"Did We Take You by Surprise?"
This is only the beginning...
Hello there! Thank you for being here right from the start. Welcome to The Wooden Block Labyrinth, an exploration of the media, places, people, and ephemera that help make up a young life. This whole magilla is written by Mack Elder; you may have read my bylines at Screen Rant, Greatist, Depth of Field, and elsewhere; seen my panels at comic and media conventions; or, if you're here this early, you're a friend and you've heard me go on about these topics in person. Now they're available in a more structured format!
Every big opening deserves a good theme tune, so feel free to read the next bit with the following Jem and the Holograms tune underneath it:
So what is The Wooden Block Labyrinth? I'll talk about the actual origin of the name in a future post, but this space is about using the nostalgic objects of the past to build something cool for the future. I love writing about media but I've never been good about talking about the newest stories. The first writers I ever cared about on the internet were able to take the recent past and find new ground to plow within it, and all through college and my first years trying to make it as a writer I grabbed onto that idea. Every single story, every last item, every place in this weird and lovely world has something to tell us.
Future topics will include:
Allo Allo and the fight against fascism
How Sleater-Kinney created the greatest album ever made
Learning about the world from Today's Special
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! and relating to your parents
Godzilla: King of the Toy Chest
Matt X, Seanbaby, and how the Internet talks about itself
Isaac Asimov's forgotten masterpiece
The essential Doctor Who
...and more!
All of the topics will center around things I was obsessed with before I turned thirty, with most of them coming from my early-childhood fixations. I hope that you'll stick around and journey through the labyrinth with me.