SameOldSchmidt

All of us at Dead Lantern were pretty excited and flattered to be mentioned in the current issue of Rue Morgue magazine. We get a nice little blurb in an article about horror podcasts.

Here’s the blurb: Weekly podcast hosted by the acerbic creators of comprehensive horror website Deadlantern.com Topics include the latest theatrical and DVD releases, convention reports and a frequently hilarious segment called “Splatterpiece Theatre”, wherein the hosts perform dramatic interpretations of their favourite scenes from gore flicks.

I know it’s not some huge deal or anything, but it’s pretty darn neat for us. I don’t know if I’ve ever been described as “acerbic” before; I’ll take it as a compliment!

Last night we lined up a sitter and went out to a few places with some friends. We started at Knickerbockers for 25cent tacos, which is always fun, and They really are pretty decent tacos for a quarter.

Then we went to the Dark Visions Haunted House on 16th street, just a little south of O. We were all pretty skeptical before going in, thinking it would probably be lame, but it turned out to be very good. Admission was $9.00 per person, which is a bit high. The consensus in our group was that if it were more like $5.00, we’d recommend everyone go check it out. I guess I’d still recommend people go even at $9.00, because the Dark Visions folks really put some effort into it and it’s a once-a-year thing. I have no idea how their business model works; They had several “actors” inside the house and I assume each of them gets paid something, so maybe $9.00 is what they have to charge to make it worthwhile for them? We’ll be reviewing the haunted house on an upcoming episode of the Splattercast, so I’ll save some comments for that.

After the haunted house we strolled over to the Starlite Lounge, which I’d never been to before. It’s a 60’s theme joint, pretty classy as far as bars go. I almost felt like I should have been dressed a little nicer. They have pretty good drink specials on Thursdays and even hand out free appetizers. I’m sure we’ll go back again.

All in all, a very fun night. Tina and I will enjoy catching up on all of these interesting places to go here in Lincoln.

You may want to take a last look at Dead Lantern, because later tonight I’m going to obliterate the whole site and remake it using WordPress, somewhat similarly to what I did with my blog here.  A responsible professional would set up an isolated test site and get all the details hammered out before doing the conversion, but I’m feeling lucky so I’m just gonna nuke it and then make things up as I go along.

Like this site, I had originally coded Dead Lantern totally from scratch.  I was proud of it, and it worked pretty well for our purposes.  Definitely quick and streamlined compared to some of the complex features in a package like WordPress.  The DL users will have to get used to a somewhat slower experience when they post, and maybe the pages will load a bit slower (but we’re talking milliseconds).

I think it’s the right thing to do for the site.  Dead Lantern is a great site and our small crew is awesome, and we do have a nice little following (shout-outs to all the Splattercast listeners!) but I can’t deny that other sites have better blogging features and DL ends up looking a little amateurish in certain spots.

I can’t cling to my simplistic yet lovingly-crafted code forever, I need to move DL into the modern era with reader comments, easy uploads for the posters, permalinks, RSS and all that other junk that people expect from a modern site.