Resolutions, 60 Years of X, shameless plugs.
Resolutions
It seems like lately I write one of these just to make excuses for not writing more, but here we are again, as my best laid "new year, new me!" plans to get into a regular posting rhythm were waylaid by real life events. There was the first work back to work after the holidays in which we got hit with successive snow storms, and I had to take 3+ hours out of my day each day to deal with snow removal. Then the next week my eight year ended up in the hospital for an appendectomy (unplanned, of course, but not emergency, thankfully, and he bounced back quickly). The week after that, it was surgery again, this time for the nineteen month old to get his second round of ear tubes plus his adenoids removed. Now that the dust has settled (?) on all that, hopefully I can get back into the regular routine I was hoping to start three weeks ago.
To that end, here are some my New Years resolutions for the year:
- Get back to writing more regularly here. Right now, the plan is one X-aminations review, one for Patrons, and one of these TWTW posts each week, with the hope to dial that up a bit once I get into a groove.
- Get something published in print. Not that there's a ton of pop culture periodicals left with much in the way of reach, but I'd love to have something physical I could hand my parents and say "I wrote something in this".
- Similarly, finish the revisions on my novel and start querying for an agent. Sooner rather than later, hopefully.
- Finally finish the "Trial of Magneto" article I've been kicking around for awhile, and find a place to publish it.
- Read more books. My reading of actual books (as opposed to comics and junk online) petered out significantly towards the end of last year (helped in part by me apparently losing my Kindle on a work trip in early November). I'm a book junkie so my to-read pile is ever growing, and I think it would be good for my mental health to put the phone (or iPad) down earlier before bed and just read an actual book for a little bit.
60 Years of X
As you may have seen, either here or on Twitter, I am celebrating the 60th anniversary of the X-Men's debut this year by exploring different facets of the team's history year-by-year on social media (and collecting all those posts here as well). I've got a few other things planned throughout the year as well as part of the celebration, but if there's anything in particular you think would be fun to see or read in a similar vein, let me know!
Shameless Plugs
I've got a few pieces coming up in various places, but the beginning of the year has (thankfully) been relatively quiet, freelance-wise. But I did get a few pieces out before the end of last year, including a ranking of the top 30 episodes from X-Men: The Animated Series (which celebrated 30 years last October, and has a sequel series coming this fall, something I hope to write about as well) for Comic Book Herald.
Over at Popverse, I wrote a little about the Disney+ Willow series and its place in our strange new flush-with-fantasy streaming world; I've fallen a bit behind on the series, but so far, it's definitely proving to be a series that doesn't take itself too seriously.
And at ComicsXF, the reviews of the final episode of Andor that I co-wrote finally went live just before the end of the year. More recently, Mark Turestky and I reviewed the latest issue of Immortal X-Men, the final issue of the series before "Sins of Sinister" kicks off; it's a doozy.
What Else?
What I'm Watching
My wife and I finally managed to carve out enough time to watch Glass Onion, which was a hoot. I think I still like Knives Out a tick more (the setting — the manor home of an eccentric writer in the New England fall is more appealing than the whack-a-doo Grecian island home of a doofus tech billionaire), but I'm excited for more Benoit Blanc mysteries in the future (I refuse to call them "Knives Out" mysteries on principal; Sherlock Holmes stories aren't "A Study in Scarlet Mysteries"...).
We also made it out to see Avatar: Way of the Water before our kids' bodies decided they needed parts removed. Like the first movie, it's visually stunning and absolutely worth seeing on the biggest screen possible with good sound (and in 3D). It's much more of a "dad" story this time around (to the point where Zoe Saladana is criminally underused throughout most of the movie), which, at this point in my life, had me connecting with it emotionally a bit more than I did the first one. It also made some sequel decisions I don't love, but we'll see how they play out in future movies (which, unlike this one, are primed to come along much faster now). Both Avatar films are great looking movies and I appreciate what James Cameron has accomplished with them (the idea of doing mo-cap underwater is...bananas), but neither is amongst my favorites of his movies.
(Incidentally, come and find me if you're on Letterboxd, where, amongst other things, I recently ranked the James Cameron movies.)
Thanks for cross-posting your tweets to Instagram. My fifteen years of refusing to join Twitter are finally becoming justified, but it's also been frustrating to sometimes feel like commenting on that Twitter sidebar, only to realize that I can't (if you're wondering why a corgi keeps liking your IG posts, that's me.)
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen either Avatar film, but nothing about either story makes me think I'm missing anything there. Yeah, I've heard the visuals are exceptional on the big screen, but I doubt sitting in a theater for three hours can compare to the Flight of Passage ride in the Avatar section of Disney World.
Agreed about the original Knives Out being superior to Glass Onion, but that's a high bar to clear. Here's hoping Johnson's new detective TV series is just as fun.