Posted inFiction

The “Lensman” Series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith

[amtap book:isbn=1568658044]

[amtap book:isbn=0739402625]

Descrip­tion: The “Lens­man” series by ‘Doc’ E E Smith is one of the clas­sics of the pulp era of sci­ence fic­tion. A bat­tle between Impos­si­ble oppo­sites, with whole civ­i­liza­tions as pawns and coun­ters in the game. There are bat­tles in space between fleets so large they dwarf whole solar sys­tems, weapons so immense as to stag­ger the imag­i­na­tion, and crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cies that cov­ered galaxies.

Yet at the cen­ter of the series was the bat­tle between the sup­port­ive men­tal giants of the plan­et Arisia and the con­quer­ing Eddo­ri­ans from anoth­er uni­verse. The Arisians find the Eddo­ri­ans too tough to take on them­selves, but find their relent­less phi­los­o­phy of con­quest unpalat­i­ble, and resolve to oppose them. To that end, the Arisians began a slow, mil­lions of years long project to pro­duce the men­tal pow­er need­ed to final­ly elim­i­nate the Eddorians.That tale, told in var­i­ous stages, makes up the sto­ry line.

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Posted inFiction

“The Hypnotist” by Jack Kahler (1966)

John Mered­ith Swift was only 14 years old and he was quite impressed by the hyp­no­tist he’d seen. It was­n’t sur­pris­ing that he tried to imi­tate the man, but, as he dis­cov­ered with young Nan­cy next door, he had to give his voice time to mature a little.

He nev­er lost his fas­ci­na­tion for the art, how­ev­er, and much lat­er … in his last year at col­lege, he had the oppor­tu­ni­ty for an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment. One which caused a young vir­gin to turn up preg­nant, almost cost­ing her life and san­i­ty … and John’s as well …

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Posted inMovies The HiM Collection

“The Hypnotic Eye” (1960) — Part II — The Images

Sev­er­al years ago, I start­ed col­lect­ing any­thing I could find regard­ing the movie “The Hyp­not­ic Eye”. I was suf­fi­cient­ly intrigued about the movie that I want­ed to know every­thing about it, and one way was to get as much para­pher­na­lia about it togeth­er that I could.

I would even­tu­al­ly col­lect two of the pub­lic­i­ty pack­ages, con­sist­ing of news­pa­per arti­cles, infor­ma­tion and ads, one each for both US and British release, which were print­ed on very flim­sy newsprint and so were dif­fi­cult to sur­vive. I also have what I think is a com­plete col­lec­tion of the pub­lic­i­ty stills released for the movie, many com­plete with the descrip­tive text attached to the back. But the biggest addi­tion to the col­lec­tion was a diskette I received from Gil Boyne which con­tained a num­ber of pho­to­graph­ic stills tak­en from when he was on the set of the movie. Many of these images were nev­er used in any pro­mo­tions and most were in col­or, where­as the pub­lic­i­ty stills were all black&white.

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Posted inPersonal

Two Weekends, Two Conventions

The following has nothing to do with the overall subject of the blog yet everything to do with the continual maintenance of the owner of the blog. The past two…
Posted inCartoons and Anime Comics, Comic Books, Comic Strips or Manga Fiction

“MM!”

Prac­ti­cal­ly every­one in this show has some kind of men­tal hangup, and that’s the focus of the series.

For the three main char­ac­ters, they all have full-grown psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders that con­flict and coop­er­ate at the same time. The male lead Tarou is a masochist, but only when women do the dam­age; Mio is a sadist and, in clas­sic ani­me style, is self-con­scious about her flat breasts; and Arashiko of the abun­dant breasts can­not stand being touched or even being around men and will even attack them if they get too close. There­fore, Tarou is in ecsta­sy when Mio or Arashiko hit him, and they do, a lot, as Mio gets inor­di­nate plea­sure from doing so where­as Arashiko does so when flus­tered or by acci­dent and is imme­di­ate­ly sorry.

Its also the run­ning joke, that Mio is always try­ing to find ways to ‘cure’ Tarou’s masochism (includ­ing an can­dle-lit exor­cism) that always wind up rein­forc­ing his masochism instead of cur­ing it. Of course, one of those ways involves hypnosis.

The rest of the cast all have their hangups as well: Tarou’s moth­er and teen-aged sis­ter are extreme­ly over­ly affec­tion­ate toward him (both want to mar­ry him) and even com­pete with each oth­er (and his girl­friends) for his affec­tions; Tarou’s friend Tat­su­kichi is a cross-dress­er (and quite good at it) and seems to have an alter­nate per­son­al­i­ty emerge when dress­ing as a woman; Noa, a senior, although her appear­ance is still that of a younger girl, is a genius who nev­er had a child­hood as she had to study all the time, and who always refers to her­self in third-per­son; Noa’s assis­tant Yuki­no­jō is a major loli­con (fan of pre­pu­bes­cent girls) and joined the Inven­tor’s Club to be clos­er to Noa; and school nurse Michiru knows all about every­one’s hangups, pos­sess­es an appar­ent­ly unlim­it­ed sup­ply of cos­play cos­tumes and loves to take pic­tures of the stu­dents in them.

Need­less to say, the entire series is NSFW.

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