Blog Archives
Opening Chernobyl Diaries
The ghostly, abandoned city of Pripyat is the setting for the new Oren Peli film Chernobyl Diaries.
For those of us who were alive at the time, the word Chernobyl—which at its essence means wormwood, fitting for a place which poisoned itself for centuries to come—is scary all on its own. I was fifteen at the time of the accident, and stories of what happened to you when you were exposed to too much radiation were rendered in gory detail around the school cafeteria. After all, images from ABC’s graphic The Day After, which had aired only two and half years before, had branded our minds.
An essay on the just-released Chernobyl Diaries, “Opening Chernobyl Diaries: the truth is scarier than the film,” is now over at the Dark Discussions Podcast Article Library at http://www.darkdiscussions.com/Pages/article_007.html.
Miss Storytown USA? It’s in living color here!
Sometimes you wake up and find a nice surprise in your Inbox. Today was one of those days.
I have very special memories of a place called StorytownUSA, which is now the Great Escape, inLake George,New York. One of the joys of today’s Internet is that it grows and grows, and if you’re looking for information or photos of something totally obscure from your childhood, Google it. Chances are you’ll find something—and if you don’t, wait a few months and try again. I’ve reconnected with so many amazing things, things I thought were lost forever, things I thought that only I was obsessed with. Thanks to the Internet, I’ve found there are loads of people just like me. None of us need dwell in isolation anymore.
That said, after my father passed away, I got my hands on tons of old photo albums loaded with goodies from my past. Each postcard or random shot of any of the amusement parks we visited became a treasure. There was, however, precious little ofStorytown,USA. Because of an article I was writing called “The Call of the Carnival,” I wanted more information.
I found a wonderful site called Storytown USA; a retrospective at http://stusa.wordpress.com/. I signed up to follow the blog immediately and, although my article “The Call of the Carnival” was published in July 2010, I have never stopped looking forward to the site’s posts. Every few weeks, new information and photos, new details appear. The site, in the past two years, has gotten quite massive.
Today I woke up and found that he wrote about “The Call of the Carnival” and his own reaction to it. Needless to say, it’s a big honor for me to be included in the only online, comprehensive “Storytown Museum.”
If you are a fan of Storytown USAand it’s beginning to languish in your memories, fear not. It’s alive forever at http://stusa.wordpress.com/. If you want to see what he said about “The Call of the Carnival,” you can check that out here: http://stusa.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/the-call-of-the-carnival/
Thank you, universe. I needed that today.
