Chronorin

You know, listening to The Lord of the Rings audiobooks has reminded me that... The Lord of the Rings is my favorite book of all time. Which is a very uncool thing to admit, it's like saying your favorite band is The Beatles and your favorite food is hamburgers. But it's true. They get better as you get older. The older you get, the more you feel the immense sense of loss that Tolkien felt when he wrote them. That feeling that you knew the world, and one day you woke up and realized that everything had changed, and so many things were passing away and never coming back. >__< Hmm. Every day on film Twitter, I'll see someone say that Peter Jackson's movie trilogy is the best trilogy of all time, unsurpassable, and that it must never be remade, because it is perfect and can never be surpassed. Man, that's so wrong. It's hard to remember now, but when the first movie came out in 2001, it was not unanimously loved. The Fellowship of the Ring is such a slow and subtle book

This is one of those times when real-life stuff is overwhelming me. [ Spent $450 doing scheduled maintenance on my car; car immediately starts overheating the next day. Had to call a tow truck for another $325; missed a day of work, found out that when they did the maintenance they left air bubbles in the coolant system; fixed for free, but now I have to file claim with my insurance company if I want that $325 back... ...my job says I have to take a "refresher course" to keep my security license, but the boss just quit/got fired, so no one can tell me when and where I have to take course; there's no one in charge, and the office people never answer the phone or return calls. The calendar is slowly ticking down to March 31st, when I have to take the course to renew my license or else stop working...? Got a new coworker, and he's so massively obese that he can barely walk, and after he stands up five times, he collapses into a chair and starts breathing heavily and falls asleep

I've said it many times before, but the worst thing about the Chuds is that in order to debate them, you have to stoop to their level, you have to get down to their barely-literate, 5th grade frame of mind and take them on using their terms and their weapons. And doing that changes the way you think. You have to become as basic and as simple-minded as they are. I mean, until just a few years ago, did any intelligent person ever use the term "Mary Sue?" I did not. See, I've been slowly re-watching all the Mission Impossible movies this year, in reverse order, starting with Dead Reckoning and working my way back to the very first one. ( I never even saw the second one, so I'm looking forward to that. ) But thanks to the to the debased discourse of the last few years, I couldn't help but wonder... ...is Ethan Hunt a Mary Sue? Or a Gary Stu, if you prefer that nomenclature? Think about it. Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. He's a character virtually without flaws. He's brilliant

So, how's your 2024 going? Mine is... busy. Hectic. Dark. Relentless. That's the world these days, I guess. The world is chaotic. We've left the Covid Era and are now in the Post-Covid Chaos era, I suppose. The Ukraine War drags on. China sets its sights on Taiwan. Britain slides into recession and King Charles has cancer. Vladimir Putin murders Alexei Navalny as the Republican Party begins to openly venerate this murderous madman. Donald Trump turns the GOP into his own personal cult of grifters and thugs and demands to be made dictator even as the courts dismantle his crooked business empire. The obliteration of the Palestinians by Israel continues. Iran-backed militias in Yemen attack trade routes. AI is coming for your job and filling the internet with endless torrents of junk content. Americans continue to snap and commit mass shootings because Americans are lonely, depressed, overworked, sick, and desperate. It's... it's a lot. It's not your imagination, things

Phew... so, how is your 2024 going? January just passed by me in a blur. ​In my neck of the woods, we had a week of snow and ice, followed by a week of rain, and now a week of unseasonably warm weather. It's very, uhh, chaotic. There's so much going on in the world and so much to talk about, I wouldn't even know where to begin... ...but there was this one night last week, when two unrelated things that I saw online threw me for a bit of a loop. Carl Weathers died. I stumbled across the feed of a racist Twitter troll. It sucks that Carl Weathers is gone. Like everyone else my age, we grew up seeing him in a lot of movies. And as a Star Wars fan, I expected to see more of him playing the character of Greef Karga, or at least see more episodes that were directed by him. And just think... Carl Weathers was born in 1948. He was 76 years old and from Louisiana. So he grew up in a world where racism was far more endemic than it is today. He had to work incredibly hard to get where

So hey, how was your Christmas? Hopefully, yours was a little more exciting than mine. Mine was... lonely. My brother was always asleep, his wife was holed up in her room with a cold, and my job kept sending me to my least favorite one-man post which is completely deserted for the holidays, so... I mean, I was literally all by myself the entire Christmastime, for three or four days on end. Isolation. Alone at work. Alone at home. Lonely highway. But hey, nobody died, nobody ended up in the hospital, and I didn't get stranded at work in a snowstorm, so it was actually better than a lot of our recent Christmases. I rewatched my beloved Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, as I do every December, and I still love them to an infinite degree. People in the future are going to wish that the first six movies were as good as these. I also love Rebel Moon. Zack Snyder is the man. I need that director's cut. I saw The Creator, and... eh, it was beautifully made, but I kind of expected...

Uaaagh... ... sometimes, people will ask me "where's the next Slimer Janine, asshole?" or "when are we getting more Droid Ahsoka, you lazy sack of shit?" ...and I just want to say -- be patient, my people. They will come along when I have the time. I never stop drawing because I'm too tired, or feeling depressed, or because I have artist's block, or aren't "feeling it." I'm always giving 100%. I don't even play videogames anymore, because that would cut into my drawing time... ...but my life can be messy. Yesterday, my job send me to the work site in north Nashville, which had just been hit by a tornado. Again. I had to get the police to let me through their barricade and make my way to the disaster zone... power lines were down, and my workplace had no electricity and no heat, and I was alone there in the pitch black night and couldn't get much done. Edit: [ It was on the national news yesterday. And I just heard that one of my coworkers had her house totally destroyed?

So, I saw The Marvels... ...and I feel like I need to go see it again in a normal movie theater, because I had totally forgotten how deafening the sound is for IMAX movies... oh god, why are those things so loud? Does anyone actually enjoy that? The movie... I liked it.  Maybe not as much as the first one. It was fun. But is that enough these days? Apparently not.  Like a lot of people, I probably would have preferred the movie that they skipped over... the dark and epic sequel where Carol destroys the Supreme Intelligence and sparks a Kree Civil War, and we see Yon-Rogg redeemed and Ronan the Accuser go crazy after being beaten by a woman for a second time... ...yeah, that's what I would have done. But I guess they felt that would have just been more of the same, a standard sequel along the lines of Thor: The Dark World.   So they skipped all of that and went directly to this one... ...and in a perfect world, this story would have been the second season of Miss Marvel. But... I

Ah... Ahsoka. Holy crap, I loved Ahsoka. Obviously. I mean, I love every part of the Mandoverse, but this one is special. There's a certain quality that some things have, where I don't just like them, I like them to an infinite amount and am absolutely certain that I will never get tired of them, ever. When I first heard "Losing My Religion" and "Leaving New York" by REM, I realized that I would never not want to hear those songs. Decades later, it's still true. The first time I saw a chunky, naked half-asian woman in a random tattoo magazine, I realized, I will never not be into that. Will always fap. ( Man, I wish I still had that magazine. I don't know what happened to it... ) Some things, you just know are good forever. Ahsoka is one of those parts of Star Wars -- like the Sequel Trilogy -- that I will never get tired of. Like, I have to be in a specific mood to watch Andor, and I have to be in a different sort of mood to watch The Phantom Menace. But Ahsoka?

Sigh... ...you know, in 2016, when Donald Trump won the election, I was shocked and upset. But still, I forced myself to watch his victory speech through gritted teeth. And the next day, I forced myself to listen to right-wing talk radio programs as they cheered and bellowed with goonish delight over the unexpected turn of events. They laughed and guffawed while I screamed in exasperation inside my car. REEEEEEEEEEE. REEEEEEEEEEEE, that's what I did. It was painful. Very painful. But I tell ya... ...if The Marvels flops at the box office in November, I won't have the strength to witness the chud reaction. I will assiduously avoid all chud spaces online. My best friend will probably send me a link to a chud celebration video, and I will say nope, not watching it. Because they will ecstatic, overjoyed, and unbearable. Think of the chuddiest chuds out there. The Prime Chuds. The angry, bitter white guys who live in their mothers' basements and can't get a job because they