- Scott Tobias on J-horror ghosts:
There’s no particular menace to these specters — I recall Kurosawa himself, in a Q&A following a screening of his fine 2000 thriller Séance, joking that ghosts in Japanese horror films “don’t do anything” — but their presence is an unnerving suggestion of death itself, specifically that unholy transitional space between the human world and the afterlife. These aren’t the usual hauntings, where spooks are looking to settle a piece of unfinished business; instead, they’re pitiable folks who are now stuck, perhaps permanently, in one fixed place, from which they can never break free. To me, that prospect is a heck of a lot scarier.
The original Pulse, by the way, is often incredibly frightening. Tobias’ criticisms of the film — which include a whole lot of spoilers — aren’t completely off, but I definitely recommend it.
- Well here’s something you don’t read every day: “…even a horny Sasquatch has an impeccable sense of orgy etiquette.” Or maybe you do, I don’t know. Me, I read it here, in a write-up of the annual Texas Bigfoot Conference. [via]
- Starting next fall, Boston college will stop offering its students e-mail accounts, instead offering a address and forwarding service to the e-mail provider of their choice. Reading the comments to that Chronicle of Higher Education article, I gather this is either long overdue or the worst idea ever. [via]
- Over at Desuko Movie Spot, Eric B. has posted a really useful index for browsing his older movie reviews. As he writes, “These 166 films represent 93 years of movie history, from 1915 to 2008,” and he always has something interesting to say about them.
- There is, in fact, a giant black hole at the center of our galaxy:
According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit.
That’s sort of equal parts terrifying and beautiful. [via]
- “Rasta Irish meth-heads doing parkour”? I almost want to see the new Punisher movie now!
1) I love J-horror. And I love their ghosts, even if they have a different cultural conception of them than we do in the west. I haven’t seen “Pulse” yet, but I would recommend “Ghost Actress,” even though that ghost comes a little closer to our western ideal of a vengeful spirit. For non-ghost related J-horror, check out “Uzumaki” and “Cure.” And then there’s “Audition”….
2) The university I work at stopped hosting student email accounts this summer, outsourcing it to Gmail, with a “laverne.edu” domain name. The same switch is planned for faculty and staff in January.
3) Thanks for the shout out. Look for some new anniversary-ish content on Friday.
The email forwarding sounds like a good idea, but I don’t think it is. There’s always the chance that forwarding into a Hotmail or Yahoo account will be treated as spam. We use offer our students an in-house account and try to persuade them to use it. That way, we KNOW they get our emails (for one) and we can find them in a directory if we need to (for another). The forwarding would still let you find them, but I bet Boston College will start seeing a whole slew of appeals over the inevitable ‘but I didn’t GET the email….!!’ Our office has a terrible time with our mass mailouts being treated as spam by a lot of providers – but if you use our in-house account, you won’t have that problem.
Frankly, for the amount of tuition students pay these days, email accounts and disk storage space should be offered. In my opinion, anyways.