Month of Joy Begins Now

Given all the grumpiness in the sf/f community and the horrible stuff happening in Ukraine, I am taking the rest of the month off from anything annoying, fiasco-y, douche-y, and so on.  I'm also doing this to gain some perspective, particularly given that I have been part of some of the community-based debates and have begun questioning that involvement to some extent.  I feel like I need to refocus, to think about what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, how I feel about those things, and where I want to go.

So for the rest of the month, I'm only going to write and discuss and read about things that make me happy.  You can expect the following:

• Book Reviews
• SFF Film Odyssey Reviews/Columns
• Random Discussions About Genre (I love books :P)
• Maybe some comics-related stuff
• Something else that is happy-ful

Feel free to join me.

Month of Joy: "Mike's Favorite Comics" by Mike Underwood @mikerunderwood

I have many favorite comics, like I have many favorite novels, and so on. But the great thing about loving lots of stuff is that it’s much harder to run out of things to talk about. So here are a few of my favorite comics/runs from across my reading history, and a little about my relationship to each.

The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix (Scott Lobdell and Gene Ha)

This is the oldest of the entries on this list, but one that stood out in my mind. I’ve always been a Cyclops fan, probably largely because I spent a lot of my youth being a Good Kid ™.  I followed the rules, wasn’t a rebel, and so on. Characters like Wolverine or Jubilee didn’t really resonate with me. But Cyclops, the long-suffering earnest leader of the X-Men, he stuck with me.

Month of Joy: "Borderlands, the Game" by Paul Weimer (A Sorta Review)

Sometimes, blowing off steam is exactly what you need after a hard day in the mundane job. Sometimes you want to wander in an alien landscape, with not much more of an agenda than to kill mutant creatures, cannibals and other assorted beasties.

Sometimes, you want enter the world of Borderlands.

Month of Joy: "Growing Up w/ Genre and Singaporean SF/F" by Joyce Chng -- @jolantru

I grew up with genre. No, seriously, I did.

It all began with a book of children’s stories complete with shape-shifting and transformation. The girl turned into a fluffy plush-tailed cat… and I was hooked. And it just kept on coming: Star Blazers (Battleship Yamato), Battle of the Planets (or G-Force), Robotech (Macross – Southern Cross – Mospeada), Star Trek and the list continued. I fell in love with science fiction and it opened

Month of Joy: "The Cardboard Robot" by Polenth Blake

After sending my critique partner a story about people living on the clouds, he commented that all my stories had robots. I denied everything. It was about cloud people! But there it was, the main character reminiscing on making a robot out of cardboard boxes as a child. Robots had made it in there.

It wasn't based on life. I never made a robot from cardboard, because I dreamt of functional

Month of Joy: "The Joy of City Stomping" by David Annandale

Though their heyday was undoubtedly the 1950s and 60s, giant monsters have rampaged through the movies long before and long after the era that saw the arrival of the Big Bugs, Godzilla and friends, and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion marvels. Obviously, King Kong casts his long shadow from 1933, but before him were the dinosaurs of The Lost World in 1925 (whose climax features the first city rampage), and even earlier, Georges Méliès gave us the likes of the Frost Giant from The Conquest of the Pole in 1912, and the titular Gigantic Devil in 1902. So, when all is said and done, we have had well over a century of giant monsters stomping (or, in Méliès’ case, cavorting) across our screens.

Why?

I’m trying to tackle the question from a particular angle, given the theme of Shaun’s site this week.

An Announcement: The Week of Joy Continues

After the horror of the weekend, which I will not discuss here, I have decided to continue the Week of Joy throughout the rest of the month.  Thus, July will now fall under the heading, Month of Joy.  For the remainder of this month, I will primarily blog about things that make me happy, and will refrain, as much as possible, from discussing the depressing garbage going on in our community.  Exceptions will exist, of course (I have a post about Jim Carrey coming), but I really want to bleed joy for a while.

And in the interest of making this as wide reaching as possible, I'm going to reach out to friends and writers for guest posts about joyful SF/F-related things.  Expect a lot of content for the remainder of the month!

On that note, I'm going to go teach stuff to students...