The Christopher Pike Blog That Wasn't

I wrote an approximately 3000-word blog on Christopher Pike.

Blogger ate it.

Was typing merrily away on it one day, as this was a blog I’ve been composing on and off for weeks. Had a list of all 61 Pike books and a fun little summary and a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on each. Plus an analysis of his work as a whole and why he’s so great.

And then it all just disappeared. The whole text area on Blogger went blank.

No, I didn’t accidentally “Select All” and delete. No, I didn’t hit any weird keys. Yes, I tried clicking “Undo” and no, nothing came back. Yes, I tried clicking “Back” and it was still blank. Yes, I tried reloading. Yes, I contact customer support and no, they did not respond.

This was possibly my favorite blog I ever wrote about a fun new writer I discovered late in life. And it just disappeared into the digital ether for no apparent reason.

Lesson learned: do not ever type your blog directly in Blogger. Just type it elsewhere, then paste it and post it. (Better yet: don’t use Blogger at all. I’m only here out of laziness, as this is where I started my blog back in 2015.)

Sometimes we have to be burned to learn wisdom and change our user behavior. Happens to the best of us.

I did luckily copy-and-paste a portion of the blog and send it to a friend a week or so before it disappeared. So I can share this with you below. Wish I was sharing the rest, too, but life happens.

His books are nutzoid in the cabeza. Cuckoo in the membrane. Insane for Cocoa Puffs. Pretty much every one of his novels has mind transference, aliens, murder mysteries, reincarnation of ancient spirits, cocaine, football players who were injured and now can't play football, time travel, evil supernatural entities, benign supernatural entities, girls named "Ann," vampires, hungry hungry teenagers, burn victims, skeptical cops, scuba diving, spaceships, ghosts, gossip, amnesia, horny horny teenagers, interdimensional rifts, venereal disease, cults, mad science, weird science, cheerleaders, meta-references to Pike's other books, pyromania, organ harvesting, the FBI, demons, high school dances, conspiracies, secrets & lies, body snatching, time-bombs coded in our DNA, dream sequences, explosions, brutal violence, harsh endings, perversion, stories-within-stories, people faking their deaths, miscellaneous high school drama, witches, endless rambling about meditation and inner peace, God, gods, fanaticism of all stripes, dinosaur people, lizard people, ancient Greek/Egyptian history, borderline-criminal parental neglect, and/or mind-boggling plot twists that also boggle the mind.

They're the best. Even the ones I don't like. You know how some books, you're not sure what will happen in the next chapter? With Pike books, sometimes you're not even sure what will happen in the next PARAGRAPH.

-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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My "legitimate" books are on Amazon here and my Phony McFakename books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I only really post regularly on Instagram.

R.I.P. MoviePass

MoviePass is gone. For real this time.

Fun while it lasted.



-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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My "legitimate" books are on Amazon here and my Phony McFakename books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I only really post regularly on Instagram.

Quick Take on "It: Chapter Two"

I won't ramble about my complex, torrid relationship with this book and its various adaptations (already did that here), so let's dive right in.

It: Chapter Two is a sprawling mess, like its source material. So let's make this review a sprawling mess, too. Pros and cons in no particular order!!!

Several scenes were very strong and effective. The jump scares are fine. The effects are slightly better than in the last It.

Opening the second movie with the opening scene from the book, the horrifying gay-bashing attack followed by the dude seeing Pennywise devour his wounded lover? BALLER. A+.

Then the balloons under the bridge and message in blood splattered on the concrete wall? ANOTHER BALLER. A+.

And then the next few scenes were a solid B. I checked my watch when grown-up Ben arrived at the school. That was the halfway point of the film, and it was touch and go from there.

Having the flame-headed demon-girl recite the entire "Your hair is winter fire" poem was overkill. One line would have sufficed. Or none. I think we got the gag based on the visual alone.

The Paul Bunyan statue and old lady attack scenes are fine.

I wondered if this movie would seem incomprehensible if you weren't familiar with the book. There's so much going below the surface here, which is nice, because it definitely feels like everyone involved actually read the book.

This isn't even a complete movie, it really is just the second half of the first movie. It is not satisfying as a stand-alone work. But that's not necessarily a flaw. In fact, that might just be commendable.

Bit bummed that the only nod to the cosmic Turtle was a model on a table, an Easter egg just like the turtle imagery in the first one. But I get it, it's a heady concept and hard to visualize. But they went to the trouble to visualize It as an ancient alien entity crashing to Earth like a comet, an extended hallucinogenic scene tracing its history, and even multiple references to the Ritual of Chud. So if they could do all that, WHY THEY NO GIVE ME MY TURTLE?

The movie lets the town off the hook, too. Very very odd that it omitted the evil influence of the town on its inhabitants and also the TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWN once the entity is destroyed. The town falling to literal pieces seems like a great visual for a movie. But I guess budget/time considerations killed that.

Had no problem with them omitting the subplot of Bill's wife getting fridged.

The creature's final form as a spider is female and she had eggs everywhere in the book. Another strong visual element I was surprised they omitted, maybe to avoid seeming like the movie Aliens?

Also I get why they put Pennywise's head on the spider at the end. It's a decent visual, but the whole point of it finally appearing as a spider was a reminder that its TRUE FORM, at least as the human mind can best comprehend it, is as a SPIDER. Putting Pennywise's head on it makes it still seem like it's still the clown, just taking a different shape. Misleading and conceptually inaccurate! Shallow and pedantic!

I wasn't sure about the severed head sprouting spider legs (an image directly ripped from the 1982 The Thing, followed by Bill Hader saying the EXACT WORDS Kurt Russell said in response to the spider-head in The Thing) but then I thought about it. It Chapter 2 has a lot of pop cultural references to stuff like that from the 80s. Which is actually surprisingly clever, because in the book, the entity appears as a ton of different pop culture monsters and things from the 50s (The Crawling Eye, Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Teenage Werewolf, etc.). Moving its mutated forms up to the decade of the kids' childhood makes perfect sense. It's doing the exact same thing the book did, which was echoing and overlapping with the past. I'll give it a pass on that.

The pacing of the film is jagged and uneven. And there's just too many characters to provide a fulfilling emotional experience with any of them. They should have omitted the kids' segments from the second film, or made them very quick jump-cut scenes. Entire sequences of the kids in the 80s bogged down the film.

The adults were all too intense, too. Like the filmmakers wanted to make sure they all had TRAITS. More so than making them PEOPLE. Eddie was way too intense and edgy. The 1990 miniseries got a lot wrong, but the adults in there all felt like fully human, well-rounded grown-up versions of the kids who were experiencing and feeling everything deeply.

MAJOR PROPS for giving the 1990 miniseries' young Ben actor a cameo in the scene with the grown-up Ben in this movie.

Making Mike Hanlon a neurotic conspiracy-theory type was...okay, that was interesting. I don't fully disagree there. Us librarians are all a little bit crazy...

And also randomly adding the element of Richie being secretly gay and attracted to Eddie kind of worked. They didn't hang a lampshade on that, but it added an emotional punch. And it makes sense.

The two scenes of Pennywise attacking kids in present-day were good ideas, as they reminded us that this nightmare is happening all over again, something the 1990 miniseries kind of glazed over.

Having Pennywise torment Bill by killing a kid right in front of him was brutal and very on-brand for Pennywise. Good addition there.

Stephen King's extended cameo was okay. Maybe a bit too on-the-nose. Props for being self-deprecating about how his book endings suck.

Bowers' sudden attack on Eddie and Eddie's retaliation worked. They managed to handle the escaped maniac Bowers as well as they could within their time constraints.

I don't HATE the new Pennywise's Scooby-Dooby-Doo-ish performance, it just doesn't resonate as much as Tim Curry's in the 1990 miniseries. Its one note gets repetitive and it relies too much on CGI this time out.

These two films total like 5.5 hours. That just doesn't feel like the right length. They should have dug deeper into the mythos and made it an epic about the town of Derry and made it a 10-episode Netflix series.

It simply isn't BETTER ENOUGH than the 1990 miniseries for me to say, "Finally, THIS is the definitive adaptation of King's book." It just feels like a different take. Not a disaster, not a masterpiece, just interesting.

The 1990 miniseries has a lot of sentimental appeal for me, despite its flaws. I'll likely never watch this movie again, same as the 2017 It. I liked that one better, maybe because it was more easily digestible as a straightforward monster movie. But they're both just entertainment du jour.

It 2: C+
It 1: B-
It the miniseries: B
It the book: A+



-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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My "legitimate" books are on Amazon here and my Phony McFakename books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I only really post regularly on Instagram.

Orphaned Books: "The True Truth About Global Warming"

In my ongoing blog series of books I didn't write for whatever reason, here's one I outlined back in 2016, when I was just doing Derpa Derp books under my Phony McFakename alias.

Weirdly, this was a skeletal outline I planned to flesh out and make even fleshier and sillier, but it stands perfectly fine as a short comic piece as-is. Good on me for leaving it alone! This material was always meant to be a throwaway blog. I firmly believe that now. And you can never change that belief.

What was my motivation for writing it, you may ask? Well, I may answer!

I was seeing a lot of self-published books declaring to reveal the TRUTH about something for the last decade or two and thought I'd throw my hat in the ring and mock this phenomenon. I wasn't mocking the topics or even the folks who held "alternate points of view" on the topics, really. I was mostly mocking the idea that anyone thinks they know anything. William Goldman said it best: "Nobody knows anything." Goldman also said: "Life is pain...Anyone who tells you differently is selling something." Speaking of which: life isn't pain, so BUY MY BOOKS.

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Title: THE TRUE TRUTH ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

(cover photo: me in white lab coat, surgical mask, pointing to white board with “LIES” and a red circle and line through it.)

At the bottom of the copyright page: "This is all fiction, except for the true parts."

Prologue

I’m sick of all these people saying that global warming is good.

Global warming is NOT good.

There are polar bears dying. There are polar ice caps melting. There are natural disasters.

You mean to tell me these things are GOOD?

I think not.

Now that we have that out of the way, prepare for me to also disprove the existence of global warming. Yes, global warming is bad, I think all of us reasonable people can agree on that.

But now it’s time for you to learn the truth. The truth about the fact the globe isn’t warming at all.

In fact, the truth is something else altogether.

The truth is: nothing you’ve been told is true.

Hold on to your rectums.

Here come the truth bombs, exploding all up in your face with information.

Chapter 1: Things Are Heating Up

I have some questions for you.

1 Are you ready for the TRUTH?

2 Can you HANDLE the truth?

3 Would you even RECOGNIZE the truth if you SAW it?

If your answers are 1) yes, 2) yes, and 3) yes, then you are ready for this book.

It’s time for you to wake up, and I’m gonna be your alarm clock.

It’s time for us to take global warming seriously. This is not a joking matter.

Al Gore showed us what’s happening to the polar bears and how the heat on the planet is going up exponentially.

They say if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Well, we don’t have the option of getting out of the kitchen. Because the “kitchen” in this story...is Earth. If you think about it.

Yeah, that’s how I used to think.

But now I know the REAL truth.

And this time I’m REALLY gonna wake you SHEEPLE up...

Chapter 2: The Science of Global Warming

In the beginning, the Earth was really really hot.

It was so hot, humans couldn’t live on it.

But then it got less hot, and humans lived on it.

And eventually it got too cold.

This was called the "Ice Age." Because it was an "age" where there was lots of "ice" everywhere. They made some cartoon movies about this time and haha, sorry to “burst your bubble,” but there weren’t really talking animals during the Ice Age. That’s just Hollywood magic.

But the Ice Age didn’t last forever.

Eventually it got less cold and it the temperature got just right. Some scientists refer to our current climate as “Goldilocks porridge” temperature. They do that because our current temperature is “just right” for humans. (Scientists aren’t all serious, they can have some fun sometimes.)

But the world is still getting hotter. It may be “Goldilocks porridge” out there right now, but soon it will be like the bowl of porridge Goldilocks decided not to eat because it was “too hot.”

Yeah, that’s what THEY would have you believe.

But I know the TRUTH.

And if you’re READY for the truth, then buckle up, because this is gonna be a dangerous ride. 
A ride into the TRUTH highway...

Chapter 3: Enough With the Lies

No more lies.

People and scientists have been telling lies for too long and I’m here to expose them.

You may think you know what you’re talking about, but you probably have no idea what you’re talking about.

I’m gonna debunk the so-called “science” of so-called “global warming” claim by claim.

Sorry if this hurts your feelings, but this has to be said.

Here’s what’s up:

1 The Earth was really hot in the beginning

2 Humans were alive before the Ice Age

3 The Earth got too cold and had an Ice Age

4 The temperature is “just right” for humans now

5 The world is getting hotter

6 The world is going to get “too hot”

Busted. Take that, so-called “scientists.” You have been debunked, point by point.

Chapter 4: Why are Scientists Lying, Lying, Pants on Firing?

They can say whatever they want, but I have the facts on my side and I’m not gonna let science  brainwash me with its lies.

I did the reading. I did the research. I know what I’m talking about.

I didn’t want to tell you this, but you should know that I know a guy who works at a science facility and he said that scientists are deliberately lying about global warming because they want money to do their science with.

See? It’s all a scam. 
Global warming is a money-making scam for greedy scientists who want to do science, no matter how many lies they have to tell in the process.

Chapter 5: The “Theory” of Global Warming

You know how scientists say “We have a theory”?

Did you ever think about that?

Why do they say “We have a theory” and not “We have a truth”?

Well, I’ll tell you why- it’s because they’re just making stuff up. They call their science-y results “theories” because they’re just “theorizing.”
How messed up is that?

If you wanted to just “theorize” on things, you can say anything you want about anything.

Heck, I have a theory about Mardi Gras beads and price-gouging in the Siberian wilderness. I would tell you about it, but I won’t.

Because it’s just a THEORY. I’m not gonna be a liar, liar, pants on fire. Because I have the humility to understand when I know what’s true and when I’m just guessing.

Though I am 99% certain that those Siberian merchants are conspiring with the guy who works at the train station in New Orleans to trick people into buying Mardi Gras beads. It’s obviously true.

But I don’t SAY it’s true. I just present the facts to you and let you draw your own conclusion.

Science is fascist and tries to tell you that just because it has a theory, it demands that you accept it.

I refuse! Because I understand the difference between a theory and a truth.

Chapter 6: The Origins of the Global Warming Scam

Did you ever notice how no one talked about global warming in the 1950’s?

That’s because the 50’s were before the lie about global warming was invented.

I researched the facts behind this lie and discovered Patient Zero for the spread of this plague of lies about global warming.

According to an issue of the Boston Globe that I accessed via microfilm like a classic old-timey reporter, global warming was invented in 1963.

I should mention that I was scrolling through the microfilm really dramatically as I came up on that article. Looking at microfilm was really cool, like something out of an old movie where they looked at microfilm.

I have to ask you a question before we continue:

Why is the year 1963 significant?

I will wait as you think about it.

Did you really think about it or did you just skip down to this sentence without thinking?

Stop that. Stop skipping to the next sentence. I’m putting extra blank lines here to give you an opportunity to think. Go ahead and think.

What’s that? You forgot the question? Oh, sorry. The question was: Why is the year 1963 significant?

Okay.

Have you thought about it?

Good.
I trust that you did the right thing. If not- shame on you. Shame.

Well, you probably guessed the answer. The year 1963 was important because that was the year the following happened:

-A TV channel named WTEV (later changed to WLNE) went on the air in Providence, RI on January 1, setting the stage for the events that followed.

-Boston was defeated by San Diego in the AFL championship game on January 5.

-The nuclear submarine USS Thresher sunk to the bottom of the ocean a few miles from Boston on April 10.

-Belgian citizen Aurele Vandendriessche won the 67th Boston Marathon on April 19.

-The Boston Celtics beat the Lakers in the 17th NBA Championship on April 24.

See what’s going on here?

Do I have to spell it out for you?

I’m gonna give you another minute to process the facts as we go to the next chapter.

Chapter 7: Waking You Up from “The Matrix” of Lies About Global Warming

Alright, you’ve had a chapter break to think about this.

Do you see the connection between these historical events in 1963?

If you guessed “global warming,” you guessed RIGHT.

Here’s how it all went down:

TV stations started to become business, they needed big stories, so they made up global warming.
CHECK. MATE.

The End


-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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My "legitimate" books are on Amazon here and my Phony McFakename books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I only really post regularly on Instagram.

Favorite Quotes: July/August 2019

“I know I was the best CIA agent that the CIA ever had, but I thought I told you honkies from the CIA that Black Dynamite was out of the game!”

“The worst thing about these dealers getting children addicted to this new smack, is that these children are ORPHANS…. And orphans don’t have parents.”

“I am declaring war on anybody who sells drugs in our community.”

“But Black Dynamite, I sell drugs in our community!”

-Black Dynamite

"You just killed a helicopter with a car."

"I was out of bullets."

-Live Free or Die Hard

“Reality is a library.”

-Philip K. Dick, Exegesis

“We got a killing spree on our hands.”

“The word 'spree' makes it sound fun, but it isn't.”

“You don't understand, I've had 236 partners and I've fallen in love with every single one of them.”

“They don’t let people in coach kill people in first class.”

“That’s true, that’s a rule.”

-Angie Tribeca

"To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death."

-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I've got places to go, people to kill!”

“Life's a joke, then you croak.”

-Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II

“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning. We shall remember them.”

-Laurence Binyen

“I am the Robot Ninja, and I kick ass.”

-Robot Ninja

“Mom, I told you I’m not interested in girls. Horror is my only passion.”

-Los Espookys

“Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”

The Long Walk

"Before the cops even began to question her, they thought Mary might be hiding something. She looked down too often, and down was the direction of the devil."

"Mr. Spelling gave Riles the evil eye. He could have had a devil in his eyeball because it looked as if some tiny demon was pushing inside out."

-Christopher Pike, Execution of Innocence

"What are you kids? I try to talk to you, and it's like you're out in space or something! All this jazzy talk and jokes! It's all a game to you!"

"And right as soon as you get with it, we change the rules!"

-The Happening (1967)

“Report back to me when it makes sense.”

-Burn After Reading

-B.P. Kasik/Phony McFakename

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My "legitimate" books are on Amazon here and my Phony McFakename books are on Amazon here. I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I only really post regularly on Instagram.

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