Every proposed food pun for this week's The Good Place.
I was disappointed I didn't see What a Friend We Have in Cheeses
(All our brie and camembert)
Well hello there, doorway to my sanity
Screw magic wardrobes, is my main point.
hashtag parenting
Tom King wrote the hell out of The Vision. It's a lovely and terrible story that's three parts surburban desperation and one part straight-up horror. It has one of the most poignant and unexpected applications of Chekhov's gun I have ever seen.
Comics fans have been happy for a while now to see our favorite characters mainstreamed onto screens big and small. Such is our delight that we have quietly tolerated those movies and shows lagging about two decades behind the kinds of stories even mainstream commercial comics are willing to tell.
Every superhero movie's third act is essentially "now we punch robots". Tom gave us a robot who makes the compromises he must to protect his family, who does everything he knows to be right and still loses. Who might be willing to burn the world to keep them safe.
I have named it the Maker of Orphans
Though its flint rod can make fire, it also wreaks darkness.
Though it was built to bring sustenance, it heralds the famine of winter.
Though its serrated butter blade be polished to a high sheen, it reflects only the futility of your existence and the bottomless void of being.
Prepare yourselves. You behold not just a mere spork, but your very doom.
You behold the MUNCHER.
Today's prayer
We thank Thee, Lord, for Thy insanely convenient AirPods, and for Thy white noise app, with which we may drown out all the extroverted parents and their OH MY GAWD Y'ALL in the peanut gallery at gymnastics, rendering reading possible, world without end, Amen, Amen.
This is the new normal
Some of you are people who I love who voted for him.
I still love you, though you shrugged off mountains of bigotry and sexual assault and insanity to support him. I still love you because I know you're capable of better than that.
But you put him in charge. Now it's time for you to remember those "principles" you cited when you sad you just couldn't vote for the most qualified (and adult) woman in the world. It's time for you to get off your ass.
Because everything that's happened this year, up to and including the poor and sick having to beg for their lives every month, that's on you already. If you stand idly by, what comes next will be on you too. You don't want it.
#TakeTheKnee
Today's Batman from Francesco Francavilla.
Well done, sir. As always.
Lasting more than four hours
I can now attest that bathing outside in the country in a giant white soaking tub like you're in a Cialis commercial is in fact a hell of a thing.
There's Nothing to Fear
Oh, I read somewhere
That in twenty years
More or less
This human experiment will reach its violent end
But I look at you
As our second drinks arrive
The piano player's playing "This Must Be the Place"
And it's a miracle to be alive—Father John Misty, In Twenty Years or So
Look what we did, you and me.
Rest in Peace, Bub
Len Wein is a name you don't know if you aren't a comics nerd. He died today.
You may not know Len's name, but he probably touched your life. He co-created the modern era of the X-Men, including Wolverine and Storm. All those X-movies people paid billions to see came from his work. He co-created Swamp Thing with Bernie Wrightson, who also died during this evil shitheap of a year. That's just the start of what Len did.
The horrible thing about working in comics is that you can have an era-defining impact on Western culture, then sit back and watch everyone else but you get rich off your work. And you labor on, for love of the game, until you die in relative obscurity. That was Len, that was Bernie. And scores more before and yet to come.
It is cruel to behold, crueler still that he should die in an era with robber barons and granny-starvers and literal Nazis taking the wheel. Len wrought heroism and optimism for a living. He deserved to die at least in sight of that promised land.
May he return to the Green.
Heh hehhhh heh hehhhh heh hehhhhhhhhhh...
Look how giddy he is about hurting people.
He will take all the abuse his master can give him, as long as Renfield gets his nice, fat, juicy rat.
Perhaps the greatest sentence in the history of comics
Fraction wrote that.
Good boy
We found out today that Mugsy has heartworms. It was supposed to be a quick run for immunizations before we leave town to go visit my parents for Labor Day weekend. A sentence from the vet rather changed the tone of my day and the next couple hundred days to come.
I am restraining the urge to get sloppy here. I have written about what he means to us before, so I won't retread that here. Suffice it to say that my mind is currently churning on the topics of fragility and emotional need.
This goddamn dog that I almost didn't want to adopt because I would have preferred a rescue who was house trained, yet here I am prepared to burn your house down to save his life.
We'll soldier through. But today is for spoiling him (more).
My Sexuality
Merry NerdsFrolickingInTheWoodsmas
Only you
If you want to delight the hell out of some park rangers, and why wouldn't you, wear your Wokey the Bear shirt to a national landmark. One of them grilled me for the right site for "the one Neil deGrasse Tyson wears".
Bonding
While his little sister gets pound-for-pound stronger than both of us combined.
I am starting a new ritual of remembrance
Every year from now on. Every year. Watch with me?
When Hate Is Your Life's Work →
And those marchers were not alone, either. It has been sickening to live here for the past eight months and witness the staggering amount of work that many newly emboldened white Americans have put into destroying people unlike them. I’ll happily write a 1,000-word hater’s guide to a retail catalog, but my hateful efforts are nothing compared to the work these men put in. Think of Mitch McConnell, working feverishly day and night to secure votes and secretly drafting bills and calling late night Congressional sessions, all so that he could take health care away from poor people. Think of how FRENZIED he was to do this. Obsessed. Think of the sense of urgency that led him to disregard all other work just to pass a bill that could potentially harm so many, and you know that urgency hasn't faded....
Think of the utter indefatigability of these men and their champions. It’s not simply that they hate, but that they have made hatred their life’s work.
And then think of all the effort needed simply to keep these men at bay, or to undo the evil works they’ve already secured. Trump is a miserable, awful man. And even though I have heard a million times that he secretly loathes being president, the man still endeavored to get the job and shows no sign of relinquishing it, not when he can take time every day to satisfy whatever hateful itch he needs to scratch. It is exhausting to deal with him, and what’s scary is that he’s not even close to being the hardest-working white supremacist in his own government. These are men who are counting on your fatigue. These are men who are hoping that their insatiable hunger for repression wears you down eventually, and that you resign yourself to the idea that inequality is both inevitable and irreversible. It will take GENERATIONS to undo the damage they’ve inflicted upon modern America, if it can be undone at all. It’s like cleaning up after a flood.
I discovered Magary through his novels. My wife got me The Hike awhile back, and I loved it so much I snatched up The Postmortal. Just finished it this week.
After reading both of those books, I can attest that Magary can imagine a whole lot of terrible shit. When a guy who writes dystopian science fiction and fantasy allegories full of dog-headed child killers is horrified by the stuff you've dreamed up, you've done something really special.
The Way and the Light
A late 19th century window salvaged from a now-demolished Baptist church in the midwestern town where I was born. A little amateur electrician work in the attic, a little LED tape, and a whole lot of finger crossing later.
This window is a holy relic with real power. If my kids touch it, they will be guaranteed to see Jesus Christ.