Last Monday, I started writing a short story. I was driving to work that morning, and idle thoughts played in my head. “What if I took this kind of character, put them in this kind of setting, and told this kind of story?” None of these three things should go together, but sitting in my … Continue reading Pounding Away at the Keyboard
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.
Yesterday afternoon, my buddy Julio Angel Ortiz quote-tweeted this to his Twitter timeline: I thought about it for a moment or three, and one scene came to mind: I ran out of characters while typing that, hence some brutal edits that resulted in the double “and” I noticed five seconds after hitting “Tweet.” The longer … Continue reading Contact
Reports surfaced today that President Donald Trump is considering Jim Webb, former Secretary of the Navy and later Senator from Virginia, to replace Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense. Mattis, famously, resigned in protest a few days before Christmas due to the president’s abrupt announcement of a troop withdrawal from Syria. Webb would be an … Continue reading The Next Secretary of Defense Will Be…?
Monday afternoon, before leaving home to attend a New Year’s party, I checked my mailbox. There was nothing of importance. Nothing, that is, but a letter from my apartment managers. The news that my rent was going up wasn’t a complete surprise — it’s gone up all but one year since I’ve lived here — … Continue reading An Unwelcome Notice
Yesterday afternoon I was cleaning up my bookshelves, and I took a moment and looked at my shelf of Nick Hornby books, as one does: his novels (except the latest, Funny Girl, which I’ve not picked up), his screenplay for An Education, his book on music, even some of the Polysymphonic Spree books. As I … Continue reading A Long Way Down
Earlier last week I took a short trip to Baltimore’s Loudon Park Cemetery, where my great-grandparents, three of my great-grandfather’s siblings, and his mother are buried. The Baltimore area received about three and a half inches of rain over the weekend (from mid-day Friday to Sunday evening), and, since the cemetery floods, I wanted to … Continue reading A Christmastime Visit to the Cemetery
The Winter Solstice coincided (roughly, by about twelve hours) with the full moon this year. I thought, at work, that I’d miss the full(-ish) moon due to heavy rain storms that passed through all day, made work feel quite bleak every time I looked out the window, and made the drive home an adventure, but, … Continue reading Winter Solstice Moon
Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” is a staple of Christmas radio stations this time of year. It appears memorably in A Charlie Brown Christmas, but is it actually a Christmas song? A look at the evidence. Continue reading
Last night, for no particular reason, I watched the first of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. (Thoughts on the trilogy as a whole here.) Watching it brought to mind a satirical video I’d seen years ago of the Rankin-Bass Hobbit Christmas special that should have been. Was it still online? A … Continue reading Christmas in the Shire
The teaser trailer for next autumn’s Downton Abbey movie dropped yesterday. Let’s take a look, shall we? There is not much there. Lovely shots of Totleigh Towers… err, I mean, Downton Abbey there. Lots of shadow, lots of light. Shots that could have been stock footage from the original television series. Some crane pans (or … Continue reading The Downton Abbey Movie Teaser Trailer