To the long list of petty moments in the comics business, add Stan Lee's comments about Jack Kirby at the 1978 Creation Con, where he called Kirby "imaginative but undisciplined," and described his latest work for Marvel as "not his best."
This has been a difficult week. Trying to do freelance writing is always frustrating and wearying by its nature, I know. But even by those standards this has been a particularly brutal few days of rejections and humiliations, large and small.
It's becoming harder and harder to keep up the necessary wall of denial that any writer needs to have to keep going: that people notice me; that they enjoy or respect my writing; that they see any talent in it...
...That I might, at some point, be recognized as someone who matters. Maybe I started at this too late, maybe I didn't have thick enough skin, or maybe I was just never very good at this. But I just don't think I'm capable of keeping up that willful delusion anymore.
I'm whining, really. But I look back on my accomplishments over the past decade, and I just see a lot of mounting embarrassments in the service of some clickbait bylines at best. Just makes me sad, that's all.
I’m sure the last self-satisfied white dude inhabiting Bluesky will feel awesome about his praxis when he’s finished devouring every good person on his side.
Before it was Jamelle, it was Tressie, before it was Tressie, it was all those black folks y’all chased away before this app was even fully open to the public. I can’t PAY a lot of my friends to try BlueSky because of what they’ve heard about y’all.
It’s not a person; it’s a proven pattern.
I just wanted a place to hang out that wouldn’t get filled with racist clowns on the right or racist clowns on the left, and I guess I just have to keep on looking
Also, one final thought I'm going to throw out there is that preemptively declaring a Trump victory the end of American democracy is, while a valid warning of his intent, not close to a guarantee of his success. History isn't pre-written before we live it.
I have a hard time deciding whether the primary motivation is their urge to suppress fear by acting enthusiastically certain about doom, or simply a desire to have the best confident smirk on the way to firing squad.
If there's one consolation here, it's that I honestly don't think any of the online Weather Underground cosplayers would have voted for Biden in the first place, so this all feels very bluesky bubble to me. We're still resolutely screwed, but it's not a new thing.
There's a distinct sense that Gaza was privately a relief to these folks, insomuch as it provided the excuse not to make a moral compromise, which they would have invented somehow or another.
Not fielding any candidate at all while obediently adhering to the moral certainty of political norms is kind of the apotheosis of Democratic Party politics.
Mark has the most baffling audience of any of the gospels -- it's not really clear who they were writing to, except that they believed they had a mystery cult knowledge about the messiah. But my point about John was just that the writer was pretty clearly Jewish to begin with, whatever the results.
