So I just got back from Awesome Con DC 2015, and happily, it lived up to its name once again, because it was pretty darned awesome! It was also kind of interesting to realize that every year I’ve gone has been a different experience, thanks to what I was doing each year. The first year,…
I came late to the first How To Train Your Dragon film. I caught it on HBO well over a year after release and while I thought the “better than Toy Story 3” hype was a touch overblown it was a revelation for DreamWorks Animation, which had previously churned out franchises like Shrek and Madagascar…
It’s rare for me to watch a movie and not have at least one complaint about it before the credits roll. I’d chalk that up not to me being overly critical of films, but to how incredibly difficult it is for a movie to hold water all the way through yet not also disappoint in…
As someone who has more books than room on my bookshelves to accommodate them, an obsessive collector of cool artifacts of things I love, and a completionist in almost all regards, I don’t think I surprise anyone by saying I love comics. But I have definitely noticed confused head quirks when I admit that when…
Microsoft announced via their Xbox Wire blog a number of changes to its Xbox One Console and related services. A new package without the Kinect camera and motion control accessory will be available starting June 9th for $399, putting the system on par with the better-selling PS4. The Kinect allows users to play a small…
A friend of mine has multiple subscriptions at multiple comic book shops. He gets excited for every new issue, and has been consuming comics this way for most of his life. Try as I might, I just can’t understand this, though not because this fervor for comics is foreign to me. It’s the issue by…
On a recent jaunt into the social media interwebs, an old foosball buddy of mine asked that I help him discover the creepy, crazy, wacky world of comic book conventions. By proxy, I assume he also means sci-fi cons, pop culture cons, and possibly the auto show. In any event? Todd Burrows, I got your…
The Coming of Age book has become fodder for dystopian science fiction and fantasy while some of the toughest Worldbuilding is done right here, on the planet Earth. Things don’t get more dystopian than growing up in Nazi Germany during World War II. As captured by Austrian author Markus Zusak, The Book Thief is a…
Story ideas are pretty malleable. I once presided over/rode herd on/sweated out an 1,100+ page continuity that began as a plot for two 15-pagers. Hemingway is credited with writing a story in only six words. (Go on. Google it. I’ll wait.) I did something a while back, just a bit over 500 words, that, I…
Sometimes living in L.A. has great perks, and one of the most recent I’ve enjoyed is the fact that of the four theaters in the U.S. that had The Grand Budapest Hotel on limited release this past weekend, one was just a few blocks from my apartment. I know Wes Anderson isn’t everyone’s cup of…
Gotta get this sucker written tonight because tomorrow or the next day I may have to resume watching the snow fall and fall and fall and fall… So: what some benevolent publisher should do (and surely benevolent publishers do exist) is to put put a book that examines the way mythology/religion have evolved quite similarly….
Bereft of much else on my mind this week, I turned to my social media outlets. I asked the world to inspire me, and seconds later, the world responded. “Monkey Fist”! It shouted at me. Well world, what about it? “Monkey Fist” is in fact a crowdfunded project being thrown by fellow indie-in-arms studio, the…
