Welcome to 2019: A Year of New Things (Podcastery, a Month of Joy, and Jen’s Delicious Tears)
2019! We’re finally here. Like you, we’re hoping it will be a good one. 2016 ended rough. 2017 was even worse. And 2018 was sort of like getting kicked in the teeth by the high school bully every single day. Whether you lost a loved one, your government lost its damn mind, or you tried desperately to keep your hopes up in yet another year of trashfires and horror, we know this last year has been just as tough on you as it has been on each of us. That’s why we tried to make 2018 a “Year of Hope.” Hopefully, our podcast was a little beacon of light in an otherwise dark abyss. Of course, 2018 wasn’t all bad. U.S.-Americans sent a message to the alt-right that y’all ain’t gonna keep this country for long. We got a new Star Wars movie (which Shaun says was absolutely kickass). There were some amazing books by old friends, new friends, and folks we haven’t met yet. Heck, 2019 was a year of phenomenal writing of all kinds. Plus, N.K. Jemisin won another Hugo Award (we’re temporarily renaming it the Jemisin is Awesomesauce Award). In a lot of ways, 2018 was a good year.
Month of Joy: The Joy of Living in an Actual Freaking Golden Age of Comics by Stephen Geigen-Miller
This, right now? This is the real Golden Age of comics, and that makes me very happy. If you’d asked me about the ideal future for comics, 25 years ago, as I was learning about the medium and the industry, preparing for my own foray into it? (Part of my secret origin is that before I fell in with a bunch of people who were making comics, and got excited about doing them myself, I really didn’t know much about them!) Or if you were a fly on the wall for the conversations between me and my friends about what comics could and should be? Or if you’d distilled all the Usenet and message board debates over what was wrong with comics, and what would make comics better, not just for us frustrated independent comics readers and creators, but for everyone?
Paul Weimer’s Month of Joy: Sometimes Image IS Everything
27 years ago, I remember seeing commercials for the Canon Rebel film camera, with tennis player Andre Agassi saying “Image is everything”. And since the Internet remembers and stores everything, that thirty-second commercial from 1990 is on Youtube. Go ahead, watch it. At the time, I thought “Well, that’s dumb. Photography is dumb. Image is not everything, substance is. How shallow, how banal.” Heck, I didn’t even know what an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera was. Cameras could…change lenses? Who knew?
Month of Joy: La Alegría del Lenguaje by Cassandra Rose Clarke
A year ago, I decided to embark on a not-exactly-new endeavor: teaching myself Spanish. I say not-exactly-new because I had attempted it before with a dubiously-acquired copy of Rosetta Stone, which I used for about a month in 2013 before giving up. My failures with Rosetta Stone hadn’t killed my desire to learn Spanish, though. Spanish is a language I grew up around without ever actually learning—I’m from South Texas and now live in Houston, so it’s been a part of the sonic and cultural landscape my entire life. However, I went a Classics route with my formal language learning in high school and college (Latin and Ancient Greek, respectively) and so Spanish was firmly lodged in a strange space of being both familiar and unknown. This frustrated me. How could I see and hear a language almost every day and not understand it?
Month of Joy: Finding Joy in a Fountain Pen by Keith A. Manuel
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2018 is to take up writing by hand again. I bought my first ever fountain pen, a Pilot Metropolitan, and the most un-holiday-ish Christmas cards I could find on after-holiday discount at my local big retailer store. I also picked up a nice journal and some color pencils. My tools are ready for a year of putting pen to paper. I’ll see how it goes, one page and one day at a time. It seems a retro, nostalgic thing to write this way, but I’m not alone. The Internet of all places is a good place to find pen pals. The prospect of having to wait a week or more for a response to a message when we have multiple, popular direct messaging platforms, Twitter and Facebooks public posts, email, and blogs for instant communication, whether to whoever is interested to read it or to a more restricted audience.
Month of Joy: Pens and Ink by Anne Lyle
When I was eleven years old I started at the local girls’ grammar school, where it was mandatory to use a fountain pen for “neat work”: homework, tests and so on. My parents bought me a Parker 45 Flighter, a pretty swanky pen for a kid, and I felt very grown up using it. That pen served me well through school and university, and for years it was the only fountain pen I owned, apart from a battered vintage Conway Stewart that I sadly lost somewhere along the way.
