Every no gets you closer to yes. This is part of the process of shifting through to find the best match. If your work is good, it will find a market. These are things authors have learned to tell themselves. Not because they are true, but because they are hopeful, and hope is a necessity… Read More Rejection is Progress
Weird little quirk of a film that somehow manages to condemn the age we live in, and the Matrix that we detest and fear and and cannot bear to be apart from (there’s no paradox there, the second thing leads inevitably to the first). Meet Ingrid. Ingrid is unhealthy. Ingrid obsesses with people she only… Read More Quick Review: Ingrid Goes West
Writing is a process of self-deception. In the first place, you deceive yourself that anything you create will be read, understood, and appreciated. That’s not me being emo, that’s speaking to the large likelihood that your work will die on the vine. That’s simple statistics. So before anything else, you have to teach yourself to… Read More You Can’t Write Unless You Can Lie
The Hulu documentary is a hoot. It’s more about the lie, the huckstering, Billy McFarland as the Incompetent P.T. Barnum of the time. The Netflix doc was more about How Not to Put On A Music Festival. This is about how people got suckered into believing something that was not physically possible. All from the… Read More Quick Review: Fyre Fraud
Picard is going to suck. It’s a bastardization of the character, reduced to catchphrases and some Borg plot. The question is, why? Why is it being made? Because member-berries? Because the carnival of 80’s nostalgia that’s been gripping us since the late 90’s just Will Not Die? Because J.J. Abrams ruined Star Trek and no… Read More Things That Are Going to Suck
Stranger Things is starting not to get the 80’s right. Probably it never did. Nostalgia coasts on dusting off old images, making people say “Hey, remember this!” and that’s only fun if it’s in the brightest possible colors. So much of the charm of Stranger Things lay in seeing boys riding around on bicycles, unattended, just… Read More Quick Review: Stranger Things 3
I like to call Solar System Blues my first novel. Certainly it was my first serious attempt at self-publishing, and my first serious review. Because of this, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted for the cover, and just kind of used the templates that CreateSpace and KDP offered. That has changed. Self-Publishing… Read More Updating a Classic: Giving Solar System Blues a Cover it Deserves
Over at Ace of Spades. I did not realize that The Sixth Sense would have been the #1 film that year were it not for Star Wars. I haven’t seen it in forever, but I have a feeling I wouldn’t dislike it on rewatch (my favorite film from that year, however, remains Fight Club). And, here’s… Read More A Smart Analysis of The Sixth Sense
Is Megan McArdle actually surprised that no one mentioned Obamacare at the debates? Or is this rhetorical surprise? The Affordable Care Act barely came up. What candidates wanted to talk about was Medicare-for-all. That is nothing short of extraordinary. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the biggest entitlement expansion, and the most significant… Read More The Democrats are Democrats
The Kingdoms of Bran the Broken is neither a Kingdom nor is it Bran’s. Discuss. This analysis, from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, argues that the introduction of Elective Monarchy to Westeros, and especially the election of Bran Stark as its first elected king, is doomed to failure. The reasons are as follows: With the… Read More Bran Stark is Hosed – A Reasonable Prediction From the End of Game of Thrones
