Tag Archives: longreads

MCC Live-Tweeting: The “Sleepy Hollow” Season 3 Finale

April 10, 2016 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 20 Comments
Sleepy Hollow!

In which Ichabbie bids us a clumsy, ill-conceived Ichabbye.

Okay, after a self-mandated 24-hour cooling-off period, I think I’m ready to tackle that Friday night fiasco.

Once upon a time, Midlife Crisis Crossover provided same-night recaps of every episode of Sleepy Hollow. I’m not a pro reviewer entitled to advance copies of any TV shows, so every recap was an intense, on-the-fly, two- to three-hour marathon writing session, thinking and typing as quickly as I could to combine plot summary with top-of-my-head commentary in 1500- to 2000-word bursts — partly to see if I could do it, partly because sometimes there’s an audience for such a thing. This formerly fun exercise became a thankless chore if I paid too much attention to the competition from actual pro websites given days to prepare their material so they can click “Publish” mere seconds after each episode ends. It’s a nice luxury if you can work your way into it and don’t have to worry about sleep deprivation disrupting your full-time day job.

When Fox moved Sleepy Hollow to Fridays for the back half of season 3, I figured it was the perfect time to pull the plug on that ongoing MCC feature, not only due to diminishing returns but also because we have a family commitment every other Friday that precluded same-night recaps. Past experiences have taught me that delayed recaps are a waste of time and bandwidth, so that wasn’t an option, and that’s why this entry is not a straight-up recap. My wife and I still followed the show as fans, and every other week I’ve been live-tweeting it, which turned out to be a much better format for me. All of the MST3K-style improv joke-writing, none of the boring golf-commentator filler.

The timing worked out so that I could live-tweet last night’s season finale, “Ragnarok”, an astoundingly disappointing episode that encapsulated all of this season’s flaws to date, then one-upped them with the most poorly orchestrated mistake in series history. And after it was all over, I was there to watch the internet burn. Not just once, but twice.

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Midlife Crisis Crossover 2015 in Review: Our 4th Annual Stats Party!

January 2, 2016 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
CARRIE FISHER COMPELS YOU!

The most intimidating command issued to me all year: General Leia Organa Solo yelling, “COME HERE, PHOTOGRAPHER.” What happened next was one of my most memorable moments of 2015.

Hey-hey, folks! Welcome to the fourth annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review! This modest site was launched on April 28, 2012, as a cathartic experiment in writing whatever came to mind without waiting for other people to start my conversations for me, and so far it’s successfully kept me busy enough to avoid 98% of all toxic social media hubs. Sometime this winter we’ll reach our 1,200th entry, look back on these hundreds of thousands of words generated to date, and thank the Lord my fingers and brain haven’t gone numb yet.

Right this way for our rundown of MCC’s best and worst of 2015!

Grieving the Erasure of Your Favorite Corporate-Owned Universe

September 12, 2015 By in Comics/Lit, Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments
DC: Where Legends Live!

DC Comics house ad from The Flash #339, cover-dated November 1984. A lot of ’80s characters are no longer around, and it’s been decades since fans begged DC to bring back “legends” like these.

We live in an entertainment culture where we take it as given that all the best ideas were conceived before we were born, so trying to forge new universes seems like too much effort. Reboots used to be a desperation move, but anymore they’re the norm for luring in new fans — not just for work-for-hire companies with an intellectual property catalog to keep fertile and growing, but for artists, writers, and filmmakers all too happy to make a lifelong career out of perpetuating the lives and histories of worlds and heroes they didn’t invent themselves. It’s a living.

It’s easy to scoff at reboots when they’re happening to characters that don’t matter to you. If you’re a geek for long enough, though, sooner or later they’ll get to a universe you do care about.

I’ve been there. I remember the first time I had a universe yanked out from under me.

Right this way for memories and lessons about two universes with a lot in common…

Wizard World Chicago 2015 Photos, Part 7 of 7: Why We Convention

September 1, 2015 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Jeremy Renner VIP Badge!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time of year again! Anne and I are at Wizard World Chicago in scenic Rosemont, IL, where we’re so far having a blast even though parts of it resemble hard work and our feet feel battle-damaged after two days of endless walking, standing, lining up, shuffling forward in cattle-call formation, and scurrying toward exciting people and things…

My wife and I took an okay number of photos over the course of our three-day stay and will once again be sharing the most usable over the next several entries.

Tonight’s episode: the miniseries finale! The panels we saw! The comics pros I met! The winners of the Annual “Convince Me to Spend Money in Artists Alley” contest! The troubles with conventioning while old! And more!

Right this way for one last batch of photos, anecdotes from the weekend, and one (1) costume pic!

Confessions of a Former Costume Contest Fan

July 26, 2015 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
C2E2 2015 Finalists!

C2E2 semi-finalists, left to right: a Warhammer 40K Inquisitor; Takuto Tsunashi from Star Driver; an original Norse Valkyrie; the Khorne Marauder, also from Warhammer 40K; and I believe you’ve met Groot.

Each time my wife and I attend a convention, we love coming home with dozens upon dozens of photos to save for posterity once we’ve turned elderly and forgotten everything we ever did, to show to friends and family interested in what we do, and to share with followers and passing strangers here on Midlife Crisis Crossover. To us it’s all a part of the geek experience, a sort of community service for those who couldn’t be there, or for those who were there but are looking for more shots, different perspectives, or simply proof of their existence when they were unable to take or locate any pics of themselves.

On a related note, for better or for worse, MCC’s highest single-day traffic figures every year are nearly always from cosplay photo galleries. Longtime readers who have no use for cons may wonder why I devote multiple entries to each con, but for me the math is easy: cons provide plenty of new content, anecdotes, and visual wonders to share with the world; and we usually see a traffic spike with each miniseries, especially when it comes to reporting costume contest results. Everybody loves winners, and even runners-up in such showdowns are impressive in their own right.

The grandest of them all is Gen Con, which we’ve been attending since before the recent boom in the Indianapolis con scene. Anne and I aren’t even tabletop or TCG gamers, but their exhibit hall contains scintillating multitudes and their costume contest attracts some of the most imaginative, hard-working, dedicated fans around with a penchant for representing characters and concepts far from the mainstream norms. I come away from each Gen Con a little more wowed and schooled at the same time. I’ve made no secret that the costume contest is the primary reason I attend Gen Con.

After our recent con experiences and no small amount of self-examination on my part, I think I need to let the whole costume-contest thing go.

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Saturday Night’s Not All Right for Fast Food

June 7, 2015 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

Icky Dump

Three Saturdays ago my wife and I returned to town after a long, long drive and had neither energy nor willpower to cook supper at home. We weren’t in the mood to wait 60-120 minutes for a table at your Olive Garden/Red Lobster level of weekend hotspots. We’d already racked up a number of single-day expenses and were neither amenable nor properly dressed to go overspend on a nicer, classier, posher, less crowded establishment. So we decided to stop for fast food.

On a Saturday night. I know better than this.

When things went south, they set off a series of flashbacks to my previous career track and reminded me exactly why I should know better.

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Indiana Comic Con 2015 Photos, Part 4 of 4: Braving the Battle Lines

March 16, 2015 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Jenna Coleman!

My wife and I in the presence of Jenna Coleman, a.k.a. Clara Oswald the Impossible Girl from TV’s Doctor Who. A friend of ours asked, “Can she BE any more adorable?” Well, no. No, she can’t.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I attended the second annual Indiana Comic Con! Part One covered our Friday experience, a smooth and engaging experience. Part Two was our bewildering Carrie Fisher encounter. Part Three collected every usable costume photo we took on Saturday.

We knew Saturday would be a busier, more hectic, potentially more disappointing day than Friday. Some cons’ Saturdays are more challenging than others. When things go wrong, blame isn’t always easy or comfortable to assign, and it’s not always the con’s fault. But when it is, the flaring tempers can light up the evening sky.

We had four primary Saturday objectives and one secondary objective left over from Friday. We tried to adjust expectations based on the con’s disastrous Saturday 2014 performance and its vastly improved Friday 2015. Ultimately we nailed three out of four, though it required strategy and persistence on our part to navigate the obstacles. If ICC’s showrunners had ever attended other cons — I mean really attended them, immersed themselves in the full experience, not just skipped through exhibit halls and glanced at activities from a distance — I wouldn’t have had to abandon the fourth objective.

Right this way for the Indiana Comic Con 2015 miniseries finale!

Technically Easy Ceiling Repair for Hopeless Amateurs

January 26, 2015 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Say! You, there!

Has this ever happened to you?

Ceiling Hole!

You’re at home trying to live or rest or hobby or whatever other normal things you do when you’re not working, unless you work from home and every day is an existential struggle over the Duality of Man, and then suddenly one day you realize you have a hole in your ceiling. Sometimes if you’re lucky, you’re present in the room when the hole is punched and you know exactly what to blame and how to swear vengeance properly. Most of the time, it’s a gradual process that may or may not have begun with a water stain that turned malignant. Still other times, you’d swear that hole wasn’t there when you left for work that morning, but now there’s a surprise ceiling hole and an innocent-looking family holding a football with everyone’s fingerprints on it. Whatever the cause, no two ceiling holes are the same, but the heartbreak is universal.

If you’re a renter, ceiling hole repair is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Call landlord.
2. Complain about hole.
3. Watch your stories till hole is gone.

If you’re a homeowner with a home-improvement skill set, it’s not so simple, but you’ve probably got it covered. If you’re a homeowner without a clue like me, it’s a conscientious burden, it’s a drain on your heating bills, it’s an eyesore that has to be hidden from guests, and it might as well be a geotechnical engineering project for all you know. What do you do?

There’s the highway (i.e., abandon the house)…or my way.

Here’s what I did in too many embarrassing steps!

Former Kickstarter Junkie IV: Here, YOU Save Spaceflight

January 13, 2015 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments
Fight for Space!

Moviemaking is like spaceflight. Dream big. Aim high. Don’t look down. Curse the budget issues.

Paul Hildebrandt needs your help. For over two years the director and his crew have been conducting dozens of interviews, sifting through countless hours of archival footage, knocking at closed D.C. backrooms, stumping for truth, analyzing the facts, looking for root causes, and working hard to bring you Fight for Space, an ambitious documentary about the sorry state of America’s position in the international space race, where things went wrong, why they’re still off track today, and what barriers still stand between humanity and our return to the stars.

I previously wrote about Hildebrandt’s project in July 2012 when I signed on as a backer to his official Kickstarter campaign. His quest succeeded and exceeded his formidable funding goal of $65,000.00, with pledges totaling over $105,000.00. For the next year-plus, Hildebrandt pursued more interviews, hit roadblocks in several areas (including any and all inquiries into Elon Musk’s SpaceX program, which availed him naught), wrapped filming, began post-production, and updated us once every few months when properly badgered.

Then the money ran out. Hildebrandt was taken aback and humbled by the process, but he means to finish what he started. To that end, he’s just launched a second Kickstarter campaign to raise more funds so he can afford to complete his work as he envisions it.

Hildebrandt needs your help, and so do I. You can make a difference and help this important project finish happening, in hopes that it could shed new light on a touchy subject and change minds nationwide. Also, if there aren’t enough backers in this second round of donations, I’m guessing the whole thing collapses and I’ll never see the rewards I’m still owed from his first Kickstarter campaign. I was kind of hoping to have those in hand before I die.

Hi. My name is Randy. It’s been 25 months since I last gave a single dime to a Kickstarter project…

Midlife Crisis Crossover 2014 in Review: Our 3rd Annual Stats Party!

December 31, 2014 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Indy Pop Con!

This outtake from Indy Pop Con captures some of the brighter parts of my 2014: LEGO, conventions, new T-shirts, Star Wars, and my wife. Not in that order.

Hey there, supporters and strangers! Welcome to the third annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review. This modest site was launched on April 28, 2012, as a nervous experiment in writing whatever came to mind in a space to call my own, and so far it’s been a much more fulfilling pastime than lurking around message boards and tapping my foot impatiently while waiting for other fun people to discuss things I wanted to discuss. Last week saw the release of MCC’s 900th post, and so far I’m at a loss to explain exactly how that happened. I dreaded 2014 would be the year I ran out of anecdotes and opinions and jokes, but in hindsight I can’t think of a reason to let that stop me now. If this happened months ago, everybody do me a favor and don’t tell me, because the longer you let me ramble on like this, the funnier it’ll be to watch my eventual horrified epiphany.

MCC’s 2012 was a slow rise from nothingness to quantifiable somethingness. Our 2013 was about steady upward trending as I kept exploring my limitations and horizons. 2014, on the other hand, saw largely flatlined traffic except around a few key events. This peaceful plateau may be in part because 2014 was MCC’s first year without a single entry achieving the much-vaunted WordPress.com “Freshly Pressed” status, that prized occasion in which the WordPress staff shares a well-regarded work of yours with a much wider audience of fellow WordPress users. Without such a generous boost to accelerate audience growth this year, it meant trying to hold your attention with old-school methods — by keeping the content coming, by appreciating the greatest audience of all times, by digging into topics that might interest other humans besides myself, by trying not to suck, and by wishing really hard that magic search-engine genies would do all my marketing for me.

Continue here for MCC’s own best and worst of 2014!