Ncuti Gatwa is the Doctor
The future is here! Ncuti Gatwa is the Doctor. ❤️❤️➕🟦 #DoctorWho
— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) May 8, 2022
Read more here ➡️ https://t.co/KoxPmoNAdL pic.twitter.com/peKsH6gCjI
I have not seen a single thing he’s been in, but I’m sure he’ll be fantastic.
George Pérez
My all-time favorite comic book artist has died.
George Perez, comic book artist and cornerstone of the industry, has died aged 67. George was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2021.
Official obituary at CBR. DC comics remembers him. Marvel pays tribute.
I met him once, and he spent an hour penciling and inking with a sharpie a Batman portrait I have framed in my office. Sometimes, they say never meet your heroes. Well, for me, Mr. Pérez was wonderful.
Wesley Crusher, Time Lord
I kinda like the idea of Wesley Crusher as a Time Lord.
Imagine if they took the Ben Templesmith and Pia Guerra version of the 13th Doctor and copy and pasted Wesley. Obviously, no TARDIS or K9 and add a beard, but that could work.
Obi-Wan Kenobi Official Trailer
Here’s the official trailer for Obi-Wan Kenobi.
This continues to look amazing. May 27 can’t get her fast enough.
The Story Behind Star Wars Day
A simple pun somehow turned into a worldwide celebration of all things Star Wars. It’s futile to try to pinpoint who first made the joke, but Zaron Burnett at Mel Magazine tries to pin it down.
With Burnett’s investigation, it seems to me the real culprit is Randy Thom.
It was further popularized by Randy Thom, the director of sound design at George Lucas’ Skywalker Sound. On May 4, 1982, he was working on Return of the Jedi when his brain kicked over the pun, and he just started telling his co-workers, “May the Fourth be with you.” The bit was good for morale and well-received, so he brought it back year after year after year, spreading the pun around the company.
I’m rather partial to “Revenge of the Sixth” to indicate May 6.
The Quality of your Questions Matter
Shawn Blanc reminds us the quality of our questions matter.
Perhaps, like me, you grew up being taught that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. But that doesn’t mean all questions are equal.
A great question will go much further in getting you to a great answer.
Three of my favorite smarter questions are:
What should I start doing?
What should I stop doing?
What should I keep doing?
I wrestle with these three all the time.
Neal Adams, RIP
One of the most influential comic book artists of the 20th century, Neal Adams, died at 80. Along with Mike Grell, Carmine Infantino, and Curt Swan, Adams was one of a handful of artists I could identify without looking at the credits page.
Looking at modern pencilers like Jim Lee, you can see the influence of Adams. When Neal Adams drew a character, he would emphasize certain things. His Joker is an excellent example of exaggeration for effect.
A great joy from my childhood was going through my father’s banker’s boxes and pulling out issues of Batman that featured stories vastly different than what I was seeing as reruns on television. In the 1970s, DC and Marvel used to produce oversized anthology books that, instead of being priced at 15 cents or a quarter, cost an unbelievably expensive one American dollar. I remember a Batman version with a stylized Batman penciled by Neal Adams on the cover. For years, that image was the go-to image of an exciting Batman patrolling Gotham City.
Adams was instrumental in reviving Batman as the “Dark Detective” in the wake of the campy Adam West television series. With writer Denny O’Neill in 1970, he sparked a trend in socially relevant comics with Green Lantern & Green Arrow’s road trip across America. Adams gave many budding artists their start in the business and was a champion of creator’s rights.
It’s making me sad that the artists and creatives that filled my young life are now leaving us. This is, of course, the way life goes. Leaving a legacy as Neal Adams did is the silver lining to this dark cloud. I can always revisit the art and the stories and, for a little while, remember a simpler time.
How to Plan Your Week
Every Monday I start with this template:
• Top 3 projects
• Events or themes each day
• Any misc tasks
• How I want to celebrate at the end of the week
Even a simple plan like this will eliminate dozens of redundant decisions.
I think I can implement something like this in my life.
You Don’t Have to Clap
Warren Ellis pointed me to this breakdown by Robin Sloan of recent developments with Twitter. It’s a good read, but this bit is the kicker:
Wishful descriptions of Twitter as “the de facto public town square” or “the closest thing we have to a global consciousness” sound, to me, like Peter Pan begging the audience to clap and raise a swooning Tinkerbell.
You don’t have to clap.
I like Sloan’s prediction of “an overdue MySpace-ification.” Seems spot on.
Mystery Incorporated
Mystery Incorporated is the gritty live-action reboot of a beloved children’s animated show that we all deserve.
Memories of Things Nobody Cares About
Will Leitch, in his newsletter, spent most of it focused on his favorite movie of last year, The Worst Person in the World. The movie is about Aksel, a 43-year-old man who is dying of pancreatic cancer and reflects on his life. I have not seen the movie, but Leitch says the movie’s protagonist makes a realization that the things he cared about were meaningless.
Leitch quotes an Aksel monologue from the movie that feels revelatory in my own life.
I’d given up long before I got sick. Really. I just watch my favorite old movies over and over. Lynch, “The Godfather Part II”… How many times can you watch “Dog Day Afternoon”? Sometimes I listen to music I haven’t heard before. But it’s old as well. Music I didn’t know about, but from when I grew up. It felt as though I’d already given up. I grew up in an age without Internet and mobile phones. I sound like an old fart. But I think about it a lot.
The world that I knew has disappeared. For me it was all about going to stores. Record stores. I’d take the tram to Voices in Grünerløkka. Leaf through used comics at Pretty Price. I can close my eyes and see the aisles at Video Nova in Majorstua. I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting, because we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them. Like books. That’s all I have. I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books. And I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. I continued anyway. And now it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.
Leitch chimes in with his own reflection on “memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.”
Aksel is dying, so his memories have an extra urgency and sadness. But it can feel like dying sometimes, to know that everything you valued your entire adult life, and thought would last as profoundly important, has gone away. And nobody really noticed, or cared.
I remember when the mysteries of Lost were what everyone was talking about. I remember the transition from the musical domination of Sunset Strip bands to the Seattle sound and understanding a shift was taking place. I remember a time when I didn’t want an iPhone. These were fundamentally important things in my life at that time. Today? Not so much.
And then Leitch drops this killer paragraph:
Part of getting older is recognizing that the things you care about are not the things everybody else cares about, and being comfortable with that. Deep down, I don’t really care whether or not anyone thinks being a Wilco fan makes me “washed,” or if you think the third greatest rom-com of all time is freaking You’ve Got Mail (????!!!!!), or you don’t like watching college basketball, or if you get bored reading. I love Wilco, I love college basketball, I love reading, those things provide me pleasure, and if they don’t do that for you, I can’t do anything about that … and it doesn’t take anything away from my pleasure. There was a time that I would have obsessed over persuading you that you were wrong, that these things are fantastic and that you should come be a part of them with me, all the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. But it’s fine now. I like too much salt on my french fries, I like Rhone running shirts and Tracksmith running shorts, I like to sit in the third row at movie theaters, I like my car seat pushed farther back than the length of my leg necessarily requires. I like things the way I like them, and I’m comfortable with that. I don’t need you to be. And you shouldn’t need me to be comfortable with whatever you like.
It’s good to like what you like from “back in the day,” but time inches ever more into the future. Maybe I’m just getting old and set in my ways just like Leitch.
I like my own personal remembrances, and what I care about others might not, but I guess one can get lost in the way it used to be and forget to focus on the here and now and the future.
That’s the trick, isn’t it? I like to strike a balance between enjoying what I like and embracing something new. It’s hard but worth it. Because I don’t want to leave this world with just “memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.”
Instapaper Triage
In a post about a lot of different things, Alan Jacobs slips in a bit about how he uses Instapaper.
Whenever I see something online that I think I want to read, I put it in Instapaper — and then I try to leave it for a while. Often when I visit Instapaper the chief thing I do is delete the pieces I only had thought I needed to read. So for me it’s not just a read-later service, it’s a don’t-read-later service. But that only works if I don’t go there too often. I try to catch up with my Instapaper queue once a week at most.
Oh, this is such a cool idea. I need to go through all of my saved pieces and start deleting.
Kyle Schwarber Explodes And Gets Ejected
Kyle Schwarber, the Phillies, and the Brewers are fed up with Angel Hernandez.
This is a really bad call.
For a long time, my hot baseball take was bringing the DH to the National League. It’s happened and no one has blinked an eye. The next take? bring on the robot umpires.
Non-Zero Every Day
Matt Gemmell has some good advice for writers. It’s a three-step process to eliminate zero days.
I have yet to implement it, but I think I’m going to have to do something to get back on track with my own writing.
Corrective Measures Trailer
I can’t wait for everyone to meet Payback, Warden Devlin, Officer Brody, and the rest of the inhabitants of San Tiburon.
The Onion Has Been Permanently Banned from Twitter
This is an elite level of satire from The Onion as first reported by Metafilter. I laughed and laughed…
Just hours ago, in a sudden, inexplicable, and chilling act of censorship, The Onion has been permanently banned from Twitter. Read all about it on their Twitter page. This is a dark day for journalism and sets a grim precedent for the freedom of expression in America. The truth perishes in the night.
It’s Been 11 Minutes Since The Onion Was Banned From Twitter. So Why Isn’t The Mainstream Media Covering This?
SILENCED: Harrowing Photos From The Onion Office 3 Long Hours Into Our Twitter Ban
The Onion Store Now Selling ‘Thin Green Line’ Flags To Support Their Efforts
‘Je Suis The Onion’: Tributes From Around The World
Twitter, Enemy Of First Amendment Rights, Permanently Bans The Onion
BREAKING: Our Intern Is Being Forced Into A Hunger Strike Until Twitter Lifts Our Ban
You might ask yourself: if they’ve really been banned, how are they tweeting about it constantly? I mean, aren’t those literally their tweets right there?
That’s just twitter brainwashing you, pal. The only way to get around The Onion’s Twitter ban is to go to their fucking website.
Twitter brainwashing…
Holoportation
According to a recent release from NASA, a NASA doctor appeared as a hologram at the International Space Station for a telemedicine visit with an astronaut in Oct. 8, 2021. NASA called this experience a holoportation, combining hologram and transportation.
Dr. Josef Schmid and his crew were holoported to the ISS using the Microsoft Hololens Kinect camera and a personal computer with custom software Aexa, according to an April 8 release from NASA. Schmid had a virtual conversation with astronaut Thomas Pesquet as part of a 3D telemedicine visit.
“We’ll use this for our private medical conferences, private psychiatric conferences, private family conferences and to bring VIPs onto the space station to visit with astronauts,” Schmid said.
The technology allows users to interact with remote participants in 3D as if they were physically in the same space.
This feels very Star Wars-y to me.
Sacred Space
The Morning News pointed me over to this post by Nick Cave.
I liked this bit right here:
I came to understand that the sacred space is the imagination itself, or rather the time spent inside the actual idea — the song you are composing, the story you are writing, or the picture you are painting. The sacred space, for the artist, is within the creative flow, at the crucial and fiery point of artistic intention, where time suddenly contracts and the work finds its power and its groove. My sacred space became the rolling fire of the imagination.
… the “rolling fire of the imagination” is such a good line.