Warren Ellis takes a look at the history of comics using the metaphor of Jack Kirby’s Robot Head as the central metaphor and anchor for his free-associating path through the topic. That doesn’t do the book justice, though. I don’t think any description ever will. Because one of the things that unifies Ellis’ disparate project […]
I remember when Office Christmas Party hit cinemas, and I’d planned to go see it. The film looked awful, a little slice of seasonal narrative that was going to be equal parts debauchery and twee, but every time the trailer’s played I kept noticing actors whose work I dug in the supporting cast: Kate McKinnon, […]
I started describing this book to my partner as I was approaching the midpoint, running through the key details: steampunk western; Escaped slaves turned dirigible pirates; a female spy forced to become a Pinkerton because she’s too famous for the South to want her anymore; MAD SCIENCE SUPER-WEAPONS! My partner basically asked me to stop […]
Yesterday I hit a milestone: for the first time in nearly four years, I’m a week ahead on writing blogs. Which means the temporality of these posts gets a little weird, because “Yesterday” can now mean a week-in-the-past-when-I’m-actually-writing-things, or one-day-back, when-I-was-posting-about-a-thing. Getting ahead has largely been a function of the first major change I made […]
It took me an incredibly long time to read Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say That We Have Nothing, but that’s not a reflection of quality. It’s an intense kind of book, dealing with an extended family of musicians during the Cultural Revolution in China, and the fall-out on their children’s lives afterwards. I frequently hit […]
My partner bought me a copy of Ibi Zaboi’s Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Remix for my birthday earlier this year, and she’s been waiting anxiously for me to read it and let her know what I thought. In a moment of rather unfortunate tijming, I spent my birthday in a hospital this year, sitting […]
When my partner first moved in and we struggled to find the space for everything in my tiny one-bedroom, the old 5-disc changer stereo got put away for a stretch. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved that stereo. Much as I enjoy being able to log onto Youtube and track down pretty much any […]
I’ve spent a good chunk of the last week reading through Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The Psychology of Success. It’s an interesting book, presenting concepts that you’ve probably come across online in all manner of articles about praising effort instead of intelligence, or assuming character traits and intelligence are fixed rather than malleable. Mostly, though, I […]
We recently started watching Glee for the first time here in Camp Brain Jar. It’s not a choice I expected to fall into, given my dislike of the musical as a format and my partner’s dislike of autotune, but I was lured in by some smart writing, some really sly dialogue in the opening episodes, […]
I finished The Artists Way over the weekend. It did less of the stuff that really irritated me in the back half of the book–a tactic that only served to irritate me more when it did intrude. I don’t necessarily regret reading it–there’s plenty of useful points to noodle over–but I don’t know that it’s […]
So I’m reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way for the first time this week, following close to two decades of people recommending it. I’d been resisting it for a long time because the first person to recommend it to me was a friend with rather undiscerning tastes when it came to self-help books, the kind […]
So I’m gearing up to release the next Short Fiction Lab release in two weeks, and the pre-orders are going out with a 99 cent price-tag in the US. Naturally, this meant today started with me dropping a Macklemore Thrift Shop reference while writing up the promo for the newsletter, because that song always gets […]
