And that world is Corpus Christi. So, when I’m not doing things like, working on the crazy WordPress Multi-Site which is this blog network, I’m doing way too many podcasts. You of course are aware of the fishing podcast, Last Cast Podcast, where my fishing buddy Jamey and I do a live taping of our attempts to catch fish and the ribald jokery which goes on when we’re alone out in the canoe.

You’re probably also aware of This Week in the Multiverse, where my old Space Squid colleague and former co-editor of the RevolutionSF.com fiction section, Steve Wilson and I tell the stories of Sioux Cantu across all his different versions of the multiverse.

You may also be aware of the spin-off Bad Roll Models podcast where Steve and Jamey and a few other surly customers play vintage 80s RPGs.

Well, all of this comes together with Corpus Thunder, a podcast where Jamey and I bring some of the characters from Bad Roll Models and This Week in the Multiverse, to the seedy detective stories of Corpus Christi, Texas. It’s a perfect storm, a confluence if you will, of many podcasts come together.

Them bats is smart. They use radar.

That’s one of the many, many goofy things that David Letterman lodged in my brain. He inspired me at a young, goofy age to try to be funny.

I do not want to get super-sentimental about it. He’s not being fired. (That already happened to him, and he came out of that OK.) I don’t know him personally. He’s not dying. He’s just not doing a show anymore. But his show started me on a path to being a creative person.

When I was 12, 13, 14, I didn’t talk a lot to people and thus, didn’t get noticed by people. Not a bad thing, really, but for some reason, it stressed the heck out of me as I was going through the social stuff that one goes through at school.

Letterman was a huge influence on my sense of humor. He helped me step outside my worries and just try to do stuff. He approached everything as a smarty-pants. He did the silliest things and grinned while he did them. He’s incredibly smart and incredibly sarcastic. He made me love the silliness that’s a basic part of all popular culture. He made me think “I can do that.”

So I told a funny speech and won a spot on my oh-so serious high school student government. I told jokes and won a talent show while wearing nothing but a raincoat. I rode inside a giant toilet on a homecoming float.

Doing all that just to gain confidence is like using a bazooka to kill fire ants.

In college, I volunteered to write a column for the campus newspaper. I made up my own college-TV channel show and had my Mass Comm buddies on as guests. We turned on the cameras and just winged it. Letterman gave the impression that’s how he did it.

We didn’t have social media back then, so I don’t know if anyone read or saw what I did. But I’ll be honest. I thought I was terrific.

Letterman and Saturday Night Live were languages spoken by lots of people my age. When Letterman published a book of his show’s top ten lists, I thought that was the Holy Grail. I took to reading Letterman’s Top Ten List books as if they were instructions on how for me, personally, to accomplish things. The lesson I learned from them was that eight or nine out of ten things were of no value at all, but the complete package, together with that tenth thing, wow, my goodness.

Letterman isn’t my only inspiration, he was just my first pop-cultural one. My grandma and my dad taught me to remember funny stuff even when things are terrible. My wife and my daughter are the funniest people I know.

Letterman taught me to find humor in everything. Every single thing. Of course I love the stuff he famously did. I also love a short Letterman skit about Mark Hamill teaching parallel parking.

Because I decided to try being goofy, now I sometimes get to be goofy in public. I did stand-up comedy, and made three or four other comedians laugh. I host game shows at sci-fi conventions, I write about TV and movies. I get to write at my job. I make my family laugh (and don’t let them tell you any different.)

Letterman inspired me to find ways to be creative and share my creativity, and that improved my whole deal.

I feel like being funny helps everybody, including me. People laughing at stuff I have said or written is just the best.

Some people go through their days making everyone else feel like crap. Letterman ended many of my days on an up-note after I dealt with people like that (or did that to myself.) I hope, like Letterman, that I don’t let anyone stay stuck in the mud with those people.

Of course, being funny and helping people aren’t the only things you need to live your life. But they’re on the top ten list.

I really enjoyed this mini series. The most fun thing about it to me was trying to piece together the history of the house from the tidbits we were given episode by episode. With that in mind here are some thoughts about the history of Hill House and how it went down.

SPOILERS (obvs)

At first we had the Hill family, who made all their money in bootlegging and then at some point the patriarch of the family died leaving his wife Hazel and son Walter with the house. Walter went crazy (more than likely caused by the house) and was institutionalized where he met Poppy (a special kind of crazy that turned malignant). Poppy and Walter had a son and a daughter. The story told by Poppy suggested that the daughter died of some respiratory ailment and the son of what sounded like some form of muscular dystrophy  (or they could have been ill and Poppy killed both of them which isn’t completely out of the question). Walter went crazier and walled himself in the basement after the death of the children and if I had to bet at that point Poppy killed herself. Hazel died of old age-itus and that was it for the Hills.

If Poppy killed both her kids and then herself there is a very good chance Walter saw all of it go down but for some reason felt he couldn’t do anything about it (from Poppy’s story – he found himself walled in with the sisters – shame and guilt) and it made him feel small. Which is why ghost Walter is so freakishly tall.

Poppy, dead and alive, was an awful type of evil, I think ghost Walter really is just curious about the living residents of the house, and dead Hazel seems down right helpful. We see ghost Hazel meeting the dead little girl in a ghost form that approximated her living form at the end for example.

As a side note, Hazel might have gone through a spiritualism phase where she was trying to talk to her deceased husband. There was a brief throw off line about the ouija boards etc. that were discovered in the drawing room. That may have been some more of Poppy’s crazy though. That one’s hard to guess. But there was a point of time where the dead weren’t quite as chatty in the house it seems.

Going by the number of ghosts standing behind Steven when he leaves the house as an adult, and counting the clock repair ghost there is a sense there were additional deaths at the House. Workers dying in “accidents”, kids in the community being drawn to and consumed by the house and so on.

As for the house itself it sounds like it was sort of a 1408/unhallowed ground sort of thing. It was just a bad place that gave birth to a bad building. Anything more than that didn’t really feel necessary to me.

As your friendly neighborhood WordPress webmaster, I would like to remind everyone that I have not forgotten about the Revblogs. Just now I have logged in and updated plugins and shook a broom at the cobwebs left by the internet spiders.

An exciting new addition to the blog system is Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for those who are hip. This is in part an improved protocol to deliver mobile-friendly web content, and also another creepy Google scheme to take over the world. You don’t really have to do anything with it, it’s enabled in basic default mode on your blog right now. Just add /amp to the end of any blog post URL like this:
http://www.revolutionsf.com/revblogs/blog/2017/revsf-movie-probe-survivor/amp/
And a generic mobile page will pop up. Let me know if you have any questions. It’s actually much more complicated than what I just said, but in practice it’s easy as pie.

So much going on here.

https://youtu.be/phFM3V_dors

I just updated several plugins and some themes on the WordPress installation. I don’t expect that to cause troubles, but if you notice anything which is behaving unusually on your blogs, let me know.

Hey, y’all!

I was sitting around, staring at a computer monitor like normal, and I thought, if I’m not on the RevBlogs every day, there should probably be some security. So I popped in to install the WordFence security plugin. This has got a bunch of nifty features, like a firewall which blocks a lot of anticipated attacks, a brute force blocker, and an automatic malware scanner. This shouldn’t cause you any problems, except that you can get locked out for inputting the wrong password too many times. But your blog admin email should get you back in. Let me know if you run into any snags or problems!

I also updated all the network wide plugins. If you notice anything odd with your sites from that too, let me know.