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That’s My Superpower

It’s that time again! Well, technically, I feel like it’s actually a little past that time; don’t I traditionally start sharing annual playlist tracks before the end of April? Maybe I’m misremembering. Anyway, as I’ve done for the last few years and shared here, I make an annual playlist on Spotify and add songs to it that are either new to me or that I’ve become newly obsessed with. (Here’s the last time I did that from the 2025 playlist, which contains links to the earlier post that year.) I do it in batches of 50 songs at a time, although as of writing, I’m up to 65 songs on the list itself and will undoubtedly be further by the time you read this.

If you have Spotify yourself, you can find the playlist right here; I recommend all of the songs, obviously, but just know that “Baby It’s You” and “Empathy” were on repeat during Emerald City Comic Con 2026, and “Lion” was the soundtrack that kept me sane during the Chicago/PAX East work weekend from home. That said, the Aldous Harding track and the (incredible) Kate Ireland track are probably the ones that have gotten the most play so far this year.

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Built on Shifting Sands

On the one hand, I love the fact that we are all — to use the terminology of both modfather Paul Weller and comics icon Steve Ditko — Changing Men (and Women, and Non-Binary Folk). There’s something comforting to me about the fact that we’re not tied to one particular definition or even identity if we don’t want to be, and the self-actualization implicit in that reality is also a comfort, in its own way; we get to make our own realities to a certain degree, and the change implicit in that is evidence of a particularly good thing.

On the other, I am more than slightly unnerved about my recent discovery that my bellybutton has, at some point in my life, changed from being an innie to an outtie, and I didn’t even realize when it happened.

Look, I’m all too aware that my body is becoming that of not just any middle aged man, but my fact when he was in his mid-to-late 40s; my stomach is swelling, and I’m not doing anywhere near the right amount of exercise to take care of that. (I will, I promise, just not right now; I have a blog post to finish, after all.) And it’s possible that my increasing width around the midriff is what’s changed the polarity of my bellybutton. Still, there’s something… unexpected about it.

It’s not as if I’ve ever placed too much value on the innie or the outtie as a meaningful thing in any manner; it’s not something that defines you as an introvert or an extrovert, or any similar thing as much as that would be a fun connection. Nonetheless, catching sight of my belly the other day and going, that doesn’t look right was one of those moments where your brain just takes a brief moment to click and your thoughts start to veer off into another direction, entirely unexpectedly. I thought I knew what I looked like; turns out, I didn’t, not entirely.

So: I’m not who I thought I was. Part of me is different, and I’m just sitting here thinking, I’m okay with that, really while being just a little unsettled as well. In the strangest way, that in itself feels somewhat fitting. After all, what is change, if not an inability to stick in one fixed form? It’s ambiguity itself made into action, so perhaps I can have some ambiguity in how I feel about it, as well.

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Looking Back with 20/20 Hindsight

When I was doing my Masters degree, I came up with the seemingly-smart-at-the-time idea of writing and illustrating a book that would display my talents and influences in one place at one time. It did both things, although looking back now, I feel self-conscious about how heavily influenced much of it was by the usual suspects, and how simultaneously obvious and oblique much of the writing was; that said, the quality of the book — and, indeed, the book itself — isn’t really why I brought the whole thing up right now. Instead, I’ve been struck by remembering how it came together.

The end of my Masters degree was this strange time; my entire post-graduate program was a compressed one, a solid year with only a couple weeks off for Christmas that included both a post-grad and MA degree course squished into 12 months, meaning that if I passed the post-grad, I’d find out in May, and then have just three months to complete the MA portion of it; in order to assist doing so, the few of us in the course (maybe 12 of us in total? Maybe less? It was a handful, at best) were given the entire otherwise empty art school for the summer as studio space and told to get it done. The clock was ticking.

What this meant was, of course, we just worked. Our lives became airtight work modules, losing a summer to just getting it done, whatever “it” looked like to each of us. (All of our work was very different, very distinct from each other.) The countdown to the deadline was something we were all far too aware of, having to plan and execute our final-final show almost immediately after our post-grad degree, which was itself just a year after our graduate degree, and it was appropriately suffocating and high-stress the entire time.

In deciding to make a book — and a hardcover book at that — I accidentally set my own deadline earlier: after all, I had to have all the material finished and ready to be bound by a third party earlier than the actual deadline, in order to let the book binder do their work by the actual deadline. I seem to remember my end-of-work deadline was three weeks earlier than everyone else’s, which isn’t a small amount when the entire thing lasted three months. For me, it all came down to staying up overnight the day before I had to get everything to the book binder, printing the book out page by page on a laser printer in a friend’s house.

I’d made my life harder through my ambition: I was making five editions of the same book, but each one was, I seem to remember, around 100 pages and using different paper and card stock throughout, with the dimensions of the book unusual for reasons I don’t even recall anymore. The night wasn’t just printing, it was collating, cutting all the pages down to size, sorting out paper jams and swapping in new toner cartridges as necessary. In all, the whole thing took about 12 hours of activity; I finished just as the sun was starting to come up.

What I remember most about that night was the way in which it felt like the entire post-grad/MA program in miniature: starting with ambition and goodwill that got increasingly frazzled and worn as exhaustion set-in, regretting said ambition by the end of the whole thing and wishing I’d gone for something easier. A manic excitement surrounding the entire enterprise that felt more fragile the more it continued, and a sense as everything became worn through that maybe it would never end, somehow.

That I find myself feeling nostalgic for that night, decades later, feels ironic given how much I was not enjoying it at the time — even a little masochistic. But there was a magic to that time of my life, even if I didn’t realize it at that moment; perspective that I should probably remember for every moment, moving forward. Everything can look amazing, in retrospect.

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Same As The First

I read something the other day about internet outlets “pivoting to video” again at some point in the near future. The whole concept of “pivot to video” is something that I’ve gone through at least three or four times since I started writing for the internet as a career 20-odd years ago, and it’s something that feels more and more ridiculous each and every time.

I’m not saying that video is ridiculous, please understand; more that, as has been demonstrated over and over again through the earlier attempts to “pivot” — which is to say, publishers deciding to concentrate on video production and output, rather than the written word — audiences for written stories and audiences for video are different audiences, and one can’t easily replace the other. It’s something that you’d think publishers would understand themselves, because think about it; you yourself, dear reader, know that sometimes you want to read something (or, at least, have something written that you can scan through quickly) and sometimes you want to watch something, and that those aren’t the same impulse at all, as an audience member. And yet.

More to the point, making video is so much more labor-intensive and time-consuming than it is to write a story, something that I’ve come to realize working with Ashley and the video folk at Popverse. It’s also an entirely different skill set; I’ve seen what happens when non-filmmakers try to make video thinking how hard can it be with the answer always being harder than you thought. It’s not just setting up a camera and talking. (At one point at Popverse, we were all asked to make a selfie video for something — I can’t even remember what — and it was so uncomfortable and awkward for me, I walked away thinking, thank God I don’t have to do that daily.) The whole idea of “pivoting to video” suggests that it’s an easy off-shoot of creating written stories, as opposed to an entirely different, arguably more difficult and certainly more complicated, discipline altogether.

The fear with all of the attempts to “pivot to video” from publishers is that it’ll mean that writers lose their jobs before publishers come to their senses; the difference now, I worry, is that we might be looking at a reality where writers lose their jobs and publishers don’t come back after, instead looking to AI to fill the gap. If there’s one thing that 20 years of the “pivoting to video” cycle has taught me in my profession, it’s that there’s little that publishers value less than the writers who create the majority of their output.

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Curse Sir Walter Raleigh

And then I realized that I’d entirely fucked my sleep cycle.

To be fair, I was aware in the back of my head it was a possibility. During the last weekend of March, I was working a genuinely insane schedule, overseeing and editing livestreams and written posts from two different conventions in two different time zones, both of which were — because of the way the U.S. works and where I live — starting early in the morning. As a result, I was waking up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 every morning and then having to get up pretty immediately because I needed to be at work around 6am. This, after working two other conventions earlier in the month, both of which also had me up earlier than usual. And, it turns out, after all of that, your body just decides that’s the new norm.

Or, at least, my body did.

The last night of the four-day-stretch, my mind was racing through a combination of extended exhaustion and over-exertion; it’s a relatively common state for me when I attend comic conventions, but this was a little different because I hadn’t actually traveled anywhere despite working two shows at once — I was still at home, dealing with all the regular home stuff in addition to the shows. (For example, I stepped away from work in the early evening on the last day, but not to rest: I had to do a grocery run, and then make sure the trash was on the curb for the next morning.) I was lying in bed, thinking to myself, at least I get to sleep in tomorrow. And then it was 4:57am and I was just entirely awake. The day after, I did manage to sleep in… until 5:20-something.

Worst, my first impulse was still to get up and start working. I didn’t, as much as I tried to justify it to myself. (Well, you’re already awake, and you do have a lot to do…) But as I laid in bed, trying and failing to simply wish myself asleep again, I thought to myself that things were, if not easier, then at least more restful when I was younger and my body more elastic as to be able to shrug this kind of thing off more easily.

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And Where Does It Hurt?

My therapist has a question she asks regularly: “But where do you feel it?” Despite her profession, she’s not asking about an emotional feeling; it’s not some coded ask where she’s wanting me to explain that I feel it deep in my heart, or the pit of my stomach, or wherever; she’s asking about the physical responses my aging body feels to a stressful situation, or some other form of upset.

I thought about this as I climbed into bed the other night, after another marathon work session that saw me sitting at my desk, staring at multiple computer screens (multiple computers, even) for far too many hours on end. I’ve noticed that, as I get older, more aches are presenting — or, perhaps, I’m simply feeling them more easily and readily. They actually do have different meanings, it seems, or at least present in recurring patterns that fit with specific stressors appearing in my life elsewhere: anxiety holds onto my shoulders as if it’s trying to lift me into the air, while overwork and exhaustion feels like I’ve been hit in my lower back, this dull ache that throb throb throbs when I move slowly at the end of the evening.

It was that throb, the lower back ache that is probably from sitting over a desk for so many hours without exercise, that I could feel as I climbed into bed, this warning sign from my body that I needed to rest and recover at my earliest convenience. Internally, I felt frustrated knowing that I understood what it meant. Not because it meant that the but where do you feel it question was a good and useful one that I’d spent almost five decades of my life not asking myself (and, when it was initially asked, found myself thinking faintly ridiculous), but because I knew when I felt it that I was realistically days away from the kind of break that my body was already asking for.

It’s one thing to know that your body really is sending you messages, another to understand what those messages mean. Sadly, it’s a third thing entirely to be able to act on those messages with the speed that they are probably demanding.

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The Movies of March 2026

All things considered, I’m surprised that there’s as many movies on my list for March as there are — especially because, midway through the month, I got so overwhelmed by work that I basically switched to watching ER and The West Wing on HBO Max as noise to try to distract my racing brain, as opposed to actually paying attention to anything, because my head was so busy. Despite that, I got to see three great movies amongst everything else in the last month — hi, Project Hail Mary, Challengers (which I’d somehow avoided before, I think due to the hype? But I loved it!) and Sentimental Value, which really hit me hard. The two Gorillaz documentaries I finished the month with were both in their own ways flawed, but interesting enough to keep my interest. Maybe I’m headed back into documentary mode — after I get out of John Wells-produced procedural drama mode, of course.

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