Quark Master's Blog
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6/3/2018Site News...and we are back! Woo Hoo!

4 Years and 2 months later...the site is back!

Wow, what a delay!

Actually, it's not so much back as all new but with same content, same blog etc.  The code, is all new, and the images are now in a database and easily to deal with.

Previously everything was stored in text "include" files that included code into the webpage filling out arrays of thumbnails, image paths, titles, sub-titles etc.

Basically, completely un-portable.

Further for some reason, the authentication system was broken, as was the image viewer, thanks to some weirdness I could not figure out after many many attempts.

So, anyway, we are now back.   When will there be new images and stories?

I have no idea...I am seriously behind on my mainstream books at the moment and need to get caught up there before my readers come at me with torches and pitchforks.  But...at least I can...and in creating the new front page images, I got some ideas for new image stories--and I also have some unfinished text stories I'd like to complete.

So stay tuned--and now, once more fully enjoy the existing content! 

PS:  Balthazar and DamnedToHell.Com are also back...He has been incredibly patient, but then he's been busy lately.

4/14/2013Site NewsTumblr

My blog is a bit broken post move, and rather than fix it before my next site redesign, I've decided to blog at Tumblr. Sooooo....come see me at QuarkMaster.Tumblr.Com for more details!

1/19/2013MoviesJohn Dies At The End

It's All About The Sauce...Soy Sauce.

Soy Sauce

The title of theis movie is not really a spoiler. I'm not saying that John doesn't die at the end, I'm saying that it's not really clear when the end is, because John and Dave are both on the Sauce. Soy Sauce and so they have a very Zen perspective of time in a highly non-linear manner.

And so, yes, John does die, but that really isn't as much of an impediment as you might think, mainly because John by the end/begining/middle of the movie is probably just a manifestation of the Sauce. There are a lot of those in the movie.

There are a lot of manifestations in this movie: including the meat monster to the right. In fact, battling manifestations is a lot of what John and Dave do.

At some point in the movie, John and Dave are some slackers, John is in a band and Dave is his friend, through interactions with a sauced up alien infested Rastefarian the two of them get introduced to the latest street drug, called Soy Sauce.

Dave didn't choose to get addicted to Sauce, that was the Sauce's work. But once he was addicted, and didn't die, it was clear he, and John were uniquely qualified to save the Earth from certain annihilation. Although not clear that's going to work out well.

 

Meat Monster
Teethy

This movie is seriously tripping.

It opens in theaters January 25, 2012, but is currently available to rent online from iTunes or Amazon.

I chose to watch it in advance, at home, where I could alter my perception of the movie. Last night, it made a lot of sense, sort of like a documentary, but admittedly I watched it drinking Absinthe and inhaling something completely legal in Colorado.

Think of this movie as like the Pineapple Express version of Scanners or Naked Lunch. It's gruesome and creepy and very funny. Soy Sauce makes the little pills in the Matrix look like aspirin.

Ok, so today, I find some parts of the movie do not connect as well as they did last night. But it was still a lot of fun, despite the fact that it raised far more questions than it answered. The movie is based on a book by the same name, and there is a sequel and will probably be a third. I am hyping the movie to get people to see it so they'll make the sequels so I can get more answers.

However, I already know that extra movies will only create extra questions.

The only person that can answer these questions is probably Dr. Marconi (below). Dave tries to explain things to a reporter (Paul Giamati) but has some issues getting his point across, thwarted by the various forces of darkness.

And boy are there a lot of different forces of darkness.

The movie is brought to us by Don Coscarelli who brought us the legendary Bubba Hotep, Phantasm and The Beast Master. All of which, I assume everyone has seen.

Paul Giameti (Sideways: first person to take a true stand against Merlot!) is the executive producer and plays the character who is the focus of Dave's narration of the movie.

Dr. Marconi is played by Clancy Brown, who does voice work for about every animated show currently on television, and has been in a number of SF movies.

Glynn Turman is the detective who's tracking the Soy Sauce and the alien invaders from an alternate dimension is fantastic. Currently he's known for playing Marty Kaan's father on House of Lies (an extremely accurate documentary on Business Consultants currently running on Showtime)

John and Dave, our heroes, are played by Chase Williams and Rob Mayes, both relatively new, and totally sexy. They're really the best looking parts of the movie, most everything else is creepy.

Warning: Do NOT pirate this movie, there have been some very serious side effects to people who pirated this movie:

Dr. Marconi
1/7/2013MoviesWerewolf: The Beast Among Us
Werewolf: The Beast Among Us
A new werewolf movie is among us.

Really no clue where this one came from, but it's fairly new in stores and rental releases, and it's suprisingly good as direct to DVD werewolf movies go.

First, it's no Dog Soldiers which is like a werwolf's who's who of BBC television personalities including: Sean Pertwee (son of the third Doctor), Kevin McKidd (HBO's Rome, Journeyman, Grey's Anatomy, Percy Jackson), Liam Cunnigham (Game of Thrones--Ser Davos Seaworth, Outcasts), Dorren Morfit,  Craig Conway, Emma Cleasby, etc.

However, in the line up of "Van Helsing" wanna-be, grade-B movies, it's not bad.  I mean, if I look at the trailers for the upcoming major release "Hansel and Gretel" movie, they look very similar.  In fact at first I couldn't remember that a preview I saw this fall was for "Hansel and Gretel" and I thought maybe this was the movie I saw the preview for.

It does, interestingly, star the former Director of Global Dynamix (located in Eureka on the SyFy channel)--Ed Quinn (big hat in picture) and Nia Peeples, Steven Bauer and several other BBC like people.   It's like half Brit/half American.  It was filmed however, in Transylvania near Wallachia, which is probably why the set design is amazingly believable.


Basic storyline is that we have a village in the 19th century (??) beset by a super nasty werewolf, who's going around making verclaws as well as baby werewolfs.  Verclaws are sort of like zombie-werewolves, where the bitten died and turned into werwolf-zombies or something, vs turned into werewolves...at least in this movie.

In any event, an intrepid team of seasoned Werewolf Hunters happens through and vies with local hoodwinks and roughnecks to capture and kill this "no ordinary werewolf."

A young lad in the village, who is studying medicine with the local doctor and who's been studying the victims, and pining for the daughter of the richest man in town (who likes to shoot at him), offers to join the team to lend them his aid and expertise.

Naturally, the kid (and villagers) eventually figure out that the super/intelligent werewolf is someone they know, the question is who?  And can they stop it?

Review:  For direct to DVD it really looks good overall. They use a combination of animatronics and CGI for the werewolf, and really, it's pretty good particularly since you do get good looks at the werewolf.   
As far as predictability, well, most people wouldn't find it predictable, unless they're the sort of person that would visit this site.   QM Gallery visitors will have a good time figuring it all out, and, I think, be happy with the ending.

Also, please note: I do not recommend Chacutrie with this movie. Nor Spaghetti....
1/7/2013Site NewsRE: I Broke My Blog
Oh, and how did I update my broken blog? By inserting stuff directly into SQL tables....bleh...
1/7/2013Site NewsI Broke My Blog

I broke my blog...

OK, so end of last year, I decided to up and move my site to a new server/host.  For the last 5 or 6 years I've had a dedicated server at a hosting facility somewhere...Actually, only one where, Server Beach...and that server was a Dell PowerEdge 440 which probably around end of 2011, I was told was no longer supported by SB, so if anything on it died, they couldn't repair it.  Time to upgrade.

However, that's a big hassle and I couldn't get a good price/performance ratio out of them for anything like the same cost (they were eaten by Peer 1 after I signed up) so I put it off.  Finally got paranoid enough to move to a new server at a new hosting provider:  Razor Servers.  And I slowly moved stuff over and ran for a couple months in parallel.  Finally killed of SB last week, Friday.

New server is actually about same price, but a lot hunkier, all Windows 2012, reasonable RAM and procs,  I've plopped a nice little VM on it for my remote workstation.  It's always good to have a workstation that's outside your normal environment that you can jump on to back test reality.  I.e. "Is it me or is the Internet/Nifty/Google/Microsoft/etc down." 

Plus implemented a backup mail server on my main one, for days when my mail server's down.  Or one of my clients is (because oddly NYC didn't have power for like a week, a while back...can you believe that?)

Anyway, in the course of that.  I broke my blog.    The buttons don't work no more.

It's because this hodgepodge website is an amalgam of ancient ASP code and more recent (but old) ASP.Net code, and it's compiled under a very old version of asp.net and who knows...I need to recompile it and get the extra binaries out there and yada yada yada it's a pain in the ass.

Particularly because I keep wanting to update the entire site.  So right now I'm toying with a new site design, and in fact just moving the mechanism to say, DotNetNuke which takes care of most of the programming for me, so I don't have to mess.   And I can certainly do that, but then I have the artistic challenge of "what should it look like"  I like the basic theme, can I replicate it?  Ehh, not liking, you get the idea....going in circles.

Then there is porting all the content to the new system, I've done a few failed attempts at this before, can't seem to get enough time to just get it done, before I decide it's not worth the effort.

Not to mention, I do have this big Story Collection that I want to finish cleaning and posting, this is other people's stories I've collected.   But then there is the author notification/request removal business and again, I run out of time.

Anyway, so I thought I'd update those of you who visit on why not much happens, I keep losing track of time.

So aside from the mechanics of the website where am I?
  • Working on a novel that I am thinking about e-publishing on Amazon etc.  I just gotta get that done, and I feel the need for far better editing and review/rewriting for something I charge money for.  But it's going....this is a "sort of" werewolf/coming out story, set 300+ years in the future.
  • Only minimal work has been done lately on my other novel AKA Andy, which is a Slave Future/ASFR story, that I debate e-publishing vs web posting.
  • I actually did do some writing in 2012 on the long delayed Damned To Hell Novel, The Incubus, that I keep promising over there.  That novel will probably just be web published, because 1) I said it would be when I started, and 2) it's got too much sex and perversion for general public consumption.
  • Satyrcation is not that far from complete, it's a Satyr and Nymph TF story, with lots of sex of all types.  Definitely a web story.
  • I have a Hobbit TF video I started working on ages ago to go with the release of the Hobbit, yeah, that got done on time.  Actually the TF is rigged except for animating the hair growth, which has been stumping me on the best way to do that.  I need to grow lots of hair on the feet (and elsewhere).  There are many ways to do it, some more a pain than others, some look better than others.
  • Plus, I was working on another Space Alient (Texaco) normal image story, that got derailed by lighting issues in one scene and I just didn't get back to it, but I still intend to.
I hope to have some more time in the next few months.  The last year I was just too bogged down with work....
 
 
6/10/2012TVReturn of Teen Wolf
 
 The Return of Teen Wolf, Season 2 :

OK, yes:

1) It's on MTV, home of the most horrifying TV monster ever envisioned: Snookie.
2) It's for teens, young adults.
3) Officially it's girl bait.

But I point out that 2 & 3 qualify it for the Gay Male Demographic as surely as the term "CW"

I loved last season, and this season is even more Decoteau'ian (meaning David Decoteau's wet dream).

I love werewolves.  If done right, they're far more interesting than vampires since there tends to be more emotional struggle between man and beast.

And if you are on this website, you know I like naked, or semi-naked young males who tear their clothes off and transform into beasts and monsters.

So how could I not love this show.  The ratio of male to female semi-nudity is about 5-1.  Which is finally, what I want to see on MTV.  (OK, I'd love to see Music Videos, but that's just asking too much for something called "Music Tele Vision")

To the right is a partial cast, basically the original characters.  There are newer cast photos with Jackson in them, who I talk about below.

The hero (above and right center) is Scott, the "Teen Wolf" his best friend Stiles (the son of the local sheriff) who provides the comic sidekick role, and who has yet to really strip, but we've been promised he'll strip this season.  Scott is shirtless about 1/3 of the time.  

Stiles was my favorite character in Season 1.  I really wish he'd get bit, but so far, no go.  I'd be happy with him stripping down though.  He's the geeky brains, Scott is the average kid, with gorgeous looks, who becomes a LaCrosse star after wolfing out.


 


  The red head, is, initially Queen Bitch, but she gets bit by the end and well, something freaky happens to her, not at all sure she ends up as a werewolf...maybe were something else...that's the plot right now.

Scott's girlfriend, below, is Allison Argent, who unfortunately, we find out is the daughter of a long line of werewolf hunters.  

OK, so a bit Capulet and Montegue...she has some underwear scenes too, but don't really remember them.

Now of course you can scream about the light makeup below, but that's explained, via other WW's that 1) there are different states of wolfiness and 2) the longer you are a WW, the more powerful you become and the more wolf like you become.  The season 1 Alpha was super werwolfy.

Scott is supposed to get more wolfy this season.
 
   In addition to the star, Tyler Posey (above) we also have the insanely gorgeous Colton Haynes playing super-asshole Jackson (sides).

This is his second run at werewolves, after The Gates where he was a super stud werewolf, here he's a wanna-be wolf.  He wants to be a wolf so bad he will do about anything.  (See last season)

He's a huge asshole, but in the second half of the season premiere he's so excited about turning into a werewolf that he borrows a video camera and tripod and strips nearly naked in his bedroom to film it.

I have come to love him in the show because even though he's about everything I hate, and definitely the sort that would be victimized at the NCMC, he's got a buried level of need/anxiety at his core that every now and then shows through his asshole persona.  Clearly a mask of unresolved issues of some sort, but manifesting in a clear need to be "different" to be something other than the rich jock stud with a Porsche and a perfect body.

If only I'd had those kind of problems in High School.

I will note that there is an openly gay player on the team, so far a pretty minor character with a few lines every third episode.  Hopefully we'll "see" more of him in multiple ways.  He is Jackson's best friend, and given Jackson's rather weird relationship with girls and in particular his ex, Lydia (the red head).  He's really not that in to girls except as a prop.

We have a new wolf boy this season, sort of  coming out of nowhere, (well, we meet him digging graves for last season's dead people) he's the son of the local undertaker, a geek and nerd (yet still on the Lacrosse team, oddly enough) who is from a very abusive home, where is father basically tortures him and likes to lock him up in the basement.  
 
Right:  You know you've wolfed it out when you have to go to a Vet to get patched up.  (Scott works for the Vet, who has some secrets of his own).

To be clear, this is NOT Michael J Fox's teen wolf.  Yes there is humor, but there is a lot of dramatic tension with wolf hunters and wolf pack dynamics and unknown other types of monsters.  So kind of a soapier, sexier, Buffy light, but given time it is working heavily on mythology, it's just got a lot of sex they have to show to keep the teens (and me) horny.
 
6/9/2012MoviesPrometheus
 
 Ridley Scott's Prometheus

Just came back from Prometheus, way better than expected.  It was a very nice return to his SF universe and style.   Alien was possibly better, but then that took me by surprise and thus, particularly for its time, I feel it was more original.

This felt like a "return" but not a "retread" because it is definitely different, but it feels like the Alien universe, which it is.  So it's a really fresh return to the style of those movies.  

Alien was scarier, but once you've lived through an "Alien" attack (4 times) you get inured.  So even though they aren't battling "Aliens" with a capital "A" it is the same "universe" and Ridley Scott, so you sort of know what you are going to get:

  • Untrustworthy synthetic beings, a "robot" in this movie, who are possibly up to no good.
  • Mega corporations with unethical plans that make life difficult for the "good guys"
  • Hard core, gritty Science Fiction, particularly in a visual sense.
  • Lots of:
    • Slime
    • Blood
    • Goo
    • Slime-Blood-Goo Explosions
  • Tentacle/Worm kinky icky stuff particularly down the mouth.
  • Creepy alien pregnancies.
  • People mutating to death (or "otherness") in very painful manners.
  • Betrayal, Greed.
  • Really bad stomach aches.
  • Malevolent aliens (with a small a).
  • One Kick Ass Bitch that lives.
Hopefully it's not spoiling anything to say that the heroine, Dr. Shaw, survives despite all of the above.  She kicks some ass, including operating on herself to remove something.  I'm thinking she'd studied historical Ridley Scott movies and so knew what to do when the time was right.

This movie was much more thoughtful than Alien, quite a bit deeper, and in someway perhaps more satisfying.  So it's more high brow, but still lots of action, subterfuge, creepy hallways, space suites, spaceshipts etc designed by HR Giger.

As you might expect, this film is a must for Giger fans, it almost seems even stronger than Alien (for which he did the design).  There's an acknowledgement to him in the credits, but he didn't actually work on it as far as I can see at IMDB.

If the Alien(s) movies were Horror movies, this is more like a really gory "Mystery" i.e. what is this shit, and what were these big white humanoids up to?  

I saw the IMAX 3D version, super.  Oddly, the 3D was well done, not some afterthought.  However, this is one of the very few IMAX 3D movies that you can forget is in 3D.  Where the 3D enhances the overall experience but doesn't over power.  As far as 3D goes, this is probably the best 3D movie since Avatar.  It's very good and blends well with the story.  You feel like you are physically present, but it doesn't "jump out" at you (well...usually doesn't jump out at you)

So if you liked any of the Alien movies, you definitely need to see this.  And if you haven't, but like good SF, than go see this.  Or if you just like genetic engineering and mutation, go see it.


6/8/2012Site NewsRE: Captcha/Updates
Actually, I forgot...somehow...that I did spend and am spending a giant chunk of time on a Story Collection.

Basically organizing, categorizing and reformatting the thousands of net fiction stories I have collected over the years.

This is a project that I've been working on in various forms for a decade.  Old timers here may remember the first incarnation of the site with it's wacky layout and story archive with no stories.  I never got the imported into the database.

This time, rather than build the web interface and backend database first, I built the database and a GUI importer program that can auto reformat and allows me to easily edit, categorize, comment on the stories.  It's basically a big toolset that I wrote in Visual Studio to process these stories.

I still have a lot of stories to go through, but I've now built the tools to do it easily.  And the majority of stories are in my database, I just have to continue to clean them up.  Extract fields for search, categorize (M/M, TF, B/D, etc) a huge number.

As that gets closer to completion, it should not be that much work (relatively speaking) to build a web interface for people to read and comment on them. (I've done it before, and I wrote this structure into the new database as well).

So, at some point, I'll be releasing my story collection.  It's several thousand stories.  I'll probably release them a few dozen at a time as I finish processing them.  When that comes online depends on what I decide to do with updating the over all site mechanisms (which I need to do...see the Captcha part)

6/8/2012MoviesBTW Forgot to tell you to go see Cabin in the Woods
  OK, 
Just realized that I never got on and blogged to you about why you must see Cabin in the Woods.

You just need to go see it.

Yes, I think you've seen this sort of movie before.

And yes, maybe you know from the trailers that there is a twist.

But really?  No, the trailer's apparent twist on the old, old, old story is not the "twist."

I won't tell you what happens.

But it is the BEST ending to any horror story ever told.  Balthazar nearly wept for joy.  Of course that would be impossible, maybe steamed out his eyes for joy but...you get the idea.

If you can, go see it, otherwise.  You must rent it.

It really isn't what you think, even when you think you know what is happening.



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