Fadenfreude (German for “Thread Joy”) is my industrial metal music project. First established for February Album Writing Month in 2012, Fadenfreude has had two full albums release. Because of lack of funds, all of the albums were recorded in my apartment and sound very homemade.
Beginnings
Coming Soon
Discography
2012 – Die Bäckerei is Geschlossen
2015 – Musen
2015 – Musen EP
Cat cat Productions is a film production company of which I share half the duties of writer, producer, director (among many other things) with Ralph Blanchard. We are centered around the comedy genre. Founded in 2013, as of 2024, we have made 9 short films, and a few other various online-style videos.
Filmography
| Title | Genre (all comedies) | Year | Running Time |
| HOnTed DOG | Found footage horror/possession | 2013 | 8 mins 06 secs |
| Old Saint Dick | Holiday | 2013 | 4 mins 09 secs |
| Apple Die | Horror | 2014 | 4 mins 47 secs |
| Old Saint Dick 2: Old Saint Dick Goes to Jail | Holiday | 2014 | 3 mins 18 secs |
| U.PH.O. | 1960’s science fiction | 2015 | 6 mins 18 secs |
| Old Saint Dick 3: Slam Dunk Saint Dick | Holiday/Sports | 2015 | 7 mins 17 secs |
| Salmonrai | Kurosawa films/fantasy | 2016 | 11 mins 21 secs |
| Yeehawbanero | Sergio Leone westerns | 2017 | 17 mins 42 secs |
| The Brat Snack | John Hughes 80’s teen films | 2022 | 33 mins 06 secs |
rammfan518.wordpress.com (and later rammfan518.com) was a blog that I ran from Feb 2007 to 2015. While the site is still active and live, I have not updated it or written for it since 2015. From 2007-2011, posts were frequent. At the height, the blog had around 210 articles, with topics mainly going over reviews and thought-pieces regarding movies, video games, television, and other media. The subtitle of the website was “A blog about movies and life, which are often one and the same.” Rarely, a post about real life would seep in there.
My most popular articles were Top 10s and also what I would now call my “hot take” articles, which were often long rants about a particular piece of media. Reception to these was often highly negative. Some nerves must have been struck!
Sometime around 2014, I removed the majority of the articles, and kept just the most traffic-driving articles on the site. Due to the high number of hits, I have considered posting on the blog again, although the I hardly feel like the rammfan518 persona anymore.
As of July 2024, the site has 194,747 hits.
Notable Articles
Why Star Wars: Revan was a HUGE disappointment – where I describe what a massive let-down the novel Star Wars Revan was over the course of 7,000 words.
Lord of the Rings Conquest Review – A review that starts off level and then quickly devolves into anger talking about the game’s bad controls. The rant continues when I bring up the game’s canonical differences from Tolkien lore. Perhaps the most nerd-rage thing I have ever written.
The Legend of Drizzt and Why I Stopped Reading – A lenghty article where I explain the Drizzt series of R.A. Salvatore went down in quality with subsequent books. This one received a lot of heat from his horde of loyal fans.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II was a piece of crap…and how it could have been done better – where I take the truly dreadful, lazy, canon-breaking plotline of Star Wars: Force Unleashed II to task, and offer up an alternate take on the store.
The House M.D. Plot Formula – where I explain the plot formula for every episode I had seen of House. In truth, I had not seen many, but when I was forced to watch the show, it felt like I was watching the same episode over and over.
Negative Comments
From Jan 22, 2009: “my guess is that you just dont have any taste for good reading, so you can go and finish reading that collective lump of shit known as the twilight series, cuz someone without any ability to appreciate actual writing isnt worth my time.”
From Jan 29. 2009: “*smacks the writer of this*”
From June 10, 2010: “the books are genius and if u had any idea about forgotten realms nd all tht jazz then ud think so too so quit ur bitchin. seriously u deserve a smack by R.A salvatore himself. love the books and always will”
From July 30, 2011: “I really feel like america fucked up by giving idiots like you the ability to voice there ignorant opinions. Nothing you say makes any sense whatsoever. You sound like someone who jacks off to the wheel of time series. Please kill yourself. This is also my first time ever posting on a blog, and im 22 have been reading since 5. I wish I could see you so I could knock your fuckin lights out ppl like you make me wanna buy a sniper rifle. Goodbye sir and I hope you grow up”
Future
Gallery
**LIVING BLOG POST: Hello all. I am too busy to blog these days, but I nevertheless want to share some ideas with all of you. A “living” blog post is a blog post that is unfinished and can be added to later at any time, when time and fancy allows. Most of the time, the topics are big.**
Here is a list of fantasy media with reference to Tolkien’s Middle-Earth works, either by borrowing names or using concepts. This is by no means a comprehensive list. This is a list of creators who no doubt would have known about Tolkien and his works when they were making their own works. Perhaps authors had other reasons for borrowing such things.
Books
Forgotten Realms: Mithril making an appearance as the name of the Dwarven homeland, Mithril Hall. In the second book of the Icewind Dale trilogy, Streams of Silver, Bruenor Battlehammer and his friends decide to find the lost city of the Dwarves, called Mithril Hall. This is no doubt in a reference to Mithril, an Elvish term from Tolkien’s legendarium to describe the precious metal mined in Moria. Meaning “Grey Brilliance” in Elvish, mithril is also the material used for Bilbo (and later Frodo’s) chainmail vest. First editions of Streams of Silver write Mithril as such, but later editions spell it “Mithral”, replacing the I with an A. I have heard rumors that those behind Forgotten Realms thought Mithril was a generic mythological term having to do with Dwarves, and when they found out it was a pure Tolkien invention, they changed the spelling to avoid any legal trouble.
Terry Brooks – A bunch of shit from the early novels.
Luthien’s Gamble by R.A. Salvatore (Sword of Bedwyr) – Also, Eriador is just straight up the name of a country in that book?
The Dragon Prince trilogy by Melanie Rawn -Main character is named Rohan. From the book’s summary: “When Rohan became the new prince of the Desert, ruler of the kingdom granted to his family for as long as the Long Sands spewed fire, he took the crown with two goals in mind.”
Video Games
Wizards and Warriors (1987) – From the game booklet: “You are Kuros, the only knight warrior brave enough to enter the woods of Elrond.” From the back of the box: “Buried within the catacombs and dungeons of Elrond lies the key to your quest.”
***LIVING BLOG POST: Hello all. I am too busy to blog these days, but I nevertheless want to share some ideas with all of you. A “living” blog post is a blog post that is essentially a Work in Progress, and can be added to at any time, when time and allows. In this particular case, the topic is quite large.***
**February 25, 2026 Update: I am trying to get up the first half of this piece online as fast as possible. Who would have thought that analyzing the similarities between two books with a combined length of 1,800 pages would be a lot of work?! I am hoping to have at least the first half of this article up by the end of March.***
THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE SWORD OF SHANNARA AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS
Names Featured In The Sword of Shannara:
Durin – In Sword, it is the name of one of the Elf brothers. In Tolkien’s works, Durin is the name of the one of the most prominent Dwarves in Middle-Earth history. Dwarves are often even referred to as Durin’s Folk. It is surmised that Tolkien got this name from an Old Norse poem. It is unknown if Terry Brooks received the name from Tolkien directly, or an older source.
Balinor – In Sword, Balinor is the prince of Tyrsis and an all-around good adventurer. This name could be a mix of two elements from Tolkien’s work: Balin is one of the thirteen Dwarves in The Hobbit, and Valinor is an Elven home from the early ages of the mythology. It could be figured that Terry Brooks mixed these two together.
Ohmsford – Not sure if this is a stretch or not, but I think it should be noted that the last name of the main character, Shea Ohmsford (the Frodo surrogate of this tale) includes the letters F-R-O-D-O, with an additional few letters. Not sure if this means anything, but I’d never seen it pointed out before.
Elfstone(s) – In the Shannara setting, The Elfstones are powerful talismans that the heroes use to combat evil. In Tolkien’s works, “Elfstone” is the translation of Elessar. Without getting into too many details, Elessar was both a collection of gems from Valinor, later given to Aragorn, who adopted the name. Terry Brooks’ follow-up novel to Sword was titled The Elfstones of Shannara.
Tom Shippey’s Excellent Breakdown of Shannara from his book, J.R.R. Tolkien, Author the Century
This is from page 232 of the Houghton Mifflin edition. (ISBN: 9780618257591)
“The most obvious example is Terry Brooks’s generally derided, but still commercially successful, The Sword of Shannara. Rumour has it that when this came out in 1977 it had been comissioned by astute editos who knew they could sell anything sufficiently Tolkienian. If so, the editors were right. The ‘Shannara’ sequence is still running twenty years later, and is up to eight volumes. Yet the strange thing about the first volume at least is the dogged way in which it follows Tolkien point for point. A group is assembled to retrieve a talisman from the power of a Dark Lord. It is ‘retrieve’, ‘not destroy’, which is one point of dissimilarity. But the group assembled matches Tolkien’s Fellowship very nearly person for person. There is a Druid, or wizard, Allanon (= Gandalf); a dwarf, Hendel (= Gimli); two youths, central characters, who take the place of the four hobbits; two elves, one more than Tolkien’s Legolas, but then one of them is called Durin, a Tolkien name; and two men, Menion and Balinor, corresponding closely (Balinor has a younger brother) to Aragorn and Boromir. Gollum is reincarnated in the person of Orl Fane, a gnome who gets possession for a time of the Sword of Shannara and tries trying to regain it. The Ringwraiths re-appear, ‘deathlike cry’ and all, as flying Skull Bearers, while the phial of Galadriel is replaced as a weapon against them by the Elfstones. As if that were not enough, the plot-outline is followed very nearly point for point as well: first journey to a ‘homely house,’ Culhaven = Rivendell; pause in a hallowed forest, Storlock = Lorien; loss of Allanon, who is dragged into a fiery pit by a Skull Bearer, just like the Bridge of Khazad-Dum (though like Gandalf he reappears); and even, ambitiously though on a very small scale, the separation of the company when the hobbit-analogues are captured and led away by orc-analogues, only to be reunited later *after the expected tracking scene). There are analogues to Sauron, Denethor, Wormtongue. The hobbit-analogues are attacked by ‘Mist Wraiths’ (like the barrow-wight), a tentacled creature in a pool (like the Watcher by Moria-gate), by a malevolent tree (Willow-man). Individual scenes are closely imitated, like the slamming down of the stone door at the end of The Two Towers, and the death and withering of Saruman, or the arrival of the Riders of Rohan on the Pelennor Fields. The similarity is so close that ibn a way it is hard to tell how good or bad the result is. Anyone who had not read The Lord of the Rings might find it highly innovative – but I doubt that many of its original readers fell into that category. What the Sword of Shannara seems to show is that many readers had developed a taste (the addiction) for heroic fantasy so strongly that if they could not get the real thing, they would would take any substitution, no matter how diluted.”
Casey Poma 