"This world is a cruel place...but it's also very beautiful." – Mikasa, Attack on Titan I spent the last part of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 watching Attack on Titan with my son. I'm glad he talked me into watching. As I said before, I'd seen parts of the…
An ongoing issue in the literary community is people weaponizing the language of social justice to excuse wrongdoing, which is not only tacky, but it minimizes real problems and weakens the language needed to discuss them. NaMoWriMo released a statement supporting the use of generative AI, and accused critics of…
“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.” Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett Girls hear early and often the dangers of leaving home alone.…
If your adolescence was anything like mine, Saturdays were all about the orange couch. I'm talking SNICK - Nickelodeon's primetime line-up geared at then-preteens (now tweens) and teens. It opened with Clarissa Explains It All. She was funny and dressed in crazy outfits like Stacy and Claudia in The Babysitter's…
A son who enjoyed the movie raised his eyebrows and said "wut?" when I asked if it hurt his feelings. Amazingly the thirteen year old boy who loves rats, Fortnite, and the color pink did not identify with any of the characters, least of all the dolls, but understood the social commentary because he's confident and perceptive. Seems to me people feigning offense on behalf of men should give them more credit because the real offense is pretending this gentle hug of a movie attacks them. Kenough already.
Technology can be a useful tool to connect people. It can not be a substitute for connection.
All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die. Rutger Hauer as Batty in Bladerunner The monologue including that line was ad-libbed by Rutger Hauer in the film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. A lot of the novel's…
I should be doing promotion, but last month's post about gun violence and pregnancy could have easily been written this month, only with different links to different real life horror stories. Book banning efforts have also taken a darker turn, and I've obviously got a lot to say about that.…
Any regard for the wellbeing of hypothetical children begins and ends with denying bodily autonomy. Consistently.
“A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object.” film scholar Richard Schickel Recently people like Quintin Tarantino have bemoaned the death of the "movie star" just as others, some of them actors, agree with the overall sentiment but approach it less mournfully. Many attribute it to…