JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

It takes two hours in the make-up chair with the brilliant prosthetics artist Cheryl Cabanos and her team administering pee-smelling latex and shreds of toilet paper to your face.

We play a zombie in Ang Huling Henya (The Last Genius), written and directed by Marlon Rivera. Specifically, ourself as a zombie. Yes, years of bugging our friends to give us cameos in their movies has paid off at last! Marlon warned us that a zombie’s life is hard: you get more make-up on than a drag queen, and sticky with sugar syrup blood. That’s actually what sold us on the part.

The make-up would’ve taken another three hours, but Marlon explained that we were only a 6-hour-old zombie and not yet in total disintegration. Also we could keep our glasses on.

So two hours to apply the prosthetics and just five minutes to rip it off. As a bonus, your zits and blackheads come off with the latex, so it’s like a facial.

Ang Huling Henya opens in late May.

Half the year is over (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa) but you still have time to show your colleagues, clients and competitors a sight they won’t forget.

Beautiful, hideous science-fiction and horror masks knitted by Tracy Widdess. via io9.

This one says, “We’re not parting with our network for less than Php200 Billion.”

And this one gives you credibility when you cry, “Of course it’s a super-duper-mega-monster-blockbuster-bonanza! Don’t listen to the people who actually saw it!”

Can’t argue with that face.

Meanwhile, in art crime news, read the curious case of the Spongebob artist, three ninjas and a gallery owner.

Consolata and I were talking about meanness. “I was much meaner when I was younger,” said Consolata.

“You mean before Frodo threw the Ring into the fire??” I asked.

How do you know Sauron is a bitch? Because he looks like a flaming vagina.

Consolata mentioned the time that he (Yes he is a he) had an assistant who was a college graduate but had no idea what percentages were. “One-fourth is what percent?” he asked, and the assistant wrote “14%”. “I want you to go to each of your teachers in elementary school, high school and college and apologize,” Consolata declared. “Tell them you wasted their time.”

But Consolata’s meanness—more crankiness really—was provoked. We recalled The Meanest Person We’ve Ever Heard Of. This man noticed that in his garden a bird had built a nest in a tree. The bird had laid three eggs in the nest and was incubating them. One day when the bird flew off in search of food, the man took the three eggs and hard-boiled them. Not to eat, which might have made sense. No, he put the hard-boiled eggs back in the nest. To see if the bird would continue incubating them.
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Movable concrete walls seal everything in.

Read The First Zombie-Proof House.

Here is one of M.C. Escher’s symmetry drawings. Look at the white spaces and you see angels. Look at the dark spaces and you see devils.

It’s like humans. ‘Normal’ people turn into monsters. The person you least expect to do something courageous becomes a hero. How does this happen? The American psychologist Philip Zimbardo proposes an explanation in his TED talk from 2008.

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There’s a lovely piece on Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, Cronos) and his horror iconography in the New Yorker. Read it here.

Does this article put you in the mood for a little H.P. Lovecraft? Check out the H.P. Lovecraft Archive. Everything online, don’t you love the internets?