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This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed or just bookmark loudpoet.com and check in now and then. You do you!

NOTE: I filtered and selected hundreds (probably thousands) of unread emails in my Gmail account going back more than 8 years — and marked them all as read without looking at any of them. If I owe you an email and it’s been weeks, or months, it’s quite possible I optimistically marked it as unread and meant to get back to it, or I never saw it at all. Nothing personal but seeing “1-50 of many”, “51-100 of many”, etc., was stressing me out. Email me now while the coast is clear and I’ll have no excuses!

_ONE

How Creativity Unlocks Innovation, Collaboration, and Mental Agility | Megan Paonessa

Putting ourselves in positions where we experience uncommon or unexpected events teaches our brain flexibility, as well as how to address and incorporate differing ideas while allowing us to communicate and perform at a higher level – all amazing returns for simple moments of creativity introduced into our daily routines.

I wrote optimistically about Public Humanities‘ potential a while back, but this is the first time an intriguing topic overcame their off-putting presentation for something to stick. (Sincere apologies to my academic friends, but many of y’all just don’t care about expanding your reach.) Perhaps because she teaches creative writing, Paonessa balances the academic format with accessible writing to explore the idea and importance of creative play, and its impact on mental agility — an increasingly important trait in these AI-obsessed times.

Her suggestions to create moments of creativity include a mix of simple and more involved ideas, all of which are appealing in different ways. I’d say the “Artist’s date…” is close to how I view running while listening to a non-work-related podcast (like Imaginary Worlds, Mangasplaining, WH40k Book Club, or The SNARLcast), although that’s usually in the morning before work, so it doesn’t technically count. I do occasionally take an afternoon walk in our neighborhood park, but never for a full hour, so I guess that doesn’t really count, either.

I was delighted to see “Read a comic, draw a comic,” in the mix, too. I do plenty of the former but haven’t tackled the latter since I was a teenager, and the exercise she provides is low stakes enough to be appealing, as long as I can resist making it about publishing or AI.

__TWO

No, Geoff Keighley—Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was not made by a team of ‘under 30 developers,’ and devs say repeating the myth is ‘a dangerous path’ | Lincoln Carpenter

“No it was not ‘one guy’,” Localthunk said. “Look at the dang in-game credits.”

I have a habit of watching the end credits of any game I finish, partly because it’s a rarity and I’m fascinated to see how many people and different roles it took to create it, especially if I really liked the game. (It’s also partly because I want to see if there is an achievement tied to watching them, but I think it’s only ever happened once.)

I’ve played and enjoyed (but never seen the credits for) several games that were allegedly made by one person — including Localthunk’s addictively excellent Balatro — and it never crossed my mind that the narrative was misleading, although I should have known better.

It’s worth keeping that in mind nowadays as speculation about AI’s impact on the future of game development gets traction, allegedly making it easy for dilettantes to make their own games — ignoring the reality that, even if true, they’d be stealing millions of lines of code and hours of creativity generated by experienced humans to make it possible.

___THREE

She was a Disney star with platinum records, but Bridgit Mendler gave it up to change the world | Eric Berger

But there was a problem. The Media Lab only offered graduate student programs. Mender didn’t have an undergraduate degree. She’d only taken a handful of college courses. Officials at MIT told her that if she could build her own things, they would consider admitting her to the program. So she threw herself into learning how to code, working on starter projects in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Python. It worked.

We were primarily a Nickelodeon household when my kids were younger, but somehow Disney’s Good Luck Charlie was in the mix, and I remember Mendler being a little different than the child leads on other shows of the time, so her name caught my attention. Ignore the clickbait headline and enjoy a fascinating story about a child actor who chose a very different path as an adult, and there’s no trauma involved! A dash of privilege, for sure, but as these types of stories go, it’s pretty inspiring and even educational.

Finding an alternative path to overcome her lack of an undergraduate degree is basically the story of my career, and I periodically entertain the idea of enrolling in a combined bachelor’s and master’s degree program that offers credit for work experience, although figuring out what I’d be passionate enough about to commit to remains the same challenge it was in my 20s.

____FOUR

The Most Delightful Surprise in the New Mission: Impossible Is a Twist 29 Years in the Making | Sam Adams

Action-movie objects are interchangeable, so much so that Alfred Hitchcock called them all by the same generic term: MacGuffins. But people aren’t, especially when the actors do their jobs as well as [REDACTED] did his. [REDACTED] is on-screen for no more than a few minutes, but his flustered bumbling is integral to making [REDACTED] work, which makes it extra unjust that the movie condemns him to such an ignominious fate.

It’s been a few weeks now, and I still stand by my claim that The Final Reckoning was an ambitiously entertaining climax for the Mission Impossible franchise. I buried a spoilery link in my brief review, but it’s too good to not share openly now, albeit while still trying to avoid spoilers because you really should experience it firsthand.

If you don’t care about spoilers, or even if you don’t care about Mission Impossible, I encourage you to click through and read it as an inspiring ode to an unheralded underdog.

_____FIVE

The 1970s “Filipino Invasion” of Comics | Jessica Plummer

Though these artists did work on marquee characters like Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man, their work could mainly be seen in other genres that are less well-represented today: horror, sword and sorcery, science fiction, war, and martial arts. This lack of major presence in superhero comics may go some way towards explaining why the Filipino Invasion isn’t as well known as the later ’80s British Invasion of comics, but I think the fact that we expect a comic book artist to look a certain way is also very much to blame.

I was in my early 30s, returning to comics after more than a decade of not reading them, before I realized there were Black writers and artists working on comics I was reading as a kid. Denys Cowan and Trevor Von Eeden were the two most notable, but I suspect there were others.

I only realized Ernie Chan was Filipino when he died back in 2012, and had no idea about the others Plummer mentions until I read this article, including Alfredo Alcala, Alex Niño, and Nestor Redondo, all names I recognized and had always assumed were Hispanic. The article is a good read, and it led me to the video below which is even more insightful.

It also means I need to finally move my DC Showcase Presents copies of The House of Mystery, Weird War Tales, and The Witching Hour into my TBR, because all of these artists probably have notable work in them.

______BONUS

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