Cannon’s “Night Falls”

By Chris Roberson, on October 27th, 2010

Julian West has made a video for my old friend Chris Cannon‘s “Night Falls,” a track off his album vine street, which you can download for FREE. Give it a listen, and then go check out the rest of the album.

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Ms. Marvel Vol. 1: No Normal, G. Willow Wilson & Adrian Alphona
I am late to the party on this one. Like… (checks calendar)… FOUR YEARS late. But I’ve fallen way behind in keeping up with mainstream comics, and am just now starting to catch up with the books that everyone has been raving about the last few years. I recently tried out the Marvel Unlimited app, which lets you read pretty much the entire back catalog, with new titles updated six months after they hit stands, and this was one of the first comics I wanted to check out.
So, yeah, everybody knows that this book is awesome. I’ve heard it from all corners. It even won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, which means it’s been recognized outside of the sometimes insular comics community. Heck, the chances are very good that if you read modern superhero titles at all that you already read this yourself years ago.
But my intention with The Good Stuff is to keep a public record of the, well, good stuff that I encounter in my media diet, and I finally got around to reading this one last week. And if by some chance you are one of those who, like me, might be late to the party on this one, this is me adding my voice to the chorus. If you like fun, clever superheroics with likable characters and engaging supporting casts, you should definitely check this one out.
(And for what it’s worth, I’m really digging the Marvel Unlimited app, too.)

09/06/18
Next on The Good Stuff I thought I’d share the movie that I’ve enjoyed the most in recent weeks. Now, I am late to the party on this one, but in my defense I have a well-earned wariness when it comes to film adaptations featuring CGI characters interacting with human actors. (I stand before you as a man who willingly saw Marmaduke in the theater on opening day. The things we do for our children…) So when Paul King’s Paddington was released in 2014, I didn’t pay it much mind. I had been vaguely aware of Michael Bond’s novels when I was younger, but I didn’t have much sentimental attachment to them or to the character, and since it wasn’t really on my kid’s radar either we gave it a miss.
When the sequel hit theaters a while back, I started to notice a lot of people whose opinions I trust raving about both it and the original. Like, a LOT of people raving a LOT about the two films. When I saw that it was rated 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, I grudgingly accepted that we were probably missing out on a good thing here. So right before the sequel was available for rent on iTunes, we went back and watched the first film, so that we could check it out for ourselves. And holy cow, y’all…
As my fourteen year old progeny pointed out, Paddington made us more emotionally invested in the lives of three CGI bears in the first three minutes of the story than many films manage to accomplish with their human actors in their entire runtimes. And it just got better from there. The cast was extraordinary, with everybody working at the top of their game. The music was great. The cinematography and editing was nothing short of masterful. It was truly and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, while managing to be emotionally affecting without being cloying or sappy. And it had something real and relevant to say.
So, yeah, the first movie was good. Like, really, really good. And the following weekend we checked out the sequel, Paddington 2. And if anything, I think it was even better. Some of my favorite moments would be spoilers, so I may just leave it at that. I like the first one an awful lot, and liked the second even better.
If you are like me and tend to be skeptical about this kind of movie, or are an adult without a kid in your life and tend to pass by family-friendly fare in general, I strongly recommend checking out both of Paul King’s Paddington flicks. They were rays of sunshine that I desperately needed in my life, and I am thankful to have seen them.

08/30/18
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, Theodora Goss
For the inaugural entry in The Good Stuff I thought I’d share the novel that I’ve enjoyed the most in recent weeks. Theodora Goss’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (which itself was an expansion of her earlier short story “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter”) was my favorite read of 2017, and so I had been eagerly awaiting the sequel for some time. It did not disappoint.
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman is the second installment in the “Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club.” For those unfamiliar with the series, it is a metafictional crossover set in the Victorian era, similar in structure to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series and Diogenes Club stories, in which characters from the works of various authors inhabit the same world and interact with one another. But what sets Goss’s approach apart is that she focuses primarily on the female characters in those stories—mad scientists’ daughters, puma women, lady vampires, and so on—and while her novels function as clever mysteries and thrilling adventures in their own right, they also serve to engage with and examine the ways that those characters were treated in the original sources. It is feminist literary critique by way of a gaslit Victorian mystery with science fictional elements. And frequently very, very funny.
To say too much more about the plot would run the risk of spoiling the fun, but suffice it to say that if the idea of a group of young Victorian women with mysterious pasts and extraordinary abilities banding together to solve mysteries in any way piques your interest, then you owe it to yourself to check these books out.

08/29/18
Station Identification: The Good Stuff
Hey, everybody, it’s me. That guy who wrote that comic or book that you might have liked that time, or who shared that article or art or video that you found interesting at some point. I’ve only made a handful of original posts here on Tumblr the last couple of years, and have mostly just reblogged stuff that other people posted that struck my fancy. But I think it’s time to try an experiment.
I’ve been increasingly disenchanted with social media the last few years, and have struggled to find ways to keep engaged. Twitter is a full time bad mood factory. Instagram is, well, Instagram. Facebook can be useful for keeping in touch with friends and family, but I’ve had to lock my posts to Friends Only and mute or unfollow loads of people to make it being there bearable. Lately I’ve been using a combination of Feedly and Google News to keep up with the news of the world and have limited my use of social media to certain times of day, often going days or even weeks without logging on at all.
I find myself missing the days before social media, when everyone had a blog, and RSS feeds and clients like Google Reader made it possible to pay attention to a wide variety of voices. When that was supplanted by platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, I didn’t much mind at first, because people tended to use the new platforms in much the same ways. But that changed over time, until we ended up in the online hellscape that we inhabit today.
When I look at the list of accounts that I have followed on Tumblr, I’m struck by how many voices have fallen silent. (Not as many as the number of inactive blogs in my RSS feeds, but that’s a low bar.) Some communities, like television and feature animators, have remained fairly active, and so as a result most of the new accounts that I’ve added in recent years have been character designers and storyboard artists. But I think the platform still has some unrealized potential.
Starting this week I’m going to try using Tumblr in a way that, although it maybe wasn’t really designed to do, might help recapture some of that lost online landscape. When I finish reading a comic or novel that I enjoyed, or play a video game that I find entertaining, or watch something that I think is really well made, I’m going to make a point to post about it here. If I find an interesting article or essay online, or encounter a bit of historical trivia that is new to me, I’ll point it out. It may be just a link or image and a few short words, but it’ll be a positive note about something in my media diet.
If I have something to share about my personal life, I’ll probably share it with my friends on my locked down Facebook account. If I have something to say about politics or the state of the world, it will be over on Twitter. If I want to share a photo of my cats, it’ll be on Instagram. But Tumblr will be reserved for the stuff that has brought joy into my day. There’s a lot of awful news these days, and I believe that it’s important to stay engaged, but there needs to be a space for the good stuff, too.
08/28/18
adventurelandia:

1969 Haunted Mansion Stretching Portraits by Marc Davis

08/25/18
maxwellian:

muirin007:

“Victorians were stuffy prudes.”

There are wonderful, I actually have a postcard with the last one on, I got it in Copenhagen!

07/12/18
nerdy-neptune:
Dragons!!!! REALLY big piece for a project about dragons, my favorite thing!! I included Charizard, Grim Matchstick, Stormfly, Maleficent, Scorch (my beanie baby), a green dragon (DnD), Brownie (my Komodo Dragon stuffie), and a dragon figure I have that has yet to have a name (oops).🐲

05/30/18
Paul Kidby’s cover art for Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, in observance of the Glorious 25th of May. “How do they rise up, rise up, rise up?”

05/25/18
adventurelandia:

Neverland from the Peter Pan Big Golden Book by Al Dempster and John Hench

05/23/18
Put the torches and pitchforks away. Take it from an animation professional.
henryscrapeteria:

There are a few reasons why you shouldn’t whine every time there’s a reboot of something. Let’s use the new Thundercats as an example.
1. Thundercats doesn’t deserve to die. It’s a beloved property that should have a fair attempt at reaching a new generation of kids. Don’t let a misplaced sense of ownership to something that isn’t yours in the first place ruin a show for other people. You like the original? Good. You can always go watch it. A reboot of Thundercats doesn’t mean the original never happened. Think a reboot should be more action packed and play older? They tried it in 2011 and turns out viewers didn’t want it.
Consider that the new Thundercats Roar may actually do well because…
2. …it wasn’t made for you. The tastes of today’s kids are different than ours, just like how ours was different than the generation before us. Test yourself by watching the original Thundercats. And by watching it I mean actually watching several entire episodes from start to finish. Most likely you’re going to get bored and want to change it to something else. A comedic adaptation of it could just be what revives interest in the Thundercats.
3. You already know and trust the artists. You trusted them when they helped make shows like OK KO, Motorcity, Rick and Morty, etc.. They’re bringing that passion and expertise with them to Thundercats Roar. You’d be surprised at how much a network relies on the artists’ unique voices to make their shows stand out. Just from TC Roar’s sick intro you should know that this show is bringing something to the table.
4. It’s opening doors for the things you love. Whether you like it or not, reboots like Teen Titan GO and Ben 10 are successful and kids love them. While you don’t have to love them too, you should appreciate them. It’s because of the success of shows like these that networks can have the resources to explore new original content. This is how progress is made. This is why cartoons aren’t just cat and mouse chases anymore. Who knows, maybe a network will even end up developing an original show so successful that in 10 years time trolls on the internet will hate its reboot.
5. If you’re an aspiring artist, this isn’t a good look for you. Go through your favorite artists’ twitters and tumblrs and see if they have ever said anything bad about any animated shows. You’ll find nothing, why? It’s because this is an industry of cooperation and support for your fellow artists.
A good portion of the people I follow online are artists trying to break into the industry. We see the things you say. Your rants don’t make you sound like an animation connoisseur. It makes you sound toxic and jaded about an industry you haven’t even set foot in yet. Why would a production want to commit to hiring someone they think will just be rolling their eyes at the designs the whole time?
05/22/18