• sundry

    RIP, 2018

    Like most everyone I know, I had a pretty rough time for much of 2018. As I said many times, it turns out that living in the early days of a dystopian future can really take it out of you. But the last few weeks I’ve been finding myself a little more optimistic. I think that 2018 was the least productive year of my professional career, but I feel really good about all of the work that I got done, and I managed to lay the groundwork for some really cool stuff coming in 2019. And even with all of the horrible stuff going on in the world there was still a lot of goodness, too. Time spent with good friends, traveling with my kid, and generally trying to make room in each day for the things that bring me joy.

    I spent at least one hour every night reading strictly for pleasure, and managed an average of a half-dozen novels a month as a result. I also read huge stacks of fantastic comics and OGNs, particularly a lot of great middle grade and YA stuff. I played five or six fantastic video games to completion over the course of 2018, and end the year several weeks into what I anticipate with be a LONG obsession with Red Dead Redemption 2. I saw a bunch of great movies in the theater, even more at home on disc or streaming, and watched more great TV this year than in any other year I can remember.

    My kid is spending the afternoon playing D&D with friends, and tonight the two of us will be celebrating NYE with a movie, some video games, and a nice, quiet evening at home.

  • Interesting Stuff

    Borges Speaks

    I have John Coulthart to thank for pointing out this hour-long interview with Jorge Luis Borges, when he appeared on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line in 1977. I’ve only ever seen brief video clips of Borges before now (who was a huge influence on me in college and after), and I’m looking forward to spending an hour listening to him talk.

  • Stuff I Wrote

    Give ‘Em Hell!

    As most visitors to this site are probably aware, for the last few years I’ve been helping steer the “Mignolaverse” with scripting duties on various titles set in the world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, the lovable red demon dude with the rocky right hand. And the publisher Dark Horse Comics has just announced that, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the character on March 23rd of next year, they’ll be releasing a special edition of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #1 and several other goodies, including a “new, folded version of the Hellboy double-sided poster and Mignolaverse timeline that debuted at New York Comic Con.”

    Here’s a thumbnail of that timeline, which includes a number of my contributions to that world in recent years (and click through for a full-sized version). And readers new to the Hellboy comics shouldn’t worry, it’s a lot easier to follow that it might appear at first glance.

    So yeah, I’ve got a pretty cool job. (And to think, it’s only been ten years since I was just a dude who occasionally ranted about his favorite comic series on his blog…)

  • sundry

    Station Identification

    Hello, world. It’s me, that guy. I wrote that thing that time? It’s been a long while since I updated this blog (aside from a quick test post in October when I updated all of the backend stuff), and an even longer while since I updated it on anything like a regular basis. Like just about everyone else I gradually transitioned from blogging to microblogging with the rise of social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, and then with the death of Google Reader pretty much stopped blogging altogether. And everything worked out great!

    Well, obviously, not so great, after all. I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with social media in recent years for the same reasons as everyone else, and have publicly longed for the longlost days when everyone had blogs and websites that they controlled themselves where conversations could flourish in carefully curated comments sections. The lack of a widely-adopted RSS reader has made a return to those days problematic (though I’ve been using Feedly for the last few months and have found it be satisfactory), and for a time I made a halfhearted attempt to use my Tumblr account for a similar purpose. But recent shenanigans have driven a lot of people I follow away from Tumblr and the future of the site is in question, and we’re left with the same mess we’ve been in.

    So I’ve decided to stop waiting for some solution to present itself. I still have this space so I’m going to start using it again. There is still a functional RSS feed for those who have the means to use it, and I’m also going to do my best to share links on Twitter whenever a new post goes up, using the platform as a jury-rigged RSS reader.

    The intention here is to use this site as a place to share the kinds of things that I’ve always shared online. If I read a book and liked it, or enjoyed a movie or TV show, or come across an interesting article online, I might share it here. Sometime I might even talk about a book or comic that I’m writing. I’m leaving up the old blog archives below, which for the last several years of the previous incarnation were largely announcements about signings and convention appearances, but farther back are very much this kind of stuff. (And the static archive of really old posts from the pre-WordPress days are still lurking back there, going all the way back to 2005.)

    The comments section is open, so if you want to weigh in on anything that I share here, feel free. But the comments will be moderated, and this is my house, so remember to use your manners.