Several days ago I took about forty-five minutes and reorganized my office bookshelf, the one with my epic run on PREVIEWS, all 141 issues to date. It had been piling up with Image comics I was never going to read, and once I cleared that detritus away the shelf looks quite nice. It won’t win … Continue reading Organizing the Bookshelf
Author: Allyn
A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.
Just a lovely morning. I had to run outside and capture it.
The soles of my feet are numb. Tonight is a full moon. Not only that, it’s a lunar eclipse. I went outside to look, and part of the moon was missing. “But that’s true most of the time!” you say, and that’s true; most of the time the moon shows a phase, a waxing gibbous … Continue reading Full Moon
It’s a bit chilly. I’d like to stay under the covers all day .. Yeah, definitely a day to spend under the covers hibernating. Bears have the right idea.
Most every year I do this — go back through my blog archives and post a link to the first post I made each month. The results are random, to say the least; there’s no consistency. But about six of these are worthwhile. Which six? That’s for you to find out. January: Winter Misanthropy: It … Continue reading 2018: The Year in Review
In 2014, the British Imperial War Museums approached Peter Jackson, the award-winning director of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, with a request. They had 100 hours of digitized film footage and 600 hours of audio recordings from World War I of Tommies in the trenches, behind the lines, and in battle. … Continue reading They Shall Not Grow Old
Going through some files recently, I came across something that I wrote, showed a few people for feedback, and then filed away. Several years back, BOOM! Studios, a comic book publisher, began publishing original Peanuts comic book stories. While Charles Schulz’s comic strip has been left alone (except for coloring the dailies), there have been … Continue reading The World Famous Time Traveler
On Thursday, the new version of WordPress — version 5.0 — dropped. I’ve been using WordPress since 2004 and version 1.2. 5.0 is the biggest change in years. I’ve been through the introduction of themes, sidebar widgets, post formats (an idea to compete with Tumblr that never amounted to anything). 5.0’s change is an entirely … Continue reading The New World of WordPress 5.0
In mid-November, while clearing away some old papers on my desk, I found a sketch I’d made of a website design. I couldn’t tell you how old it was — two or three years, probably — but there wasn’t anything particularly surprising or new about it. It was the same, basic idea I’ve pursued, sometimes … Continue reading Coding This and That
Last weekend I discovered coquito, also known as “Puerto Rican egg nog,” even though it contains no eggs and is really nothing like egg nog. A friend of mine, of Puerto Rican descent, posted a photograph to Facebook of a Starbucks sign for a coquito frappuccino. Now, I’ve not been in a Starbucks in a … Continue reading Some Christmas Cultural Appropriation
In mid-September it dawned on me that November 11, 2018 would mark the 100th-anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. Intellectually, as an historian, I knew this. I knew it in the same way that I know that water freezes at 32 degrees and objects fall to the earth at 32 feet per … Continue reading My Armistice 100 Adventure
Three hours. It took three hours to get home from work tonight. Diamond announced that they were closing at 4 o’clock today due to the inclement weather. I was close to wrapping a project at 4, and at 4:15 I dropped the text for a catalog section for January’s catalog on a desk in Purchasing. … Continue reading The First Snow of the Season