Thoughtnami™

  The last week of January is always the coldest week of the year for me. Two women who were a huge part of my life passed away decades apart in the same week.  I think that's partially why I'm not really a fan of my birthday week because it comes so close to that cold week. People passing away suddenly never sits well with me, and that's why that coldness never really goes away.  Twenty-seven years ago, I lost the first person who really understood me, helped guide me into the person I am today, and never made me feel like I was weird.  My grandma was a saint. She was my mother's mother. A teacher, a helper, someone who would give her all to help someone else, even if it was a total stranger. She had this aura, this presence of peace and kindness that was just omnipresent. She was creative and encouraged my creativity, much like my mom does today. She had seen a lot of the world for what it was, endured the prejudices within it, but held on to her faith and empathy ...

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 97 on January 15 this year. On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day... and yes, that's the official name of the federal observation of the third Monday of January is despite what the current administration wants to tell you... there is a weird erasure of what this brave man accomplished for civil rights in this country. It feels low-key and intentionally so this year. Events celebrating Dr. King are being cancelled nationwide, and the current administration has been hellbent on erasing his name and accomplishments in achieving civility, peace, equity, and brotherhood in this country and throughout the world. Dr. King actually won his Nobel Peace Prize. It wasn't given to him like a Best Dad mug a couple of weeks after Father's Day.  The media tends to downplay the holiday as a whole for the most part, often shortening it to MLK Day, which I'm sure our current administration will misread and use to chug raw unpasteurized whole mi...

In July 2024,  I made a bucket list  of things I want to do before I reach 55. Basically, a nine-year list of goals I want to accomplish or at least try just once. At the end of 2024, I recapped my progress. Eh, it could have gone better, but I did make progress. As for 2025, I think I did a lot, and it's time for another progress report. I know I have a long way to go. Some things are going to take a bit longer due to technical and life limitations, but they're still going to remain because, well, things change. Find love again.  Still the hardest thing for me to do. Losing my angel in January 2022 still hurts. She was my first real love. I've been moving on, but it's not easy. Especially after being with someone for over a decade. It sucks not having her in my life. It sucks I can't talk to her, tell her about my days, ask her about hers, and just tell her that I love her. I don't want to go on this journey of life alone. I'll find another girl one day, bu...

This may get a little wordy, so bear with me for a while.  A little over a year ago this month, we officially entered the Glitch. This isn't a corner of The Twilight Zone , a sector in The Outer Limits , or a reflection within the Black Mirror , but rather some odd series of events that showed the world that the United States of America is not only imperfect but critically flawed, unapologetically hateful, unbalanced, and tenuously fragile.  The United States showed the world that it doesn't matter if you're educated, empathetic, rational, and truly overqualified, ESPECIALLY if you're a person of color or a woman. Or, heaven forbid, a Black woman (a sidenote: Michelle Obama was right, and the fact that so many people are trying to distort what she said just proves her comments were true and valid). The United States showed the world that its citizens are pretty okay with authoritarian fascism under the rule of a revenge-seeking felonious despot surrounded by racist, sex...

Want to play a little game?  Back in the day when I was working full-time on TXB, I created a series of articles called "Imagine If." Essentially, reimagined scenarios of media companies doing things they likely could have done in the past but decided against it.  Saban buying Funimation. Warner Communications keeping Nickelodeon. Ted Turner actually buying CBS. The USA Cartoon Express lasting beyond 1998.  Things like that.  This is no different.  I was given a challenge by reader and fellow AU scenario writer Chandler Ritter-Roberts over at Bluesky . The challenge?   Building a media company that could become a massive modern media conglomerate.  #BuildYourAltConglomerate, as his hashtag goes.  I could create a company as big as I want to counter what two of the biggest media companies, Warner Bros Discovery and The Walt Disney Company, could do and create a realistic media empire.  The one caveat in this game? While every media compan...

  “I’ve always felt that the cool thing about being a writer is that all you need is paper to do the job. The best thing to further what you do is write and read all you can. Read both stuff you like to see why its good and read bad to see how to fix. Doing that will help you see and solve problems in your own writing.  “But I think the biggest advice I can offer is don’t just pick one story and stop, write as much as you can, as many stories as you can. The best thing about being a writer is, a writer’s craft is nearly perfect because a writer can go anywhere and do his craft.” Dwayne McDuffie, writer, creator of worlds, legend. A creator. A genius. A dreamer.  An icon. An ideal. An inspiration. A collaborator. A colleague. An intellect. A friend. A son. A brother. A husband. The Maestro. Dwayne. I think of the many writers who inspired me to create my own stories, Mr. McDuffie remains the keystone to the creator I grew up to be. His works resonated with me when I first ...

Back in 2011 on the old Tumblr site, I wrote this bit of dialogue. I wanted to write a script for an idea I had for Silver , a DC Elseworlds story about a few vigilante characters in a setting in a Civil Rights Era DCU in the 1960s. I left a lot of the plot under wraps because that's still a project I'd love to write of the publisher one day. Or, perhaps, I'd adjust it for my own superhero multiverse. Already wrote a similar story set in the 1940s for my main universe.  I look at Silver as something that was a fun exercise, especially this dialogue I had with the main heroine and the guy who arrested her after a recent attack. It was the first time I realized that I absorbed a lot of what Elmore Leonard did with his books with his dialogues. It was a lesson I kept with me to this day. -jh Officer: State your name. Perpetrator: Black Canary Officer: Your government name, ma'am. BC: I plead the Fifth. Officer: I beg your pardon? BC: I plead the Fifth. Office...

Today's my birthday.  I turned 47 today, and I'm still here to celebrate it. I still have my health (aside from the usual allergies and the occasional back pain, I wasn't too sick this past year). I still find myself writing, drawing, and creating things on a daily basis. If anything, this past year was one of my most creative periods in a long, long time.  I find myself constantly learning things about the world and still get inspired by it. And despite feeling a bit lost at times and dejected of the state of the world, especially in this country I still kind of tolerate (can't really say love because that's a pretty loaded word, and it's kind of hard to feel that way about a place that has people that wish you ill will because you were born a different color than than), I'm still here. I'm another year older, another year wiser, a bit more hardened, a bit humbled, and a lot more contemplative about life. I'm closer to 60 than I am 30, and I'm o...

Back in July, I made a bucket list  of things I want to do before I reach 55. Basically, a nine-year list of goals I want to accomplish or at least try just once. And now, as the year is winding down (it'll be 2025 in a couple of weeks), II felt it was time to revisit what I've actually done so far. I managed to cross off a few things off my list, but I know I have a long way to go. Find love again.  Marry that love or at least try my damnedest to make her happy. Write a novel.   I have one completely done, but I'm making it into a full series, all of which are in various points of creation. But at least one is completely done. Another slightly unrelated one is ALMOST done. I say "slightly unrelated" because when I first started it, it wasn't related to another story, but now, it's connected to two other stories, and one of them is an indirect prequel that fits in the timeline.  Write at least two non-fiction history books. Editing one right now and writi...

As you may be aware if you're following me on social media, I’m currently working on a follow-up to The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time , a 1994 book written by Jerry Beck showcasing the best animated shorts ever made. Needless to say, I have a lot to cover and 30 years of new shorts to consider. I’m creating a list of 100 shorts rather than 50 because I wanted to celebrate first 110 years of the medium from 1914 to 2024, from the golden age to the Saturday morning era to the cable boom and Animation renaissance to the rise of the internet and streaming.  My main list of 100 is fairly set in stone. I know what's in my top 10. I know what's my #1 choice.   That said, I want to see other perspectives and voices, and I want to gauge other people’s tastes in the medium.  I'm currently contacting as many folks as I can who love animation as much as I do. Fans of American cartoons, fans of anime, Disney fans, Looney Tunes fans, Hanna-Barbera fans, golden age cartoons fans...

 A long, long time ago, I made a bucket list of sorts of goals I wanted to accomplish before I turned 40. This was made the day before I turned 34. Two years had passed between the first mention of the list and the last time I talked about it .  A lot has happened in that time.  A lot. In fact, the first three things on my original list got shaken up dramatically. I lost the love I found unexpectedly in January 2022. When she died, the goals of marrying her and starting a family with her were evaporated too, so, I just looked at those remaining goals with tear-soaked eyes and felt it was pointless to even try them.  As I mentioned before, the remainer of 2022 feeling cursed, frustrated, angry, and alone. The world was changing for the worse, and I still have anxieties about a lot of things. But I have to have hope because I'm still here. And I still have things I need to do. At the time of THIS writing, I'm 46, so a good 12 years have passed. I’m blessed. I ha...