Aliens, space horror and growing up Evangelical

original art from MOTHERSHIP

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."  

Aliens came out 40 years ago this week and I thought I should talk about it.

When I was growing up my mom kept an extremely close watch on what kind of media I consumed. Cartoon ghosts were condemned as demonic. Fantasy magic was devil worship. Sitcoms where the characters had extramarital sex were deemed harmful to my moral fabric. Even the Archie comics I collected were, for a while, the Al Hartley Christian comics because that's all my mother would let me read. I had been exposed to horror themes as a child, largely through gaps in my mother's surveillance: the odd ghost story here, playing Doom in my neighbor's basement there. But after my parents' divorce, my mom started paying a little less attention, and was a little more lax in what she was willing to let me read or watch or play; in that space I was able to cultivate a great love for horror that has lasted to this day.

Twenty twenty five.

Gonna keep this one short.

This has been a really rough year for me. I've had rougher; the seven years since mom died have contained some of the worst moments of my life. While 2025 doesn't quite have the sheer level of awfulness that was the first few months after mom died, or frankly speaking most of 2021, or the last three months of 2024, it was still an absolute stinker of a year. I think the only thing that saved me was moving into my own apartment, even though I can barely afford it and am losing money fast living here. I also had a visit from one of my very best friends in the whole wide world, and that made a lot of difference.