I've been publicly addressing white mediocrity since my 2011 blog post "The American Way: Mediocrity, When White, Looks Like Merit," but I learned A LOT from @IjeomaOluo's MEDIOCRE. As Brittney Cooper's @nytimes review said, it really is an invitation for society to do better.

Okay look - I didn’t grow up with comic books. But I read stacks of science fiction digests and I kit-bashed model cars into fantasy rods, and just tried to maintain a low profile until I could get out of the house. So you could say I’m a distant cousin of the comic book fan. /1

And sometimes one’s childhood passion follows them into adulthood, sometimes not, sometimes as an adult one finds a passion they never had as a child and embraces it. For me, that must include getting involved with a puppet show at the age of thirty. /2

So who’s to say whose passion’s legitimate and whose is bogus? Nobody. Someone might indict your passion but they have no ground to stand on and should be dismissed out of hand. /3

Maybe they’re envious that you have a passion, maybe they think that their passion is cooler than yours, or maybe they’re just insecure, who knows. Doesn’t matter. /4

What matters is that if something gives you joy, and in the process doesn’t hurt others, then by all means follow it. It’s how we explore our secret hopes, our shadow sides, our inner character. /5

All warfare is based on deception.

Everybody assuming Trump hasn't been working furiously behinds the scenes to affect certain outcomes were wrong.

They based their assumption Trump doing nothing & just hoping for the best on the surface of things.

As they were supposed to.

The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip ended 25 years ago, so let’s celebrate a New Years treat by analyzing it! Awhile back I had a students annotate structures in every C&H strip, so we have data on the whole thing. As Calvin says: let’s go exploring! 1/ https://t.co/GAm45Ni1m5

An interesting feature of this strip is that Watterson took a few sabbaticals during its run, and came back with more artistic freedom. So, I’ll focus here on how a few aspects of the strip change over time. Here’s what every panel per strip looks like (all 14,712 panels!) 2/

Let’s start with storytelling. Overall, the strip shifts to becoming more visual and multimodality balanced in meaning over time. In this graph, higher numbers mean more meaning carried by pictures than words (0=balanced) 3/

You can also see this in the overall increase of wordless panels across strips. Interestingly, you see the same trends for both daily and Sunday strips, suggesting broader shifts in Watterson’s storytelling inclinations 4/

The amount of words also changed. The strip steadily got more wordy in the first half of its run, but then started decreasing again as it shifted to visual meanings 5/

on a very basic level it is astounding to me that seemingly half the country is hooked on the adventures of The Vision & Scarlet Witch, whose last series together was a precise contemporary of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, and which was quarter box fodder for decades

in hindsight, of course, the idea of framing a superhero story as a suburban dramedy seems novel and fresh to people, but that’s only because other people spent literally three and a half decades sleeping on it

now, of course, many new fans who look into the history of the matter might wonder why such a seemingly popular and fecund direction for these two characters was permanently shelved in the late 80s, what set of factors could possibly have -

they were able to put back some of what was broken - in time - but they never were able to get back to the marriage, and by the time the characters had new status quos in the early 90s the company had moved away from those kinds of genre experiments, and the rift became permanent

the Vision was a humorless drip for years, doing much the same schtick as Data during the precise years ST:TNG was airing

and as a consequence of those stories Wanda permanently became the poster child of women who cannot handle their power because of female inconstancy ...

Now many readers have asked me over the years "how do I (with my great hair) go about fleeing a gothic house?"

That's a very good question, because it's not as easy as it seems...

There are of course many gothic domiciles that women with great hair can flee from:
- a house
- a mansion
- a castle
- a chateau

More adventurous gothic heroines can also choose to flee:
- a manor
- a keep
- a graveyard
- some dark foggy towers

As gothic houses come in all shapes and sizes you may come across the following things which require fleeing:
- Strangers (call a taxi)
- Tombs (walk to the nearest exit)
- Hell (fleeing recommended)
- Darkest Death (head start required)

There are some items that are a clear giveaway that you are in, or near, a gothic house that requires fleeing. Look around you and see if you can spot:
- sarcophagi
- crucibles (unless in a chemistry lab)
- anemones
- any form of ides