Stuff I Watched, Read, Heard, Etc in 2021

With the continuing pandemic and my own reluctance to go out and get potentially exposed, there's been a lot of time to watch stuff at home. Unfortunately, it's meant that I could only watch what was available at home, so HBO Max came through for me in a big way, while Disney Plus took a little longer to share its cinematic delights. Anyway, without further ado:

Movies

I feel like it was a blah year for movies, for the reason listed above. HBO Max, as I said, came through with a number of new releases at the same time as in theaters, and because everything feeds into some IP or other, it meant my girlfriend and I caught up on a bunch of movie series. For new stuff, the standout is probably Dune, which had a nice mix of action and intellect. That is to say, it's not the kind of introspective SF that marked Interstellar or even Denis Villeneuve's earlier film Arrival, but it's a cut above most tentpole SF blockbusters because the explosions and warfare aren't the point. It was a faithful adaptation in all the best ways, and the casting was mostly good. I'm looking forward to the next one - and maybe I'll even get to see it in theaters!

HBO Max also provided access to a couple of big superhero-related movies: the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, and the Suicide Squad. It was interesting seeing the long-awaited Snyder Cut, since I remember JL being pretty bad; the new version wasn't Citizen Kane, but thinking back on it now, it felt like a different movie and like all the parts fit together in a way that I don't remember the previous version doing. 

Suicide Squad, meanwhile, was a fun romp through the incredibly rich back catalogue of random DC characters. I don't love James Gunn's other superhero work, but it was nice to see Warners give him free rein to tell the story in as violent and sweary a way as he wanted. The result came off like DC's answer to Deadpool, and it looks like the story will continue with the new Peacemaker series.

I also caught up with Warner's Godzilla movies, several of which I'd seen, but they were better on the second go. Kong: Skull Island was particularly fun, and even Godzilla: King of the Monsters held up better than I remembered. Kong vs Godzilla was a little bit sillier than either, but was an okay romp. It was also nice to rewatch the Jurassic Park movies, and some bits of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom looked a lot better seen a second time.

The one new series that I caught was the Conjuring movies, again because HBO Max released the latest one and made the rest of the series available. The first was obviously the best, but it was fun seeing how the Nun and the Annabelle movies fit into the overall whole.

Looking at the amount of movies I watched there, it's clear that HBO Max has taken over as the streaming service to get the kinds of movies you'd actually want to watch. Netflix has some good ones, but they're mostly its own originals, as all the content holders take their stuff away to form their own streaming services.

TV

I caught up with a lot of series this year that I'd been watching previously, but the main new thing I discovered was Star Trek: Lower Decks. It took a while to warm to it, because I'm not entirely on board with the frenetic type of humor it mines from Rick and Morty, but the show improved as it based more of its humor on obscure Trek lore. I hold it up in contrast to the Orville, which tries to do the same thing (identifying the absurd parts of Trek while also getting at the meanings, morals and messages), but still got stuck too much on making Family Guy-style jokes about it all. That said, both are the continuations of TNG that I've been wanting, so I'm interested to see how their respective second seasons turn out.

Narcos was another fun one, both the original Colombia show and the Mexico sequel. I saw them out of order, catching Narcos: Mexico first, which perhaps made the original stand out better, even in the third season when the focus moves from Pablo Escobar to the Cali Cartel. Both, however, were entertaining procedurals looking at how the drug war is prosecuted, and the final season of Narcos: Mexico looks promising so far. Though I could watch another few seasons of Wagner Moura as Escobar.

Music & Podcasts

I'd love to separate these into two categories, but even with my British music listening project, it's been hard to find new music to fall in love with. The one exception, though it's not recent, is Echo and the Bunnymen, which sounds like something I'd have loved in high school and college. There's something about the soundscapes that reminds me of the Smiths and the Cure, so it's been fun exploring their back catalogue in its entirety.

In terms of podcasts, I discovered a few good history podcasts, mostly on ancient cultures. The Ancient World, the Ancients and Fall of Civilizations have all been entertaining to listen to, and feel like they could provide some good fodder for fantasy or science fiction story ideas.

Books & Comics

The one new book that I read that really caught my attention this year was Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It was a quick, compulsive read, which I found hard to put down and which felt like a spiritual successor to Stephen Baxter's Evolution, and indirectly to Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. I'm looking forward to the sequel, Children of Ruin, and to looking at the rest of Tchaikovsky's back catalogue.

Otherwise, I just read more books in series I've been rationing out year to year (like Genevieve Cogman's super-fun Invisible Library series and Marko Kloos's also-fun Frontlines books). I've got the final Expanse novel, Leviathan Falls, queued up on my Kindle, which I'll be tackling at some point in the new year, though I don't know what I'll do with myself when I've finished the series. I also read the second and third books of Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness trilogy, following up his First Law series. Like with Leviathan Falls, I don't quite know what to do with myself now, and while I'll be looking forward to Abercrombie's next book, I hope he revisits this setting sooner rather than later, because I want to know what comes next.

In terms of comics, I stuck with re-reading my whole collection, so I've been revisiting books I haven't read in about 10-20 years, if not more. I've also finally gotten to my Marvel books, and it's been interesting (and sometimes a little infuriating) getting acquainted with the X-Men again. I'm still leaning toward subscribing to DC and Marvel's digital comics services at some point, so that I can read... well... everything. Who knows when I'll find the time for that, of course...

Games

There hasn't been much interesting gaming this year, though I'll have some extra time for it in the coming months. I did manage to get a Switch at the end of last year, and I have a couple of Mario games, as well as FIFA 21 (a stripped down version), to play with. Other than that, I drifted away from Mario Kart Tour on iOS, and drifted into Apple Arcade, which has also led me back to Kingdom Rush - and to the nerdy world of Kingdom Rush fandom on YouTube.

As I keep saying, iOS games like Kingdom Rush are good because they don't require the time and mental investment that the latest blockbuster games for the state of the art consoles require. I've tried picking up Skyrim again recently, but it's been years and I don't exactly know what I'm doing anymore. On the other hand, I can knock out a couple levels of Kingdom Rush without keeping all kinds of backstory straight.

That said, I do sometimes think it'd be nice to grab a new console and game, like God of War or Horizon: Zero Dawn, to be up with what everyone's talking about. I might just try, though I feel like I ought to finish more of the games I already have...

Year in Review 2021: Yet Another Year That Can't End Too Soon

Like every year, 2021 had ups and downs on a personal level, though this year the personal downs have outweighed the ups for the first time in a while, as my relationship ended. Globally, it's been just the latest tough year for everybody, a streak that began in 2016 with the great celebrity die-off and continued through Donald Trump's election, something that affected how things have gone this year.

On the writing side, my fiction suffered a bit, as the second year of lockdown meant more mental stress and fewer ideas overall. I tried to write a cyberpunk short story, but fell afoul of the rule Lavie Tidhar once gave me for writing steampunk, which is that it should be about more than its genre. I think I have the atmosphere almost right, but I need more compelling characters and a better plot. Still, some of it's percolating and elements will likely come out at the right time.

More positively, I was pleased with the work I did throughout the year on my other blog, where I did a round-up of mobile plans aimed at seniors, students and children throughout the US and Western Europe. They weren't always easy to pull together, but at least each month I knew what to work on, and in the end I think I created a body of work that no other analyst has collected and compared. And it was just fun to use my various language skills to do the kind of mobile industry research I enjoyed in 2012-13.

The other writing positive is that I started work on a new novel idea. It was partly inspired by my character in the Dungeons & Dragons game I've been playing this year, and I spent part of the year working on background and worldbuilding for it. I started writing it in earnest in November, when I took part in my first NaNoWriMo, which was unexpectedly fun.

Speaking of D&D, that almost-weekly game was a good anchor for the year, as it became my primary vessel for seeing my friends, even if it was only through a computer screen. I've slowly started seeing them in person again for outdoor walks, but D&D turned out to be a fun activity to keep connected to my main social circle.

Fitness-wise, things were made difficult by the ongoing pandemic and another summer of heat and unhealthy air. The pandemic means I'm not going to the gym, especially to breathe hard on a treadmill or elliptical, but when smoke from our now-annual wildfires blankets the Bay Area, I can't run outside. I still managed some regular workouts, and even started seeing a personal trainer again (virtually), but I'm really looking forward to the day when I can go back to the gym with confidence, or at least when I can buy my own damn treadmill.

My biggest piece of good news was that I managed to find a new job. I'd been trying since January 2020, but the pandemic stopped that fairly quickly, but I set myself the goal of sending out a certain number of applications, and got to work for the first six months of the year. Ironically, the interviews I got were based on applications I sent out last year, which were only now being followed up.

The timing was also good, because the day before I received the job offer that I ended up accepting, my previous company announced that we'd be expected to go into the office for team meetings, which was awkward for me as my team was in Arizona. Being on Zoom in the Los Altos office would be okay, but being on Zoom at home would not. I gave my notice the following day.

Two other thoughts from that whole experience. The first is relief that I left when I did, because I recently learned that the project I'd been working on was pulled. I don't know where I'd have ended up if I'd still been there, so I'm glad I'd left. The other thought is more of a rule for life going forward: never have your last day on a job be the last day of the month, because your health insurance coverage ends the month you leave. I managed to give my notice on 1 July, which meant I was covered throughout my whole 18-day between-jobs period.

At a global level, the pandemic slightly faded into the background, though it was always there to remind us that we're still very much in it. One reason for the fading was positive, as the vaccine rollout took on speed, and I got jabbed in May (and boosted this month). They may not confer 100% protection, but as another layer of protection on top of masking and social distancing, they helped lower deaths and hospitalizations, at least in some places and for a while. More negatively, we've seen the drawback of our inequitable system of distributing vaccines, as two terrible variants, Delta and Omicron, arose in India and South Africa, respectively - taking advantage of large pools of unvaccinated people there to develop.

The other thing that put the pandemic on the back burner was way more frightening, as a mob of right-wing extremists stormed the US Capitol on 6 January to stop Joe Biden being certified as president and keep Donald Trump in office. We've seen the effects of right-wing violence resonating throughout the year, from that and from violence at some BLM protests last year, and the atmosphere just grows more and more worrying. Mass shootings are back up in 2021, after last year's lockdowns meant people weren't congregating in places, and far-right extremists are just elevating the tensions further by making more explicit threats against lawmakers they don't like - sometimes lawmakers themselves are threatening their colleagues.

To add to the instability, Republicans are making moves that will make it easier for them to steal the next presidential election. The media's focus has been on voting laws in places like Georgia, where the accusation is that voters of color will find it harder to vote in coming years, but the GOP has also quietly been shifting election officials in various battleground states, who are expected to be more tolerant of shenanigans than the officials in place in 2020. 

All of these steps, and the simple demographic sorting of Democrats into urban areas and Republicans into thinly populated rural areas, are setting the stage for Republican minority rule for years to come. That'll mean more regressive laws like Texas's SB 8 abortion law, but my other big worry is that laws like that will be used to weaken laws in progressive states - our governor in California, Gavin Newsom, says he wants to use SB 8's model to sue gunmakers, but I also see a danger in right-wing judges striking down our own gun, environmental and labor protections.

The cherry on top has been the political polarization of the pandemic, which started last year with protests against lockdowns and mask mandates, but gained a new battleground with the vaccines. Many of the same people parroting the big lie that Trump won the election are also pushing the idea that the vaccines are dangerous, sometimes in very cynical ways (see any Fox News host, where vaccinations are apparently mandatory and well taken-up). On the fringes, but dangerously close to the mainstream thanks to social media, are people claiming that the vaccines are a plot to depopulate the world.

To sum up, I had a couple of good wins this year, but a couple of big losses, and weighing on all of it is the uncertainty of what's happening in the world around me. I'm lucky to live in an area that's both responsible with regard to pandemic precautions, and is seeing lower numbers, but other parts of America (and California in particular) aren't so lucky. I see the pandemic continuing for another year, if we go by the length of the 1918 flu pandemic, but I also expect that the polarization and misinformation on vaccines will mean we have to get boosters for the next few years, which will suck.

Unfortunately, next year will see a midterm election, and the forecasts are already negative for the Democrats, so we can expect gridlock and hateful right-wing rhetoric to ramp up. So unfortunately, I don't think we're going to see a good year for some time to come.

Chris Claremont's X-Men

Once again, a dispatch from my big comic-collection reread, where I've now moved onto my much-diminished Marvel collection. Just as reading my DC books started with the Justice League, which was my favorite of those titles, here I've started with the X-Men, which is what got me into superhero comics in the first place. Though the book that did that was (New) X-Men #1, I've started with Uncanny X-Men, the title that had gone back to the team's creation by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Like most comics readers of my age and generation, the Chris Claremont version is pretty much definitive, having given us a lot of the ideas and characters that we associate with the team now. Because of my searches for back-issues back in the 90s, my collection of his run goes all the way from the late 70s to his departure in the early 90s, so that you can get a sense of how he reused characters and settings over time.

Something that struck me recently, as I read the Muir Island Saga that ended his run on Uncanny, was how well he developed sub-plots over a long time, so that they paid off years later. The Muir Island Saga took place in 1991, but we started to see hints of the Shadow King's takeover there in issues from 1987 or 88, taking advantage of other storylines and subplots that had taken place even earlier. Rereading these issues, I remembered feeling the same awe at seeing a bunch of storylines come together as I did back in the 90s when his run on Excalibur came to an end (though sadly I only have one issue of that run remaining).

Part of what let him put all those subplots in place was the enormous breadth of characters that he created for the book. The main X-Men team, at that time, was believed to be dead but was actually operating from an abandoned outback Australian town. Events conspired to separate them and deposit them, with memories erased, all around the world, leaving Wolverine to go and collect them again. At the same time, tipped off by Jean Grey, two marginal X-Men, Banshee and Forge, went looking for them, while also investigating the odd happenings on Muir Island. On this read I enjoyed the way these characters, who either weren't very well-established or hadn't been seen for a long time, alternated as leads with the main X-Men characters, giving a sense of a self-contained universe.

This period is also notable for being when Marc Silvestri and then Jim Lee were drawing the book. I was a little surprised at how rough Silvestri's style was at this time, somewhat inconsistent and not very recognizable to the linework of his later Cyberforce or Witchblade comics - probably the effect of his inker Dan Green, though I could be wrong. Lee's style, meanwhile, undergoes an interesting transition from his early, Art Adams and manga-influenced work, to the linework that's become more associated with him.

Lee's style, in particular, gave rise to legions of inferior imitators, especially once he and Silvestri and others decamped to Image to create their own books. Interestingly, you can see Claremont's influence there too, as a lot of early WildCATs or Gen13 stories feel like what the writers think Claremont would do. This is both in the breadth and type of villains, and in the ponderous language used in the narrative captions.

One thing that I don't love about Claremont's work now is how wordy it is. Compared with a Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis, who either don't use narrative captions or use them less, these X-Men books take a long time to read, because there's so much speech and narration going on. His language isn't as stilted as, say, Roy Thomas's (my earliest X-Men issue is the one where Thomas introduces Sauron, with typically florid language), but I do remember a friend in college laughing about the vocal tics that Claremont was known for.

The other thing is his accents, which are uniformly terrible. Rogue's is pretty bad, but Banshee's is worse - if you've ever heard an Irish accent in real life you won't recognize it in how Claremont wrote him. Moira MacTaggart's Scottish accent is also not great, in part because Claremont didn't seem able to distinguish it from Banshee's Irish one. These are kind of minor quibbles, but they get magnified by the legions of inferior imitators who propagate these terrible accents because that's how Chris did them.

Because I haven't gotten to New X-Men yet, or read what was happening around the books, I don't recall exactly why Claremont left the books when he did. What I can say is that he left just as they got big in the wider culture, with the 90s animated show using a lot of the characters, designs and plots of that New X-Men reboot period. As I've suggested before, this wider attention is a mixed blessing, because even though it means more people are familiar with the work, it also puts pressure on the creators not to veer too wildly from what viewers of the TV show or movies are familiar with.

Another way of saying that is that Claremont's more long-form, sub-plot driven stories, with less-recognizable characters in less typically superheroic situations, wouldn't have worked in the X-Men's imperial phase of the 90s. Unfortunately, in the hands of lesser writers, the whole universe became bloated and unwieldy, which at least led to the creative rebirth of the late 90s and early 2000s, where Grant Morrison took on New X-Men. 

I'll probably write more about that later, but it's interesting that it took a talent like Morrison to shake the X-Men free of Claremont's influence. Though it has to be said, rereading his run emphasizes how much better he was than the writers who immediately followed him.