Aviation (Aviation Geek Club): The SR-71, unofficially known as the “Blackbird,” is a long-range, advanced, strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed from the Lockheed A-12 and YF-12A aircraft. The first flight of an SR-71 took place on Dec. 22, 1964, and the first SR-71 to enter service was delivered to the 4200th (later 9th) Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base, Calif., in January 1966.

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): “The Hills of the Dead” was first published in Weird Tales, August 1930. It was reprinted in Skull-Face and Others, Arkham House, 1946 and then reprinted in edited form in Red Shadows, Donald M. Grant, 1968.

Firearms (Spec-Op Magazine): The Zastava CZ 99 is a semi-automatic pistol manufactured by Zastava Arms. It is primarily available in 9mm, but there are also versions chambered in .40 s&W and .45 ACP. Developed in 1989 by Božidar Blagojević in the former Yugoslavia, the CZ 99 was intended to replace the older Zastava M57 pistol in use by the Yugoslav police and army.

Cinema (Grim Dark Magazine): Today, The Hollywood Reporter dropped the news that I, and millions of other Warhammer 40,000 fans, have been waiting for. A company with the cash and capability to do our most beloved sci-fantasy universe proud is on the verge of acquiring the rights to do so. The Rings of Power got the Amazon treatment first. And it looks like we’re next in line.

Cinema (Bounding Into Comics): Following his declarations that testosterone is “a toxin you have to slowly work out of your system” and that depictions of pregnant women voluntarily engaging in non-essential combat was the next step in “female empowerment“, James Cameron has gone for a neoliberalism hat trick by revealing that he cut roughly ten minutes of footage from Avatar: The Way of Water because he did not want to “fetishize the gun”.

Warhammer (Track of Words): Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m very happy to welcome back Steven B. Fischer to talk about his brilliant new Warhammer 40,000 novel Witchbringer. Steve and I chatted recently for an Author Spotlight interview and it was super interesting (you can check that out here), and the little glimpse we got into Witchbringer was more than enough for me to want to chat about the novel in more detail. With that in mind, in this interview Steve gives a great overview of what to expect from Witchbringer.

Anime (Kairos): You knew it was coming sooner or later. In another blow to the meme of Based Japan, I regret to inform you that anime did not escape the blast wave of Cultural Ground Zero. H/t to author JD Cowan, whose post last week inspired this one.

Writing (Rough Edges): There’s no point in denying that 2022 was a rotten year in many ways, but there’s also no point in dwelling on that. So let’s turn our attention to more pleasant endeavors, such as writing, reading, editing, and publishing.

Authors (DMR Books): Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I’m Harry; I grew up in North Yorkshire and now live in London. Although I’ve written in one form or another since I was a child, it’s only this year that I’ve started to consistently finish and publish short stories.

Forthcoming (Goodman Games): Cease your wailing, mortal dogs, for once more I have granted your fondest wishes and returned with fantastic tales of sword-and-sorcery! No more must you pace forlornly before your mailbox waiting for salvation only I can deliver, contenting yourself with the reading of street signs and the backs of cereal boxes! Now that you hold my peerless magazine in your hands once more, it is time to be transported to realms of wonder!

Tolkien (The One Ring): Good news for all the fans out there who are disappointed that we have yet to see tales from The Silmarillion performed on stage or screen: composer Paul Corfield Godfrey’s suitably epic opera of First Age stories is now available, in a recording made by singers from Welsh National Opera. We may not yet be seeing these tales; but at least you can listen to them!

Cinema (John C. Wright): I have been re-watching the classic Disney animated features in order, from SNOW WHITE onward. The well-deserved immortal fame of these films hardly requires any additional comment, but, as a professionally opinionated curmudgeon, at some point, I may write up reviews of each.For now, I wish only to pen a critique of SWORD IN THE STONE, which was bland and boilerplate, badly-drawn, badly-adapted, and badly-told.

Fantasy (DMR Books): Fantasy stories are typically set in either an imaginary world like Nehwon and Narnia or an imagined past like the Hyborian Age or Middle Earth. Then there is the Dying Earth genre which is set not only in the future, but at the end of Earth’s history. The earliest story in this genre might by The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (which I have not read). This essay will focus on three series set at this time: Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.

D&D (Monsters and Manuals): All this talk about Dungeon23 has put me in the mood to write some posts about megadungeon design, not as a tutorial exactly (I wouldn’t begin to call it anything as presumptuous as that) but more as a kind of worked example that others may find interesting.

The posts in the series will (as currently envisaged) be: 1. The concept (a somewhat unified thematic approach being crucial, I think, to giving a  dungeon coherence and verisimilitude)

Authors (Goodman Games): Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of the birth of Sterling E. Lanier. He wasn’t just a favorite author of E. Gary Gygax, nor was he merely a cited influence on both the Dungeons & Dragons and Gamma World role playing games. For those things alone he would still be notable and of interest to role playing gamers everywhere. Sterling E. Lanier was the quintessential polymath. His personal interests ranged from skin-diving and boating to bird watching and conservation causes. He was also a naval and military history buff.

Comic Books (Pulp Super-Fan): After the Tarzan comic license ended at Marvel, Malibu Comics (when they were an independent company) got the license in 1992 and produced three mini-series. First was a five-issue miniseries titled Tarzan the Warrior, written by Mark Wheatley and art by Neil Vokes. Next was a three-issue miniserues titled Tarzan: Love, Lies and the Lost City. Finally there was a seven-issue miniseries titled Tarzan: The Beckoning, with story and art by Thomas Yeates. It was reprinted in trade paperback by Dark Horse Comics in 2016.

Ghost Stories (Dark Worlds Quarterly): The Christmas Ghosts of  E. F. Benson are perhaps not as famous as M. R. James’. E. F. Benson was the middle child of the famous Benson Brothers (A. C. older and R. H. younger). If we judged on volume, Benson would have James beat easily. He produced 52 to James’ 25. But quality does play a factor. Benson is often anthologized like James, but certain stories tend to show up more often: “Caterpillars”, “Mrs. Amworth”, “The Bus-Conductor” and “The Room in the Tower” and “In the Tube”.

D&D (Grognardia): I now own a copy of the original printing of Deities & Demigods, which has probably seen more reading than my original one, largely because of the two chapters TSR removed. I suspect I’ve spent more time reading the Cthulhu Mythos chapter than the Melnibonean Mythos chapter and a big reason why is its downright funky art by Erol Otus.

Review (R’lyeh Reviews): Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England extends the reach of the Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraftian investigative horror into the late Georgian period, a period synonymous with the novels of Jane Austen such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Indeed, it is these novels which this supplement for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition.

Fiction (Fantasy Literature): A little while back, I was very pleased to read my first collection in the genre known as “weird-menace” fiction, which genre mainly dealt, back in the 1930s and early ‘40s, with lurid, violent, supernatural stories that usually turned out to have rather mundane – and often far-fetched – explanations. I happily picked another winner; namely, The Tongueless Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Wyatt Blassingame, Volume 1.

Fiction (Chimney Sweep Reader): The year 2022 marks the 75th anniversary of the original publication of the very first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane way back in 1947. While a dozen more would follow, all penned by Spillane himself, he also left behind numerous unfinished manuscripts, summaries, radio scripts, ideas, etc.

History (Frontier Partisans): In the years of America’s founding, Christmas wasn’t that big of a deal —certainly not the centerpiece holiday we celebrate today. In Puritan colonial New England, celebrating Christmas AT ALL was frowned upon. If the Pilgrims observed the day at all, it was a solemn moment of spiritual contemplation — certainly not any kind of celebration. Christmas actually represented everything the Puritans were trying to “purify” out of the English church. Stephen Nissenbaum, in The Battle for Christmas, wrote:

Cinema (Bookgasm): Aside from being a winking pun, The Joy of Sets hasn’t been named willy-nilly. Lee Goldberg’s collection of 11 preview articles, mostly for Starlog, indeed captures the feeling of reading about hotly anticipated movies in the blockbuster excess of the ’80s. One can sense the then-young film obsessive had to have felt with such access to the making of multimillion-dollar pictures. Some of his subjects exhibited joy, too.

Christmas (Men of the West): It’s that time of year again when good Christians honor Christ’s birth though all sorts of festivals and rituals with the big lead up to the 25th for many. It’s also that time when the neo-pagans crawl out of their parent’s basements, put on their plastic Thor cosplay costumes, and hurdur that Christmas is pagan. Here’s a couple of short videos that combats that myth from an Eastern Orthodox member: