The Furious (theatre) – I was going to try and be all clever by writing this relentlessly entertaining martial arts action movie had me at the moment the lead pulled out a hammer and started wailing away on the heads and appendages and torsos of the twenty or so guys who were impending his quest to find his abducted daughter, but the truth is, I was already fully on board from the opening scene. If you dug The Night Comes for Us and/or The Raid movies and/or The Roundup movies, then this one’s definitely for you.

Birds of Paradise (Oliver K. Langmead) – This speculative fiction fantasy  novel about the original Adam’s modern-day quest to find the now-scattered inhabitants (both flora and fauna) of the Garden of Eden reminded me, in the best way possible, of American Gods and The Library at Mount Char.

Concrete: Stars Over Sand (W/A, Paul Chadwick) – Concrete is a comicbook about a man whose brain/consciousness is transplanted into a giant concrete body (similar to The Thing) by aliens. It is not, however, a superhero comicbook like The Fantastic Four; rather, it’s a philosophical, beautifully illustrated and composed exploration of the quotidian reality of what it would be like to go through life as a half-ton, near-indestructible being while, internally, you’re still just a regular human. It’s one of my all-time favourite comicbooks, and after almost fifteen years, writer/artist/creator Paul Chadwick is finally releasing a new, five-issue mini-series through Dark Horse Comics..

Time Traveller – John Titor (Those Conspiracy Guys podcast) – John Titor claimed to be a time traveller from the year 2036. He first revealed himself in 1998, when he sent a fax to (of course) Art Bell via the Coast to Coast AM radio show. He then popped up on a bunch of internet forums in the early 2000s where he backed up his seemingly outlandish claim with a whole bunch of very detailed posts. Then, he disappeared, never to be heard from again. Being a time-traveller enthusiast myself, I’ve known about Titor for a while. I wasn’t aware of all the specifics, though, so I recently decided to seek out some additional information. Surprisingly, there’s not a whole lot out there about this guy, but I did find this terrific episode of the Those Conspiracy Guys podcast. Released back in December of 2015, it’s a granularly comprehensive, almost four-hour deep dive into the whole (probably fake, but maybe not …) Titor story.