Yesterday afternoon, since it was sunny and nice, I decided to go for a drive into Lancaster County and check out a cemetery. My great-great-great-grandparents are buried at the Millersville Mennonite Church, about twenty-five miles away, which is closer than Diamond’s offices, but I’ve never gone to look for myself. The reason? Lancaster isn’t far … Continue reading Exploring Cemeteries in Lancaster County
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.
For the Fourth of July, I drove down to Baltimore to visit the cemeteries and leave flags.
A couple of pictures from the last few days. Nothing terribly exciting, and in these days, “nothing terribly exciting” is just fine by me.
Last night I listened to a baseball game on the “radio.” Radio goes in quotes. It was Internet streaming audio, but for all intents and purposes, it was a radio broadcast, complete with ads for local business. With the COVID pandemic raging unchecked across the United States, most baseball leagues have cancelled their seasons. Major … Continue reading Baseball on the Radio
A few days ago I decided I just had to tackle the piles of graphic novels sitting on my living room table. I have reluctantly concluded I must go out and buy another bookcase; the question then will be, where will it go? One of the graphic novels among the piles was Batman: Gotham by … Continue reading The Calculus of Future Comics Purchases
The last few days, I’ve seen my friends talk about an upcoming film debuting on Netflix this September, Enola Holmes, based on a series of young adult novels by Nancy Springer, starring Millie Bobbi Brown (Stranger Things) as the titular character and Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) as her older brother, Sherlock Holmes. Among the … Continue reading Some Enola Holmes Thoughts
Before the world went into its COVID-imposed lockdown, I discovered, quite by chance, while reading about Mary Ann Hall, that a photograph of my great-great-grandfather’s gravesite in Washington, DC’s Congressional Cemetery is on Wikipedia. No one but me would care that, in the background of the photo, is the gravesite of William Gardner, but it’s … Continue reading The Grave of a 19th-Century Astronomer
Saturday I drove down to Baltimore to visit Loudon Park Cemetery. I hadn’t been since the end of January, it was a nice day, and a cemetery is a place where one can socially distance without much difficulty. I had no idea if I would be able to get into the cemetery; some cemeteries are … Continue reading Questionnare!
This week, Elbow released a new live album. Unfortunately, because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the band has cancelled their live dates for this spring and summer, so they’ve been posting videos on YouTube of the band, separately, playing some of their songs from home, the #elbowrooms sessions. These aren’t polished, there are occasional fluffs, but … Continue reading The #elbowrooms Sessions
Even in the midst of a pandemic, laundry must be done! I could have done it over the weekend. The rainy, dreary, chilly, gross weekend. Instead, I decided to do more to clean up my office, throwing out boxes of magazines I’d saved that I’d not looked at, not even thought about, in years. I … Continue reading Multitasking Laundry
If the first day of working from home was a strange and new and exciting experience, the second day felt more routine. I got out of bed at 7:30, though I’d been awake for several hours before that. It was another night of rough sleep; it was difficult to get comfortable temperature-wise (take a blanket … Continue reading Diving in on Day Two
For ten years, the Snoopy coffee mug sat on my desk at Diamond, first on Greenspring Avenue, then on York Road. I’d bought it some years before at the Big Lots in Eldersberg. I liked the message — “Is there no one to rescue me?!” It seemed… apropos. As I gathered up things in my … Continue reading My Work-From-Home Experiment Begins