When the hell did democratic socialism become the devil in America?

It’s insane when you step back and look at it: the very policies that dragged us out of the Great Depression, built the biggest middle class, and literally saved capitalism from itself were unapologetically democratic socialist. Social Security. Medicare. Public schools. The interstate highways. The GI Bill. Rural electrification. The 40-hour workweek. All FDR’s New Deal — all wildly popular then and now.

Yet somewhere along the line, the word “socialism” became a four-letter word you couldn’t say in polite company without someone clutching their pearls and yelling about Stalin.

How did that happen?

How did we keep every single one of those programs — and add dozens more — while convincing ourselves we hate the very idea behind them?

Short answer: decades of deliberate propaganda and a whole lot of civic ignorance. Truly, the only reason any of the fear-mongering worked is because most Americans are uneducated as hell about what socialism or democratic socialism actually is.

Here’s exactly how it went down…

The big flip happened in three overlapping waves — all after FDR was safely in the grave and couldn’t defend his own legacy.

1. 1947–1955: The Red-Scare Rebranding Right after World War II, the Cold War kicked into high gear. Truman started the “loyalty oaths,” HUAC hunted “Reds” in Hollywood, and the word “socialism” got deliberately welded to “Stalin, gulags, and godless communism.” Anything that smelled even faintly New Deal-ish was suddenly “creeping socialism.” Republicans and Southern Democrats led the charge. By 1954, even Eisenhower—who liked most of the New Deal—had to keep saying “I’m not a socialist.”
   
   
2. 1960s–1970s: The Southern Strategy & the Culture War Pivot When LBJ passed Medicare, Medicaid, and the Great Society, conservatives needed a new attack line that didn’t sound racist (because a lot of the backlash was about Black and brown people getting benefits). So they turned “socialized medicine” and “welfare queens” into dog-whistles. Nixon, Reagan, and the Sun Belt GOP blurred the line between democratic socialism and Soviet communism until most people couldn’t tell the difference.
   
   
3. 1980–2000: The Triumph of the Word, Not the Policy Reagan and the conservative movement won the branding war. They never got rid of the actual programs (Social Security is still the third rail), but they made the label “socialism” so toxic that even liberals ran from it. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over.” Democrats started calling themselves “progressives” or just avoided the S-word. By the 2000s, saying “I like single-payer” got you labeled a communist—even though Medicare (single-payer for seniors) polls at 70–80 % approval.
   
   

Bottom line: the United States never rejected democratic socialism as policy — we kept and expanded the programs. We just let a decades-long propaganda campaign convince a huge chunk of the country that the word itself is evil, because too many of us never learned the difference. That’s why, when Bernie started using the term again in 2016, half the country lost their minds… and the other half went, “Wait, that’s what we’ve had all along?”

All the things you probably didn't realize were democratic socialism:

The Internet (original backbone funded by DARPA / public research)

GPS (built and run by the U.S. Air Force)

Public Airports (most major ones built with federal grants)

The Moon Landing (NASA = pure public funding)

Public Defender System

The 911 Emergency System

Amber Alerts

The Weather Channel (built on National Weather Service data)

Public Golf Courses

Public Swimming Pools

The Smithsonian Museums (free entry)

Public TV & Radio Towers

The Hoover Dam

The St. Lawrence Seaway

The U.S. Coast Guard

The Army Corps of Engineers

Public K-12 Textbooks (in most states)

Free Public Wi-Fi in many cities

The entire U.S. electrical grid in many rural areas (still co-ops from the REA)

Social Security

Medicare

Medicaid

Public Schools

State Universities

Community Colleges

Pell Grants

Student Loans

Roads

Interstate Highway System

Public Libraries

Fire Departments

Police Departments

VA Hospitals

GI Bill

FEMA

FDA

CDC

NIH

National Parks

State Parks

Public Beaches

Public Housing

Section 8

SNAP

WIC

School Lunches

Unemployment Insurance

Workers Compensation

40-Hour Workweek

Minimum Wage

Child Labor Laws

OSHA

FDIC

Public Defenders

Rural Electrification

Flood-Control Dams

TVA

Public Water

Public Sewer

Public Transit

School Buses

Amtrak

Air Traffic Control

US Postal Service

Snow Plows

Mosquito Spraying

Public Health Clinics

SSI

Head Start

Public Campgrounds

PBS

NPR

National Weather Service

EPA Clean Air & Water

U.S. Military

On Plot Twists and Corrupted Files

The Bowie baby doesn't allow sad. 

The first rule of a good story is that the thing you think is the monster is never the real monster. 2025, apparently, took a masterclass in narrative structure.

The year kicked off with a simple, almost cliché, villain: cancer. Uterine. The kind of thing that has a clear story arc. Diagnosis. Panic. Surgery. The Big Fight. I went in, they brought out the robots and the lasers, and they cut the poison out of me. Full hysterectomy. Scars and Steri-Strips and a pathology report that screamed, "You're clean! We got it all! You win!"

And for about three weeks, I was a god.

For the first time in my adult life, the engine wasn't rattling. The background noise of imminent-fucking-death that has been the soundtrack to my life since I was a teenager finally went silent. I felt immortal. I thought, "This is it. I'm finally healthy." I actually believed the story was over.

Spoiler alert: that was just the inciting incident.

The real story started when the neurologist got a look at the pre-op brain scans my cancer doc had ordered. Just a safety check, you know. Make sure the overhead wiring is screwed in tight before you start renovating the basement.

Turns out the whole goddamn building is condemned.

Here's the thing about your brain. It's just meat. Wetware. And my wetware, my OS, is shot to shit. The neurologist put the pictures on the screen, and it was a goddamn Jackson Pollock of things that have already died. Little white stingrays of nothingness. Warped diamonds of dead zones. What the reports call "severe for age small vessel disease," "old lacunar infarcts," and "intracranial atherosclerotic disease."

Translation: The plumbing in my head is rusted shut, and it's been causing a series of strokes for years. But the damage is so weird, so "extreme for my age," that she's pretty sure there's a second gunman on the grassy knoll. Her primary suspect is Multiple Sclerosis.

So now we're in the second act. The part of the story where the hero realizes the monster was just a distraction, and the real horror is that the very ground she's standing on is toxic. The cancer didn't matter. It was a fake-out. A cheap jump scare before the real villain showed up. And the real villain is my own brain, which is actively, methodically, bricking itself.

The euphoria of being "cured" is gone. It's been replaced by a quiet, clinical acceptance that I'm on a clock. And it's ticking fast. Making it to 50 feels like a stretch goal now. The language buffer in my brain is already glitching—the aphasia, the memory holes, the inability to focus. Sooner or later, the file is going to corrupt for good.

This is the new map. This is how it is.

So here's the plan. The Final Act. I intend to keep teaching my writing courses for as long as I can. Guiding other writers through the architecture of their own stories is something that still sparks a light in the middle of all this. But that light is dimming. After I get these next few terms wrapped up, I'm done.

I'm cashing in my chips, going on disability, and I am going to write...while I can. I am going to bleed on the page until my cognitive function is a dial tone. I am going to finish as many of my own broken, beautiful things as I can while I still know what words are for.

What this means for those reading this, my friends, my colleagues, my people: you're going to see the glitches.

I will repeat myself. I will post the same meme three times in a day or five times in the same week because my memory is a sieve. I might write a comment or a message with a word that makes no sense. My brain is going to lag. I am asking you, just once, for this: if you see it happen, just know that it's a symptom of the wiring shorting out. A little grace goes a long way.

This isn't an apology. It's the user manual for my new, faulty operating system. I am not asking for pity. I'm just letting you know what to expect as I try to land this plane with one engine on fire.

The clock is ticking. Time to get to work.

My new terrible haircut! 

The Last of Us 2 -- My Final Thoughts *SPOILERS*

Okay! So, I have thought a lot about it (obsessed), and I think I get what The Last of Us 2 was going for. I am still going to maintain that it’s not the game we wanted. HOWEVER, it was kinda brilliant and I deeply respect what they have created here.

AMBIGUOUS SPOILERS AHEAD

We spend the entire first game killing people like they are…well…video game characters. We never once pause to think about the nameless NPCs we’re mowing down to get to the climax, because we’re the protagonist, we’re the good guys. Since hopping on poor defenseless Koopas in Super Mario, we have been conditioned by games to just chew through the "bad guys" and not worry about the body count. Sometimes, if there is an achievement in a game to not kill anyone, or take a pure stealth route, we'll actually care, but that is about us, not about those nameless NPCs (non-player characters). 

In the beginning of TLoU2, we’re shown what it feels like to NOT be the protagonist, the hero of the story, but rather, just one of those pixel-people in the way of someone else’s climax. And we hates it!

We hate it so much we don’t even acknowledge it; it doesn't register that maybe this isn't our story as we head off on our quest for revenge, killing even more pixel-people without a care for who they are or what their story is. 

But this time they aren't nameless.

If you stand around in stealth long enough, you can hear the NPCs talking with each other about their own stories and lives. They got things going on! A lot of them just seem anxious to get home for dinner before the maniac slowly picking them all off (YOU) gets them. You kill a character in TLoU2, and some friend of theirs will happen across their body and mourn them, assuming you give the friend time before you kill them as well. You hear random names called out all through the game as you take characters out, including the DOGS.

Like Bear. I killed BEAR! OMG he looked like an overgrown corgi, and I demolished him with a hammer!

(RIP Bear. All he wanted was to play a little fetch with my liver...😔)

So we go all the way through this game, actively making the very point for Naughty Dog, and so many of us are so freakin’ self absorbed that even once it gets spelled at the end, we’re still pissed because…we’re the hero, dang it!

But, we’re not.

There are no heroes here, as in real life, just different points of view.

The world (especially in TLoU2) does not revolve around us. We could be, and likely are, all the villain in someone else’s story.

Honestly, it’s like a brutal lesson in empathy, which…given how crap the world is right now, is probably needed, and yet, for those of us who just wanted to take a break from all the bad and play a game with characters we loved, totally unwanted. I know I was personally looking for a little relief, and given I don't get to spend much money or time on entertainment, I was initially very disappointed.

Even now that I understand what they were doing the whole time, and why they made the choices they did, I am still a little let down. All this moral baggage put on the player is rough, especially given that the player gets no real chance to sway any of those decisions, to make the wrong choices for themselves—there is no real choice throughout the game. That makes it feel like we’re being punished for decisions we have no control over, sort of that Naughty Dog assumes we’re all bad guys and so we all need the same lesson—

Wait a minute! Did we just get made into NPCs? LOL Guess we should just be glad Devs didn’t ring our doorbell and throw a brick or soda bottle in our face, huh?

So, final thoughts...

In terms of entertainment, the story still gets lower marks from me (4/10), just in that it seemed the story wasn’t even intended to entertain (that’s what the gameplay is for—to distract you from the Jedi mind trick). If they cared about storycraft over the gimmick of  their Shyamalan POV twist, the story would have been organized differently, with less need for hackneyed flashbacks within flashbacks, and we would have legit started the game in the correct POV character.

The game play itself was beyond a 10/10. It was a beautiful game with amazing play and some of the best accessibility features I have ever seen (just in general a very inclusive experience).

 In terms of weaving something that really hits hard and makes you think…10/10. I have done little but obsess about it since the credits rolled. I would not be surprised or disappointed if it ends up game of the year.

Can’t wait to see how they mess with my head in TLoU3!

Hybrid Publishing?

A situation came up when dealing with a student recently, where I realized that not everyone looking to self-publish was around for the early wave of vanity publishers preying on inexperienced authors. The scam of promising an author a traditional publishing experience for a fee was one even my own mother fell for, so you would think it would always be at the forefront of my mind. Nope, there is nothing but vast echo of “meow meow meow meow” going on in there about 80% of the time. The other 20% is filled with exploring the futility of existence and the inevitable heat death of the universe.

  

The term “Hybrid Author” no longer just means an author who traditionally publishes as well as self publishes. The term has been taken over by the latest iteration of vanity presses, preying upon novice authors. What’s worse, many major, legitimate publishing houses now use these vanity presses as the “self-publishing arm” of their company, lending credibility to the predatory practice in exchange for a percentage of the profits—even though we trade in art, it must never be forgotten for a moment that a publisher’s main concern is running a business and making profit, not filling the world with great literature. They are not benevolent caretakers of our work and should not be trusted blindly—this is why we read contracts and give our agents a percentage of what we make to ensure we’re not being taken advantage of. Please be aware of what vanity presses look like in today’s publishing landscape and don’t be fooled.

Addition reading:

Author Solutions – Writers Beware! by David Henderson

The Case Against Author Solutions, Part 1: The Numbers

Author Solutions AKA AuthorHouse Gets the Chop

Army of Clones: Author Solutions Spawns A Legion of Copycats

Damien Graves -- Guest Post -- Hineni

 Damien Graves here!
 

I haven’t yet set up a blog of my own, but as this is “Disturbed Graves” I figure I fit here as well as anywhere. While this is my mother’s blog, I will be doing the occasional guest blog, sharing writing exercises I have completed and every now and again a short story.

Below is a writing exercise I did in my Holocaust course, where we were meant to become a person being sent on their way to the death camps of Auschwitz. My professor was very pleased with the result of my exercise, so I wanted to share it. Now, while I am studying the Holocaust and WWII, I am by no means claiming to be anywhere near an expert, so if I got details wrong, I apologize.

For your consideration,

D.A.Graves

 

Hineni

The smell that hit us when they opened the doors of the cattle train was a physical presence—the tang of soured bleach, old death, and defecation. Like a maw of some great beast gaping in the darkness, its perfumed promise of sorrow swallowed us up as we were herded as livestock into its unkind gloom.

I settled myself as well as I could in the corner of the car, propped against a water bucket. The available space was eaten up quickly by body after body forced into the car, packed like maggots in a wound, with scarcely a breath of distance between us. Men with overgrown and unkempt beards, women with tangled hair and fussy children, all scattered the interior of the train car now. They are people. I am people. Yet here we are, huddled for warmth in a box made for animals to the slaughter. I prayed the train would stop, the doors would open up, and we’d be released somewhere warm and dry, somewhere we could begin anew. Somewhere that hope still lived. Somewhere the children these women held might have a chance to smile again.

But I knew of the rumors. I knew where we were going. I knew where we were going and what was to come, and still I prayed. I prayed to God, as I always had done, to protect us, to help me see it through. I prayed to God even though it seemed so long since God had listened to any of us. God wasn’t in this place anymore. He seemed to have turned his back, shut his eyes, or perhaps just grown so weary of the human capacity for greed and cruelty that instead of sending flood or fire he’d decided to let us be the device of our own destruction. Would the war leave any who knew his name, to praise it, to raise it up with a hallelujah, or to curse it for his apparent cold indifference?

Would any of us on this train even make it to our stop? Its wheels rolled on and on for an eternity, and even in the ceaseless night within our car I could see most of us were but fading ghosts of ourselves. Fathers’ brows furrowed with worry for their children, daughters whimpered about the cold, mothers struggled to keep everyone together and put on the bravest faces of all of us to calm the little ones. Would I die when those wheels came to a halt? Or was I going to be put back to work, like in the ghettos? Was it selfish to think of what was to come for me when so many hollowed out and terrified faces surrounded me? Was it wrong to think of my own fate when looking into the eyes of a cold and hungry child who had not yet begun to live? Probably, but my fear was beyond my control now.

The train’s wheels slowed, screeched against the rails, and eventually those doors opened once more. The SS greeted us, harbingers of doom in snappy black uniforms. A larger officer stepped in front of me, his boots shining. He grabbed my shoulder and shook me hard before pushing me toward the exit. I landed awkwardly on my feet and shuffled aimlessly for a moment, and then the officers began barking orders. They divided us up, left and right, pushing people into different lines. I was urged to the right; I wasn't sure why they divided us up this way, many women and young children found themselves going left, older men, graying in hair were also sent to the left. We were ushered toward a gate with a sign that declared “Work Sets You Free.” We marched our way over to a building reminiscent of a barracks, long and made of brick, gray in every sense of the word. I was forced to undress, as we all were. I removed my scarf and coat, and more slowly my under things; the closer I came to being completely undressed, entirely on display, the more shame I felt. I was reluctant to part with my fragile armor, and clutched my shirt to my chest, imagining that maybe this one strip of cloth could spare me some dignity. It was ripped from my hands, and I was shoved, herded along with the others to be shaved.

I shambled along my course like a creature with no mind, deaf and blind and numb to the cries around me, to the slaughter I felt sure was to come. When I sat to be shaved, my mind was somewhere else, somewhere green, but the putrid stench of unwashed bodies and human waste wouldn’t let the fresh meadow in my mind persist. My hair was taken without ceremony, damn near half my scalp going with it, making me truly as naked as the day I was born, hairless and exposed. We were then given garments, prison uniforms, because that was what we were now. Prisoners. Criminals.

And now I have to ask myself, who am I? I’d been reduced to a man in stripes with a star pinned to his chest, my identity corrupted into something horrible, into something to be ashamed of. At least I was not alone. None of the men here looked as they had when we arrived, but rather the army of once unkempt men now resembled shaven rats. My father crosses my mind then; he’d always had long hair and a beard. Would I even recognize him if he were in the room with me now? Would he recognize me? I hope that he is not here, that he is never here, or any place such as this. I wouldn't want him to see me this way, and as much as I wanted to see him and Mom again, never, ever, here. What was is now gone, and I could not look to the past for comfort. All that was left was God’s will, and an uncertain future, however long it might last. I would face it as bravely as a man with no other option could be expected to. “Hineni…” I whisper. Hineni.

Boring Dialogue and How to Fix It

As an editor, I run across boring dialogue all the time. I consistently advise my authors to study "micro tension" and often to look into some of Donald Maass's books where he discusses it.

Good dialogue has good tension. Sometimes all that is needed to build tension is to give your audience an expectation of a negative outcome (they know something the characters don't or are pretending they don't), and then delaying that outcome while often teasing its arrival. Watch a few Tarantino films--the man knows his dialogue. Check out this scene for instance.

Warning: This scene is a bit graphic and the language gets offensive, NSFW. It's a Tarantino film, and that's just how he rolls.

Everyone knows that Candy knows Dr. King Schultz is playing him. When Candy returns to the room, the audience expects Schultz to be confronted. That doesn't happen, not immediately. Instead Candy engages the men he knows are trying to cheat him, appearing affable, all while telling a story that grows increasingly more threatening. The audience very quickly realizes that Schultz knows that Candy knows, and so throughout the entire nine minute scene we're expecting violence and a full confrontation. At multiple points it looks like the situation is going to explode into real violence, but it's not until about eight and a half minutes in when we're made to, for just a moment, think Django's wife is certainly going to be killed, and yet even in this expectation we're denied. The dialogue and interactions set up expectation, deny it, set it up, deny it again--this is tension.

An alternative scene that does nearly the same thing, but isn't quite so NSFW: 

Chapter 1 Inglorious Basterds from Escinee on Vimeo.

________________________

Inglourious Basterds Analysis — The Elements of Suspense

But you don't always have a gun pointed at a character's back, and you don't always have imminent doom you can use for a scene you are writing. When that happens, micro tension is king, but even then it works on the same general principle of setting up expectations and then delaying them. Every scene should have a purpose, and every character in a scene should have a goal--what the character wants in the long run, and what the character wants RIGHT NOW. Tension in dialogue is created when the wants/needs of one character are at odds with the wants and needs of the other character. It can be as minor as a man really needing his morning cup of coffee, and a barista who really just wants the morning rush to clear out, so she can check Facebook on her iPhone. As both of these characters stand in the way of the other's needs, and the author delays fulfilling those needs, you create tension.

Micro tension at its finest! 

Check out these links for more information on micro tension:

http://www.novelrocket.com/2012/12/donald-maass-on-micro-tension-and.html

Pick a passage of dialogue. Strip it down. Increase hostility between the speakers. It can be friendly ribbing, worried questioning, polite disagreement, snide derision, veiled threats, open hostility, or any other degree of friction.

http://jrvogt.com/ppwc-donald-maass-on-micro-tension/

You can add micro-tension in dialogue in two ways.

1. Escalate the language. This doesn't mean tossing in a bunch of F-bombs or otherwise. That's just trying to be edgy and failing. But don't let characters use wussy words or vague phrasing. Make their statements direct and strong. Use harsher, more meaningful words.

2. Have the dialogue create friction. Besides the composure of the dialogue, consider the content as well. Are people kitten footing around the issue when they talk to each other? Get them to call each other out. Perhaps one character uses a word the other might consider blasphemous or insulting. Don't let them become so diplomatic (unless it's that vitriolic diplomacy where tension is simmering below every nicety).

http://suspensenovelist.blogspot.com/2009/09/writing-concept-micro-tension-in.html

Maass says earlier in the chapter: Micro-tension is easily understood but hard to do. I know this because when teaching it in workshops I watch participants nod in understanding when I explain it, but see them stare helplessly at their pages when they try to do it themselves.

http://justinemusk.com/2010/03/07/the-art-of-microtension-and-mystique/

Dialogue becomes compelling when the two speakers are emotionally at odds with each other: perhaps one is dubious of the other's argument. The reader reads on, wanting to know -- needing to know -- if, at the end of the conversation, the speakers will be reconciled.

Don’t blink! Authors Don’t Look Away. (Part One of My Unsolicited Advice Series)

Well, some do, and when an author blinks an angel eats their soul with spidery mandibles and coughs up a hairball of mediocre prose that gives us all a bad name. Okay, so maybe it’s not that bad, but it can take a potentially amazing work and make it blah.

As a professional editor, I've found the advice I end up giving to my authors more often than not is to get deeper into their character’s POV, and to not be afraid to type the words that make them cringe. Good writing comes from the heart. Awe inspiring comes from the gut, particularly if you’ve torn it out and drizzled it all over the paper—go there, say it, write it. The more difficult a scene feels to approach, the more important it is that you free yourself to write it.

Let the bad guys be BAD.

One of the worst lit crimes I see, and I see it often, is when authors write jerks. Jerks, asses, and douche-bags get no love in most books. They may get a lot of screen time (probably not) but they don’t get the TLC of a protagonist. This is a problem, because you could have a book with really well developed protagonists,but when you pit them against their jerky rival, the scene loses balance and authenticity—it’s hard to take a hero seriously when he’s fighting a cardboard cut out of a cartoon bad guy. If you really want to make that “bad guy” believable, and the threat to the protagonist genuine, you need to employ the same sort of deep POV and characterization you use with your protagonists.

I know it feels icky and you want to distance yourself from feeling like an ass as much as possible—nobody wants to get under the skin of a character no one is supposed to like—but you will thank me for it later if you really give yourself over to it…and so will your readers. What’s the worst that could happen? A reader picks up your book and makes the mistake of thinking some part of you is just like the jerk in your story? Well, yeah, that may happen, but it’s better than the reader thinking some part of you is a cliché, mustache twirling, drama hound, right? Give yourself permission to say all the vile, awful things that little dark part of your heart has always wanted to say. Give yourself permission to slip into the shoes of your berating father, your overbearing mother, that jackass at work who doesn’t know his sexist jokes aren’t funny and spits a little when he talks. These wonderful models of terrible people in your life are not contagious—you can wear their skin for a scene and go right back to being your usual pleasant self…after you show your ass in the scene and make your protagonist really uncomfortable. Don’t hold back. Don’t parrot the words of bad guys from TV—it comes off sounding like a bad high school play—get real, get ugly, and go there.


Don’t tone it down.
Don’t just give your readers what you think they can handle in terms of asshole people.
Don't do that! Don't write a jerk, BE a jerk.
Don't tell yourself "I can't have them say this because...it doesn't sound like writing" or pull back because some part of you is just afraid to relive those words people have said to YOU again.
Just spill it. Let your jerk be full-on rotten.
And let him or her be inspired by the full-on rotten people in your life. It's like method acting. You channel that hateful awful person through yourself, to the keyboard. Let us see you be bad!

Official Apology : I’m sorry I broke Amazon

For years I have tip-toed around the idea of self-publishing, but for one reason or another I always talked myself out of doing it. I finally took the plunge this weekend, and excitedly uploaded my work to Amazon.

I’m sorry Amazon readers. I’m really very sorry other authors who were trying to publish their own books. I’m sorry Amazon—I didn’t mean to break you.

Apparently what had been running as a well-oiled, predictable machine totally forgot how to Amazon when gunked up with my first dip into the self-pub pool. My work got stuck in queue, under review for days when less than twelve hours was the previous norm, and I took everyone else down with me. Self-publishing message boards everywhere were filled with people  trying to figure out why their books weren’t being processed, what had happened.

I happened.

I’m cursed.

If I touch something, it breaks.

If I want something, it’s gone.

If I love something, it dies…or runs away screaming because it knows what’s coming.

If I go “Hey, that’s the best show ever!” it gets cancelled (Firefly is probably my fault too. Sorry browncoats.)

If I enter a crowded room, it clears out (although that may have less to do with my luck and more to do with an inability to censor myself for polite society).

If I join a group, a team, a movement, it self-destructs.

So yes, Amazon, and all those affected by the great end of August slow-down of the review and publish process, I apologize. I’ll try not to let it happen again, but as I have four more parts to my serial to get out, I can’t make any promises.

Zombie Night (Review)

Zombie Night

I’m a sucker for a good B horror flick. Toss in zombies, and I have a hard time not at least giving the film a single watch through. Add in John Gulager, the man behind the Feast trilogy, and this became a must watch film. 

Let me just say, this movie was no Feast. One thing I have come to expect from Gulager is characters with a lot of bite (the puns here are unavoidable, my apologies). Characterization in this film was shoddy at best. The plot was nonexistent, explanations for the zombies nonexistent, decent acting over all pretty sparse, dialogue not remotely engaging. Even for a B horror film, most of Zombie Night was pretty disappointing, however, there were some shining moments that prove this film could have been amazing with a little focus, investment, and editing.

 CLICK READ MORE
(Spoilers and review under cut)

Since/cents/scents/sense when?

The boy may be in college, but I can’t seem to turn off the internal Mommy editor. At least he has a good sense of humor about it.

Damien Graves

Is it alright if I take a nap?
I’m not feeling well

Shannon Graves

Sure, honey.

Damien Graves
Alright
Thank you.

Shannon Graves

All right*
Alright is not a word.

Damien Graves

Sense when?
WTF since*

Shannon Graves

Since*

Damien Graves

Oh.
Goddangit
Okay.

Shannon Graves

Since is a time based indicator. As in “I haven’t talked to her since last week.”

Damien Graves

Yeah. I know. I’m stupid-ed

Shannon Graves

Sense is like "I have a sense that something bad is going to happen."

Damien Graves

O.O

Shannon Graves

or "Sight is one of the five senses."

Damien Graves

lol

Shannon Graves
Cents is a measure of money, usually in the form of coinage. As in "I have five cents."

Damien Graves
Goodnight dictonary.com
love you
and your ability to check my homonyms

Shannon Graves

Scents is something that triggers your olfactory senses, such as "The scent of the cookies and bread baking in the kitchen made me want to chew off my arm."

Am done now.

Damien Graves

Good night Sheldon!
Lolololol
That made my day.