Fortunately for our uncommon family, J. K. Rowling created characters for every imaginable somatotype.
Most of the accessories were thrift-shop finds. My son’s Weasley hair was simulated using an entire can of orange hair spray. We spent the evening accompanying her sister’s family and had a total blast. And then we never did it again.
The average loner feels as if they’re always on the outside looking in. This is a POV of me on the inside looking out, convincing myself that I’ve turned the tables on the rest of humanity. Your move, humanity.
Just got back from attending my first concert in years…I have multiple reasons for rarely indulging in live music, but in those extremely rare situations when bands I actually, truly like (or liked at one time) come to town, this old man has been known to grant exceptions.
For the record, as with many of my past concert experiences, I attended alone. My wife and I share many important qualities and beliefs, but we differ on some of the unimportant stuff, including but not limited to musical preferences. That’s hardly a recipe for disaster, but if I want to catch one of my favorite musicians live, it means I’m on my own. The only acquaintances who share my musical tastes all live in different states. When I was younger, it was a bit more soul-crushing to find myself alone in a crowd full of happy couples and cliques. The older I get, the less it damages me.
When I have the opportunity to check out something interesting beyond our four walls, it’s not an automatic assumption that someone must be there to hold my hand. My wife and I find plenty of opportunities for quality time, but sometimes I’ll heed the call of a potentially rewarding solo adventure. How do I keep my spirits up without whining about loneliness or making sad puppy-dog eyes at other people and wishing really hard that they were my BFFs? What follows is a partial list of some of the personal guidelines that served me well on this particular jaunt.
Dateline: October 17, 2013 — Just got back from attending my first concert in years. Tonight at the Vogue, one of Indianapolis’ most well-known nightclubs in the heart of the Broad Ripple neighborhood, three catchy bands appeared on a single bill for an appallingly low price. Honestly, for $22.00 a head, I felt as if we were ripping them off.
I have multiple reasons for rarely indulging in live music, but in those extremely rare situations when bands I actually, truly like (or liked at one time) come to town, this old man has been known to grant exceptions.
The evening of excellence progressed like so:
The Smoke/Ashes two-in-one limited hardcover edition was made possible through Kickstarter and conscientious perseverance. Art by Tomer Hanuka.
This fabulous package was the result of a Kickstarter campaign that was launched in October 2011, successfully funded in December 2011, announced with a delivery date of December 2012, and plagued by setbacks too numerous to recount. Through frequent updates composed with above-and-beyond personal candor, DeCampi kept in touch throughout the process, provided backers with access to a digital version months ago, and generally gave the impression that she had every intention of fulfilling her commitments, no matter how much it would end up costing her in the long run, all without passing the budget overruns on to us. Congress should be so conscientious.
More than a few Kickstarter projects out there can’t say the same.
Just so we’re clear, this haunting illustration is not intended as a superliminal message.
Some of that support is provisional, though — offered in hopeful accordance with the implied adage of “I’ll follow you if you follow me!” I’m not sure how many online communities this largely unspoken expectation pervades. When MCC first launched, I kept this guideline in mind, especially in the early era of single-digit daily traffic when any sort of response, human or otherwise, was a welcome change of pace from spending quality time with the Void.
The longer my resulting reading list grew from everyone I Followed in turn, the less I wanted to keep observing that adage. And yes, I mean “reading list”. I tried keeping up with all of them/you, even if the subject matter didn’t interest me in the slightest. It seemed the most honest response. I still read many, many blogs in any given day, but I’ve had to perform some serious triage for the sake of my free time and sanity. I’m unclear on when the “Follow” button became less a simple, literal statement for some users and more of a token to be swapped with passing strangers like marbles or pogs.
For some of my oldest followers…I think using the “Follow” button jinxed them.
Not every moment of the average vacation will lend itself to an attractive headline, a cheery anecdote, or a photogenic souvenir. Even the world’s greatest professional travelers have their share of failures, their horror stories, their occasional awkward faux pas, their incidental doldrums, their best laid plans gone awry. All of those not-shining moments are yadda-yadda’d from the eventual professional article, to the approval and applause of a hundred Likes, a dozen Follows, and a few cents’ worth of ad revenue generated by their hits. Selective anecdotal recounts can turn anyone with a travel budget into Hero of the Beach.
Full disclosure from this humbled amateur with complicated aspirations: Day Four of our road trip began not with entertaining travel heroism, but with ninety minutes of sitting off to the side of I-93 South during Boston’s mid-morning rush hour.
The next time my wife and I decide to attend major geek conventions two weekends in a row, someone needs to remind me to sleep twice as much first.
Today at the comic shop, one of the owners confirmed they and the other customers have been suffering from “GenCon hangover week”. We don’t drink, but the effects are similar. We’ve been wiped out the last few days, soldiering on in our jobs, ignoring the lingering muscle strains, and lamenting that we’re no longer surrounded by those who Get It. That last part’s always the hardest to handle.
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In my version, only one of these characters survives the first five minutes. Possibly the bearded guy in the white hat. He’s already guaranteed his own action figure. (Photo from our personal Star Wars Celebration III archives, April 2005.)
Every Star Wars fan has their own ideas about what Star Wars: Episode 7 should accomplish. Director J.J. Abrams and screenwriter Michael Arndt should make it all about the Holy Trinity of Luke, Leia, and Han, pretending they’re all still under 35. Or they should make their kids the main characters. Or they should invent all-new, barely related Jedi. Or they should bring back all the dead characters because movie magic. Or it should be a mixture of demographic demands scientifically calculated to please everyone, if everyone loved formulaic sequels. Or it should be a two-hour Jar-Jar roast.
They’ve worked well together before, but never in live-action. Can two super-heroes share a tentpole film without driving each other crazy?
Despite my previously expressed skepticism, I wouldn’t say the announced Superman sequel with Batman in it — or vice versa — is guaranteed to fail. I’m sure much deliberation and debate will occur behind the scenes as the filmmakers work together for the common goal of creating the best possible superhero moneymaking machine. If it’s bearable to watch more than once, then hey, bonus points.
What could possibly happen? I can imagine several outcomes, not all of them great.
All the essential supplies: maps, guidebooks, drinks, containers, summer reading, tunes, pens ‘n’ notebook.
(Ha! Little joke. I wish I could see my wife’s face right now as she reads this. Hopefully I’m still in bed and well out of striking distance.)
Cutler and Stan (Harry Hamlin and Jay R. Ferguson) rush to the nearest TV to see what’s in store for their characters.
In Part One of this two-part non-epic, I covered what I liked best about Man of Steel, the new Superman treatment from director Zack Snyder, producer Christopher Nolan, and screenwriter David S. Goyer. As I mentioned there, despite the team’s successes on numerous fronts, I thought the film had room for improvement.
Those examples require a courtesy spoiler alert because a few of my complaints happen toward the film’s back end and involve major plot points. If you plan to see it pristine and unspoiled for yourself, abandon the reading trail here, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
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Onward, then, to what I liked least:
After seeing Man of Steel today, that sweeping statement occurred to me and required two minutes’ worth of thought to confirm. It helps that I’ve seen all six of director Zack Snyder’s feature films to date, even the animated ones.
Of the other five: Dawn of the Dead was not bad for what it was — arguably his second-best, but not quite essential. 300 broke visual ground and set new standards for faithfulness in graphic-novel-to-movie adaptations, but makes me snicker in a few extraordinarily hammy spots. I’m glad someone finally adapted Watchmen so we could all say it’s been done and move on with our lives, but its brazen attempt to do for super-hero movies what the original miniseries did for super-hero comics didn’t have nearly the same intellectual impact or coherence. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole admirably demonstrated the visual techniques of 300 for an all-ages audience, but was incomprehensible unless you’d read the entire book series beforehand and could spot the dozens of pages’ worth of vital backstory that was excised for the big screen. (Thankfully my son was a fan and explained the crucial omissions.) And Sucker Punch was a skeevy, disjointed orphanage for outlandish sci-fi skirmishes that had apparently wandered away from the nonexistent movies that spawned them.
In comparison to the rest of the Snyder oeuvre, Man of Steel stands tall as his boldest achievement yet.
Tonight I found a glaring hole in my son’s education that all the high school diplomas in the world couldn’t cover.
At his recent graduation, a friend asked him to hold her school ID during the ceremony because neither her dress nor the graduation robe had pockets. As her friend and a lifelong pants-wearer, he obliged. When we arrived home hours later, he realized she failed to ask for it back and he forgot to return it. (Even though they’re both graduated and free, I think she still needs it to pick up her 2012-2013 yearbook when they’ve finally printed circa spring 2015.) Since their schedules haven’t quite synched up, he offered to mail it to her. She messaged her address to him.
I handed him a blank envelope. He gave me a blank look.
The Navy Pier McDonald’s in Chicago is one of tens of thousands of locations expected not to mourn for the recently departed Angus line.
Full disclosure: my first job was a twelve-year stint at McDonald’s, ten of those in management. My wife likewise did time there until she found the gumption to exit long before I did. We bear the company no ill will and we still eat there more frequently than the average ex-employee. That being said: large portions of our respective tenures were spent watching new products die.
Talking hobbies amongst friends is cool. Sharing them with Grandma is generous of you, but will frighten and confuse her. (Pictured: “Eltingville Club” art from Evan Dorkin’s Dork #6.)
From my own day-to-day standpoint, it’s as simple as this: if I talk about a given subject at either church, work, or family gatherings and receive nothing but blank stares or furrowed brows in return, those are the ordinary people. In those settings, I know that my version of “small talk” would wander too far past the geek boundary and I keep my mouth shut, except about the weather or whatever subjects they bring up first.
All of this sets aside the fact that I do embrace ordinary aspects about myself and my life as well, as longtime MCC readers should recognize by now, considering the number of past entries that were overtly not about geek-relevant topics, but were usually (hopefully?) informed in subtle ways by my interests and skill sets. (Tomorrow night’s entry will be one of those, in fact, 100% guaranteed.) Suffice it to say I’m not mocking anyone who’s 100% ordinary/0% geek — merely observing there are pronounced differences when those percentages fluctuate.
Comics! Anime! Video Games! T-shirt vendors! Whovians! Uglydoll! This never-before-shared file photo from C2E2 2011 has it all! (Unlike Indianapolis. For now.)
Several theoretical names have floated fancily through my head over the decades, ever since the erstwhile Comics Buyer’s Guide taught me about the magical world of comic book conventions when I subscribed to them in 1986. I’ve always wondered if Indianapolis would ever be respectable enough to merit a large-scale comic-con of its own. We had little comic book shows on the east side a few time a year that occasionally drew one or two special guests. Circa 1989 or 1990 someone threw a shindig in Indy called HoosierCon 1, but I had to work the entire weekend and missed it. I never heard a peep about it after the fact, sequels never manifested, and Google tells me no one in world history has ever rhapsodized about it online. I presume plans went awry.
This week the Indianapolis Star reported that someone out there wants to make my pipe dream a reality. A young Florida-based company called Action3 Events and Promotions has scheduled a comics convention for March 14-16, 2014, in our very own Indiana Convention Center. It’s as yet unnamed and not yet listed on their official site, but official enough that they’re proclaiming its proposed existence in public interviews. That much alone is a positive sign.
The last time my family went to the theater, the ads that ran from the film’s scheduled showtime until the moment the feature presentation began spanned over twenty minutes. Many of the ads were movie trailers, but not all of them. Ads for new cars, smartphones, TV shows, and soft drinks are routine pre-show entertainment while you’re settling into your seat, mentally preparing yourself for temporary phone deprivation, swapping notes with your companions, and consuming your snack too early. Even when it’s ostensibly showtime, the commercial parade isn’t over yet, because a lot of manufacturers want a moment of your time, in exchange for keeping your theater in business.
According to a Hollywood Reporter article this week, the National Assocation of Theater Owners have decided that movie studios are taking advantage of your presence, and it’s all their fault that your time is being wasted. Obviously the owners can’t simply run fewer spots, because then here comes the poorhouse. To that end, NATO members are demanding an amended guideline limiting trailers to a maximum of two minutes, slashed from the current 2½-minute boundary.
We can infer from various statements in that THR article that owners believe this will reduce the length of the pre-show, instead of giving them latitude to run even more ads that eat up the same allotted minutes. They believe that it would be harder for shorter trailers to give away the entire movie, apparently forgetting that most romantic comedies can be boiled down to their primal essence in twelve seconds flat. They seem to think the current limit is a recent abuse of creative power, somehow unaware that trailers in the ’40s and other nostalgic decades could occasionally run well past the three-minute mark, sometimes spooling entire scenes instead of mere quick-cut snippets.
Why browse through someone’s full-sized collection of vinyl cover art when you can peruse a strictly formatted collection of charmless Windows icons instead?
One digression was left unexplored due to issues of relevance and length:
My reluctance to embrace MP3s would require an entry in itself. Short answer: not at this time, but thank you for the option.
Far be it from me to let a promise of digression remain unrequited.
I recognize that digital music has numerous advantages over CDs and its precursors, but I have yet to embrace iTunes or to fill multiple external hard drives with jams for a variety of reasons. Some of them may sound tired and overused; most are conclusions I reached over the years after repeated bouts of personal deliberation. Continue reading
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 