Celebrating 20 years: The top 10 posts and SPFBO thanks

The year was 1997, and I had just logged on to the internet. After a few months of cruising around and checking things out, I came up with some big plans. I'd always wanted to be an entertainment writer and own a bookstore, and the internet put those possibilities in front of me.

On the World Wide Web, I could reach an audience that would appreciate my reviews of heavy metal music and fantasy books like the readers of the newspaper that I was writing for at the time never would. Associates programs gave me the opportunity to have a book and music store without a lot of the hassle of actually running a book and music store. It was the perfect storm, so I thought.

That led to the launch of two sites on the old members.aol.com servers, The Hall of the Mountain King (viewable via the Internet Archive), which served as landing page and music site, and The Bookwyrm (also viewable via the Internet Archive), which housed my book content. In my mind, these two sites would eventually become go-to hubs for content on fantasy fiction and heavy metal. As you can see, that didn't work out quite as I'd planned.

Review: "The Walking Dead: Compendium Two"

It took me a while to get through “The Walking Dead: Compendium Two” ($59.99, Image Comics) because I put it on pause for a while, debating whether I wanted to go beyond what I’d seen on the television version.

As I mentioned in my review of the first volume, reading through this is something of a different experience for me. Usually, I’m very familiar with the literary basis before I watch the film adaptation, but my introduction to The Walking Dead came via the AMC show.

Adding to that is the fact that I haven’t had cable in a number of years, so I’m running a season behind everyone else on the TV show. So I stopped at the pivotal moment in Alexandria that ended the last season. Ultimately, I decided to push on, and I’m glad I did because some of my friends who are current with the TV show would have spoiled a big plot point for me if I hadn’t.

Review: "The Walking Dead: Compendium One"

I received “The Walking Dead: Compendium One” as a Christmas gift, and mowed through it thanks to an unfortunate cold that kept me laid up during the New Year holiday weekend.

It was a very interesting experience for me, backwards from the usual. In most cases, I’m very familiar with the source material before I go into TV and movie adaptations. This time, I had about five seasons of the TV show under my belt without having read the comics.

SPOILER ALERT: Before I go any further, I’ll tell you that if you haven’t read the comics or watched the first few seasons of the show and plan to, you may want to stop here. I’ll be discussing the similarities and divergences between the two, and you may learn some things you don’t want to know.

Now that’s out of the way, I’ll start by saying that I was a little surprised at how very different the two are. Though they follow the same basic story arc, so much has been changed. I wondered constantly while reading this whether I would have the same appreciation for the show if I had read it before or if I would have been angry about some of the changes.