Terrificon 2026

I took my daughters Hannah and Emma to Connecticut's Terrificon comic book convention at Mohegan Sun this past Sunday. We had a good time.

Holding hands with Thanos.

The Great Gatsby

I listened to The Great Gatsby audiobook earlier this week, and the single biggest thought I have coming out of it is annoyance that they made everyone read this back in high school. What high schooler or college student could possibly have the life experience necessary to understand this book?

Honestly, what is anyone supposed to get out of this book if they've never been in love or moved across country or tried to reinvent themselves? How can you understand it if you've never had sex?

Notes on a Saturday Morning

Good morning, friends. 

Since early December, I've been working steadily on The Return of Dr. Necropolis and its sequel Gun Girl Gracie, and now that both are done in draft, I'm at loose ends. I still woke up at 5:30 am this morning out of sheer habit, but with nothing to work on, I've just been sitting here.

It's so weird not to have anything to work on, but I feel like I really NEED to take some time away and attempt to get some perspective on my own work. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, here are some thinky-thoughts, just to scratch the itch.

#AsForDynamite: Alright. Even *I* Didn't Like That One.

I wrote earlier this week about how AEW is a young man's or woman's company, and then they throw *that* out there.

Let's Reboot Miami Vice!

It took some doing, but I finally convinced my wife to watch the original Miami Vice with me via Amazon’s FreeVee service. We’d just finished The Sopranos, and for as much as we enjoyed The Sopranos, I gotta say we're both enjoying Vice a good bit more. Part of that is undoubtedly down to nostalgia. My wife and I were both 80s kids. Most of it, though, comes from the vibes, which were immaculate at the time and remain unchanged even to modern eyes. I have therefore started wondering what a modern reboot of Miami Vice might look like. 

Here’s my idea.

Greetings from my Social Media Break

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, friends!

I started my social media hiatus on Friday, December 15th, which was about ten days ago. I drove up to the University of Vermont that day to pick up my eldest daughter Hannah, making it easy to leave Facebook and Twitter behind. I'd found myself getting a little too obsessed with seeing reaction to things I'd written, mostly for As For Football, over the previous months. I therefore wanted to break the habit of checking in with the world-at-large. 

Merry Christmas from Casa Cabeza!

It had gotten a little too easy to doom-scroll my way through the day, and with that had come a lot of unfiltered bullshit. Too much of what passes for opinion comes from miserable bastards looking to outsource their own unhappiness. I've missed interacting with AFF's Firstie Club, but the cold turkey approach seemed like the best thing for the moment, and here we are.

I've read quite a bit, I've listened to a few audiobooks from my local library, and I've watched a few movies. The beauty of all of this is that I've gotten to do it in the vacuum of my own space, allowing an easier place from which to form my own opinions.

Quick Thoughts: The Mandalorian Season 3 Finale (Spoilers)

Spoiler alert: this post is totally going to have spoilers for the Mandalorian Season 3 finale.

As For Dynamite: So Many Bad Takes...

I guess I just like this show more than a bunch of the people who actually write about it for a living.  I mean, I don’t know what else to make of it, nor why anyone would dedicate that much time to talking about something they’re lukewarm about.  I read one review this morning where the guy literally said of every match on the card: “I liked it, but…”

What are you doing, guy?  Is this shit really making you that much money?

Okay, so I made a header for the column. I guess we're serious now.

Find another hobby.  This one is making you miserable.

Quick Thoughts: All-Elite Wrestling’s All-Out PPV

I’m gonna keep this quick because there are already a half-million takes on All-Out out there, and I can already tell you that the very last thing anyone needs is another Internet smark’s interpretation of anything.  I watched the show sitting next to my 15-year-old daughter Emma, and if there’s one thing that experience taught me, it’s that some of y’all read too much Internet before you turn on a pay-per-view.  Because Emma’s reactions and some of y’all’s reactions were so diametrically opposed that y’all are clearly wrong.

They say “the economy is not the stock market, and the stock market is not the economy.”  The same is true of Twitter.  It’s not really reflective of popular opinion; it’s reflective of a certain echo-chamber slice of popular opinion.  Hence people getting off Twitter for two weeks and -- consistently -- talking about what a life-changing experience it was.

Some of this stuff was only good or bad because one has a very particular view when one’s head is stuffed that firmly up one’s own ass.

Movie Review: The New Mutants

I took my kids to the Mansfield Drive-In Movie Theater last night to see the New Mutants.  A great experience overall but probably not one that we would repeat on anything like a regular basis, mostly because the theater itself was over an hour’s drive away.  Needless to say, this was my kids’ first experience with a drive-in.  We brought lawn chairs but forgot to bring a boom box and thus learned the hard way that my car’s speakers aren’t as loud as I might’ve hoped when you’re sitting outside.  Volume issues affected our enjoyment of the film, unfortunately.  It was hard to hear at times.  Still, we all enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.  

Elicit Brewing Company & "Meet Me at the Barre"

My beautiful wife Sally did an event at the Elicit Brewing Company in Manchester, Connecticut, yesterday.  She called it "Meet Me at the Barre".  I went with her and took some pictures for her new website HeadSpace.Fit.

The Elicit Brewing Company

5 Things on a Friday: Purple Rain

Hey folks, happy Friday!  Let’s do it.

Six Things on a Saturday: Divining Artistic Pretensions

It feels like the world has gone off the rails.  It wasn’t this week in particular or anything, but…  wow.

Let’s get to it.

TRON Reconsidered

I didn’t love TRON when I first saw it in theaters. Mostly because I’d had enough programming at the time to understand that, “This is not how computers work.”  Partly, too, because the movie is deliberately weird.

Alas, I missed some of the film’s subtler themes.

Quick Thoughts: Ralph Breaks the Internet

Sally, the kids, and I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet over the weekend, and we all liked it.  Most of the reviews I’ve seen talk about the ways in which the movie cleverly captures the quirks of online life, and I agree that they did a nice job with that.  But the movie also went to kind of a lot of trouble to get into issues of toxic masculinity and girl power, and while I think those aspects are great in concept, it’s this that I wanted to talk about.  Bottom line, I didn’t love some of the movie’s basic premise nor the way the plot resolved itself.

*Spoilers Below*

No seriously.  I am gonna get straight into the movie’s climax right after the jump.

Quick Thoughts: A Star Is Born

Sally and I went to see A Star Is Born last night, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in which Cooper is himself making his directorial debut.  I liked the movie a lot, but I had some thoughts about it, too.

Detailed spoilers are below.  Click through at your own risk.

TV Review: Marvel's Cloak & Dagger

My daughter Emma and I finished Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger on Freeform last week, and we both really enjoyed it.  Truthfully, I think I enjoyed it more than she did.  Before watching the show, I’d have guessed that it was aimed squarely at the teen-girl fan-set based on its choice of cable networks.  The reality, though, is that the former ABC Family Channel has more in common with Spike TV than it does with, say, The Disney Channel or even Lifetime.  Where we were expecting something along the lines of the CW’s Arrowverse but starring younger Marvel protagonists, what we got was a decidedly gritty psychological drama that was much more in line with the tone of the original 1980s-era comics than I’d have believed possible.

Thoughts on Solo & the Star Wars Universe

We saw Solo: A Star Wars Story over the weekend.  Everybody liked it okay.  I don’t think it was anyone’s idea of a great movie, and even my kids saw some of those closing double-crosses coming, but it was still entertaining, and that’s fine.

5 Things on a Friday: Praying for a New Plane

I’m back.  I’ve been busier of late, so I don’t know that 5 Things' return is necessarily going to be a regular occurrence, but there’s so much going on that I thought maybe we ought to talk about at least some of it.

Let’s get it on!

Stupid Movie Reviews: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets

Welcome to Stupid Movie Reviews!  This is a new, uh, maybe bi-weekly segment on the blog.  This week, we’re looking at a rather enjoyable stupid movie,Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets.