(anti)climactic

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Running behind on Sunday's newsletter (or feeling like I'm running behind on Sunday's newsletter) but that's usually the case: the addition of audio, while a welcome feature and a great writing aid, has added a bit more rush to the deadline than I had anticipated though most of that sensation's probably from my own pre-performance mental fuckeries. Once I sit with the thing and write it and record it, I'm fine and the dread reveals itself as more than a little anticlimactic. Though I can't deny a growing desire to make it more than a recap of this weekly unfurling. Heading there, certainly, hopefully, perhaps.

In other news, I leaned my head too far back and snapped the headrest of my office chair / shit fuck etc etc.

wonder flower trip

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SMW looks like lots of fun. Can’t wait:

Power-ups aren’t the only way players can transform. Super Mario Bros. Wonder also introduces eponymous plants that make things a little … trippy. A Wonder Flower might make Mario really, really big, or it might transform him into a Goomba. Sometimes they shift the very world itself, making pipes bend and slinky along. Mouri says that with so many Mario games behind them, they realized creating new things that surprise players was a challenge. They first played with the idea of items that warped you into different areas, until Tezuka offered some poignant criticism: “If you’re still just going to warp to a different area, it’s still the same. Why don’t you just change where you are right now?”

un/usual

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As per usual paper return efforts lasted until I started using the reMarkable again (which takes forfuckingever to charge) and dutifully fell back in love with the thing while, as per unusual, a massive breakthrough in the MainThing rendered all previous efforts and mental gymnastics moot, a rendering which was, as per the usual in this particular unusual, a simple twist to one minor detail that produced large ramifications: this is the way, every so often.

WEB OF SPIDER-MAN, No. 103 (Kavanaugh / Saviuk; Marvel, 1993)

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Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-)read it, write about it, and publish whatever emerges. Earlier installments live here.

(Box19): The more I encounter '90s Marvel (though DC was guilty of it too) comics in these Wednesday blind pulls, the more I'm amused by how every character's dialogue has the same rhythm: to imagine each being read by Paul Soles (Spidey's voice in the '67 animated series) is not only not a stretch, but adds an even deeper amusement (MJ and Peter's connubial woes, for example, are brilliant in a Soles voice; little wonder writers of the time wanted to ixnay the marriage – though that doesn't mean I agree with the decision).

But: MAXIMUM CARNAGE! And it was, indeed, Maximum, even down to the length of the crossover 14 parts... which would then prove to be not MAXIMUM enough, what with two-year-long CLONE SAGA a year in the future (but I'm sure I'll get to some of those issues as I do more of these). And this issue, in particular, opened with CARNAGE WITH A BIG GUN.

MAXIMUM!

Derision of the MAXimal thereness of much of the issue aside (being part ten of 14 tends to do that), I do have to mention here that Alex Saviuk draws one hell of a Spider-Man: his action scenes (of which this is wall-to-wall) MOVE and he can capture small emotional beats that would otherwise be (and were) glossed over in the hands of lesser artists. Should be mentioned as one of the definitive Spidey artists.

But yeah, Carnage with a big gun. Probably could have led with that and saved both of us some time. MAXIMUM time.