Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 11/29/24

Black and Blue Friday edition

Everyone here at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker hopes you had exactly the kind of Thanksgiving celebration that you wanted to have, whether it involved an elephantine amount of carbohydrates and hours of college football at the Doritos Concussion Bowl, or eating roasted carrots and vegan gravy while binge-watching the Hallmark channel.

Making Merry over here. Nothing but a party.

2024 Holiday Gift Guide

Chalk this up under “Things you didn’t know you needed and are really glad you have it.” This is the 2024 NTAB Holiday Gift Guide, a useful list of ideas to help smooth out your shopping odyssey. There are several old favorites included, as well as a few options that are both timely and topical. The Holiday Gift Guide is available in PDF form at this Google Drive Link:

The 2024 NTAB Holiday Gift Guide

Please download it to your preferred device and lower your blood pressure as we tumble towards the home stretch and the end of the year.

For those of you who may well be wondering, “Hold on, why exactly do I even need your recommendations for Christmas shopping this year?” Two reasons for that.

1. You can easily get vapor-locked trying to come up with something to get that certain special someone...I mean, there’s an infinite variety of options to choose from. What if you get the wrong thing? Yeah, that can happen, but when you are given a choice from three, four, or even five things and you’re told to pick the best one, it’s a lot easier to do.

2. I wrote it, and in my signature chatty, avuncular, and irreverent style.

Want to Pull a Job?

Hey, are you a tabletop gamer? Do you want to break bad, steal some shit, disrupt the nefarious actions of the 1% and live like kings? You’re going to need a little help, especially if you don’t know where to start. Don’t worry, I got you covered. Over on DriveThruRPG, I’m floating a bundle of titles, including Polite Society #1 and #2, Tools of the Trade, and Ogre’s 11, all in pdf for $33. That’s 25% off the regular price. This bundle won’t hang out for long—only until the end of the year—so if you want to take advantage of that, best to do it sooner rather than later.

Last Chance to Save 25%

This newsletter is free, and always will be. Some of you, though, have elected to support my efforts in a more direct way, for which I am most grateful, and to show my appreciation, here’s a link to a 25% discount on a one-year subscription, if you wanna: https://ntab.substack.com/5fe3c81c This link is only good until November 30th.

Nuts to That

You may have noticed a certain fatwa has been delivered to you, as a value-added extra, called Keep Your Nuts to Yourself. That’s just good advice, and worth remembering. For those of you wondering exactly how many times I’m going to repost this article, the answer is: until you learn, people. Until you learn.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: everyone here at the DMR is exhausted after putting together the Holiday Gift Guide, and we’re still not exactly overflowing with Christmas spirit, even in the face of the oncoming crush of cultural pressure. The movie below isn’t a Christmas movie, at all, but we’re of the opinion that some counterprogramming is healthy for a balanced diet..

Woman of the Hour (Amazon)

Anna Kendrick stars in, and also directs, a suspenseful thriller based on a true story.

This dramatization of what is now known as the Dating Game Killer’s appearance on the eponymous game show is Kendrick’s first directorial outing and I have to say I’m impressed with how deftly the story moves, and also how accomplished the suspense elements come off. There’s a definite style, or maybe the beginning of one, in the movie, and I’d like to see what else she can direct.

Okay, now that I’ve told you that, I have a confession to make: I’d never heard of the Dating Game Killer until mid-October, when I saw a documentary (presumably re-released to take advantage of the movie) during a surf-scroll through one of the streaming channels, I think it was Hulu. I went through a serial killer/true crime phase in my 20s, and I’m very familiar with, um, all of that. This one somehow got by me, to my chagrin. No matter. You can look up the documentary on Hulu, I think. Just search for Dating Game Killer and it’ll pop right up.

My only concern with this movie is that I am worried it’s not a complete picture. It was easy for me to follow the story because I knew other things not mentioned that helped color in the blank spots. Could you watch this with no prior knowledge of the case? Probably. It’s not a deal breaker if you can’t, though, because there’s more stuff out there to answer any hanging questions.

Kendrick does a great job of taking us back in time, even if it’s a little heavy-handed. We know how predatory L.A. was in the 1970s and 1980s; then again, for people Under a Certain Age, this will all be new to them, and certainly worthy of a scolding tweet or other digital admonishment. Woman of the Hour is a decent introduction to this sidebar to the larger tapestry of true-crime-hunting-a-killer stories. It’s serious, without being scary, and even if you know how it all shakes out, you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat at least once or twice.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”