Sentential Links

Linkage, for them what likes clickin’ those links….

:: Here’s some questions answered and my predictions for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe! (Do check this out, if you’re at all interested in how the Marvel-verse of movies may proceed from here. As long as the quality keeps up, this group of inter-related movies may end up weaving together an unprecedentedly amazing story!)

:: Here is a small thing I have started doing. It may be silly, but symbolic. I am wearing my wedding ring on my right hand in hopes that people ask me why. This will give me the opportunity to bring up my opposition to the amendment. It seems superficial, but people notice a wedding ring on the right hand and often ask why you do it.

:: Take a sip every ten times Wolverine calls someone “bub”. (Hey, it’s “dangerous”, not “fatal”.) (A Chris Claremont era X-Men drinking game! Just what the world needs!)

:: I asked you my fellow readers which of the Fantasy tropes you were most tired of and one answer stood out from the crowd: the farm boy saving the world. (Yeah, I’m tired of that, myself. Which is why in the fantasy book I’m writing now, the farm boy does not save the world. I’m not even sure if he saves himself yet. And it doesn’t matter, since he’s not really a farm boy in the first place.)

:: The thing is, young readers and viewers are pretty amazingly good at stitching together a story they love, skipping over the parts they don’t get or making up their own explanations. They like to learn new things, especially when they involve giant herds of living bicycles and stompy red dragon-type things. Nearly every “big” word I used in Fairyland can be found somewhere in the seven books of Harry Potter. Yes, kids will need to look some of them up, or ask their parents what they mean. This is part of the joy of reading as a child. Kids shouldn’t be surrounded by stories that only reflect back to them what they already know–and neither should adults.

:: Be self-centered and stupid. Do it now while you still have the veil of youth and immaturity. I’ve had the most amazing drunken decade, resulting in the kind of life that allows me to tell amazing stories which people sometimes find hard to believe. (Advice for young people.)

:: What matters, really, is that you, the sixty-year-old person, were born into a society where you had it all. You had enormous purchasing power. Yes, computers have gotten cheaper, and that’s great, but the cost of basic shelter has increased and if we’re talking about home ownership it has exploded. At twenty-four, you the sixty-year-old person in 76 (the year I was born!) would be out of university – which cost you much less than it cost me, to say nothing of what it cost a kid today, because university tuition has wildly outpaced inflation over the past thirty-six years. That’s assuming you even decided to go to university, because in 1976 you could get a decent job with a high school diploma – and when we say “decent,” we mean “above the median salary” decent. Depending on what country you lived in, your access to quality healthcare would vary, but generally speaking it was easier for you to get it then than it is for a comparable young person to get it now, be that because a given country’s private system has collapsed or its public system has been chronically underfunded (but not for senior care, which so often manages to escape the knife). And of course you were guaranteed healthy retirements, and anyone my age or younger has been systematically trained to believe that retirement is something we’re never actually going to get to do. (Systematically trained, one would note, by old people. It is convenient how that goes.) (Advice for old people.)

:: The take-away from the Mittens was a prep school bully story shouldn’t be that Mittens was a prep school bully; it should be that Mittens is an idiot.

More next week!

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