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music

Picture of a musician: America
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Music
America

America is a British-American rock band formed in London in 1970 by Dewey Bunnell, Dan Peek, and Gerry Beckley, all Americans. The trio met as sons of US Air Force personnel stationed in London, where they began performing live. Achieving significant popularity in the 1970s, the trio was famous for its close vocal harmonies and light acoustic folk rock sound. The band released a string of hit albums and singles, many of which found airplay on pop/soft rock stations.

The band came together shortly after the members' graduation from high school in the late 1960s. In 1970, Peek joined the band, and they signed a record deal with Warner Bros. The following year, they released their self-titled debut album, which included the transatlantic hits "A Horse with No Name" and "I Need You". Their second album, Homecoming (1972), included the single "Ventura Highway". Over the next several years, the band continued to release hit songs, including "Muskrat Love" on Hat Trick (1973), "Tin Man" and "Lonely People" on Holiday (1974), and "Sister Golden Hair" and "Daisy Jane" on their 1975 record Hearts. It was also in 1975 when America released History: America's Greatest Hits, a compilation of hit singles, which was certified multi-platinum in the United States and Australia. Peek left the group in 1977 and their commercial fortunes declined, though they returned to the top 10 in 1982 with the single "You Can Do Magic". The band's final Top 40 hit was "The Border", which reached no. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983. The group continues to record material and tour regularly. Its 2007 album Here & Now was a collaboration with a new generation of musicians who have credited the band as an influence.

movies

movies

Picture of a movie: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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Movies
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
1964
Paranoid Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper of Burpelson Air Force Base, believing that fluoridation of the American water supply is a Soviet plot to poison the U.S. populace, is able to deploy through a back door mechanism a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without the knowledge of his superiors, including the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Buck Turgidson, and President Merkin Muffley. Only Ripper knows the code to recall the B-52 bombers and he has shut down communication in and out of Burpelson as a measure to protect this attack. Ripper's executive officer, RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (on exchange from Britain), who is being held at Burpelson by Ripper, believes he knows the recall codes if he can only get a message to the outside world. Meanwhile at the Pentagon War Room, key persons including Muffley, Turgidson and nuclear scientist and adviser, a former Nazi named Dr. Strangelove, are discussing measures to stop the attack or mitigate its blow-up into an all out nuclear war with the Soviets. Against Turgidson's wishes, Muffley brings Soviet Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky into the War Room, and get his boss, Soviet Premier Dimitri Kisov, on the hot line to inform him of what's going on. The Americans in the War Room are dismayed to learn that the Soviets have an as yet unannounced Doomsday Device to detonate if any of their key targets are hit. As Ripper, Mandrake and those in the War Room try and work the situation to their end goal, Major T.J. "King" Kong, one of the B-52 bomber pilots, is working on his own agenda of deploying his bomb where ever he can on enemy soil if he can't make it to his intended target.
Picture of a movie: The Silence of the Lambs
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Movies
The Silence of the Lambs
1991
F.B.I. trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) works hard to advance her career, while trying to hide or put behind her West Virginia roots, of which if some knew, would automatically classify her as being backward or white trash. After graduation, she aspires to work in the agency's Behavioral Science Unit under the leadership of Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn). While she is still a trainee, Crawford asks her to question Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Sir Anthony Hopkins), a psychiatrist imprisoned, thus far, for eight years in maximum security isolation for being a serial killer who cannibalized his victims. Clarice is able to figure out the assignment is to pick Lecter's brains to help them solve another serial murder case, that of someone coined by the media as "Buffalo Bill" (Ted Levine), who has so far killed five victims, all located in the eastern U.S., all young women, who are slightly overweight (especially around the hips), all who were drowned in natural bodies of water, and all who were stripped of large swaths of skin. She also figures that Crawford chose her, as a woman, to be able to trigger some emotional response from Lecter. After speaking to Lecter for the first time, she realizes that everything with him will be a psychological game, with her often having to read between the very cryptic lines he provides. She has to decide how much she will play along, as his request in return for talking to him is to expose herself emotionally to him. The case takes a more dire turn when a sixth victim is discovered, this one from who they are able to retrieve a key piece of evidence, if Lecter is being forthright as to its meaning. A potential seventh victim is high profile Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), the daughter of Senator Ruth Martin (Diane Baker), which places greater scrutiny on the case as they search for a hopefully still alive Catherine. Who may factor into what happens is Dr. Frederick Chilton (Anthony Heald), the warden at the prison, an opportunist who sees the higher profile with Catherine, meaning a higher profile for himself if he can insert himself successfully into the proceedings.
Picture of a movie: WALL·E
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Movies
WALL·E
2008
In a distant, but not so unrealistic, future where mankind has abandoned earth because it has become covered with trash from products sold by the powerful multi-national Buy N Large corporation, WALL-E, a garbage collecting robot has been left to clean up the mess. Mesmerized with trinkets of Earth's history and show tunes, WALL-E is alone on Earth except for a sprightly pet cockroach. One day, EVE, a sleek (and dangerous) reconnaissance robot, is sent to Earth to find proof that life is once again sustainable. WALL-E falls in love with EVE. WALL-E rescues EVE from a dust storm and shows her a living plant he found amongst the rubble. Consistent with her "directive", EVE takes the plant and automatically enters a deactivated state except for a blinking green beacon. WALL-E, doesn't understand what has happened to his new friend, but, true to his love, he protects her from wind, rain, and lightning, even as she is unresponsive. One day a massive ship comes to reclaim EVE, but WALL-E, out of love or loneliness, hitches a ride on the outside of the ship to rescue EVE. The ship arrives back at a large space cruise ship, which is carrying all of the humans who evacuated Earth 700 years earlier. The people of Earth ride around this space resort on hovering chairs which give them a constant feed of TV and video chatting. They drink all of their meals through a straw out of laziness and/or bone loss, and are all so fat that they can barely move. When the auto-pilot computer, acting on hastily-given instructions sent many centuries before, tries to prevent the people of Earth from returning by stealing the plant, WALL-E, EVE, the portly captain, and a band of broken robots stage a mutiny.
shows

shows

Picture of a TV show: Bewitched
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TV shows
Bewitched
1964
Darrin (Dick York/Dick Sargent) and Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery) are a young, bi-species married couple: he's a mortal human being, she's a witch, something which she does not divulge to him until after their wedding. Darrin just wants them to live a simple, mortal life, to which Samantha agrees, meaning no witchcraft and no telling any of their mortal friends and relatives of her being a witch. However, that no witchcraft vow is difficult to maintain if only because of Samantha wanting or needing to use it to get out of one scrape or another, and her relatives, especially her mother Endora (Agnes Moorehead), the most constant thorn in Darrin's side, against the marriage and the idea of denying Samantha's heritage as a witch. Mortals in their lives also add to their complicated lives: Darrin's friend and spendthrift boss, Larry Tate (David White) of McMann and Tate Advertising, who always wants Darrin to do all the work while the company gets all the glory and money; their nosy neighbors, the Kravitzes, Gladys Kravitz (Sandra Gould/Alice Pearce), who always arrives at the most inopportune time to show her exasperated husband Abner Kravitz (George Tobias) that something funny is going on in the Stephens house; and Darrin's parents, his mother, Phyllis Stephens (Mabel Albertson), who is prone to splitting headaches which become more prevalent as she thinks she sees things in Samantha that just couldn't be in her mortal view. That complicated life gets even more complicated when they start a family, the children who could be mortal or who could be witches and warlocks.
Picture of a TV show: Gargoyles
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TV shows
Gargoyles
1994
In the Dark Ages, there was a race of heroic warrior monsters known as Gargoyles. These creatures existed as stone during the day, but become flesh and blood at night. One Scottish clan made an alliance with humans to help protect a castle by night if the humans would protect their stone forms by day. The uneasy alliance was shattered when human prejudice provoked a betrayal that allowed the castle to be sacked and most of the resident clan destroyed, leaving only six adult survivors and a rookery of unhatched eggs. A further misunderstanding during the clan's retaliation on the invaders and rescue of their hostages left the clan frozen in stone by a magic spell that would only be broken when the "castle rises above the clouds." For a thousand years, the castle laid abandoned and the clan condemned by this curse. In 1994, a wealthy multibillionare named David Xanatos (Jonathan Frakes) bought the castle and transported the whole structure to Manhattan, where he placed it on top of the Eyrie building which he owned. It is high enough to be above the clouds, thus the conditions of the spell were met and the Gargoyles were revived. Now, this clan must adjust to this new age and gain friends, like Detective Elisa Maza (Salli Richardson-Whitfield), who reveals that Xanatos revived them to exploit them for his unscrupulous ends. This is coupled by the fact that another Gargoyle comrade, Demona (Marina Sirtis), is alive from their age, and is now an insane renegade bent on the extermination of humanity. Rebelling against them, the clan abandon the castle and pledge to protect New York City like they protected the castle in the past.
Picture of a TV show: Lexx
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TV shows
Lexx
1997
The tyrants who rule the Light Universe pass their essence onto their successor upon their demise, while their still-conscious brains are kept in a vault; their chief resource is The Lexx (Tom Gallant), the most-powerful mobile weapon in the universe, which can only be commanded by the keeper of the hand-key. The previous incumbent wiped out the Brunen-G race, except for Kai (Michael McManus), who he kept in a state of amnesiac suspended animation, to be revived by proto-blood for short periods, and used as an assassin. Into this background comes anti-hero Stanley H. Tweedle (Brian Downey), an ignored non-entity clerk, who misses an appointment and is branded a criminal. In the dungeons, overweight Zev (Eva Habermann) has been convicted of not fulfilling wifely duties, and is being transformed into a gorgeous, svelt love-slave. Meanwhile, captured terrorist Thodin (Barry Bostwick), due for public execution, escapes with his gang's help, and causes chaos, setting into motion Tweedle's accidental theft of Lexx and new ownership of the hand-key, Zev's escape with her new body and the characteristics of a giant reptilian attack worm, but before mind-wipe (which goes instead to a robot head), and Kai's release to combat the terrorists before his memory returns. Tweedle, Zev, the lovesick robot head, Kai, and the stolen tyrants' brains head off in Lexx to vaporize tyrant planets and find a place for themselves in the Dark Universe, while searching for a supply of proto-blood before Kai expires.
books

books

Picture of a book: hellboy
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Books
hellboy

Hellboyis a fictional superhero created by writer-artist Mike Mignola. The character first appeared inSan Diego Comic-Con Comics#2 (August 1993), and has since appeared in various eponymous miniseries, one-shots and intercompany crossovers. The character has been adapted into three live-action feature films. Two starring Ron Perlman in 2004 and 2008 in the title role, and one in 2019 which starred David Harbour, as well as two straight-to-DVD animated films, and three video games –Asylum Seeker,The Science of Evil, and as a playable character inInjustice 2.

A well-meaning half-Demon (or Cambion) whose true name isAnung Un Rama("and upon his brow is set a crown of flame"), Hellboy was summoned from Hell to Earth as a baby by Nazi occultists (spawning his hatred for the Third Reich). He was discovered on a fictional Outer Hebrides Island by the Allied Forces; amongst them, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, who formed the United States Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.). In time, Hellboy grew to be a large, red-skinned adult with a tail, horns (which he files off, leaving behind circular stumps on his forehead), cloven hooves for feet, and an oversized right hand made of stone (the "Right Hand of Doom"). He has been described as smelling of dry-roasted peanuts. Although a bit gruff, he shows none of the malevolence thought to be intrinsic to classical demons and has an ironic sense of humor. This is said to be because of his upbringing under Professor Bruttenholm, who raised him as a normal boy.

Picture of a book: Cell
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Books
Cell
Stephen King
Literary critics can moan all they want about Stephen King's "penny dreadful" oeuvre, but his mastery at the craft of storytelling is indisputable. King writes his novels like a seduction, the story unfolding delicately and deliberately. As any Stephen King fan knows, his coy expository chapters often take up the first hundred pages or more. In Cell, however, the reader is brutally dragged into the main action--unspeakable, senseless violence--within the first seven pages. Cell is by far King's most brutal, transgressive work to date.Many have compared Cell to his earlier epic, The Stand. On the surface, the novels are quite similar: an apocolyptic event threatens the very existence of the human race as a band of survivors struggle to come to terms with the carnage and avert further catastrophe. Cell, however, is the far more mature novel of the pair. The Stand was, in many ways, a novel by an idealistic youth, whereas Cell is filled with the trenchant and world-weary observations of an adult. The subtext is laden with so much chillingly apt futurist rhetoric that it is as though the author had Marshall McLuhan whispering plot devices and metaphors into his ear as he labored over his typewriter. King manages to explore several of the major sociocultural conflicts of our time, most persuasively the end of the era of individualism and the rise of collectivism, here symptomatic of heavy reliance on technology. Whereas many dystopian novels are almost comically blunt when expounding upon the dangers of collectivism, King's horrific plot and action give his metaphors a sort of subtlety that renders his subtext much more graceful and easier to stomach than the work of Ayn Rand.As the epigraphs indicate, it is also a meditation on the intrinsic violence of the human race. King clearly feels as though the world is out of control and wants to find out why. His preferred genre, horror, is an excellent one with which to consider the depravaties of modern life. The Stand was a novel that, if not upbeat, was at least optimistic--a reflection of the times in which it was written. There was also violence, but it had its own biblical logic, if violence can ever be called logical. In Cell, the violence is senseless, oppressive, and omnipresent. There seems to be little promise for a better world... at least not one inhabited by human beings.Many reviewers took issue with the unresolved ending. Considering the subtext of the novel, however, the reader will find that the ending's abruptness actually informs the sense that Cell, besides being an excellent horror yarn, is a meticulously painted portrait of the horrors of global culture. The many crises of our time are still developing and mutating. The end is not yet, it seems, in sight.
Picture of a book: The Lottery
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Books
The Lottery
Shirley Jackson
Science Imitating ArtJackson’s story was published in 1948. At the time, and since, it has been praised as insightful and criticised as obscure. But almost 20 years later, the French philosopher, Rene Girard, produced a theory which has a remarkable congruence with its theme and, I think, provides the best explanation of what Jackson was getting at in The Lottery.Girard argued that our individual desires are never the product of some inner longing but always rather of the imitation of others. We want what other people want. This he called ‘mimetic desire’ and Girard went on to explore the implications of this insight for the next half century.Mimetic desire, according to Girard, has a predictable trajectory that is familiar to advertising executives around the world. One person wants what another has, just because the other has it. This attracts the desire of others in a sort of exponential wave of wanting. But widespread wanting of anything means, first, a shortage of that commodity, and consequently the mutual antagonism of all those who share the same desire. Girard’s contention is that this incipient hostility threatens to create a sort of Hobbesian world, a non-society, in which no cooperative or coordinated action, including effective government, can be established.Human beings, Girard believed, deal with this situation unconsciously and instinctively by the mechanism of ‘scape-goating’, through which a group identifies one of its own members as the cause of its mimetic tension. This individual is both sacred and an object of communal hatred. The elimination of this individual is therefore not just necessary for the welfare of the community, but also forms the basis of religious practice in which the role of the scape-goat is transformed into a noble duty.Girard goes even further in his later work to claim that the ritual establishment of the scape-goat is the most primitive form of representation, and consequently of language, that human beings have demonstrated. In a sense the essential foundation for human power in the world is religious violence which victimizes random members or groups in modern society.Whether or not one agrees with Girard’s anthropology, and there is a substantial body of evidence to recommend it, his literary usefulness is demonstrated by the application of his theory to The Lottery. The theory explains, among other things the liturgical character of the story; its origins in a distant past; its particular relevance to a relatively isolated agricultural community; and its connection to a paternalistic hierarchy whose continued existence depends on the ritual. As far as I am aware, Girard did not read The Lottery; but since he was in America at the time he might have done. In any case, it is certainly remarkable that an author of fiction like Jackson could have written such a tight short story which captures so much of subsequent academic work. Thus demonstrating, if demonstration were needed, the tremendous importance of fiction to cultural life.For an introduction to Girard’s work see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
games

games