The proposed column, if we can call it that, is titled Marvel Mondays. Let’s see just how many that’s going to be.

Less, now; checking my notes, I first had the idea for Marvel Mondays back in February. That certainly would have been a more comprehensive look at the MCU, and actually I’m kind of glad I kicked that can month after month, because even though I like Marvel well enough (at least when the ask is only 3-4 movie tickets a year) I don’t know that I want to write that much about capes. Doomsday will premiere on 18 Dec and [*checking calendar*] hm. That’ll still be half a year. 26 Mondays between now and then.

There’s certainly enough source material — somewhere between 35 and 70 “official” movies, depending on how you want to count the various takes on the Fantastic Four and all the X-Men (once outside direct Diz control but since purchased along with Fox) and of course the Sony Spiders. Reddit, being Reddit, has a thread offering a multitude of takes, whether you want ‘official’ or not or Disney+-TV-show-inclusive or not — or diagetic chronological, or movie release order.

I’m not exactly up for tackling a full rewatch of seven seasons of Agents of SHIELD,¹ to cite one of the more peripheral works, though the 12 episodes of Loki (besides totally being worth a rewatch) are probably a bit more central to whatever multiversal shenanigans gives us a RDJ Doom to start with. Also it’s hard to skip Phase 1 though I kind of want to skip Phase 1² and even in the Big Team-Up Avengers Movies, not everyone is a starter, you know what I mean? Some capes could have stayed on the bench.³

I don’t really want to dig for Doomsday spoilers to see which parts of the MCU are going to be relevant, so we’ll have to make educated guesses. I also don’t want this to break down, stop being fun, and become just a homework assignment, so we’ll visit with some favorites in the MCU even if they aren’t going to be Doom-relevant.⁴

Let’s consider some big blocks. What the columns might actually cover.

• Captain America: The First Avenger, Agent Carter, & What If…
• Winter Soldier, Civil War, Black Widow
• Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and (with regret) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
• Comedy and Capes: Guardians, Ragnarok, Love & Thunder, Deadpool.
• Infinity War & Endgame
• The MCU Spidey⁵
• The Sony Spiders⁶
• The Netflix Diversion⁷
• Ultron. Eternals. Inhumans. Dancing around the X-men.
• OK, fine: Let’s talk about X-Men. [X-Men, X2, Last Stand]
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings⁸
• Loki and the TVA
• The other time travel movie: First Class & Future Past
• Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: No Way Home, & Multiverse of Madness
• Capt. Marvel & Miss Marvel & The Marvels
• Not Quite Captain America: Brave New World & Thunderbolts*
• OK, fine: Let’s talk about Agents of SHIELD
• Revisiting Iron Man: Back to where we started
• The Fantastic Four: First Steps
• Wanda Vision & VisionQuest⁹

There are other corners I’d love to revisit, like Moon Knight, and there’s enough slack in the schedule that I might just do that. And some of the topics I’ve listed above might have to be split into two parts (or might demand a sequel). This isn’t a promise, or a contract¹⁰, but is the current plan. We’ll have to wait and see how much I actually have to say about Marvel. [/mblind]

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¹ I tapped out at the end of season 4 when it was first airing; I suppose I should get around to the rest someday but other that a rewatch of the Ghostrider arc, I’m not feeling it, ya know?

² Iron Man in 2008 was 18 years ago; Avengers (the first one), six films and just 4 years after that. We’ve had a long time with those particular films and those versions of these heroes. Here: Overly Sarcastic Productions – Detail Diatribe: The Lost Art of Marvel’s Phase 1 [1hr43min]. Better than I can do it and probably not the last time we’ll cite a take from Red & Blue

³ I’m not saying the Guardians of the Galaxy don’t really belong in an Avengers movie but they had to bend over backward and tie Thanos directly into those films (& two main GotG characters) to get that inclusion to work. It could have been more of a Captain Marvel thing, is what I’m saying.

⁴ especially if they aren’t relevant.

⁵ Tom Holland, basically. His Spidey is more than just behind-the-scenes studio negotiations but we’ll cover what’s on screen and just a little bit of that Sony-Disney dance.

⁶ basically an excuse to watch the rest, including the two Miles outings. And make fun of Morbius and Madame Web. why not.

⁷ I CAN’T cover all the seasons but we’ll talk about “street-level” Marvel, the crossovers and about Matt, who seems to be Disney’s Favorite Defender.

⁸ I think we need to go back and re-watch this one (or watch it) and find the place for it.

⁹ Can’t cover VisionQuest until December

¹⁰ totally non-binding, not enforceable

Like many folks—even folks who have been online for decades and grew up on, in, and involved with many different iterations of “Internet”—I find myself spending a lot of time on social media.

To my detriment. Social media¹ is momentarily engaging and gives the illusion of being both connected and informed, but it’s not good for the attention span and I feel like I’m running in circles, chasing my tail some mornings. Do I need 15 takes on Bad Thing™ before I’ve had my coffee. Do I really need to know how The Main Character of the Day™ messed up so badly that they became the main character of the day.

The link to the article editor in the back-end of my CMS sits on my bookmarks bar, just five little icons away from the Bluesky butterfly, and is just as easy to click. Except I never do, these days.² Blogging can be just as valid an outlet for my errant thoughts, and this editing window on a monitor could just as easily be my sidekick and companion during the workday, instead of the endless doomscroll on the phone. Blogging used to be the way most of us shared things online. Well, “most” in this case being the folks who had stepped away from early Facebook and hadn’t yet been trapped by Instagram. Or Twitter.

Why did we blog? It was the thing to do, for a time.

There were all kinds of blogs, back in the day (insert your slightly out-of-focus, sepia toned memories from 2006 here) and while some blogs grew (into news sites or fan sites or “content”) a lot of blogs just… stopped. No fault, no blame; and I know exactly how it is. We have limited time and attention, and as the internet mutated and developed and grew several new appendages, other bits of the internet figured out how to grab more of that limited time. The itch to share could easily be scratched elsewhere, and the back-and-forth conversation and community found new places to roost.³

This blog [rocketbomber.com] was always a bit of a shambles, without a focus for most of its existence and slowly becoming a bookselling-and-publishing adjacent space because I was employed as a bookseller at the time. That’s what I felt like writing about, the rabbit holes I’d dive into. It shouldn’t have survived.

It persists because I do — and because I’m spending the $21 a month (plus annual domain registration fees) to keep this and the rest of my Online Empire intact. Mostly because a couple of those .coms I own have email addresses attached (also, now, 20 years old) and I can’t really afford to ever let those go.

And so. The Blog, this blog, sits there unused. A elegant relic of a more civilized age.

Oh, I suppose I do get the old dog out of its comfy bed for a quick walk around the internet, every now and then. When I’m feeling nostalgic about the blogging-internet-that-was or when the social media platform du jour is either in full melt down or does something so egregious we all threaten to leave in a huff.

Occasionally I have something genuine I’d like to share, or a flag I want to run up a mast, and having the blog as that place—my place—online has been a comfort.

I still have plans. I will likely open a new storefront on Internet Street (metaphorically speaking, and mentioned on the blog previously) where I can share my game design stuff⁴ and as the design ideas grow into games and resources and physical objects, that’ll be the home and space for that portion of my creative output. But I’m also getting an itch⁵ to do some long-form writing on media. Given what I like, “media” means TV and movies, and more sci-fi (and superheroes) than not. I could wrack my brain for a new URL and blog title for writing about sci-fi but I’ve done that, I did that (all the way back in 2008) and the brand I came up with then will serve admirably now: Rocketbomber. The shout the anguished anime protagonist makes as they launch their mecha special move, and more prosaically, the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar III, the original RoBo [rocket bomber] program.

I’ll be starting with some “Marvel Mondays”, mostly just my thoughts as I rewatch various bits of the Disney/Marvel corpus ahead of the December premiere of Doomsday. And after we’re all well and truly sick of Marvel, I’ll probably shift over to Mythic Mondays, as we plumb the back catalogue for 80s sword & sorcery & fantasy flicks, and then to more generic Movie Mondays (if I have to) after we run out of schlock fantasy.

The trick, to both projects, is to step away from the time-sinks, and get back into the writing habit. [/mblind]

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¹ primarily Bluesky, in my case: the methadone of the reformed twitter user

² current exception, ah, noted.

³ Mostly discord, these days? I think?

⁴ OH LOOK an actual topic to hang a blog on! what a crazy happy idea!

⁵ an itch social media can’t scratch. and no, I don’t want to make a YouTube channel about it either.

Things don’t always go as planned, and in this case (even with a domain name purchased and a fair amount of intention) we don’t always get the online name we might want. It’s an old story; I wanted to call my very first blog Parenthetical Aside (lol. so young. so naive.) but of course that was, like, everyone’s first pick for a blog name, even back in the early early 2000s.

So I’ve edited the announcement to reflect that. We are now going with [*New Blog Name To Be Determined], which is a lovely placeholder.

The name I had intended to use (the midnight cartographer) is now apparently a new series of middle-grade fantasy books, and that’s on top of a pre-existing YouTube channel, a “cinematic alternative rock” artist on Bandcamp, and the other series of middle-grade fantasy books that was self published a couple of years ago. The space is getting a little crowded. So far I’m only out around $15 for the domain name registration, which I’ll just not renew at this point, and we’ll go for an easy re-brand.

When? And with a new blog, does that mean no more updates to the venerable RocketBomber? I guess we will see…

27 months.

The last post to this site was on 31 October 2023, and that means I’ve paid my web host for two solid years and haven’t bothered to blog anything. Just keeping the lights on. And for a couple of email addresses, along with the domain registrations…

OK fine, the monthly “hosting” bill is about more than just this one blog. But it is criminal how long I’ve neglected it.

I have a longer list of things to do for 2026. There are a couple of static pages that I need to set up, landing pages for both my professional site and another for the business site, after I file for the DBA and pay appropriate local registration and administrative fees. In parallel, I need to get the Itch site up and running so that when I hit my publishing deadlines for 2026, those pdfs have a place to live and maybe even sell (priced pay-what-you-want for this first year). Once I convince myself I can hit multiple publishing deadlines in a single year, for 2027 there might be a Patreon or some other way to subscribe, and we’ll do it all again.

And while I also want to blog more, in 2026, it’ll be at a new URL. RocketBomber was and is my personal site, it was about bookselling when I was a bookseller, and about feeling lost in the wilderness and casting about a bit when I more suddenly wasn’t a bookseller, a decade ago and more. RocketBomber has been a solid “brand” but it was never the perfect fit; like a lot of domains I’ve collected since 2000, it was for a project that never quite launched. When you start planning, you buy a dot com (like a normal person) because you don’t want to be in the situation where you have a great name but someone else has the website.

This year, when I write, I want it to be on a topic I am enthusiastic about, a hobby I actively enjoy, projects I’m doing on my own time because I can’t help but work on them. I want to be inspired, I want to share the joy, I want to have fun and hopefully I can communicate all that. So I’ll be diving into RPGs, fantasy maps, fantasy fiction, and table top games as [*New Blog Name To Be Determined], and producing my own game-related stuff on Itch, as Interpunct Games (and also under the Fantasy Mile brand).

This isn’t a goodbye. I’ll likely still need a personal blog for personal things, especially since the new site will be narrower, topic-focused. But the energy and activity will be over there, and RocketBomber will only get its [typical?] once-a-year-or-so updates.

It’s been a year since I wrote Beautiful Twitter Sunsets, and roughly a year since the ownership and management change over on Twitter-that-was, and after something like 13 years on that site (and who knows how many words written) I have deleted my account. My accounts, actually, I had more than one. The alts rarely updated but one was “Available Quests”, a handle that posted D&D, table-top appropriate quests like some kind of guild job board and the other was “Timeline Operations”, a customer service account for time travelers stuck in this awful splinter timeline. TimelineOps was always a fun character to step into and the jokes mostly wrote themselves as I interacted with people.

Anyway, both of those and the main account deleted.

Like everyone else, I am waiting to see what comes next. Mastodon is probably the technical (and tech) leader in this race but has a horrible brand, a fractured user base, and something of a reputation among the folks who haven’t used it yet. The ActivityPub protocol is the key jewel in Mastodon’s potential social media crown, but we’re still waiting for another major player to implement it [Tumblr, maybe?] or for someone to build a new app and website from scratch that will federate with Masto and the rest using ActivityPub, while also resonating enough with users that it gains traction.

The other ‘open’ option that is 1. not open, 2. wholly owned by a private company, and 3. actually gaining some mindshare out there is Bluesky. Bluesky, or bsky.app, is using the AT Protocol (yes, they capitalize it even though you’re supposed to say “at protocol”, not sound out “A. T.”) which is similar to ActivityPub in that it will allow different platforms to cross post and ‘federate’ and let you take your online social presence with you to whichever platform you’d prefer (that uses the AT Protocol). Except that the AT doesn’t connect to anything and no one else is using it. Bluesky is succeeding where a number of other platforms ain’t by basically looking like and acting almost exactly like twitter from, say, 2017 while also restricting access behind invite codes while they go through their “Beta”. The first batch of invites went out to journalists and a few other heavy hitters so they’ve managed to make a site that you’d want to read with accounts that you’d probably like to follow and then immediately closed the door to everyone, only opening it a crack.

It was just six weeks ago that Bluesky hit a million users, despite technically being around since 2019. It could probably grow to ten times that size in another six weeks if they opened the door to everyone, but the folks that run Bluesky are being very careful. Users are great but users are also the worst thing about a lot of social media.

If you go to the bottom of this web page you’ll find links to my accounts on both of these new platforms¹. I’m spending more time right now on Bluesky and will probably be active there for the foreseeable. Though the social media I probably have more fun using is Tumblr, which is kind of hilarious since I was on Tumblr even before making a twitter account in 2010. Everything old is new again.

Twitter-that-was: You were awful, and then somehow over the past year you got worse. You will not be missed; mourned a little, maybe, because you were a part of our lives for quite a long time, but not missed.

There’s not a replacement yet. Like everyone else, I’m still waiting to see where we all land.

¹ The Links section is baked into the CMS and almost trivial to update, when I remember to update, so if you are reading this in 2 or 3 years time and we’re all on some new second-life VR/AR social media platform called StupidGoggles or TormentNexus or whatever, my account for the latest-greatest social media platform should be down there too.