Chilling Adventures of Sabrina – A Midwinter’s Tale Review
Image: Netflix
This review contains spoilers for the first part of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, including the special available for streaming on Netflix.
While the second part of the series isn’t due until April 5th of next year, Netflix has already gifted us with more of our favorite, teenage witch in the eleventh chapter of part one, “A Midwinter’s Tale”, just in time for Christmas. This 55 minute special finds us a few days before Christmas and the Winter Solstice, and we see the half witch, half human Sabrina Spellman wishing for the council of her long, dead, human mother, who she saw in Limbo earlier in the season. She decides to perform a séance during the Solstice when the barrier between this world and that of the dead is at it’s thinnest. Meanwhile, we follow Susie as she gets a job as an elf in the Christmas village – something she’s wanted for a long time, but it isn’t all that it seems.
In what will be undoubtedly classic Chilling Adventures of Sabrina form, this special takes things that we would find familiar from the Christmas Village and Yule log and turns them on their ear to fit into the Chilling version of Earth. Likewise in the same way, we watch as Sabrina goes back to the well of bad choices made with good intentions.
While a fun holiday special, the majority of this episode is spent resolving and updating us about the going ons of the characters in the story before the second part releases. We know where Sabrina stands with Harvey after getting the advice from her mother’s spirit about her experience trying to be a mortal in love with a witch, and how he in turns feels about the witch side of her. On the other hand, we also get that she has, to one extent or another, reconciled her relationships with her friends, both mortal and magical. We also get what Aunt Zelda will do with Leticia, the female twin that she stole from Father Blackwood, and a minor insight into to the warlock group read more…
Top Selling Science Fiction Audiobooks at Audible Right Now
In the middle of moving, I realized that I have no problem finding a locality to purchase a bed and a couch. I’m not worried about finding the heavy stuff and not moving things like furniture. You know what essential item I am bringing with me: my books. I simply can’t live without my books. They go where I go.
My books are like memories. While closing one volume, I contemplate the period I was in at the time. I remember reading all of Dickens and then moving onto Hawthorne and not understanding what it meant to have a scarlet letter emblazoned on you. Fast-forward into the modern world and the streaming services that offer books, a classic becomes an instant hit.
We all know how some of the world’s most renowned authors didn’t make it big until long after their deaths. What they had to say did resonate at the time, but it wasn’t until long after they were gone that we as humans understand what they were trying to say about the current culture and conventions.
Take my favorite book Contact by Carl Sagan, and how a story really told the insider mind of science through narrative. That’s what science fiction gives us. It not only puts into reality modern science and understanding, it gives us characters that utilize these scientific tools
We’ve compiled a list of the bestselling science fiction books available on Audible.com right now. These books tell of real human people struggling and how technology is impacting their current life and how it is projecting the future.
- Artemis, by Andy Weir, Narrated by Rosario Dawson
- For We Are Many, by Dennis E. Taylor, Narrated by Ray Porter
- Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, Narrated by Wil Wheaton
- The Extinction Cycle Boxed Set, by Nicholas Sansbury Smith, Narrated by Bronson Pinchot
- The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi, Narrated by Martin Freeman
- Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey, Narrated by Jefferson Mays
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams, Narrated by Martin Freeman
Fans Pricing Saturday for December 15, 2018
(Note: We request the price changes from Amazon on Friday evenings. Unfortunately, they don’t change all of the prices at one time.)
Everyone In LA Is An Asshole Book 2
AND – A special Holiday bonus from J.L. Hendricks.
Miss Claus and the Secret Santa: A Shifter Christmas Romance
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Avengers Endgame, Trailer Review and Speculation
Part of the journey is the end. So says Tony Stark at the start of the two minute and twenty-five-second long first travel for the upcoming fourth and, if Marvel Studios is to be believed, last Avengers film, which also reveals the long-awaited subtitle: Endgame. With this, we begin to set the stage for whatever that film is and how the actors and characters we love so much will make their exit from the MCU.
The trailer begins with Stark on one of the ships from Titan, out of food and water and soon out of air as well. He records a message into the heavily damaged helmet of his Iron Man suit for his fiancee, Pepper Potts. We then shift to Thanos, having left his armor behind, walking on a world with flowers, with Black Widow voice-over, talking about how Thanos did what he promised, killing one-half of all creatures. Quick cuts to some of the surviving characters, Widow, Captain America, Bruce Banner, Thor, and Nebula. We see Natasha encounter someone in a new, less flashy outfit with a bow, revealed to be the former Hawkeye, Clint Barton, in his Ronin guise. Widow assures Captain that whatever they have planned is going to work, to which he replies: “I know it is, because I don’t know what I’m going to do if it doesn’t. The title card appears, the subtitle forming from rubble backlit in purple. The final moment is Scott Lang outside the front gates of the Avengers HQ asking to be let in as Captain and Widow look on with stunned amazement.
The trailer, while not letting on a whole lot about what will happen in the movie, the trailer is filled with emotion, a desperate need to hope. Captain barely read more…
Fans Pricing Saturday for December 8, 2018
(Note: We request the price changes from Amazon on Friday evenings. Unfortunately, they don’t change all of the prices at one time. As of right now, two of the books have not yet been price changed to fan’s pricing.)
Star Trek Discovery – Space No Longer The Final Frontier
Note: This article contains spoilers of Star Trek: Discovery Season One
Season one of Star Trek: Discovery gripped us like the science-loving nerds we are and dragged us to places we never knew we wanted to go. Michael Burnham is an intriguing protagonist with a more-than-strange past that plays a major role in how her future is shaped.
Being a human raised in a Vulcan society gifted her with an extensive knowledge base of sciences and of course logic. Michael is also Spock’s half-sister, adding to Michael’s already complicated past.
Knowing that piece of information helps ramp you up for what seems to be. As always, there are also teases as to what the seven signals sent throughout the galaxy could be.
Since chasing the impossible seems to be the Discovery’s thing, what new impossibility could they be exploring? Weren’t the famous words of the original Star Trek “Space, the Final Frontier.”?
Yet it seems that the ability to jump across the universe as we know it wasn’t all this new Spore Drive technology had to offer. Lieutenant Stamets showed us it was possible for a human to navigate the mycelium network.
Think about the reality of that possibility for humanity. Could we jump universes at a whim? It’s far-fetched, read more…
Making the Leap from Podcasts to Television
Podcasts have, in one shape or another, existed on the internet since the early 2000s, and as an avid fan myself, I love the medium. Everything from movie and television studios making podcasts to reach out to their viewers, comedians delivering material to their fans, and authors self-publishing their novels as weekly serialized audiobooks. While the medium has been around for a while, it’s widely believed that the current golden age of podcasting was begun by two wildly popular shows, the absurdist horror fiction radio show Welcome to Night Vale and true crime Serial.
Since then, there has been a boom in podcasting, particularly in the serialized science fiction/horror and true crime genres, many of them also becoming wildly popular. As the saying somewhat goes, a high tide raises all casts. In the circular way these things work, it is now podcasts that are being looked to for a source to adapt for other media. Here are a few massively popular podcasts that are, have been, or will be soon turned into television shows.
Homecoming
This sci-fi thriller was already ahead of the curve when it premiered with a star-studded cast which included Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac, and David Schwimmer, whose first season has been wonderfully adapted for television and is currently available for streaming on Prime Video. Starring Julia Roberts, Stephan James, and Bobby Cannavale in those respective roles lending even higher prestige for complex and time jumping story. While the show seems to be a direct adaptation of the first season of the show, the way it is shot and having the visual element adds so much to the story that fixes some of the weaknesses of the show. If you enjoy thrillers and slowly unwinding mysteries, Homecoming would be a great show for you.
Lore
Horror writer Aaron Mahnke in his podcast goes deep into stores of dark history, monsters, and killers. Each episode of Lore takes the listener by the hand and accounts history narratively so that the driest of facts are entertaining and the more sanguine details lessened in their macabreness. The television version, whose second season just released for streaming on Prime Video, does this at a slightly longer, using a huge read more…
Fans Pricing Saturday for December 1, 2018
(Note: We request the price changes from Amazon on Friday evenings. Unfortunately, they don’t change all of the prices at one time. As of right now, two of the books have not yet been price changed to fan’s pricing.)
Cyber Monday Boxed Set Bonanza
It’s Cyber Monday, and it’s also Kurtherian Endgame week (WOOT!), so what better time to have a one-day flash sale on the Kurtherian Gambit series.
You can grab each of the Kurtherian Gambit boxed sets on this Cyber Monday for just $.99 each.
Here’s what’s included in each boxed set:
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 1 (Death Becomes Her – Queen Bitch – Love Lost)
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 2 (Bite This – Never Forsaken – Under My Heel)
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 3 (Kneel Or Die – We Will Build – It’s Hell To Choose)
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 4 (Release The Dogs of War – Sued For Peace – We Have Contact)
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 5 (My Ride is a Bitch – Don’t Cross This Line – Never Submit)
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 6 (Never Surrender – Forever Defend – Might Makes Right)
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 7 (Ahead Full – Capture Death – Life Goes On)
Grab your copies and complete your library today!
Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica Review
Starting in October of 2005, the world-spanning city of Ravnica has been a favorite setting for players of Magic: the Gathering, playing host to seven expansion sets: Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, Dissension, Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, Dragon’s Maze, and Guilds of Ravnica, as well as the next two sets for the upcoming year, Ravnica Allegiance and a heretofore unnamed third set. With nearly two thousand cards based on Ravnica and it being the first not Dominaria world to be visited three times, it’s clearly a fan favorite, so it’s no wonder that the people at Wizards of the Coast wanted to bridge the gap between their two very popular brands, Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, in this sourcebook that allows players of the latter to explore the rich cityscape and unique setting in Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica.
First thing off the bat, this book is beautiful, it mixes art from the cards with new fresh art on its 256 pages. The cover features the most amazing piece of art, a black human woman, with natural hair, in the regalia of the super intelligent (sometimes too much for their own good) magical scientists of the Izzet League conducting an experiment before her guildmaster Niv-Mizzet, the firemind and dracogenius. As a person of color myself, it is so inspiring to see someone who looks like people in my family, like me, in a position of prominence when the world of tabletop gaming is still pretty white and male.
There is a plethora of new content for Dungeons and Dragons players on Ravnica, include new races, like the elephantine Loxodons and mutated Simic Hybrids, two new class options in the enchantment focused Order Domain cleric and necromantic Circle of Spores druid, as well as dozens of items and monster stat blocks. In the 5E rules, guild membership comes in the form of a background, rather than the standard urchin, soldier, or merchant. In that way, being a member of the Boros Legion comes with a suite read more…