It has been an eventful couple of months, and that’s not including the quickly unraveling bag of cats that is American democracy (though that in itself, oof).

There have been some personal, family oriented upheavals I won’t go into, but it’ll be enough to say things were very intense and confusing for a while. Thankfully, everything has settled, a new normal is in place, and everyone is fine.

So, what’s in the other hand? To paraphrase a joke from Metalocalypse, it’s what you get a nihilist for their birthday — nothiiinnng. And what I mean by that is I’ll no longer have a job in a couple of months (if it even takes that long).

If you keep up with publishing news, you might have noticed a mostly family-owned daily newspaper entered into negotiations to “merge” with a very large media company sometime around the middle of last year. (I can’t remember exactly when and can’t be assed to look it up.) That deal, which was really more of a straight-up purchase, went through and the family-owned paper is now a part of the larger media company.

Things are tough for newspapers, and have been for a long time. On paper, the deal makes sense and will, hopefully, keep the paper going while the industry tries, again, to adapt to a changing media landscape. In more practical, and personal, terms, it means the new company suddenly found itself with more copy editors than it needed and laid off those working for the newspaper. All 26 of them. Including me.

When I took this job a couple of years ago, it was done with eyes wide open. This industry isn’t exactly a mystery, and layoffs are way too common. And when word of a possible merger first started bubbling up, it was easy to recognize this would probably be one of the outcomes.

Still sucks, though.

Now I find myself fighting short-timers while mentally preparing for the fact we start training our replacements in a few days. There’ll be a period of transitioning, and then … well, I’ll definitely have more free time on my hands. We (me and Sandy) are still trying to figure out what this will all mean for us, but we’ll be OK while I look for another job. Fingers crossed.

In happier news, we’ve been trying to make more time for the movies (we’re the weirdos who still love the experience of going to a theater), and I’ve been making more of an effort to carve out reading time more regularly. Here’s what I’ve been into lately:

MOVIES

People who say, “Hollywood is dead” and “They don’t make good movies anymore” are insane. In my opinion, it feels as if we’re in a growing, new Golden Age of cinema that’s producing truly original and interesting films. Most recently I’ve watched — and loved — One Battle After Another (obsessed with this very in-the-moment movie), Hamnet (Jessie Buckley may be one of the best actors out there right now), and Frankenstein (sumptuous, tragic, and I’m so glad we got to see it in a theater and on 35mm).

But I’m going to talk about 2023’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves instead.

We all have our comfort movies, the ones we watch over and over again, that we don’t have to give 100 percent of our attention but we know line by line. For myself, most of those tend to be older movies; The Blues Brothers, The Fugitive, Twister (don’t judge). Honor Among Thieves is a more recent addition, because it meets all the criteria I look for in this kind of movie: It’s fun, not too demanding, but also not lazy. There’s enough of a story to keep me interested, but it’s not going to keep me up at night chewing over what it all meant. The actors give their characters the proper amount of charm, everyone gets a chance to shine, and the bad guy is appropriately evil and straight-forward in their goal.

Also, there’s a gelatinous cube, which is awesome.

BOOKS

There are currently three books at the top of my reading pile:

• Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado: I’d heard about this book a long while ago, mostly in the context of it predating Dracula and laying a lot of the groundwork for Bram Stoker’s more-famous novel. I finally found a nice copy in a used-book store, slowly circled my way to it, and then that’s when everything hit the fan. Now I’m finally making my way back to this vampire classic. Sandy is also reading it and is a little ahead; she’s enthusiastic, so I’m looking forward to it.

• Absolution, by Jeff VanderMeer: This is VanderMeer’s fourth, and supposedly final, novel in his Southern Reach series, which began with the mind-bending Annihilation. I wish I could give a synopsis of this series that wouldn’t sound like a crazy person talking about upside-down towers, sentient fungus, and slightly off duplicates of people who have been somehow changed by an unexplained and inexplicable ecology, but I can see I’ve already failed. If you’re at all a fan of Weird fiction, definitely give this a try.

_{(Ironically, I couldn’t find a decent image for this next one.)}

• Darth Vader, written by Kieron Gillen; art by Salvador Larroca; colors by Edgar Delgado; and letters by Joe Caramagna: Remember that scene at the end of Rogue One? Our heroes are dead, either killed in the battle planetside or wiped out in the test of the Empire’s world-killing weapon. In orbit, a rebel ship is trying to escape while soldiers desperately attempt to get the Death Star plans to the Alliance. Suddenly, amid alarms and smoke, a fiery red blade flashes to life in the shadows, and there is palpable dread and panic as the rebels realize Darth Vader is among them.

It is a wonderful, somewhat terrifying scene that for the first time makes the audience understand why Vader is so feared throughout the galaxy. He is implacable, hateful, death in a cape and would absolutely kill you as soon as look at you. I’m only a few pages into the first volume of this 10-year-old series, but it pulls off the exact same vibe and I am here for it.

That’s where things stand for now. More updates as they warrant. Thanks for reading.