Tactical Highlighter #3

I have two movies on here thanks to my new subscription to the DVD delivery service with the hideous red colors and the unaccountable pop-unders which it continues to use to advertise itself despite the year being 2009. I don't know that I'll be posting movies regularly, but if I do, I'll keep them nice and obscure like the ones here.

Audio
• Some highlights from Hypersonic Tales: Big Wheel Estrangement, Delectable Cakes, and The Tea Party. Hypersonic Tales publishes very short stories in audio format. Their stories tend to be quirky science fiction fare and if you don't like a story, it's less than ten minutes before you're listening to the next one.
• James Durham's FETIDUS, a noir post-apocalyptic science thriller with ... ZOMBIES. This is probably the darkest thing I've ever recommended, and it is emphatically not for children or the easily offended. It is, however, one of the best podcast dramas produced to date. James Durham's talents aren't limited to writing. He also wrote and produced all of the music used in the podcast and some of the sound effects as well. Many of the characters are voiced by professional voice actors, and the amount of care and love that went into this production shows through. FETIDUS recently won two well-earned Parsec awards.
• J. Daniel Sawyer did a full cast production of the first chapter of Gail Carriager's Soulless. It's been described as Austen meets paranormal. The distinction I would make is that it is Jane Austen herself meeting paranormal with aplomb. I want the book yesterday.
• Dunesteef is a quirkly short-ish stories plus talking podcast I checked out recently. A lot of their work is Science Fiction in light terms, but they do a bit of thriller, horror, and quirk as well. My favorite pieces were Restoration Blues by Stewart S. Smith, and Scriptopia by Michael A. Kechula (second feature in a poem, story, story event). Restoration Blues is along the lines of classic White-Halls-and-Shiny-Buttons SF, but not by any means antiquated. Scriptopia is ... a very playful piece and I'll leave it at that.

Movies
• Primer. I happened upon this movie and the premise was too good to be ignored. It's a great movie, though the scientific content of the dialog can be more than a little difficult to understand. Other than that, its only real flaw is the title. It's not attention grabbing, just kind of mundane.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera is a dark dark allegory of the American health system. I'm not sure it was meant to be, but it fills the position very well. Definitely not for the kids, and there's quite a bit of violence. But it has Anthony Stewart Head, and it's very entertaining. This one doesn't feel that obscure to me, but only because some of my friends are in love with it and talk about it all the time. I've never heard anyone else talk about it, so I feel free to assume that this is pretty obscure.