The clickbait got me. I like to think that I’m above all this noise, but every now and again something so artlessly pathetic crosses my awareness that, like a hungry jackal, I delight in the prospect of tearing it to shreds. And since no one does “artlessly pathetic” quite like Matthew Perry, here we are.… Read More Matthew Perry is Clearly Doing Great
This is an idea I’ve had for some time: doing a book tour reading from the comfort of my office and sharing it with YouTube. Here is a dip in the toe from the idea: six minutes from the first Drunk Vampire Hunter story, “Edge of the Graveyard” It’s six minutes because my current web… Read More Introducing Virtual Book Tours: Drunk Vampire Hunter Reading
If you watch Breaking Bad on Netflix, you will not notice that the show’s final season was bifurcated. But if you watched it at the time, you had to wait almost an entire year between the first and second half of that season. The first half ends with Hank Schrader discovering that Walter White is… Read More One’s Self I Sing – Breaking Bad and Freedom
TrueFansTM always find reasons to retain their devotion: I almost never comment on YouTube videos, but I did on this one, because the assertion that the Prequels merit critical rehabilitation, as a consequence of the audience having the Wrong Expectations, needs to be smashed with a hammer. When people are Fans of a thing, they… Read More The Prequel Effect Is Just Fandom Coping
I subscribe to 32 Poems, which is put out semi-annually. It contains, as promised, 32 poems per issue. They are thematically curated; the Spring/Summer 2022 issue features “32 Stages of American Hunger”. It’s that sort of thing. In said issue, I read a piece I found provocative: Agnes said that painting is not about ideas… Read More On Art and Freedom
There is nothing that I enjoyed so much in my youth and abandoned so thoroughly in my adulthood as Transformers. I still have a box of toys that I collected well into early adolescence. And then, quite suddenly, I just decided that they no longer mattered. I’ve never seen a single Michael Bay Transformers film.… Read More Transform and Roll Out
This probably contains SPOILERS, but I’ve really written it for people who’ve already watched the season. If you’ve never watched it, it won’t make sense to you. I wasn’t really going to take the time to analyze Stranger Things. I wasn’t even going to watch it. Others have pointed out that the show has lost… Read More Dumping on Popular Entertainment: Stranger Things Has Too Many Characters
Here’s a Podcast: We had this recorded last month, and of the 2 hours+ we recorded, this is the stuff that was actually about the ostensible topic, Neil Gaiman. I think we went over the edge on this one. The rest of the merry nonsense is going up on a “Bonus Episode” for Patrons, which… Read More Neil Gaiman Goes Over The Edge, Caligula Goes into Rewrites, and The Journal Still Has No Name: An End of July Update
I promised, when I did Chapter 1, that Chapter 2 would be coming soon. “Soon” is a vaguely defined word, so I will invoke the principle of the Zen Master and say that if a blog post emerges before it is ready does ill to reader and writer. And if you believe that, I have… Read More Notes on Kafka’s The Trial, Chapter 2
Libraries are wonderful resources. Several times at my local Barnes & Noble, I’ve scoured the local philosophy section (Shiny new Foucault but no Baudrillard, bleh), looking at the stoics. I’ve read some Seneca, and most of the Meditations, but one wants something a little more systematic, a little more Aristotelian in it’s presentation. The parables… Read More Epictetus, Aversion, and the Escape From Cosmic Demand
