entertainment industry, most notably horror and science fiction films.

Second, along with playing music, it allows me the space to disentangle myself from the worries and problems of the day-to-day world. Some may call it checking out of reality; I call it therapy.

The last reason is the most selfish of all – it’s because I want to! For some inexplicable reason (even though I just did my best to explain it), I feel compelled to share my experiences from this period of my life, and in some strange way, reconcile it with the present. I don’t think it particularly needs justifying, but motivation is always good to understand.

Now, before you go and try to analyze me, I think it was Freud who said something to the effect of: “Sometimes a tentacle is just a tentacle” or something close. In this case, I fancy myself as part historical conservator and part hopeless pop culture junkie. I have spent the last several years as a member in S.T. Joshi’s Esoteric Order of Dagon, otherwise known as the H.P. Lovecraft Amateur Press Association. If there ever was a body of individuals – both armchair and academic – that have explored and extracted the minutest details of a historical figure’s life, it’s these guys. Having some of my own research published alongside today’s preeminent Lovecraft scholars has been a proud accomplishment.

So, has this all been a monumental waste of time? I think not. Along the way, I have got to know a number of people, even made some friends. All-in-all, I feel like I have, in some way, contributed – like a lot of bloggers -- to the collective time capsule of our society. It may not be all about the advancements of science, the arts, or industry, but it does have something to do with the human aspects of friendships, sharing, and the desire to preserve a part of our cultural heritage. This may sound all lofty and high-handed, but, hey – it’s what I came up with at the moment. After all, it’s my birthday and I’ll blog if I want to!

Read More → IT'S MY BIRTHDAY AND I'LL BLOG IF I WANT TO!

A few days ago I mentioned that I was getting a little frustrated with Blogger's "noodling" around with so-called improvements to my "Blogging Experience". I know that it is the nature of this industry, as well as the digital industry as a whole, to constantly evolve, grow, and (hopefully) progress. My most recent experience with this not-always-welcome phenomenon was seeing the news about Nikon's next gen line of cameras about a month after I bought a D5100. While it probably won't put this model to shame anytime soon, it still illustrates the fact that electronics manufacturers seem to revel in constatntly dangling the digital carrot in front of consumers.

But, like everything else in life -- artificial or otherwise -- this all comes with a price. Hackers, spammers, and other unsavory characters are out, surfing the bandwith for cracks in any firewall that they can get their nefarious string of code through, all for a buck -- and a lot of times just to see if they can frack up someone's day.

Case in point: I have a link to Jim Clatterbaugh's MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT blog on the sidebar of MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD. I hadn't seen anything new on it for a while, so I decided to drop Jim a line to see what was up. He replied that his blog had been "temporarily" shut down by Blogger because their security software had detected that his site was being used as a host for a spammer. I don't have any other details except that he has to go through some sort of "authentication" process before he can resume. There was even a cryptic implication that he might have to even vacate his space because of all this. As of a few minutes ago (Monday, September 28, 5:00 PM PST), his blog remains shut down.

So, in my mild rant of a few days ago I mentioned that Blogger had suddenly started using an image interface pop-up that was similar to Facebook. My beef was that you couldn't resize the image easily to read smaller scanned images that had text in them. Well, this condition seems to have returned to the original setup where, after you click on an image it will open in another window where you can click again on it to enlarge the picture. Yay!

Seems like my worries are slight compared to my friend, Jim Clatterbaugh's, though. What does raise a larger question with me however, is that this huge, seemingly chaotic miasma of online madness -- despite the prevalence of "social networks" such as Facebook -- is creating an ever-widening gap between the individual and more meaningful human interaction. And, as with everything else, there are outlaws, predators and flim-flam artists to watch for, along with scams and schemes that serve no pupose other than to either cause someone misery or remove them from their money as quickly as possible.

Now, I don't mean to paint a dim picture here. This all has its bright spot, and it is mostly bright, I might add. While I am a veteran computer user and fairly adept at the use of the Internet, I was once extremely averse to jumping into the world of blogging -- not because I was a Cyberphobe, but because I thought the idea of "journaling" about my life and my interests to anyone who cared to read about it was, well, kinda dumb.

Boy, was I wrong.

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GOOD BYE, BORDERS

First it was Ruby's Diner, one of my favorite places for a burger. Great Cobb Salads, too. And the shoestring fries were pretty much second to none. Then, one day they were -- BANG! -- gone from Washington State in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but my thirst for their syrupy-sweet Cherry Coke.

Now Borders Books (a.k.a. Waldenbooks) will be closing its doors for good in just a few days. And this time it's on a national scale.

At least once per week I'd go to the local Everett Mall for my lunch break. They have a food court there that's no great shakes, but at least they have an Ivar's Seafood joint and a Teriyaki place where I can get chicken and stir-fried veggies. After that, I could browse the Border's right next door. They were generous with their discount coupons and I purchased many a book and CD this way.

This is also the place where I purchased a good share of my monster mags, too. I usually found titles like SCARY MONSTERS, VIDEO WATCHDOG, FANGORIA, and RUE MORGUE lurking in their magazine racks. Guess I'll be going to the nearest Barnes & Noble for that now. The other options are to buy direct from the publisher where offered or otherwise online, or Diamond Previews (the lease profitable for indie publishers). The point is that brick and mortar bookstores are slowly going the way of the DoDo and Billy Beer. There was some hope that a benefactor would come in at the last moment to rescue Borders from bankruptcy, but alas, the miracle didn't occur.

Ironically, MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD'S recent survey showed that readers prefer their monster 'zines in printed form rather than digitally. I, for one, also much prefer the traditional bookstore/newsstand. Call it Pavlovian, a learned response, or whatever, I still like to browse the shelves and smell the fresh paper and ink of a newly printed book or magazine. I'll just be doing it at one less place in a few more days.

Read More → GOOD BYE, BORDERS

RETURN TO THE LAND OF THE LOST "HELLO"

Well, I have returned to the bowels of the Mysterious Mansion, back from a much needed vacation. This time it was off to the Central and Southern Coasts of Oregon. No TV and only local papers made it seem like I was light years away from the usual workaday world. I could learn to get real used to it.

After gorging myself all week on various things with fins and crustacean critters, I have to say for the record that my favorite new fish is . . . Sturgeon! Firm flesh, mild to medium flavor, not "fishy" or strong, I had it as both "Sturgeon and Chips" and as a filet, grilled with a mango chutney sauce. Yum!

So, I have returned to the once-fabled Land of the Shoegazer and to what I have newly dubbed as The Land of the Lost "Hello". Why? I have already noticed a remarkable difference between the city dwellers of the Seattle area and the shoreline denizens of the Oregon Coast. I did quite a bit of socializing with the locals during this trip and was pleasantly surprised to find how friendly and gregarious they all were. One might say they were much like the "salt of the earth" that one so often reads about.  Conversely, while a few people that I passed on my regular walking path my first day back have returned my "hello", so far not one has initiated the internationally-recognized greeting on their own. A by-produce of urbanization, perhaps? I have heard the term "provincial" used more than once.

Believe or not (and there's more in that phrase that you will see soon), a few opportunities presented themselves on my trip that I think are appropriate to include in this blog. How does a visit with dinosaurs, Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Fiji Mermaid sound? Stay tuned right here, and in the next few days, I will regale you with the revelations!

Read More → RETURN TO THE LAND OF THE LOST "HELLO"