Year in Review 2022

These years certainly run together, but I'm not sure if that's because of kids or the pandemic or general ennui or some mix of all three.

Anyway...did I write anything I'd like to read over again?

1. Some Movie Ramblings from January
2. Some Dual-Role Actors Ramblings from July
   
3. Tomb Raiding
   
4. We went camping!
   
5. Tux's Eulogy
   
6. Virus Invasion
   
7. Trip to the Farm
   
8. Star Wars Clearing House
   

Also, we have the two Daddy Daycare Trips:

1. La Brea Tar Pits
   
2. Adventure City
   

Happy New Year!

More AI Fun: With the Kids

My son was inspired to give me a prompt for the AI art generator when I was showing the fam the pics I made for my recent post. The last picture I generated was "a cat and a dog play ping pong with a flaming frog" was the cue for him. We tried a few "dinosaurs playing ping pong" before moving on to the main event.

At first he wanted "a cat fights a dog on top of a train," but that seemed WAY too easy. Once i replaced 'dog' with 'tornado', I knew i had some generator-breaking material. Once I generated the fist image (using NightCafe), I simply cycled through their different style filters.

So, here we go:

"a cat fights a tornado on top of a train"

This was the default style setting, I suppose, and I don't remember what, if anything, it was called. I'd be pretending if I said I knew what I was looking at. Is that a hamster? A cat's butt? I see train tracks, but no train.

From here, I started clicking on new styles. First:

Renaissance

And then:

Impressionism

I guess it makes sense that there's no train in the Renaissance era, since there were no trains, but if it's just a style? But then the Impressionists forgot the cat?

We're off to a great start: smoking cat butt, ghostly cat Renaissance scene, and a smoky Van Gogh-lite train.

Magic World

This was a setting that had, like, a Gandalf-inspired wizard-type of character in a shire. I thought we might get a tough kitty and some magical swirls of a fighting a tornado. Instead...a misty train valley and a beacon of light. Ohhhh-kay.

Wood-block Print

Who knew they had a "wood-block print" setting? This one at least has a cat and some windy/smoky/stormy thing going on.

Since each rendering took anywhere between ten and fifty seconds, the kids interest was waning and we were getting ready to move onto other things for the day. The last style setting had a too-good-to-be-true name:

Architectural Rendering

It's also one of the best pictures? One of the weirdest, at least. The cat IS the train, so the battle is internal...?

Is the fear about AI art generators more about artists becoming obsolete or more about the general sharpening of AI's abilities?

Here are some dinosaurs "playing ping pong:"

Renaissance

Impressionism

Holiday Sticker Fun

My mother has a tendency to send holiday cards, and not just the normal ones. She sends cards for Valentine's, Easter, St. Paddy's, the 4th, and whatever else they have. It's pretty wonderful. Getting physical mail reminding you that someone cares is pretty cool.

Recently, she's been including sticker collections: a large blank body frame and various mouths, eyes, noses, and other accessories, all so a person can make their own character. The first one that was solely mine was earlier this year for Easter. I wanted to have some fun, and make my easter birdie a little crazed:

I used two different eyes and made the eyebrows screwy. I liked it.

When Thanksgiving came around, another sticker set came for each of us, and again I wanted to have some fun:

I got the snowman for Christmas. Once I turned the mouth upside down I figured out how to make it crazed---make shock and surprise the ethos:

Family fun is fun...

Inconsequential Hot Take Alert

After finishing the first season of Andor on Disney+, Corrie and I decided to watch Rogue One again, this time in an attempt to view it through the prism of it being an Andor story. I know that Tony Gilroy, the creator and showrunner of the Andor show on Disney+, was tasked with writing on Rogue One, and I know that he wasn't the sole writer. I also know he was never the biggest fan of Star Wars.

After watching Andor and then Rogue One quickly in succession, one can tell what's Tony Gilroy's material and what isn't, and it's why it feels like it starts as an Andor episode and then transitions into a Star Wars movie.

The first season of Andor, essentially "The Education of Cassian Andor," is a template for how a two-bit criminal ends up willing to kill and die for a cause, and it's very good. Believable and tense and nary a Jedi or Sith lord in sight.

As for the "Hot Take" in the title: Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie. Maybe it should be: "Rogue One is my new favorite Star Wars movie."

Let me lay our my points in bullet-fashion:

• With the knowledge gained from the 12 episodes of Andor, I care deeply about how the revolution is unfolding, and now we see Captain Andor? Cool!
• There is a saucy droid and a tough sidekick, BUT it's the same person/thing!
• As a corollary, there is no very annoying character.
• Jyn Erso's story is both heartbreaking and condensed, as we get her on the run at age 5-ish and her holding her dad as he dies a la Luke/Vader in just over an hour.
• Galen Erso is about as bad-ass a mole as the Rebellion has, and Cassian nearly assassinates him anyway.
• Forest Whitaker has a tough decade-and-a-half in the time between rescuing Jyn and being sought out by her (as he's half-robot by the end). Then he dies in spectacular fashion. 
• Instead of a bonafide magic dude (Jedi) we get all-around badass Donnie Yen as a blind force-sensitive kung-fu master, and his machine-gun toting sidekick.
• Darth Vader's here! So is video-game-looking Peter Cushing! And there's still room for an ambitious bureaucratic bad guy in Ben Mendelsohn.
• The third-act space-fight feels just like the one in Star Wars (the 1977 OG), only in this one the action set piece shifts to an analog attack, as the Rebels ram a disabled Star Destroyer into another one.
• Only a third (give or take) of the rebel squadron gets away with the data that Andor and Jyn retrieve.
• And then everyone else dies! All the characters we just began to care about are blown the hell up!

I've spent too much time writing about this franchise. There was the time I wrote about prepping for going to see The Force Awakens back in December of 2015. There was another time where I went back and rewatched the original trilogy right after Lucas sold the property to Disney, and even looked at my old toys. One time I even droned on at length about the Holiday special. Another time I wrote about Solo, and another I mentioned The Madndalorian just because I wanted to share the comparison pic of Mando and Boba Fett.

I may like The Mandalorian best as a product. Later on I'll write again (and waste more of my and the reader's time) about my theory about the different universes within the Star Wars universe at large. To preview, here are the names I've ascribed to them:

• The Ewan McGregor-verse (676 minutes long so far)
• The Solo-verse (136)
• The Luke-iverse (389)
• The Andor-verse (718)
• The Mando-verse (1026) (this includes the Boba Fett show, which probably should have remained a movie)
• The Rey-verse (438)

Too much wasted time...

Oh, and even as I wanted to include the two television Ewok movies, they didn't fit into my poster collection scheme that is meant to go with the post. Also, they're not cannon. Shouldn't I include them anyway?

See how much energy I've wasted on this so far?

Playing with AI Art Generators

I have mixed feelings about AI art generators. I'm not sure they'll ever grow out of their current position as "novelty," but to imagine a world where they serve a specific purpose (in the arts, or, in the capital-A Arts) doesn't seem like a bridge too far.

Photography probably occupied a similar boogeyman position when it first developed and became available to the masses. And e-readers caused much hand-wringing among publishers of actual physical books, like "the end of the Book is nigh," which I think is laughable. A lack of literacy is more alarming to me than the rise of a tiny, plastic, book-shaped/book-purposed thing.

So, really, what is the real fear about AI art generators? They don't stop professional artists from trying to speak to the human condition...

Anyway, I was playing with various generators from various websites, for free, and seeing what I could do. This could be an interesting venture later, a deep dive that could yield some bizarre, broken AI-like images. Today, though, I just Googled "ai art generators" and tried three of the ones the search engine returned. The results were mixed. Maybe next time I'll use the same prompt to gauge which I like best. 

This first is from the NightCafe Creator programming. The first prompt I offered was:

"cafe full of black panthers"

I can see what the AI was trying. And I guess I like it. The atmospheric Parisian look is something I probably would have unconsciously tried to achieve had I felt compelled to try to paint the idea.

Maybe, as an untrained amateur painter, I shouldn't gauge the results off what I would do.

The second prompt I offered was to Hotpot.ai and was:

"outdoor library populated by smoking revolutionaries"

This image took FAR longer to achieve than the first. Maybe that was a property of the generator or the prompt or both, but I didn't feel that the result was good enough for the wait. So far, I prefer the first image. What makes that character a revolutionary...and are they smoking? Is that an oxygen mask after years of smoking? Also, my prompt was plural, as in less lonely...just saying.

That picture inspired me to get frisky. I wanted something far more chaotic or "cuckoo bananas" as a friend says. The last prompt I entered into a third generator (who's name I can't remember) was:

"a cat and a dog are playing ping pong with a frog on fire instead of a ball"

Well, it's certainly more chaotic. It looks like two cats, and maybe their heads are paddles...? It's certainly bizarre, but barely legible as to WTF is happening.

I still prefer the first.

There remains ample room to have fun with this...

Bringing the Woodland Inside the House

Again in our lives during the December winter season we've partaken in the pagan tradition of taking a piece of the outdoors and bringing it into the house.

We've been purchasing real trees for a few years now, pining-up the house's natural smell, and decorating them with shiny baubles and lights. The expenses ratchet up a little more each year, but that's natural. And the ornaments...our ornament collection is the only thing in our possession comprised of objects that Corrie has more of than I do.

This year we went out and got what seemed like an enormous tree:

It's not Rockefeller Center huge, obviously, but for our downtown apartment, it's the tallest tree we've ever gone after. We were looking for one that would be tall and relatively skinny at the bottom (a tight diameter). This was successful on both counts.

I'll try and show a picture from last year also, just so I can compare.

Here's this year, with the skirt and train setup:

2022

And here's last year:

2021

The perspective is close, and the violet that shows through in the saved pictures is weird, but probably makes sense from a science standpoint.

My brother made a good (financial) point the other day on our bi-weekly Skype calls: invest one time in a fake tree and then get a wreath each year for the smell. This isn't a terrible idea. It's not very practical for us for two reasons:

1. Corrie will NEVER go for a fake tree, and;
2. We have two kids and a thousand square feet, so where do we store a fake tree for 11 months a year?

I really don't care, and if it was solely up to me, I might never opt for a tree. But I also enjoy having it after we get it, so maybe I'd get one. But that's a universe where I'm single and childless, so so many things would be different, contemplating is facile and probably a waste of time.

Anyway, I love our new tree! Even if it was essentially a $300 afternoon! It smells so awesome and makes the whole apartment glow. 

Go pagans! They had some shit figured out, didn't they?

Thanksgiving 2022: "Autumn at the Water Park in Arizona"

December marches on and the trip to Arizona feels like it was months ago. In reality it was only weeks, but here we are.

We visited my mother in Phoenix for Wednesday through Saturday, and stopped by my 95 year old Grandma Lorraine's before starting the drive back to the Southland. We've been making the drive on and off for Thanksgiving since moving back to California and changing jobs, which makes time off more plausible.

In that time, my mother has been putting us up in a hotel; her and her partner's place is small (but still bigger than our apartment), and would be cramped for us and the kids. This year, she changed her normal hotel choice and went with the Great Wolf Lodge.

Up until this past summer, I was wholly unfamiliar with the Great Wolf organization. One of Cass's friend's mom sent out the feelers about a possible birthday party at one of the locations. Corrie looked it up online and thought, "We're not going to rural Minnesota for a kid's party."

It turns out there are quite a few Great Wolf Lodges around the nation. The first is in the Dells, in Wisconsin; another near Duluth; and then they begin sprouting up all over, even one in Garden Grove (in Orange County and Anaheim-adjacent) and one in Phoenix.

The kicker for this place, the main attraction, is that it's an indoor water park attached to a grand hotel. Activities and attractions abound inside. Mini-golf, rock-wall climbing, mirror mazes, kiddie bowling, eateries of all kinds, and even magic-wand fueled "game" that had kids running all around pointing plastic sticks that lit up at all manner of things.

Those games and attractions were in the space between the "enormous hotel" part and the "enclosed water-park" part of the place; think the Overlook from the shining with a warehouse stitched on to the backside.

The waterpark was very nice. It was never too hot, never too cold, you never got sunburned or otherwise savaged by the sun, they sold food and alcohol, there was a wave-pool never more than five feet deep at the deepest point, and all sorts of waterslides and water-play zones for the littlest kiddos. Cass was tall enough for every single option, and did everything at least once.

Some stuff he could do solo (some stuff was solo by nature), some stuff he and I did together, some stuff he and Corrie did together, some stuff the three of us did together, and there was even a slide (with a big tube) that we all did as a family with Camille. 

Camille even slept for nearly an hour in my mom's arms, a rare form of cherished snuggle time.

Thanksgiving came and went, I over-brined the turkey and then just over did it, and my potato experiment didn't go as I had planned, but overall the trip was very nice.

I don't have all that many pictures, because I mostly left my phone as far from the water as I could.

Kids playing with Grandma

Here's to seeing my mom again in a few weeks. The "Holiday Season" takes on new meaning with little tiny human roommates.

Birthday Party Upgrading

Birthday parties for kids these days range from "little get-together at the house" to "themed excursion at the park with actors showing up to add to theme idea" to "holy hell, what are we supposed to do next?"

Unfortunately, Cass's birthday this year was canceled due to the invasion of the pandemic into our house. But we had planned a baseball-themed day at the park, complete with old baseball card giveaways (thanks to thousands of worthless cards in my possession).

The ante was jus upped again for us parents. 

Cass was invited to a birthday party at a John's Incredible Pizza, specifically the Anaheim location (which is technically Buena Park).

A 'John's Incredible Pizza' is an enormous buffet/arcade/ride-having establishment, much like a Chuck E. Cheese, only this one seemed like a bigger deal. The establishment in Anaheim took over the entire bottom floor of a dying mall. It had rooms to eat and sing songs in; it had a ton of games and ticket-yielding activities as well as the necessary prizes to buy with the tickets; it had a pizza/pasta/salad bar/dessert buffet; and it even sold beer and had a spot to put eyes on sports while you drank that beer.

This depth and distance involved here can be seen in some of these pictures. I'm not sure what the costs were, since each kid was given a card with a magnetic strip with $15 worth of gaming purchases as well as  everyone having access to the buffet.

Corrie rode the ride with Cass and his buddy, but only Cass is visible below in the green shirt:

I tried to take a picture where you could see the mall proper (behind the glass, able to look longingly at the fun being had) above the John's Incredible zone below:

Our engagement was quite early in the day, starting at 10 am. By the time we were leaving, close to 2 pm, the place was a total zoo. The buffet is apparently quite popular.

It was a good time, and while we may not ever go here for the birthday experience, it's nice to have another arrow in the quiver for possibilities.

Notes on Some Paintings

My favorite app on my phone currently is called Daily Art. As the name states, the app delivers a work of art---usually paintings, but occasionally a sculpture, craft, piece of jewelry, or former ceremonial object---with a brief story about either the work or the artist or both.

Most days I look at the piece and exclaim my usual response: "WHOA!", but I am both easily impressed (with art) and have new, more practical, considerations when I approach a new work. Over the last few years of enjoying this app, my understanding of art criticism and art appreciation has grown.

Anyway, sometimes when I see the painting I find myself dumbstruck. Sometimes I find the work so compelling that I struggle to put it into words. Corrie has the same app, and sometimes one of us will say, "Oh, hey, did you see..." and the other usually responds, "Oh my goodness, yes..." It's corny, but so are we.

Sure, art is subjective, but maybe you'll be gripped like I was with some of the paintings I'm sharing today. I'd like to write more about each of them, but I've said that phrase so many times over the years ("I'll come back and write more about these (insert multiple objects of the same media here) later/soon") that...let's just be optimistic.

But JUST LOOK AT THIS:

This is titled "Afterglow" and is a view of New York painted by Swedish painter Jonas Lie. This was one of the more recent "Didja see..." talks between Corrie and me, and likely it speaks to us in ways it may not speak to everyone. The misty glow of lower Manhattan...my skin can feel the air, and it can can do that for all of the possible seasons, since to me this is an indeterminate time of year. Foggy summer evening after a rain? Icy confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers with building steam filing the low sky? It's all good for me...

This next one got me right away, but then also creeped and burrowed itself into my consciousness:

This is called "In the Northland" and was painted by Canadian national treasure Tom Thomson. The color balance, the composition, the difference between how it looks from a distance to what it looks like at the brushstroke level...the naturalistic scene exudes a crisp autumn whiff of beech leaf and lake air. I can't really explain the hold it has on me.

Not everything that really gets me is a play on Impressionism or a natural landscape. Check out the following attempt to induce anxiety:

This is titled "Vertigo" and was painted by Belgian graphic designer and painter Leon Spilliaert. This isn't a horror painting, but it definitely isn't designed to make you calm down. Spilliaert played with this motif repeatedly, the stark alternating color blocks, or blacks and whites, to great effect, speaking to the shared horror that the new modern world was bringing to the masses.

As I spend the occasional block of time trying to make things on canvas out of lifeless goop, I'm building my perspective on works like these; not just the subject matter interests me, but the way in which the composition was settled upon and how the execution was performed are equally important.

Out with the Boys

I have a few drinking buddies. As a parent, the times when I "go out" with the boys, or go out drinking are, eh, few and far between. Date nights for me and Corrie are limited to a few times a year. She goes out with some of her friends more often than I do, but those tend to be lunches and brunches, with the occasional night thrown in.

I joined my boys more often before Cass was born, but whatever. They still call occasionally, and I try to join them for those times. When I do, the realities set in that I often hear but ignore in practice: parents need some adult-only time.

This is always easier said than done. If Corrie and I want to go out ("date-night") babysitters are expensive, busy, hard to find or are stopped by some other situation. Making time for ourselves (on our own) and our pals is dependent on their time as much as our own energy level.

Anyway, I went out with the boys this past weekend, and we each shared our visions for what our lives were like: me, dad of two young kids, gawking at the fact people are out after dark; and my buddies, childless yet weighed down by life and ambitions nonetheless, trying to place themselves in positions of making parental decisions in their imagination.

It was obvious they enjoyed their relative freedoms, their own times to themselves. I'm hoping it was obvious that I enjoy my kids. 

It got me thinking...did these boys ever want kids, beyond their thought experiments while we talked? I know specifically one did, but circumstances conspired against it. When the alternative is that you have relative freedom and sufficient income, no one can be too upset, right?

And I thought about myself, too. Do I miss the long nights at the bars, carousing around, the smoky alleys, the psilocybin-fueled discussions with crashing waves at the beach?

I can't say that I do, entirely, miss it. That life? No. Getting some quiet moments to drink a cup of coffee and read a sports page? Is that such an impossible thing to accomplish? 

I definitely want a better balance. Being an adult out of my house away from my wife and kids but with other adults is something I want more than once a year. I'd like to be out with Corrie---just the two of us---more than four times a year. Making these things happen has been harder for me than I would have expected.

Anyway, I'll always want to go out with the boys when they call, and sometimes I will join them. And maybe one day I'll even arrange it myself.

Costume Season

After last year, I knew Halloween would take more effort. Last year I took Cass to get a costume in the second half of October. The line for the costume store came out the door and wrapped around the corner of its stripmall location. In the same vicinity was a Target, and its costume aisle was thrashed.

We came away with a nice Black Panther outfit. Cass looked rad, but I learned that my lagging won't be cutting it moving forward.

Me being anxious about how much effort I would need to expel expressly ignored the fact that my kid is a human---big for his age, sure---but a tiny human who has ideas and feelings about things. He had an idea he wanted to do for Halloween (wait, I don't need to make a decision? Sweet...), it required minimal effort for me (but plenty for Corrie--d'oh!), and was a group plan.

We were the Scooby-Doo mystery solving team:

Corrie was Daphne, Camille was Velma, I was Fred and Cass was Shaggy. As beautiful as my kids are, Corrie and I rocked the look best. At work, on Day 3 of wearing the Fred costume, I chose a different blue shirt, as this one looked nearly black.

Anyway, at work, was when I saw too ladies dressed as Velma and Daphne, I joined them for pictures. Later on, I saw another pair of ladies dressed as Shaggy and Scooby. I gathered all four of the ladies together, joined them for pictures, and had all of us entered into the costume contest at work.

Which we won. It was the first time I've ever been a winner of a costume contest, team, individual or whatever, so it felt cool. We may have cheated the system, seeing as how we won the group category even though I hadn't coordinated with either pair of ladies and neither pair knew each other.

Winning was cool, though!

Crafty Seasonal Decorations

We got into the spirit of the Halloween season with some crafty window decorations. How quaint. Apparently we're letting our suburban side show...

Corrie did the cutting and gave the kids the choices on what design would pass muster. Then Cass and Camille (but mostly Cass) told me where to put them from the outside. I made the web using the string we had leftover from our Decemberween-tree purchases each year:

The cat, tree, and graveyard are very masterful, and I believe Cass cut the bats:

I really liked the cutout of the witch on the moon...

At one point Corrie said, "Maybe we should move the tree up to---" to which I had to cut her off.

"Eh, I don't think any of these are moving from these spots. Not sure they'll survive..."

It was a very traditional afternoon, something we don't really engage in normally. We have enough 'bike-rides to the beach' and 'scooter trips to the playground' that normal suburban-type 'sit and craft some window decals' is novel.

Maybe that's novel for everyone, and my consideration of it being 'traditional-suburban' says more about me. 

Anyway, Happy Season! Cass decided on our Halloween costume and I'll show pictures as we get closer. (Or zoom past it.)

Discovery Cube in OC

We had a playdate this past Sunday at the Discovery Cube in Orange County, Santa Ana to be more precise, in the shadows of the CA-22 and I-5 freeways:

It's a pretty neat exploratorium-type place, only not as spectacular as the SF location. Older kids may not have been too impressed, and Camille was too young really, but Cass and his buddies loved it. 

There was a Halloween themed event happening as well, with "corn mazes" and other things:

The longest wait was for the bumper "cars," which were devises with steering controls similar to Ron's ride-on mower at the Farm. We waited in line for nearly an hour, since it took only four riders at a time and each group got three minutes:

They had a bed-of-nails attraction, where you laid on a table that was smooth, and once activated, the nails would emerge en masse hoisting you up, holding for a few beats, then returning to the table. Cass saw me doing it, and wanted to try himself, which is when I took the following picture:

Outside they had a giant dinosaur you could walk through, with pieces of flesh and meat stripped away scientifically, and a makeshift GI tract inside the belly zone.

One thing that was kind of an issue was that the whole outdoor space looked like a playground, but it wasn't really anything like that. That didn't stop Camille, of course, from doing Camille things:

Inside the giant cube itself was a replica of a space exploration module from a generation or two ago, with fake steam and smoke that made the kids flee quickly after arriving at it:

Cass and some of his buddies all go to different schools now, and it was cool they got to hang out:

They even did a laser-room sneak-attack thing---see them on the monitor below, trying to avoid the beams:

All in all it was a nice trip to see some things. I think the Halloween aspect was, eh, not as spectacular as they billed it, but the kids had a good time, which is what we're really trying to do.

Oktoberfest with Family

My cousin Lizzie and her husband Thomas came to visit us in Long Beach this past weekend and we ventured to an Oktoberfest event that was both kid friendly and dog friendly, so we could bring all of our babies, both the fur- variety and the human- variety.

We posed for one of these nifty pics:

Camille doesn't quite get it, and we adults may have had some beers by this point, but such is life.

It was up our street, Elm Ave, at the Scottish Rite Temple (a Freemason building and home to the rad Ernest Borgnine Theater) grounds, had big tents set up, and had a (relatively) rockin' polka band.

I joked when we got their that the band, and polka in general, is what white people would come up with musically when left to their own devices and not influenced by the creative passions of a formally-enslaved and currently-oppressed people.

It was super cool, especially to hang out with family, which I'm trying to improve on---my imposing on family so our kids feel like they are part of a family.

It's always fun, though.

They gave us return tickets for this weekend, because of the purchase of these tickets, and we'll head back for a beer on Saturday afternoon. We'll keep it far more mellow this weekend.

British Invasion (Of Comics!)(In the '80s!)(Comes to the Moving Image!)

Having just finished Netflix's first (and currently only) season of The Sandman, I wanted to reflect a minute on comics from the 1980s and the shows/movie . Well, not that exactly...

The comics industry got some influx of new perspectives in the 1980s that helped move the medium into a more mature direction. American Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns, 1986) and a trio of Brits Alan Moore (Watchmen, 1986), Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, 1989), and Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, 1989) were the main auteurs, if you could use such a term. The success of the two Englishmen and the Scot had the small circle of critics at the time claiming a British Invasion. This led to the likes of Garth Ennis and Peter Milligan (comic nerd alert!).

In any case, each one of those properties has been adapted for the screen, small or large, in the past, er, decade (plus?). Skipping Frank Miller's work, since it's been adapted a few times in various ways, and he's an American, I wanted to briefly mention the other three works.

The top row above is each writer's first issues with their respective titles.  Grant Morrison took over with issue 19, but the other two were first issues. Watchmen was a self contained story and universe, a twelve issue maxi-series), and was a dark satire of superhero comics and superhero universes in general. That's why it's generally beloved by comic fans. The movie took itself a little too seriously, was very slick, and basically became the very thing the comic was trying to satirize and parody. 

Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol was another novel approach to super hero comics, and is beloved by a far smaller subset of comic fans than Watchmen or the Sandman. It's weird for weirdness's sake, and if that's a facile description, it's because I don't think the fans of the comic read this dreck. I really enjoy it.

Sandman I never really read, but I remember the comics, and along with Doom Patrol, I remember them before they switched over to the Vertigo imprint. In fact, it was those titles (Sandman and Doom Patrol) along with Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Grant Morrison's Animal Man, that helped bring the Vertigo imprint into existence.

Sandman is Neil Gaiman's total recreation of a character and introduction of new mythos into DC Comics, as well as introducing  dazzling visual vocabulary since the main character is the anthropomorphized Dream, the king of The Dreaming, his realm, the collective unconsciousness of humanity. It's wild, heady stuff.

All I really wanted to do is say that I liked Doom Patrol better than Sandman, and what I'm talking about is the shows. I haven't read the Sandman comics yet, and while I did enjoy the show quite a bit, I like Doom Patrol more. Doom Patrol seems like it splits the difference between superhero comics and existential fuckery. 

Maybe it's the combo of the out-of-this-world acting by Diane Guerrero as Crazy Jane and an ensemble cast of tortured misfits trying to not screw up The World that makes the show for me. They're just trying to get by, like so many of us. 

Some of the episodes of Sandman are good, and I like Tom Sturredge as Morpheus, and the ladies playing his older sister, Death, and the Vortex, Rose Walker, are awesome. The approach of gender fluidity and non-binary characters and actors to portray them fits with the ethos of a comic WAY ahead of its time. 

I'll certainly keep watching new episodes of Sandman, should they come. With Doom Patrol, I mark the calendar and circle it twice.

I would like to check out the Watchmen show on HBO, I hear it hits pretty close to the heart of the original comic.

Heatwave Finally Breaks

Just like everywhere, it seemed, we in the Southland were being smacked by a heat and humidity wave, a moist blast furnace that defied description. If you live in Saudi Arabia, maybe, or Manilla, or Ho Chi Minh City, sure, you may be able to withstand the 100+ degree and 99% humidity. Or Phoenix...or Biloxi...

But in LA? In Long Beach? Just look at the display on our Google spy:

That's nearly twenty past noon on a Sunday and it was 106 degrees outside. Opening the door was like being hit with a blast of steam-room air: hot, muggy, and immediately you started sweating and your hair kinked up. That quickly became a "No-go outside" day, as many of them turned into.

I'd like to say that it was an aberration, just a weather fluke, but I'm afraid it's what the new moral looks like, a sadly predictable result of what things are and will be as we move forward in time.

It got so crazy that when I'm outside and NOT feeling oppressed by the furnace of The Normal, I'm confused.

Cool Airplane Pictures

Corrie took a few pictures from her flight to Texas that I doctored a bit for this post. Check it out:

Visible at the bottom is the marina and even the start of the beach proper, our Alamitos Beach section. There's also the convention center and the performing arts complex. 

The red and yellow arrow is our apartment and the blue and yellow arrow is Cass's new school, just a few blocks away. It was built, I'd wager, in the years immediately following the earthquake in 1934 that destroyed so many schools. The newspapers all pointed out that everyone was lucky the quake hit on the weekend. 

Anyway, this kind of thing I find fascinating: pictures from above and being to find recognizable things.

Corrie's New Office

We moved Corrie out of her old office space, which notified their renters with about four weeks notice that the space was closing to retool. What followed during the month of August was a scramble to find a new space, and there were various configurations of how Corrie and some of the other folks in the old space were set to do that.

Eventually they all opted to find their own situation, and Corrie settled into another nearby office space. The mural on the back, the alley-facing facade, is pretty damn cool:

The view from the second story conference room is also pretty nice:

The space is bigger snd the price reasonable, and it's even a bit closer than the last office.

But, that back mural is rather striking, and I took the following picture when I was driving by the other day:

My Long Beach-related question would be: when are they going to make this parking lot into another apartment building?

Quick Pizza Note

Last post I mentioned the four pizzas we had at the adult birthday party. I meant to mention that during the day I had two other establishment's pizza's fare. The first was leftovers from our own pizza dinner the previous night, and the second was at the kid birthday party before the nighttime party. So, for the record:

1. Broadway Pizza
2. Domino's
3. Little Coyote
4. Michael's
5. Thai Curry Pizza
6. Speakcheesy

So. Much. Pizza.

Pizza Sampling Date Night

We were invited to a small birthday celebration, and by "we" I mean Corrie and me, as adults, like no kids. It was a date night! Earlier the same Saturday (yesterday, incidentally) we had a different birthday party for one of Cass's friends. There were certainly kids there, as well as dinosaurs and a video game trailer. Um...

The side panels opened up for Nintendo Wii action, and the old folks (like me and other parents) played a round of Bowling after I shot three holes of golf. It was nifty.

At night, the dinner discussion was fun and nerdy, as the host purchased four separate pizzas from four separate establishments:

In the picture above, starting with the biggest and heading clockwise, the establishments are: Little Coyote; SpeakCheesy; Michael's; and Thai Curry Pizza.

Michael's is down the street from us and is cooked on a wood-burning oven like I used in SLO and NYC. They don't cut the pie, as is tradition. It looks like SpeakCheesy also uses a wood burning oven, but I haven't been inside. The Thai Curry Pizza entry was pretty good---exotic and kinda what it sounds like---but it was probably the least best one of these four. 

Little Coyote is new and trendy and has all sorts of gourmet and weird concotions, each more exciting and better than the previous. One pizza they have is an Elote Pizza, complete with dollops of mayo that cook into a custard.

The six of us put a hurting on the pizza:

Two of the people at the dinner live very close to us and gave a lift home, so we didn't need to use Uber. My week was rather crazy, and this was a nice capper.