Kickass Trailer: "Apollo 18"

According to IMDb, Apollo 18 is "about the real mission to space in the 1970s that was canceled by NASA."

In this found footage film, the audience watches as their moon mission becomes one from hell when the crew, one by one, begins to get killed off by aliens.

Learn more about Apollo 18 and it's April 22 release here.

Hello from Eastern State Penitentiary

Sorry, but no guest post for this week. Instead, take a look at these photos I took during a recent visit to Eastern State Penitentiary, a former prison in the center of Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood.

It's supposedly one of the most haunted places in America, but I didn't see any ghosts (well, except for maybe this cute little guy I found on a wall).


However, it is a very creepy, ruined, looming building that's worth checking out for the atmosphere alone.

Ghost Cats is an art installation in the prison. These cat statues are everywhere, representing the stray cats that resided in the prison after it closed in 1971.

Some writing I found on walls of a cell.

Prison cell where no famous criminal stayed.

Prison cell where Al Capone stayed.

"There is No Bird" by Richard Dansky

There is certainly not a golden bird, caged just above my heart.

That would be silly. He’s on the other side. A little higher than the heart, I think–that’s where I feel the fluttering. When I cough, or lose my breath, or just hold very, very still when he thinks I’m not paying attention.

The fault is mine. I caught him. I put him there. One lung down, the other failing, and so I did what any sensible man would do – caught a mythological creature, bound it to my breast with half-understood magics, and lived in fear of its leaving every moment thereafter.

Because the bird will leave someday. That I know. He will burst through the bars of his prison and shatter them. Shatter me. Leave me behind, broken and gasping and empty, and forget me as he flies away. He is immortal, after all. Were I to keep him for a hundred years, it would be as nothing to him. But he will be free.

This will happen. I have seen it in a dream, heard it in the song he sings late at night when sane men have long since gone to sleep. He is warning me, I think. It is a kindness, or a warning, or a torment. His ways are inscrutable, as, perhaps they should be. He is, after all, eternal. He is, after all, not human.

He hasn’t left me yet. I don’t know why. Pity, perhaps. Or fear.

Silence.

Flutter.

I wait.

About Richard Dansky

Named one of Gamasutra’s Top 20 Game Writers, Richard Dansky is the Central Clancy Writer for Ubisoft/Red Storm. He has written for groundbreaking series such as Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six, as well as contributing extensively to tabletop RPGs in White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting. Richard is the author of five novels, including Firefly Rain. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and their inevitable cats.