those who spuff

The Dead Meat channel is putting together an anthology film to be shown in theaters next month (lol what the hell is this turnaround time). They put out a call for short films earlier this year, and now fan voting is part of their process for selecting which short films to include, based on one-line descriptions and short trailers.

I had a really fun time watching all the trailers and picking my ten favorites out of thirty. If that sounds like fun, you can vote too. You will need to confirm an email address. Voting closes Sept 10.

My picks under the cut with reasoning, in case you want to compare:

( my list )

Coyote vs Acme (2026). After years of his schemes failing due to faulty Acme products, Wile E. Coyote decides to sue, and he drags unwilling human personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) into the lawsuit with him.

You may have heard of this movie because three years ago, Warner Brothers decided to shelve the completed movie for a tax writeoff. Then there was a big hue and cry, and they grudgingly agreed to sell it instead (for $50M, so there is no way you can convince me that wasn't better for them than the tax writeoff). It has now finally been realeased in theaters by tiny indie distributor Ketchup, and the question is, is the movie worth all that bother? Can the actual piece of art hope to live up to the narrative around it?

Friends, I am pleased to report that this movie is a fucking delight and one of my favorite movies of the year. The sight gags are plentiful and very funny. The Wile E./Kevin dynamic is fun and sweet (and yes, I ship it). The integration of cartoon and live action worlds generally works and has a lot of fun little moments. The acting is generally solid, and there are some real highlights. It's got a lot of heart; I had feelings by the end! But most of all, it's just really clear that this movie was made with a lot of joy and care and love for the source material, and that feels ever more precious in our days of hypercapitalism and AI slop.

Some particular favorite parts:
- John Cena as the mean opposing lawyer, using classic intimidation tactics on... Tweety Bird.
- The hip hop song where all the censored bits were replaced with "beep beep"
- That Wile E. doesn't talk. He communicates entirely through pantomime and signs, and it's perfect.
- More that I'm definitely forgetting, but that's okay, pretty sure I'm going to see this again before it leaves theaters.

If I have any complaints, it's that the transition of the plot from climax to epilogue didn't quite work, and also I wish there'd been more female characters. It's basically just Kevin's intern niece and a single female cartoon. But these are quibbles. Absolutely bonkers that this is what WB wanted to shelve, as opposed to all the mediocrity they've released recently.

If this sounds like fun, go see it. For #art, and because it's just a really fun time.

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Buddy (2026). In the world of a forgotten 90s kids TV show about an orange unicorn named Buddy, things are starting to feel very wrong to the kids on the show.

Another viral breakout success, this is a horror movie that is basically about how Barney the Dinosaur was really creepy. It takes some pretty bold risks, structurally; we watch an entire episode of the show and part of another one before things start getting shaken up. There's a hard switch of POV and setting at one point.

Overall, I would say this accomplishes what it sets out to do. Buddy's increasing unhingedness is really scary, especially to kids with no resources, no adults to call on, and who can't even leave the world of the show. The violence begins offscreen (which is very good for all the confused parents who apparently didn't read the rating or genre and chose to bring their kids to see it) but escalates to some pretty gnarly on-screen gore, most of all on Buddy himself, which feels wrong in exactly the right way. The way the movie interacts with the TV world worked really well for me. The kid acting ranges from solid to really great; Delaney Quinn, who was nine or ten at the time, really carries the film. The movie also has just the right amount of lore, IMO. It doesn't overexplain, and I appreciate that.

I don't know if the movie does a lot more than what you expect from the premise, but it does execute that premise pretty well, IMO, and it captures some of that "little kid in a big scary world" vibe that was popular in a ton of the more traumatizing 80s kids movies (Return to Oz, An American Tale, The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy, The Brave Little Toaster, to name just a few).

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The Dog Stars (2026). In a world emptied years ago by a plague, survivor Hig (Jacob Elordi) flies his prop plane to get supplies, check on neighbors, and search for evidence that life can still be good. Costars include Josh Brolin as Bangley, Hig's "partner" in survival (no comment); and Margaret Qualley as Cima, a fellow survivor whom Hig discovers when he has to make an emergency landing.

This movie doesn't make a ton of sense. There are a bunch of roving, murdering bandits that threaten even Hig and Bangley's isolated outpost, to the point that Hig does daily recon to spot them. In Denver, desolate and lifeless and something like a decade out from the epidemic, there's still electricity, and apparently the roving bands struck straight out into the wilderness, because there are still tons of unlooted supplies, and Hig's own abandoned house seems to be untouched. And from this whole isolationist survivalist fantasy, we drop briefly into the bizarro fever dream of the Grand Junction survivors, which feels like it comes from some other movie.

This film also doesn't move very fast; it's more of a character drama than a thriller, but the characters aren't exactly complicated, either. (And this is after Elordi and Qualley brainstormed a bunch of "personalizing" touches for them; I can only imagine how thin they were in the original script.)

And there's some really clumsy writing at times. For example, the last fifteen minutes or so are a mess, structurally, like they tried to just jam all the novel's remaining plot and thematic points in whether they fit the movie or not.

So yeah, it's not very good, and yet I had a pretty good time watching it. For one thing, I'm a simple woman who just really enjoys Elordi wandering around being tall and sad, and we get a ton of that here. There's also copious gorgeous mountain scenery as Hig is flying around. I liked the Hig/Bangley relationship (yes, I ship this too), and Brolin is fun in the role. I have mixed feelings about how the story deals with Cima, but Qualley is always solid, and I enjoyed Hig and Cima's very slowburn romance as they're both mourning their respective dead spouses. (I really appreciated that Cima was married, too, and comes to the relationship with a similar amount of romantic and sexual experience.)

Overall, far from the worst I've seen this year, and I'm not mad I saw it. IMO it doesn't really deserve either the critical shellacking (38% on RT) or the cratering box office performance. I now have some OT3 feelings that I might explore via a Yuletide request or something.

CW for pet death.

I continue to read lots of short fiction this year. I have realized, extremely belatedly, that I prefer short fiction collections to have a Theme, whether that theme is "weird sea fantasy" (review upcoming) or "works by a single author." You'd think that described most collections, but I came to SFF through the old school short fiction magazines (like Asimov's and F&SF) and Year's Best collections, all of which were a total hodgepodge, thematically.

Anyway! Here are two single-author collections I have read this summer.

Black Juice (2004) by Margo Lanagan

I remember people raving about this collection when it came out, and I think I tried it and found it offputting and too dark. No surprise, it's now very much up my alley.

It's also really fucking good. Everyone was right. All the words I can think of to describe Lanagan's writing here are cliches: stuff like "fearless" and "confident." Almost every story is set in its own brand new world unlike anything you have ever visited or imagined, told from the perspective of an inhabitant of that world to whom all this is commonplace.

That's what a lot of fantasy and science fiction try to do, but Lanagan does it better. She never gets bogged down in explaining her settings. She is an absolute master of the flow of information, an underrated but vital skill for the speculative fiction writer: in her stories, you know exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it, no more and no sooner. There are no tedious expositional openings here.

And most importantly, her perspectives are truly alien in a way that very few authors can manage. The most memorable example to me is "red nose day", the story of two revolution-minded young men with a rifle, determined to take out as many of those oppressors of society as they can: clowns. Because in this story, clowning is where the greatest social power lies, and our POV character was so traumatized in his youth by his experience with one or more of them that he wants to burn the whole institution down. The story treats this premise with utter seriousness and never blinks. The clowns are not metaphors for anything. They're not a joke, and the story is not ironic. There's no implication that the guy's clown trauma involved something ordinary like sexual assault. This world of clowns simply is, on its own terms.

And the clown story isn't even one of my favorites! It's just the one that most readily illustrates the point: that every story here commits to its premise 110%, while leaving the actual point to the reader. There is no didacticism here.

Favorites
"singing my sister down" is the story in this collection you are most likely to have heard of; it won a bunch of awards that year. A young woman's extended family of children and adults make a mournful picnic on a tar pit to keep her company as she is executed by sinking into the tar until she suffocates, while the rest of the village watches from solid ground.

Nails that horror premise trifecta of simple, horrible, and completely original. It's incredible difficult to hit all three, and Lanagan makes it look easy.

In contrast, "sweet pippit" is probably the lightest story in the collection, about a herd of what are clearly elephants, though the word is never used, who break out of their enclosure to go rescue their their favorite human handler from prison. The elephant perspective here is just really delightful, showcasing that alienness Lanagan is so good at without ever leaving you in doubt about what is happening.

And "wooden bride" is about a young woman who never finishes things but is determined to complete her years of elabroate bride training, even when on the final day when she takes a wrong turn and gets lost in her own city on the way to the ceremony. There's some stuff going on here about patriarchy and slavish commitment to tradition, but honestly I think most of all it's about how sometimes we choose a goal for no reason that makes sense to anyone but us, and that's okay.

Least favorite:
"perpetual light" is the most conventional story in the collection, about a dystopian future of disease, destroyed environment, and mechanical animals to replace the wildlife long extinct. It's fine.

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This'll Make Things a Little Easier (2026) by Attila Veres

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I read Veres' first translated collection earlier this year and reviewed it here. The man himself translated this second collection.

This collection is shorter than the first and contains only six stories, all of around the same novelette length. I'm sorry to say there isn't a single one I loved, versus loving three or four in the last collection. This collection is also angrier and more focused on class inequality, and so the horror is more allegorical, I guess? Which is not my favorite mode.

Stories I liked okay
My favorite story is, unexpectedly, "Damage D10+7," about a young man who manages his all-encompassing existential terror via an elaborate series of daily dice rolls that together construct and operate his self-designed RPG. This works great until a) a player decides to rape a secretly all-powerful NPC, and b) the DM chooses not to record it, which causes both his game and the world to unravel.

I'm going to be honest with you, as someone who has only played D&D a couple of times and wasn't really into it, it hadn't occured to me until this story that D&D players would roleplay raping NPCs... but of fucking course they do. Of course they do.

Anyway, I think the point of this story is that even more than allowing the roleplay rape to happen in the first place, what really destroys the fabric of reality is our DM denying that it happened. Sexual violence aside, this story has a strong Philip K Dick cosmic dread vibe to it that I liked.

Meanwhile, "'a pit of teeth'" is about a man whose short story is translated into the language of a lost, possibly apocryphal tribe that doesn't believe in the concept of fiction. I didn't totally follow the mechanics of the fantasy element here, but I'm always down for a horrifying lost language, so.

Least favorite
"The Summer I Chose to Die" is about two thrillseekers who are getting high on every drug they can find while killing as many of the invading, sea-people as they can. Unfortunately I hated the main character and was deeply unmoved by his journey. A bummer, since it's the only explicitly Lovecraftian entry, and usually I like those.

In 2021, I started to get really bad insomnia. This almost exclusively manifested as waking up in the night or early morning and not being able to get back to sleep, usually because my brain was working too hard. Too many thoughts!!

I spoke with multiple health professionals, including a sleep specialist and my therapist, and no one had any ideas that helped me. I tried melatonin, THC gummies, middle-of-the-night yoga, progressive relaxation, upping my exercise regime, listing out all my thoughts... nothing worked consistently. I was regularly either going 1-2 hours short of sleep every day or spending up to 12 hours in bed in order to get the 9 hours I actually needed. Maybe most frustrating was all the times I was advised to form a bedtime routine, when getting to sleep at bedtime was never the problem. Everyone seemed mildly flummoxed by my form of insomnia.

Friends, I finally figured it out. I got the cheat code, and now I'm sharing it in case it works for any of you.

It turns out I have anxiety. This spring I started taking a mere 10mg of escitalopram (Lexapro) daily, and my sleep problems are basically gone. I can get up to pee and then just... go back to sleep. I cannot even tell you what a gamechanger this is, or how much more energy I have, or how great it is to feel like I can trust my own body again to do the thing I need it to do.

Am I really pissed that I had to diagnose this myself and ask for an anti-anxiety med all on my own, because no professional I spoke to in five years suggested it? Ha ha, don't even get me started. But better late than never!!!! So if you have the same kind of insomnia and haven't tried an anti-anxiety med, maybe it's worth looking into.