Thoughts on that Jim Ratcliffe Thing

Just a quick one, because enough ink has been spilled about Sir Jim Ratcliffe's comments about immigrants. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the guy who supports Brexit and moves his business abroad to avoid paying UK taxes, then comes in and cuts a bunch of positions at Manchester United that don't have much impact on the bottom line (your tea ladies and so on), turns around and mouths off in pretty gross and innumerate ways about how immigration is affecting the UK.

But it's still dispiriting, especially when football likes to present itself as this bastion of equality and meritocracy, where everyone is welcome. And his non-apology was pretty gross - it's not that people chose to be offended, but that he said things that are offensive, not true, and that only lead to more violence. 

He claims that the UK population has grown by 12 million people since 2020, which actual UK statistics don't back up (they say it's 3 million). Referring to this number - whether 3 million or 12 million - as "colonization" is pretty clearly inviting irresponsible people to do irresponsible things, when the UK desperately needs immigrants to come in and work for the NHS and for care services for older folks and children.

Or does Ratcliffe think these roles can be filled exclusively by the UK's existing 70 million residents? Or only by white people? You wonder what Ratcliffe knows about how normal people are being impacted if he has so much money that he can insulate himself from daily life in the UK.

I read the Guardian pretty much every day, and I have to say I fear for the UK more and more. They seem ready to bring in Reform UK, which promises to do all the shit Trump and his cronies are doing over here, but in a more cack-handed way. The idea that Ratcliffe is in favor of that, because it'll reduce his tax load and cut the regulations that keep him from destroying the environment and the social fabric is even more infuriating. But he's providing ever more evidence that billionaires are less job-providers and more drains on society - maybe it's people like him that need to be stopped from colonizing our societies.

Thoughts on Wonder Man

I just finished Wonder Man on Disney Plus, and I think it was pretty great. I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by it - I wasn't even really planning on watching it right now, but decided to check it out earlier this week, just to see how it was. And, to be honest, to give it kind of a pity-watch - I expected the bad-faith review-bombers to get to work on it, since it changes the lead from a white guy in the comics to a Black guy.

But I took to it immediately, in part because the episodes were short - only about half an hour each, growing to about 35 minutes toward the end. But also in part because of the two leads: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is great as Simon Williams/Wonder Man, and Ben Kingsley reprises his role as Trevor Slattery/the Mandarin from Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi. Abdul-Mateen commands the attention in the lead role, especially when Acting. Meanwhile, Kingsley's portrayal of Trevor grows better and more layered every time we see him, with this show casting him first as Simon's friend and then (early on) revealing that he's got his own agenda.

In between we get a lot of enjoyable business about what it's like to be a jobbing actor in Hollywood, contrasting Simon being at the beginning of his career and Trevor being, if not at the end, certainly defined by his most notorious role as the Mandarin. As a creative person myself, it was particularly enjoyable to watch them navigate that life, even toward the end, where they find themselves in a different headspace than at the start.

As far as the changes to the character of Wonder Man himself, I've already referred to the change of ethnicity - though it's interesting that they gave Simon a Haitian background. The other big change is that, instead of getting his powers through some energy nonsense, as in the comics, their origin is just... unexplained. There's some suggestion that he's always had them, or that they emerged during puberty, which would imply that he's a mutant, which Marvel's been seeding through the movies and shows for a while (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ms Marvel, Deadpool & Wolverine and the Marvels all refer to mutants in some capacity).

But this show isn't about superheroes or their origins. It's about getting out of your own way to reach your goals, and about how you lift yourself up by connecting with others, rather than focusing constantly on yourself. This eventually becomes... literal? You'll know what I mean if you've watched the last scene.

The important thing is that Wonder Man doesn't do the usual superhero pyrotechnics (even if most of the best MCU shows, like WandaVision and Loki, also didn't), preferring instead to tell a character-based story. I've seen some reviews suggesting it might even be Marvel's best show? I don't know if I'd go that far, as WandaVision (and yes, Loki, just to mention both again) were probably richer overall, but as I said, I watched it just to see what it was like, and ended up bingeing it in half a week.

I don't know if we'll get to see Simon (or Trevor) again, but I hope so. He's not a huge character (one of the reasons why I was a little reluctant to start the show), but he's always been associated with the Avengers in some way, so it might be fun to see him pop up in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Or, while we're thinking pie-in-the-sky, an Avengers West Coast movie?

RIP Sal Buscema

Just read the news that comics artist Sal Buscema passed away last week at the age of 89. I might not have remarked on it, if I hadn't been revisiting some of his work in the last few weeks - I just wrapped up a long-awaited read-through of Walter Simonson's run on Thor from the 80s, the last half of which Buscema drew. Reading it, I was reminded of Buscema's classic style, which I recall from reading books like Spectacular Spider-Man back in the 90s.

As some of the posts I saw noted, Buscema was one of the last remaining creators who were present in the early years of what we now know as Marvel comics. In addition to his long run on Spectacular Spider-Man, he also drew the Incredible Hulk for ten years, and I'm sure I've come across his work elsewhere. He was also the younger brother of John Buscema, who's associated with formative runs of so many Marvel characters - but ironically, I feel like I've encountered more of Sal's work over the years.

The timing is sadly ironic, because his work on Thor reminded me what a good artist he was, and I found myself considering reading Spectacular Spider-Man just to see his run on the book - I'd even looked him up on Wikipedia a week or two ago to find out what else he'd done. I'll definitely read Spectacular Spidey now - and looking again at his body of work, it looks like I have extensive runs on Daredevil and the Avengers, among others, to look forward to.

My condolences to his family and coworkers, and all the fans - it's sad to see one of the old pros go.

Blue Lights May Be My New Favorite Brit-Cop Show

I just finished Series 3 of Blue Lights, and wow, wow, wow.

It wasn't even on my radar until fairly recently. I'd watched the first series of Line of Duty a couple of years ago on Hulu, and then wasn't able to get back to it until last year, when I knocked out Series 2 through 4 in short order and Series 5 when I got to the UK last July. When I discovered that Hulu here didn't have Series 6, I started considering taking a subscription to BritBox, reasoning that paying $11 to watch a full season of a show is completely fair.

Then at some point I read about Blue Lights, and was intrigued. So when I finally found the time to subscribe to BritBox (back in November, when it was offering two months for $6 rather than the usual $11), I finished Line of Duty and then went looking for Blue Lights. And I was hooked from the start.

The best I can say about it is that it's like the UK's version of the Wire, which is my absolute favorite TV show ever. It starts with following the cops, but expands to spend more time following the criminals as well, with investigations that expand from the first series through to the third. However, like the Wire, it's as much a profile of a city as it is a police procedural.

Series 2 expands from Series 1's investigation of a former Republican turned gang leader to look not only at the loyalist gangs of Belfast, but also the effects that the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis, plus a decade and a half of Tory austerity, have had on the city's neighborhoods. The first image of Series 2 has two of the protagonists answering a call about a homeless man's overdose death - and it soon becomes clear that he was killed both by the drugs sold by the ongoing antagonists and by society's indifference and powerlessness in response to the ongoing and overlapping crises.

Series 3 is a little weaker in some ways, but still compelling TV. It's meant to look at how criminality has infected the higher levels of society, but I didn't feel like it delved into those characters' inner worlds as well as the first two seasons did with the Republican and Loyalist neighborhoods. In part that's because they're engaged in varying levels of child exploitation and abuse, which makes it pretty impossible to make them someone you want to watch, let alone root for. But none of the villains in Series 3 are as good as Series 2's main antagonist Lee Thompson, who's at once clearly a criminal but also disposed to see himself as a key part of his community.

That said, the final episode has a nice sting in the tail when Series 1's Tina McIntyre faces the Dublin gangsters she's been propping up since her husband and son went to prison. I don't know if it sets anything up for Series 4, but it was a satisfying ending to the show so far.

All of this means that I'll now have two reasons to subscribe to BritBox again down the line - the BBC has commissioned Series 4 of Blue Lights and Series 7 of Line of Duty, so I'll be keeping an eye out for those. I've cancelled my subscription in the meantime to save a bit of cash and not feel like I have to watch yet another streamer regularly, but again, paying $11 for a month in which to watch a full season of either show, plus whatever other Brit-delights I can fit in (the Responder! Silent Witness! Wire in the Blood! Rebus! The New Statesman!), is completely worth it.

The bottom line, though, is that I can't recommend Blue Lights highly enough - even if you might need subtitles to cope with all the Belfast accents.

10 Years of This Shit

Funnily enough, the title of this post isn't precisely, or only, referring to the political stuff. 2016 was the first in this current sequence of terrible, terrible years, and it started off with a bang when I logged into the AV Club and learned that David Bowie had died. I was reminded of that when I started seeing think pieces, on Facebook and on the Guardian, among other places, marking that anniversary. And these have been followed by 10-year tributes for Alan Rickman, which means we're going to get to relive the Great Celebrity Die-Off of 2016.

So I wanted to get out ahead of all that, and just note, in among all the horrible shit going on in Minneapolis and Alligator Alcatraz and Greenland and Ukraine and Venezuela, that we're going to be reminded of how awful that felt back in 2016. And the worst part is, that all began in January 2016 and went through the whole year, until we got treated to Brexit and Donald Trump's first election win.

I was also thinking about the good things from that year, of which there were few, but a couple did spring to mind. One was, of course, Leicester City's Premier League title, which remains one of the greatest sporting fairy tales I've witnessed. They had a good few years after that, even though they sacked Claudio Ranieri as manager the following season, but then they had an ever worse set of seasons until they were relegated a couple of times. Sic transit gloria.

The other good things that I remember from 2016 are in the dating realm, where I went on four dates with someone and even smooched her a couple of times, the first since I'd moved back from London. I also got a mini-raise that year, also my first since London, although the following year I learned just how grossly I was being underpaid by my company.

Anyway, this post isn't about me. It's more about solidarity: we're going to be seeing a lot of commemorations of ten years of All This Shit, even as All This Shit burns down even more intensely around us than it did then. Take a break from social media and the news as needed, and set boundaries so that people don't bring that kind of thing up as a way of making small talk (I have people in my family who do this). As shit as it all is, and as shit as it's all likely to remain for a while, we'll get through it as long as we take care of ourselves and of each other.

Thoughts on Pluribus

It's been a while since I finished Pluribus, about a week or so, but I wanted to set down some thoughts on it while the show was still relatively fresh in mind. The TLDR is that I really liked it, more than Breaking Bad and more than what I've seen so far of Better Call Saul, although I've still only seen one season of Saul. I'm looking forward to seeing where Pluribus goes next, but to discuss that, I'll have to engage in some SPOILERS, so proceed with caution after the jump.

So Long, 2025: Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

You know, I've been writing these posts every year since 2016. Some of them have titles like, "Gosh, what an awful year" or "Another year I'll be glad to see gone". When I looked forward, it was stuff like, "Things are gonna get worse after 2024".

Thing is, they really all have been terrible in so many ways. We should have noticed in 2016 when all the celebrities started dying, completely out of nowhere, but by the end of that year it was clear we'd crossed into the darkest timeline. Even when we got a respite at the end of 2020 by voting out Trump, 2021 started with a deadly riot at the Capitol and the deadliest phase of the Covid pandemic was about to start.

So, uh, with that in mind, welcome to my recap of 2025! It's been another bad'un, both at the macro level and the micro level. Looking at the wider world, political chaos and violence have been the norm, and while it's been disheartening to see how many institutions simply caved to whatever nutty Trump demands came their way, it's been good to see some pushback from the grassroots level. Though it's not going to mean a thing if the Democrats don't take back the House and Senate in the midterms and impose some accountability on this administration.

Oh, and btw, it still won't mean a thing if they do. Realistically, even if Democrats sweep a supermajority in both chambers and impeach Trump, he'll get pardoned by President JD Vance, and whatever Vance can't pardon him for, the Supreme Court will just say he had immunity or something. I'm not actively worrying about how bad things will get in 2026, 2027 or 2028 because I can't change any of those things, but I still sometimes find myself wondering what absolute chaos will happen because people last year thought Joe Biden was too old.

As a final point on the political stuff, whenever Democrats regain the levers of power, I'm really worried about how hard it'll be to undo everything that's happened just this year. A bunch of agencies, like USAID and Voice of America, are probably not coming back at all, because both parties seem to have lost interest in soft power, but apart from that, the health and economic data collection isn't going to bounce back easily - even if whoever's in the White House and Congress after 2028 has any interest in resuming all the research and data collection that we had before this year, any datasets we have on, say, infant mortality or broadband penetration or basically anything will have these large gaps between 2025-2029 that'll skew our understanding of what was happening.

And that's to say nothing of the sustained cyberattack that was DOGE, in which a bunch of unelected Elon Musk fanboys got a hold of the federal government's data and can now do whatever they want with it. That situation isn't going to change when President Gavin Newsom or whoever gets sworn in, and we're gonna be feeling the aftereffects for generations.

Okay, but how was it for me?

Ugh.

As I may have mentioned, I lost my job in March - incidentally, five years to the day since my boss at State Farm told us we'd be working from home because of the then-nascent coronavirus. But we'd be back in a couple of weeks, they assured us. In my five subsequent years of work, I spent 1.5 days working in an office, and those were for office parties.

The job search sucked, with three legitimate callbacks and one that was a waste of time because it paid way too little (like, it would have meant a $36k pay cut). On the plus side, the last one then led to my first proper interview of the year, so we'll see how that went.

The first thing I did, though, was schedule out my time for every week, so that I'd ensure I was spending my time doing the things that mattered to me. This meant that I had time for writing, job-hunting, going to the gym, learning, and so forth. Of all of these, the writing is my one bright spot for 2025, both because I made sure I spent a couple of hours on it each day and because I was in that TV writing class I've talked about so much.

Compared to previous years, where I found it tough to get new projects off the ground, this year I ended up writing four TV scripts (one spec and three pilots), plus plotting out four novels (two rewrites and two new ideas). I also came up with ideas for movies, a non-fiction book, and a rewrite of a novella I wrote a few years ago. It's hard to say whether I'll be able to maintain this momentum, especially when I find a job again and don't have quite as much time anymore, but at least I know what to work on.

On the dating side, once I lost my job, this was never going to be a great year, but at the very least it seems to have been better than 2024. I went on a couple of dates, had a phone call vibe-check that was supposed to turn into a date but then she bailed, and after Thanksgiving I reconnected with someone I'd gone out with back in 2023 - we've only been texting, but it's nice to chat with her again, wherever this leads.

Fitness-wise, I got a lot more serious about going to the gym, even though I had to cancel my monthly personal training sessions. I maintained my schedule of going 4 times each week, and I way overshot my original goal to lift a total of 300,000 lbs, by hitting over 1.2 million lbs. This included that period of two months when I was in Europe and wasn't going to the gym. Not to be shallow, but the friend I've been texting noted that I looked fit when I sent her a picture of myself next to the Christmas tree, so it looks like at least all that gym work has had some effect.

On the financial front, once again, it was never going to be a great year, but I was quick to cut down on certain spending, and was lucky enough to be able to lower my rent quite substantially. All of which means that, even though I haven't had any money come in since September (when my unemployment ran out), I still have a fair bit of runway, even without raiding my retirement accounts.

As far as the life/other goals, mixed bag again - I didn't get out to as many cultural things as I'd have liked, but I got to some. I didn't leave the Bay Area as many times as I'd have liked, but traveling is expensive, and anyway, I managed to fuck off to Europe for two months, which was cool. Still didn't do enough decluttering, though.

There's no dressing this up: personally, 2025 was a shit year, and it was a shit year in part because the macro directly affected my micro (I'm pretty sure I'd still have a job if Kamala Harris had won last November). But amid the shit, I made the best of it where I could, and that's the important thing. Now... it'd be nice to have a year where I thrive, both personally and professionally. I'm not due anything, because the universe doesn't work like that, but the hope is that I unlock something, whether internally or externally, that makes that year (decade? Lifetime?) of thriving possible.

For as many years in a row have been terrible, in however many ways (2026 looks to be the 11th bad'un in a row), the hope is what keeps me going. Things may not clear up in 2026, or 2029, or, honestly, in my lifetime. But something will come along. It'll do so for me, and it'll do so for you.

Happy New Year, and don't let the bastards grind you down.