The Penguin

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'...

pretension 1 [pri- ten -sh uh  n] noun the laying of a claim to something. a claim or title to something. Often pretensions. a claim made, especially indirectly or by implication, to some quality, merit, or the like: They laughed at my pretensions to superior judgment. a claim to dignity, importance, or merit. pretentiousness . the act of pretending or alleging. an allegation of doubtful veracity. a pretext. pretentious [pri- ten -sh uh  s] See more synonyms for pretentious on Thesaurus.com adjective characterized by assumption of dignity or importance, especially when exaggerated or undeserved: a pretentious, self-important waiter. making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious. full of pretense or pretension ; having no factual basis; false.    (From dictionary.com ) As you know, I've struggled with comics as my medium of choice - mostly due to their perception (yeah yeah, I know...blame sokeyi...

Creationism is a funny thing. Even more than Flat Earthism, it personifies Karl Popper's definition of pseudoscience , in which all evidence is bent to accommodate a presupposition (true science, meanwhile, crafts a hypothesis and then tries like hell to disprove that hypothesis). I grew up a Creationist, reading Creationist dinosaur books by the venerable Duane Gish ; though I now reject Creationism as not even remotely connected to reality, I still have a bit of a soft spot for its loopy tenacity. Creationism comes in as many flavors as American Christianity, but I'll attempt to provide a broad-brush definition of the Young-Earth Creationism I grew up with: in the modern American sense, this is an attempt to conform scientific understanding of life to a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. It amounts to a wholesale rejection of mainstream evolutionary theory; Big Bang theory and the age of the universe (and by extension the age of the earth); and places the Chri...