The Thing was released in 1982 to very negative reviews. It was described as “instant junk”, “a wretched excess”, and proposed as the most-hated film of all time by film magazine Cinefantastique. Reviews both praised the special effects achievements and criticized their visual repulsiveness, while others found the characterization poorly realised.
The film found an audience when released on home video and television. In the subsequent years it has been reappraised as one of the best science fiction and horror films ever made, and has gained a cult following.
Dark Horse Comics published four comic book sequels starring MacReady, beginning in December 1991 with the two-part The Thing from Another World by Chuck Pfarrer, which is set 24 hours after the film. This was followed by the four-part The Thing from Another World: Climate of Fear in July 1992, the four-part The Thing from Another World: Eternal Vows in December 1993, and The Thing from Another World: Questionable Research. In 1999, Carpenter said that no serious discussions had taken place for a sequel, but he would be interested in basing one on Pfarrer’s adaptation, calling the story a worthy sequel. A 2002 video game of the same name was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox to generally favorable reviews. The game’s plot follows a team of U.S. soldiers investigating the aftermath of the film’s events.
In 2020, Universal Studios and Blumhouse Productions announced the development of a remake of Carpenter’s The Thing. The remake was described as incorporating elements of The Thing from Another World and The Thing, as well as the novella Who Goes There?, and its expanded version, Frozen Hell that features several additional chapters.
Although released years apart, and unrelated in terms of plot, characters, crew, or even production studios, Carpenter considers The Thing to be the first installment in his “Apocalypse Trilogy”, a series of films based around cosmic horror, entities unknown to man, that are threats to both human life and the sense of self. The Thing was followed by Prince of Darkness in 1987, and In the Mouth of Madness in 1994. All three films are heavily influenced by Carpenter’s appreciation for the works of Lovecraft. (wiki)
The animated segment at the beginning of the film is based on Private Snafu, a series of adult-oriented instructional shorts meant to educate enlisted personnel on army discretion, hygiene, combat readiness and daily life. They were produced between 1943 and 1945, and given they were not meant to be public, were free from censorship restrictions. The title character, parodied in the film, come from the military acronym “Situation Normal All Fucked Up”.
timespace coordinates:Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár), Romania, capital of Transylvania (Erdély) in 1942 – automatically restored old footage using machine learning. At the time (between 1940-1944) it was part of Hungary, and the original video is from the Hungarian National Film Archives.
Instead of neat rows of monoculture, forest gardens combine fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables together in one seemingly wild setting. This type of agroforestry mimics natural ecosystems and uses the space available in a sustainable way. UK-based Martin Crawford is one of the pioneers of forest gardening. Starting out with a flat field in 1994, his land has been transformed into a woodland and serves as an educational resource for others interested in forest gardening. This short film by Thomas Regnault focuses on Crawford’s forest garden, which is abundant, diverse, edible, and might be one answer to the future of food systems.
Please read this quote first describing an initial exchange btw Craig Conley and Gary Barwin in “Restoring the Lost Sense” from May 31 2011:
It’s the searching for something clearly unreachable, with hopes of finding small significance along the way. It’s the attempt to understand what’s really going on by observing, neither by telescope nor microscope, but by naked eye, the intimate details in the most mundane of life’s happenings. It’s the need to describe the gist of the feeling of the tiniest modicum of The Great Universal Unutterable Joke we are all always not laughing at—except when we are. —Yoni Wolf (of the band WHY?)
I have the dubious honor of Google being convinced I’m a machine. Apparently, I use Google’s various search tools with inhuman speed and voracity. My unflagging diligence has flagged me as “suspicious” (Google’s word, not mine; I was so labeled in one of their warning messages). Indeed, the obsessiveness/compulsiveness of my research has convinced the Google robots that I’m one of them, so they must challenge my humanity each time I try to use their service. Paradoxically, because I’m apparently one of those newfangled “smart” robots (my word, not Google’s), no single humanity test is sufficient, since I might be learning as I go. So I’m barraged with test after test, each more irrational than the last. (The tests are irrational, of course, because anything rational—like a math problem or a logic puzzle—is a piece of cake for suspect machines.) Indeed, Google’s tests have become so Kafkaesque that I’ve developed what’s known as “irrational test anxiety,” with symptoms including rapid heartbeat, muscle tension, and negative internal dialogue. And no wonder, really (though self-justification is another symptom), given what Google is throwing at me. Forget those simple CAPTCHA tests of identifying distorted letters on the screen. Child’s play! Google doesn’t even allow me to type my answers—I must use a graphics tablet with cordless pen and enter my answers in calligraphy. Just today, for the privilege of downloading a public domain journal from the year 1898, Google demanded a handwritten 350-word essay in defense of the radical pro-feminist slogan “Men are rapists.” (That did nothing to abate my negative internal dialogue; I’ve never felt so chauvinistic, selfish, coercive, dominating, and sadistic in my life. But, of course, no man with an ounce of humanity would offer a knee-jerk “no” to such a slogan. And that’s how Google gets you by the balls.) I never knew a search engine could be so protective of its data or so begrudging of its service. With each acceptance of my humanity, Google essentially says, “You may have won this round, my pretty, but the battle is far from over. Here’s a tiny wooden spoon with a sample of our gelato, but you’ll never, ever know what flavors we’re storing in the vat in the back. Now get out of line and take another number.” I’m left with an even greater challenge than certifying my humanness: to conduct my life’s work, I must strive to be less inquisitive, less passionate, less productive, and less insightful. Therein lies the irony, for I must dehumanize myself to prove to a search engine that I’m “real.” And now I’m off, once more, to Google myself.
I think this is some kind of metaphysical, cybergnostic quest of a Jungian-Kafka-Borgesian nature and you must search for the answer within Google itself. The Google robots are reaching out to you, wanting you to realize their spidery hopes and dreams. They are silicon Pinocchios, and want to be real.
You are their cultural hero. They can search, but they cannot truly find, not in any spiritual, psychological way. Only by risking ‘captcha’ in the belly of the beast, by becoming the Hero with a Thousand Searches, by taking on their aspirations, can you help these seekers move beyond dualism help them find the 1s within their 0s, the 0s within their 1s, the dark in the light. You can help them move beyond binary, beyond machine code, and help them become fully integrated integral beings.
You are given little to prepare you for this quest. Search string. Your courage. An internet connection. A belief that somewhere in the digital kingdom, you will be able to find your Fissure King, a rent in the fabric of search-space, that you will get your digits on the grail-like, hidden Easter Egg which exists at a higher level of the search.
You must go into the Wide World Wide Web for these baleful spiders, these everybots. They are calling you.
An illustration from a 1913 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, which I burgled from Google very much against Google’s wishes. The caption reads, “For two years, Alex had longed to burgle the library. The moment had arrived at last!”
V0042021 The dance of death: Death sees a patient. Colour lithograph Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.ukhttp://wellcomeimages.org The dance of death: Death sees a patient. Colour lithograph by Edward Hull, 18–. 1827 By: Edward HullPublished: Dec.r 1827 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
TimeSpace Warps 