Sam Keith, an incredibly formative and important artist for me, passed away this year from the horrid disease Lewy Body Dementia. I can't understate the effect and value his comic work had on me through out my career. Choice quote from Kieth in this retrospective: "“If you can’t be better than you were, I’d rather fail while trying to find a voice and being different, than by trying to play a young man’s game my whole career."
"Generative AI is a pattern matching tool, a very powerful one that we’re just starting to learn how to use. However, trying to use generative AI to replace human creativity isn’t even wrong, it’s fundamentally a category error. The fact that this is how AI companies chose to market their tools blows my mind. These companies have chosen to introduce generative AI to us by dressing it in a dancing skin suit and hoping we were more amazed than horrified." My friend Branden is very smart. I'm lucky to know such smart people to talk about things so I don't have to.
It's an interview between two actors who clearly enjoy each others company, but also aren't afraid to express it. "At any given moment during our conversation, one of them is usually angled toward the other, head cocked attentively; the only way they could get any closer is if one jumped into the other’s lap. O’Connor will occasionally snake an arm around the back of Mescal’s chair while his friend is speaking, or Mescal will give O’Connor’s arm or knee a reassuring squeeze. The message is clear.... we are relaxed enough in ourselves not to recoil from intimacy."
This is a piece of writing that's been around since 1993, but I only just discovered it courtesy of an article on 404 Media. "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world." Another one: "We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence." Just banger after banger.
'“One of the worst things I can do is stop a book somewhere in the 30 to 70 percent range, go do something else, and tell myself I'll come back to it. Coming back to those books is really hard.”" As I'm working on getting back into comics, this was a really fun article to read. Big time writers, they're just like us!
I love it when someone who writes well does a piece that organizes the jumble of thoughts in my brain for me. "You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of."
A barn-burner of a horror book that is quite heavy, so I had to take it slow. I'm glad I finally read it, for sure. Scene after scene of characters talking to each other in an enclosed setting - the mental health hospital - made it feel so much like a riveting play. Only one book left in the LaValle Quartet!
One of my formative books. I read this the first time as I just out of school and starting a career as a graphic designer. Reading it again over 20 years later and it still is just as important to me. It didn't age a day, either.
The poetic turns of phrases El-Mohtar uses help define the world has much as the actual descriptions. It was really beautiful and really sad. I can't wait to read more from her.
Alex recommended this to me and unsurprisingly it was excellent. Scalzi goes into how the book came about in the afterword. In it he describes it as a pop-song of a novel, and that nails it. I laughed out loud so much while reading it. "I lift things."
All of VandeerMeer's books are must reads for me. The way he play with language and place in his writing always reminds me why I love books. As much as I love Annihilation's adaptation, I think his worlds are just better as books. Reading this makes me want to go back and the entire Southern Reach trilogy all over again.
I was well overdue to read this. A character exploration through comic tropes (with superheroes and supervillians and all) that was stunningly well told and has stuck with me since I finished it. With how much I enjoyed Cannon, apparently this is what I want from my comics this year.
Paul H. recommended this to me and he was so right. The cartooning is just excellent and there's a particular sequence of panels that is both gutting and sweet. It uses a grid of four panels per page that also hearkens back to OG webcomics / autobio comics that brought a little nostalgia with it. Excellent.
These books are *wild* in the best way. The stakes go from a haunted house to something so huge and world-expansive, while keeping the family core to it all. It all makes sense though, which feels rare when a comic does that.
I reread this every few years to pour over JP Leon's work. It's just stunning. I own a black and white copy, but this time I wanted to step and re-read the whole thing. The ideas are just clever and fun. Definitely the peak of Marvel's What If? work.
Pierce's Installer is just straight up fun. I'm always learning about new apps and new gadgets from it. Also: Subscribing to the Verge is a must do for me. The range of reporting they do - from tech to politics - is some of the best around.
Sloan's newsletter is a monthly journey through the web. He connects it all in ways he might not even realize (outside of his table of contents.) It feels similar to all the connections across Mr. Penumbra, Sourdough, and Moonbound.
Another opportunity to learn about my favorite author. It was filmed over a decade (and released right after her death) and is a really touching portrayal. I'm clearly biased, but I'm embracing it at this point.
If anyone would like to know what my specific flavor of anxiety is like, this film nailed it. Props to my therapist for telling me to go watch it. I think the Inside Outs are my favorite Pixar movies.
A move that's both very dark and very uplifting at the exact same time. Through friends of friends, we heard that the studio had no idea how to market it, and I can see why. But it is so very good. Now to go read some Walt Whitman.
Horror and humor woven together in to a mystery I actually want to follow week to week. They keep revealing more and more, at a great pace. It's hitting the zeitgeist now as it should be.
Murder mysteries abound in this really well constructed anime. It's kinda reminds of Pluribus in that the mysteries are solved through investigation and conversation more then action. It almost feels like a radio drama?
