I love Christmas Eve. Possibly more than Christmas Day. Both are great fun, and reuniting with friends and relatives I rarely see is delightful of course.

But the quiet anticipation of Christmas Eve is where it's at. For me it's usually a day off work, wrapping (occasionally running ...

If you haven't noticed, 2016 is all about pitting superheroes against one another. This coming spring, we'll have Captain America facing off with Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War, and DC's two biggest heroes at odds in Batman v. Superman: Dawn Of Justice. But forget about ...

Yesterday evening my friend and I donned our prettiest dresses and went to see The Marriage of Figaro. Neither of us had ever been to the opera before, and we weren't the only ones - it was “student night” where they sell cheap tickets to the final dress rehearsal, so ...

Say My Name

There are titles that fit perfectly with their subject, titles that could fit multiple subjects/contexts, and titles that don't work at all.
Recently I've seen several titles referenced that made me say “I HAVE to see that/read that!”. I'll share those at ...

It had been years since I donned my black cocktail dress to spend an evening listening to one of my favorite writers, and that is exactly what I did on Saturday night. The scene was set in Long Beach at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center and I was excitedly waiting ...

If you've heard me talk for any reasonable amount of time (apologies!), you know I can't maintain much of a conversation before beginning to list movies. What can I say? I love ‘em!

So for this penultimate October Thursday, I thought I’d share my Halloween movie playlist ...

-art by Gunwallace


THE PASSENGER
by kawaiidaigakusei

On a very untypical evening, I found myself driving around the rainy streets of Los Angeles late at night by myself. Somehow I ended up south of Pico Blvd and as I turned the corner onto Venice Blvd around Loyola High School, I ...

Horror…and the baddies and creepies and long-legged beasties of horror…come in many flavours.
These divisions might be incomplete or somewhat meaningless in a way, but hey, I have to approach it somehow…

Reality Bites: Human Creeps, Scary Animals and Nature
-Serial Killers, Jason, Michael Myers, The Strangers, And ...

CHARACTER SHAPES
I've never consciously designed characters this way, but I recently remembered hearing about this notion some time ago, on the dvd special features for an animated something-or-other.
Characters derived from basic shapes can give a very strong impression of their basic personality type. This can help the ...

Change is difficult. Decisions are made out of comfort and convenience because staying the same is safer. Anything that strays off the beaten path has a tendency to seem foreign. It feels like a strange sensation that makes the squishy parts of the brain uncomfortable.

In a way, I am ...