The B-Masters Cabal

…aaaaaaaaaand sinking right back down again.

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Sigh.

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Glad to see the back of a truly diabolical 2023, currently fooling myself that 2024 will be different…

Best wishes to all the hangers-in-there!

Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

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…well, obviously not gloom of night.

Nothing, it seems can stop our fireworks from going ahead, which over the last three years have thumbed their noses at the worst bushfires we’ve ever had and two different manifestations of a pandemic.

So of course I had to share:

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Things are pretty disastrous here, so I can only hope that life is being kinder to the rest of you. There doesn’t seem much to say beyond “Take care” and “Good luck”, so I will say both most sincerely. Here’s hoping that 2022 gives us a break—and sooner rather than later.

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(Ahem. The other thing I should say is—apologies to those people I owe emails. You know who you are. And more to the point, so do I.)

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.Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

Well.

If the last twelve months have taught us anything – and sadly, overall I suspect not – it’s that nothing – not raging bushfires, not a global pandemic – will be allowed to get in the way of our fireworks.

As was the case last year, there was much debate about whether the traditional New Year’s display was appropriate, and many calls to cancel; but as was also the case, in the end cancelling was viewed as unhelpful and depressing. A compromise was reached by clamping down on attendance, cancelling just the earlier, family-timeslot display and shortening the midnight celebration.

And let’s face it: few years ending have required celebrating more than this one just past.

I don’t often go in for communal activities but in 2020 I got into the spirit of things by having a crushing disaster of a year. Things have recently eased slightly, prompting extremely cautious optimism about many things, including my writing; but I’m not going to be stupid enough to make promises.

Instead, I will simply send best wishes to all our friends here, and join you, I imagine, in hoping for much better in 2021.

…to quote my old friend Arthur Wellesley.

I know that you guys like starting the year with a fireworks image, but this time you went very close to not having one—because we went very close to not having any fireworks.

Given the catastrophic fire conditions in the country, there was a strong push for cancelling our usual NYE celebration, and for very cogent reasons; and an equally strong push back for keeping it. Some people, in the current circumstances, found the display disrespectful; some were for keeping it more or less as an act of defiance, of refusing to buckle under. Others, sensibly enough, pointed out that we have quite enough smoke in the air already.

In the end, the winner was probably pragmatism: the display had been fifteen months in the planning, and was fully paid for and was ready to go; while as always, thousands of people had travelled in from all over the world to see it. It is an event that pours some $140 million into the economy: money which hopefully goes without stint and without delay to our emergency services.

So it is with slightly mixed feelings that I post our usual New Year’s greeting.

What is not as all mixed, however, is our gratitude to all of you who visit this blog and our sites. Your continued support means more than we can say.

 Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

 
So far our Roundtables this year have been all about celebrating the past; this time it’s about looking to the future—whether by adding a new section, taking the existing ones in new directions, or by finally getting to that project…
 

Please join us throughout November for Part 4 of 20th anniversary celebration!

 Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

 
The third part of our year-long anniversary presents an opportunity that some of us are sorely in need of…
 
This time around, the Roundtable will be focused on those films that we always meant to get around to…that surely by now we should have gotten around to…that were THE ENTIRE REASON we founded our sites in the first place…
 
…but you know…it’s been a pretty hectic twenty years:
 

Please join us throughout August for Part 3 of our 20th anniversary celebration!
 

 Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

It’s that time again…

For the first part of our year-long celebration of our 20th anniversary, we tackled what we called our “core competencies”, that is, those topic areas we had in mind when founding our sites in the first place.

In this, not surprisingly, we dealt with material where there could well be overlap between our sites. For instance, El Santo reviewed From Hell It Came, a wacky walking-tree opus with plenty of mad science; so you would wouldn’t be surprised to find it over at AYCYAS! Likewise, Will tackled the first four parts of Shake Rattle and Roll, horror anthologies out of the Philippines, a country whose genre films Santo has examined on a fairly regular basis.

This time around, though, we’ll each be tackling what we’re calling our “special subjects”: those subgenres that each of us has pretty much entirely to themselves.

 
Terrifying but true: 2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of the B-Masters.

There have been many changes across those years, but our love of weird and wonderful films and our desire to share that love with our friends remains the same.

While we marked our 10-year anniversary via a reproduction-of-sorts of our first ever Roundtable, with all of us reviewing the same film, for this our 20th we’ve decided upon a different approach: an approach that allows us both to celebrate the joint venture that is the B-Masters, while also highlighting our individual strengths and passions.

This year, therefore, instead of individually-themed Roundtables, we are going to have four linked topics that reflect the aims of each of our sites.

First up, we’ll be going back to basics—with reviews that illustrate the “core competencies” of each of the B-Masters, those particular areas of interest that were a significant impetus in the founding of our sites in the first place:
 

Please join us throughout February for Part 1 of our 20th anniversary celebration!

 Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!