Dinara Tengri

How can I not write something Halloween-related on Halloween night? And even though I didn't initially plan on posting anything tonight, it was last night that I realised that I didn't have any other choice. So. today, after school I dug into my secret comic book stash, and I read Home Again - the now unofficial sequel to the gory The X-files episode I reviewed last night. Not to be confused with the live-action season 10 episode about a murderous trash-sculpture.  Here's what I think: The artwork is amazing. Mulder, Scully, and Skinner look exactly like their real-life counterparts, which really helps to get their voices right when you read the dialogue. The visual accuracy, the attention to the details, the dark and brown-ish colour pallete - it all helps to re-create the dirty and depressing atmosphere of the original episode.  As for the story... well, it seems like the writers tried to splice together two completely different stories, and it all came...

It's day 7 of Halloween Week 2016, and today I'm talking about an old TV-episode I saw last night.  Home was first aired on October 11, 1996 in the USA, and it's considered to be one of the scariest  episodes in the history of television. I watched it for the first time last night, and I have mixed feelings about it.  This review will contain some spoilers for the episode, and even for some events that unfold later in the show.  When a body of a deformed baby is found buried in a small community of Home, the suspicions turn to the Peacocks - a family of inbreds who have been living in isolation ever since the American Civil War. When the agents, together with the sheriff start investigating, the Peacocks will stop at nothing to protect their home.   First of all, Home is a beautifully shot and very well-directed episode. I think this was the first time I was paying attention to the camera angles and the camera movements, because they're just beautiful. ...

First, an announcement: tomorrow, I will be going live on Twitter. I'll be watching the X-files episode, Home , from season 3, for the first time. And I'll be tweeting about it. What time? Around 11.00 PM, Standard European Time.  Is there a better way to celebrate Halloween than with a cup of hot spicy beverage seasoned with nuts and raisins, and a horror movie binge? Yes, definitely. But this way is not so bad either. Plus, if there's anything I learned from Nightmare before Christmas is that you can combine two different holiday traditions and still have a good time.  It's day 5 of Halloween Week 2016. It's also Friday, and I'm up for a quiet movie night. The real question here is what movie/movies I'm going to watch. I'm not a fan of slashers, found footage or torture porn. So what does that leave me? Here are a few horror movies that I really enjoy, and one that I haven't seen yet.  Sci fi  Alien A classic claustrophobic...

Today, I have a little surprise for you. It's day 4 of Halloween Week 2016, and we are back to discussing scary books. But we're not going to do it here. Instead, we're moving to Book Bloggers International. Last week I wrote an essay for their latest project, R.I.P. Reads (that's Readers Imbibing Peril). The essay was about The October Country by Ray Bradbury. I took a deep dive into this collection and tried to see these stories as a reflection of the human soul. I had so much fun writing this essay, and now I want to share it with you. So click on the link to read   Ray Bradbury's October People

And we're on day 3 of Halloween Week 2016. Today, I want to give books a little break and talk about TV. Some good old fashioned TV horror. Last year, I listed Ten Spookiest X-Files Episodes . So this year, I've come up with six scariest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Enjoy! 1. Hush , season 4 episode 10 Often considered to be one of the scariest episodes on television ever, Hush brings grim fairy tales to life, with a touch of Tim Burton. When monsters known as the Gentlemen steal the voices from everyone in Sunnydale in order to do some organ harvesting, Buffy and the Scoobies have to find a way to save their town without uttering a single word. Written and directed by Joss Whedon, it's one of the highlights of season 4. I don't think I'll ever be able to get the image of the Gentlemen out of my head. Then again, I don't want to. They're fantastic. 2. Helpless , season 3 episode 12 If Hush is a fairy tale, Helpless is a ...

Counting down: it's day 2 of Halloween Week 2016, and we are moving on to the mysterious and gloomy land of Cornwall. That is were Sherlock Holmes and John Watson engage in a scientific experiment that almost costs them their lives. I'm talking about The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, a short story which was written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published in 1910.  In the Devil's Foot, Holmes and Watson go on vacation in a fictional hamlet in Cornwall. But their lazy and melancholic existence is soon interrupted (much to Holmes' excitement) when a family tragedy shakes this small and peaceful community. The circumstances surrounding the case are so incredible and terrifying and defy all logic that the ones involved see no other way but to suspect a supernatural culprit. But Holmes doesn't believe in the supernatural, and is determined to solve the case the good old fashioned way: "I fear, said Holmes, "that if the matter is beyond humanity it is ce...

I was walking home from school on this beautiful October day, when I saw something in the window of the sci fi book store. It's been recently re-decorated for Halloween, and there was one detail there that I only took notice of today. Despite the chilly weather, I felt warm inside. As a born-again Buffy-fan, I couldn't just walk by and not immortalise this image on my phone camera. And since Halloween is just a week from now, I'm kicking off a project dedicated to celebrating ghosts, monsters and other forces of evil that live in our collective imagination. Last year, I reviewed a few horror and fantasy novels in preparation for this scary little holiday, and I also wrote an article about t he importance of keeping black cats safe on Halloween. This year, I decided to dedicate this whole week to Halloween, by writing smaller, lighter posts each day. I will write shorter reviews of some of my favourite horror short stories, and cram this blog space with fun lists. T...

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish .  For this week's top ten list, I decided to take a road less travelled and focus on something else other than books and popular culture. So for all of you who study full-time and also have secret blogger identities, here come ten survival tips.   *Author's note: this is a humorous article and is not to be taken too seriously. The author of this article is not responsible if this advice will prove unsuccessful.  1. Get plenty of sleep. Because you cannot study and manage a somewhat functioning online enterprise  if you're running high on too much caffeine. Taping your eyelids to your forehead may work too, but it's not good for your skin. 2. Study first, blog later.  Because the nagging little voice in your head will eat you alive if you're writing another trivial top ten list, and you still haven't started on this week's case study.  3. Always have...

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish . Today, I want to talk about books that I changed my opinion about. There are books that I used to like but don't anymore, and vice versa. It doesn't happen often, just enough times to make a top ten list. 1. Fledgling , by Octavia E. Butler I read this book about a year ago. I don't know if I was honest with being myself when I gave it four stars. I liked the re-imagining of the vampire genre and the subject of race and identity. But other than that, the story didn't strike me as anything special, and the dialogue was quite awkward at times. Now I'd give it three stars.  2. Foundation , by Isaac Asimov This book started my obsession with all things Asimov, but I hated it the first time around. It was just so slow. This book is 99% dialogue and it bored me out of my mind. But at the same time, I wanted to know how the story ended. It got a lot better with the second readi...

Last night, I went to see   Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children , with my student. In the ideal world, I would have read the book before I went to see the movie, but what are you gonna do?  The best thing I can say about Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is that it got me a little curious about its source material. That, and the visuals are stunning. It's a beautiful film with very good CGI. A real treat. But in my experience, a film will not have a lasting impact on me simply because it's beautiful. And it's not that difficult to create great visuals with today's technology, so it's not that much of an achievement. Any movie, be it fantasy or drama, has to have a good story in order to have a lasting impact, and I'm already beginning to forget some parts of this movie. Like I said, I haven't read the book, so I don't know if it suffers from the same problems as the movie. I certainly hope not. The movie follows a t...

I've been studying for a little over five weeks now. The first class was okay. We got a pretty good grasp of what the oral health is all about and what it is that the dentists (and dental hygienists and dental technicians) actually do. Turns out, it's so much more than just teeth. But there was a lot of filler, and way too much philosophy than I would ever want in dentist school. I can speak for the majority of the class when I say that we were all anxious to get to the real stuff. The biology. The human anatomy. The mouth.  And this week we're getting heavily into science of the mucous. I've only been studying cellular biology and histology for two days, but it already feels like two weeks. When I come home at night, I'm either too tired to sit down and write a new post, or work with Photoshop (I got a seven day free trial and I'm hoping to make the most of it), or I have other stuff that needs to be done. Which is why writing this post right now feels more o...

Top Ten Tuesday is  a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish .   Villains. A good villain doesn't leave you indifferent. You may hate them, love them, or have very ambiguous feelings about them. A good villain walks the line between good and bad, and shows their human side once in a while, displaying their vulnerability and their heart.  Here are my picks for six movie and TV villains with a heart. I'm excluding all comic book movie villains and all Disney villains. It would be way too easy.  Be warned: there are spoilers Movies Christof  The eccentric mastermind behind The Truman Show . A man who's idea of entertainment is to film a man twenty four hours a day for thirty years, without the star's knowledge or consent. He's everything that's wrong with our media and our show business. But does he believe that he's doing right by Truman? Maybe. Besides, the real villains in this movie are the audience.   D...