scop (noun): Old English – bard, minstrel, storyteller
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Mighty Beasts of the 1950s
Time Traveling Let’s go back in time. The distant past! To the days when terrible lizards roamed the imaginations of prepubescent minds. I’m talking about the 1950s. Dino Evolution Back then, dinosaurs were juggernauts: massive, lumbering brutes that had more in common with locomotives and steam shovels than with the T-rexes and Velociraptors envisioned today.…
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Unboxing John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness
What’s in the Box? Psionic transmissions from the future, multiverse portals, body horror transformations, a capsule of pure evil, Alice Cooper, and a heady dose of weird science—it must be a John Carpenter movie. And for my money, it’s one of his best. For last night’s re-watch of Prince of Darkness, I picked up Shout…
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The Pub Shall Rise Again
I read the news today, oh boy. Last Thursday, the texts started arriving. My daughter got the first one. It was from Liam Macik, a playwright, director, and podcaster who was a frequent special guest at Riley’s Storytelling Nights a few years back. The second text came to me. It was from Christopher Laughrey, my long-time musical…
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They Live … again.
Movies don’t change. We do. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus proclaimed long ago, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” The reason is simple. Both you and the river change with time. But experiencing art is different. Take movies. The original Star Wars trilogy notwithstanding, the films you see in your teens are the…
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More from Milford Fest: Live and In Person.
In an age when professional magazines are inundated with computer-generated submissions and screen actors can be replaced by CG doppelgangers, there are still activities that remain exclusively in the human domain. I’m referring to in-person events. You can try and simulate them with Zoom and Facetime, but there’s nothing like the real thing, and I…
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Milford: Authors, The Anchorage, and Arrowhead
Around the world, the town of Milford in eastern Pennsylvania is famous for its role in the development of science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, James Blish, Virginia Kidd, and Anne McCaffrey are just a few of the luminaries who have traveled to Milford to be part of the…