The Penguin

I'm generally not one to speculate on the future; I think it's wrong to constantly sit around waiting for everything to get better - almost as bad as sitting around whining about the "Good Ole Days". The present is all we have, and whatever past we have to rectify, or future we plant the seeds for, can only be affected in the Long Now. At the same time, I'm not a Zen hardliner, living only in the moment - I myself feel like our current circumstances are pretty heavy. The kind of heavy where you just shut off the TV and the radio because there's so little you can do about it. That may sound like defeatism, but it's a much healthier response than chewing your finger-bones, venting your spleen online to non-people who can't hear you and don't care, or staying up at night worrying about all the things you can't control. Political awareness is one thing, but mental self-torture is quite another. So why don't we try a little fun exercise inst...

Glass Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, and Samuel L. Jackson Directed by M. Night Shyamalan Universal Pictures I can tell James McAvoy's "Horde" - a collection of 34 distinct personalities serving the animal-like "Beast" - is supposed to be the most interesting character in this movie. But in terms of split personalities, the award for "All Over The Place" really goes to the movie itself. I'll spare you the buildup and just get my big pun out of the way first: Glass  is splintered. And some of those pieces are little more than fiberglass. The plot revolves around three characters from Mr. Shyamalan's previous outings: The Overseer (Bruce Willis) and Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) from Unbreakable,  and Horde (James McAvoy) from Split. After a big dustup between Horde and Overseer, they are captured by a psychologist ( American Horror Story's  Sarah Paulsen) who keeps them locked in a psychiatric ward while she attempts to cure t...

Photo by  bruce mars  on  Unsplash (No, this probably isn't the 637th of these things...but who cares? It looks impressive. Roll Tape!) If you're a creator, at some point you're going to face critique. If you're a creator for money, you're going to definitely face critique...from people with far less imagination than you, who don't get your vision/sense of humor, and - let's face it - you don't particularly like. These could be bosses, coworkers, clients, friends, family, neighbors, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, partridges in or out of pear trees. Anybody. All of these people have vastly different priorities than you, they're looking at the project from a certain budget and time frame, and it often seems like they just don't care that much about artistic merit at all. I'm going to tell you, as a creator for money in both my day job and my side job, that your assumptions about the lack of imagination and creative merit...

Hello, patient readers. I've blogged about Raptors before, specifically Deinonychus and the problems of depicting dinosaurs in general. In an earlier post, I was wrestling with the then newly-popular preponderance of plumage on our favorite Terrible Lizards, and while I finally conceded that Deinonychus and Co. were probably fully feathered, I whined and hemmed about the amount of feathers and griped about how dinosaur lineages with no evidence for feathers at all were now being given fabulous coats. In the midst of this, I decried the new crop of bad paleo-art, using this image as my piéce de resistance: Credit: Luis V. Rey, from his blog . Essentially my big scientific argument ran along the lines of, "Looks dumb, therefore wrong". It seems now that I might have to eat that argument, slathered in Nelson Muntz' Gourmet Ha-Ha Sauce ...with one important caveat, which I'll get to later. Since writing that blog post - in fact, several years later - I'...