By Isaac Handelman

I just made a mistake. I screwed up. It was my first chance to provide my camp with a major upgrade, something that might improve the livelihoods of my compatriots, those I’ve come to think of as my friends and family. Lured in by the promise of upgrades to my satchel, I opted to buy an expensive set of leather working tools, dropping around one hundred dollars from my personal savings (more than half of what I had accrued since the disastrous failed robbery) as well as the entirety of the camp’s collective funds on the endeavor. As soon as I’d made the purchase, I regretted it. Buyer’s remorse in a world without refunds. A simple reality dawned on me: I had just chosen to purchase a handful of tools in order to improve my satchel’s capacity to hold herbs, ammunition, food, and other assorted goods. I’d never been out roaming the frontier lands and wanted for extra space on my person before; rather, I had been seduced by the luxurious promise of an upgrade to my personal abilities. I c...

I am not qualified to speak about the “best” films of 2018, because I have seen only a tiny handful of the myriad, wonderful films that released this year. I wish this were not the case. I wish I could say I’d seen every worthy film, from Shoplifters to Eighth Grade , Sorry to Bother You to Leave No Trace . But the truth is, I haven’t. I am a student and a freelance writer, and I do not have the time nor the disposable income that would allow me have a comprehensive knowledge of 2018 in film; the films I have seen are disproportionately American. But I still would like to share my favorite films of the year, however incomplete my filmic experience has been, and however much my feelings might change as I continue to absorb 2018’s cinema in the new year. So, here is my woefully incomplete portrait of a year that, for all its political toxicity and global violence, at least offered up some great movies. I’ll be doing my best to add one new entry on each of the last five days of this...

This article contains relatively major spoilers for all seasons of 'Channel Zero'. Nick Acosta’s Channel Zero is a show with so much to offer. At its highest points, it's the scariest thing on television, probably by a long shot. It can be so adept at its get-under-your-skin-and-make-it-crawl approach so as to rival the most unsettling sequences in popular horror media. But then it goes off the rails. Off the deep end. It takes things too far, and instead of going lovably bonkers, it just gets boring. This is not an isolated occurrence — I'd argue that it's happened, to an extent, in every season of this underappreciated SyFy anthology series, each incarnation of which adapts a different creepypasta story from the dark corners of the web. In the first season, Candle Cove , a blood-curdling opening scene gives way to a genuinely chilling mystery surrounding a shady children's TV show and a creepy, clicky, child-snatching tooth monster... and then the toot...

One cannot separate the art from the artist; they are deeply intertwined. To understand why, consider this scenario: We choose to study the films of Roman Polanski in-depth, without considering the fact that, while in his forties, the director raped a thirteen year old girl. On the surface, the argument is simple: we wish only to consider the art, the form of the films, the narrative content and the thematic subtext. We do not wish to get caught up in the personal life of the artist, however egregious his actions might have been, because such a line of inquiry is not relevant to a survey of the art itself. But then, we should surely be able to teach a similar class on the visual art of Adolf Hitler, who was famously rejected from an art school years before overseeing the mass murder of more than 11 million innocent people. Of course, that would be impossible. With the weight that the name "Hitler" carries, how could one possibly teach a class on his art without address...

The point is that you can never ever run out of things to write about. Just let your hand go, and it will write something. If you put no blocker on it, no filter, and you have no criteria, and just write whatever is flying through your brain down on a piece of paper, or a wall, or a table, or whatever it is you’re writing on, you can’t possibly run out of things to write because your brain is always firing, there’s always something shooting through it, every fleeting moment from its formation until your death — your brain-death, that is. If your heart is beating but your brain is blank, you aren’t really alive, because you can’t write anymore. At that point, you have truly run out of ideas.

Is anyone still thinking about Harry Potter? For the better part of the seven elapsed years since the release of the eighth and final installment in the film franchise centered on The Boy Who Lived, I have not been. But obviously, the franchise still has plenty of ardent followers — the ones who are lining up for the midnight premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, who have propelled Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to dizzyingly successful heights in London and on Broadway, and who continue to fuel J.K. Rowling’s seemingly endless world construction on part-fan-site-part-universe-expansion Pottermore. I, however, have fallen out of the loop. In 2011, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 entranced me. When it released, I was fourteen, about to begin high school, and nearing the tail end of a childhood that transpired very much in the midst of the Harry Potter phenomenon. To say that I was anything less than engulfed by the franchise for a majority of my youth...

If someone could create a pen that would never run out, I think I could entertain myself forever. When I run out of paper, I can write on walls and floors and ceilings. I can draw on them, too. Once I run out of those, I will start writing on the ground and the rocks and such. And before I run out of those, I will die. But the pen will not run out.