Saturday 16 January 2021

Lupine Book Club is dead -- long live Lupine Transmissions

 G'day gang,

If you've been visiting this sire of late, you'll notice it hasn't been updated much of late -- nothing through 2020 at all, in fact!  

The reasons for this are myriad, but I guess the simplest is that I lost my interest in running this particular site. My headspace is in a very different place from 2012, when this began; back then I was in the process of recovering from a bit of a breakdown and writing was very therapeutic. 

With that said, it was never really what I wanted it to be; I had visions that were more aligned with something like Dinosaur Dracula or The Surfing Pizza, and somewhere along the way it just fell into me buying a lot of Funko POPs and Lego. 

That's not to say I'm not proud of a lot of the stuff on here; I definitely had a lot of fun, and I hope you guys enjoyed reading it. 

But with that said, it's time for something new -- and I've recently launched a podcast called LUPINE TRANSMISSIONS, focusing on all things strange, dark and unusual.   

You can download it here directly through the AUX Network. It's also available on Spotify, Stitcher and Apple. 

Meanwhile, you can also find me over at Instagram via @lupinetransmissions

I'm sure I'll post the odd update here and there, but these are the best ways to find me these days. 

Tuesday 8 October 2019

Lupine Transmissions - Broadcast 1 available now

I've been very, very quiet on here on year -- and that bums me out a little, as I've indicated in the sparse number of posts I've made. I've done some stuff over at Astral Noize and We Are the Mutants, but the Lupine Book Club has been a but neglected in the process.

But I've had a good reason -- over the last couple of months I've been working on my first e-zine, Lupine Transmissions. And now it's finally ready!

As some of you will know, I've been running this site since 2012.  But the gap between why I started that site and why I enjoy writing today has become an increasingly widening chasm. I wasn’t confident in the prospect of rebranding the site entirely. The structure that the site itself is built on is also ageing, and I am not a proficient behind-the-scenes tech guy.

An e-zine seemed the logical solution, and so Lupine Transmissions was born. It’s a format that could be true to the spirit of the site’s origins while also covering a far broader range of subject matter. So with that piece of self-promotion out of the way, what can you expect to find within its pages? 
  • In this issue’s main feature, I speak with Dr Laura Thursby about the cultural influence of UFOs and extraterrestrials.
  • Grindhouse Classics takes a deep dive into Lucio Fulci’s 1981 release, The Beyond  
  • DJ Studded Leather Gauntlet sends his consciousness all the way from Reno, Nevada to talk his radio show, EVIL SPELLS
  • Enter the Crypt rounds up some of some of the best metal releases of the last few months
  • Stu Horvath and John “Hambone” McGuire from The Vintage RPG Podcast drop by to talk Dungeons & Dragons – and let you know which edition is their favourite. 

Each issue I hope to feature a mix of metal, tabletop gaming, paranormal/occult and horror. As you might imagine, I’m still feeling my way a bit with this one and I’m not totally certain on release schedule. Maybe quarterly? Broadcast 2, as you’ll see on the back cover, is scheduled for December.

Beyond that – well, as with any creative endeavour it will depend on reader interest. So make sure you tell your friends and get this bad boy distributed far and wide! And don't worry, the blog isn't going anywhere for the forseeable future either. More updates are still planned for the near future. 

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Broadcast One of Lupine Transmissions. You can download it here -- it's best viewed on a tablet or PC screen, rather than a phone. 


Tom G. Wolf, October 2019 


Friday 19 July 2019

New article at We Are The Mutants - Men in Black

If you've been reading the site for any length of time, you'll know that I have a longstanding interest in the unexplained and paranormal. Particularly UFOs and all of their associated phenomena! Well, given that the new Men in Black film was just released, I thought it was time to take a closer look at the possible real-life origins for their entry into the wider discourse around UFOs.

You can find my piece over at We Are the Mutants -- Harbingers of Paranoia: How Men in Black Infiltrated the UFO Phenomenon.

Wednesday 3 July 2019

New review up at Astral Noize -- Ulver's Drone Activity

Yep, been a while between posts again. This time it's mainly been because my old laptop has been on its last legs for a few months, making writing for extended periods on it difficult at best and totally impossible at worst.

But fear not! I have a new laptop, which is much easier to work with. So I'm hoping to be posting again soon with some kind of regularity. In the meantime, here's a piece I did for Astral Noize -- a review of Ulver's Drone Activity. I've been an Ulver fan for...ooh, about 14 or 15 years by now.  This album is one of my favourites from them. If you like ambient or drone, this one is definitely worth a listen.

You can read the whole thing here.

Thursday 18 April 2019

New article up at Astral Noize

This week I wrote a piece over at Astral Noize, about one of my pickups from this year's Record Store Day -- High on Fire's Bat Salad EP. You can read it here. Enjoy!

Saturday 16 March 2019

New article at We Are the Mutants - Faces of Death

Well, it's again been far too long since I posted on here. Work remains busy, and I haven't had much time for the blog in the last couple of months. But articles are planned, and I haven't forgotten about you.

However, I did recently publish a new piece over at We Are the Mutants. In To Witness the Final Moment: 40 Years of Faces of Death, I take a closer look at cult phenomenon and video nasty Faces of Death, as well as the pre-digital days of "deathsploitation" media. I hope you find it an entertaining read, though I should warn that it may be a bit of a confronting read.

In the meantime, thanks for hanging in there -- I hope to have some new articles up in the next week or so. 


Saturday 5 January 2019

The Lupine Book Club 2018 Roundup


Well, we’ve come to the start of 2019, which seems totally insane to me. Where did last year go? Christmas and New Year’s Eve were both good, and probably the ones I’ve enjoyed the most in quite a number of years. I worked in retail for many years, so I still get seasonal dread accompanying this time of year, but it’s finally beginning to fade as the years go by. I hope you enjoyed yours, too – or if you don’t celebrate, that you had a good time nonetheless.

In last year’s roundup, I mentioned it was the first time in a while that I had really begun to feel like myself again. That continued this year, but there were still big chunks of 2018 where I felt I was pretty much operating on autopilot – get up, go to work, go home, sleep, repeat. Things were busy, busier than I would have liked at quite a lot of points.

In practical terms, this meant I read hardly any books, only made it to the movies a handful of times, listened to an absolute bare minimum of new music and didn’t watch too many new TV series. Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned that they’d finished around 150 books this year, which is absolutely staggering to me. 

You would have also noticed that blog has been pretty quiet the last few months – but don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about it. Just the overall busyness contributing to the autopilot factor, I guess.  And to be fair to myself, most of this was down to simple logistics; for the first half of the year I was devoting pretty much every waking moment to Lost Tunnels, while the second half saw me starting at a new job. Both of these are time-consuming enterprises, and that means other stuff has to get left out by necessity.

I should add that I had a pretty positive year on the whole. My book, Lost Tunnels, came out – please buy and read it if you haven’t already – and I’ve really been enjoying my new day job too. And I did watch a bunch of wrestling and listen to a ton of podcasts, I guess. 

So while I’ve never been a big one for New Year’s resolutions, as 2019 kicks off I find myself reflecting on some of the things I can do better over the coming 12 months. So here we go – if you’ve got any of your own, feel free to share them in the comments below. 

1. Get better with time management

Really, this is the font from which everything flows. I wrote an article earlier this year about writing, and I mentioned that time management is an important part of ensuring you find time to write. But you’ll notice I also said I’m a natural procrastinator, and unfortunately that hasn’t changed either. So I’m trying to make a conscious effort to be more judicious in my use of social media in particular. It will never cease to amaze me how much time I can waste on it.  

2. Get into better shape

As I mentioned above, one of the things I have spent quite a bit of time doing this year is watching wrestling. Your own feelings on that will vary wildly, but I know that for me it’s been a bit of a wake-up call to start taking better care of my health. I’m now in my thirties, and accordingly there’s been a natural slowdown of metabolism – but it’s not all down to that, and I know there are some lifestyle things that I need to take control of more effectively. I’m overweight and that’s not going to change without a concerted effort on my part. So 2019 is the year for change!  

3. More targeted collecting

The problem with being a collector is that it’s very easy to buy something without necessarily thinking about how that thing will fit in with your collection, or even within your house. I’m sure many of you can relate.

For example, in spite of not actually reading all that many, I did buy a ton of books in 2018. Now to be fair, I give a lot of books away once I’ve read them – they won’t be taking up space forever. But for the meantime, there are quite a few just lurking there both on my bookshelf and on my psyche.

In practical terms, this year I definitely plan to take a longer, harder look at things I plan to buy before actually pulling the trigger. And probably cull a bunch of stuff I simply don’t need. I don’t really buy into the minimalism trend, but there is something to be said for doing a bit of a spring clean every now and then.

4. More targeted writing goals

One of my highlights at the end of last year was that I’d finished the first draft of my horror novella, Lost Tunnels. Well, I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I self-published it in June of this year. And if you haven’t already given it a read, you really should! Inspired by my old hometown and Lovecraftian weird fiction, my sister called it “nightmare fuel” which is one of the highest compliments I could have asked for. You can find it here for Kindle.

But where to now? Obviously I want to do another one. But what will it be? That’s a big question, one that I’m still nutting out. I'll keep things updated on here as I know more. 

In 2018 I wrote some stuff that I was really proud of, particularly over at We Are the Mutants – I hope you enjoyed it too. There are plans for more into the future. But I also spent a lot of hours working on stuff that felt like, and probably was, a waste of time and energy. Believe it or not, I frequently get people asking me to write things for them, and I try to be very selective when saying “yes”. It’s easy to underestimate just how long things can take to produce, and the temptation for greater exposure is often very hard to say no to.

There was one site I stopped writing for in 2018. I don’t want to trash it at all, because it’s a good site and the people who run it are nice and very professional. But the work I was doing simply wasn’t translating into additional attention for me or my work, which was a stated part of my goal in doing it in the first place. It would be a very valuable opportunity for others looking to build a portfolio when they’re starting out – but given that writing is already my day job and I have this blog, it simply wasn’t delivering what I’d been hoping it would. It was time to cut the cord. If you’re a writer starting out, don’t be afraid to do the same if you feel that the working relationship isn’t mutually beneficial.

Well, that’s it for me. Hopefully you found something useful in there for yourself, too. As always, keep your eye on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to keep up to date on what’s happening with me and the Lupine Book Club.