Antick Musings Is Old Enough to Drink Today!

As of today, Antick Musings is twenty-one years old. That may seem impressive, but I have two children older than that. I also tend to see only the things that annoy me about the blog (my own badly-worded or trite thoughts, this horrible layout that I don't know if I even could change at this point).

But: yay! I suppose.

Every year on this day, I intend to post about the glorious holiday, and have succeeded most years. (I missed most of the big round numbers, due to a flaw in my character.) Since I'm starting to type this post almost a month ahead of time, it might actually happen this year.

(If you're reading this, and there's just some vague apology below, and it's late November: oops, I didn't.)

History of the Blog: Links to Links

For me, blogging often devolves into links to links that in turn link to other things. The Glorious Anniversary is no exception, so here's the history: first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth (published two months late and substantially shorter than the others), eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth (much shorter than usual, but on time), seventeenth, nineteenth and twentieth.

You may note that several years are missing in that list.

Yes. Yes, they are.

And let me quote a lightly edited version of what I wrote last year about what I grandly call The Myth of Antick Musings, because it's still as true as it was then:

I started this blog as practice, since the book-club company I worked for at the time was going to start up a bunch of blogs, and I would be tasked to write the one for the Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC). That corporate blog was scrubbed from the Internet long ago, and the company has changed hands several times. It may well be entirely out of business now; I see that Columbia House just died. So the fact that my half-assed practice blog is still running while the SFBC itself seems to be gone, well, that's a sign of something in the world, I guess, though I don't count it as a win.

After I was cast out of the SFBC (and, though I didn't realize it at the time, editorial work and the SFF field in general), this blog turned into exactly what I thought it never could, should, or would be: a book blog. Oh, well.

I used to watch moves and write about them here. I used to post notes and links to random things actually happening in the real world, too! We truly are living in the worst possible timeline.

History of the Blog: Easily Manipulated Metrics

At this point in the annual post, I traditionally throw in a table of the number of blog posts each year. Why? Would any reader care? I doubt it, but, somewhere deep in my psyche, I suppose I see it as the Blogging KPI, and so I must track it.

• 2025-2026 -- 406 posts
• 2024-2025 -- 407 posts
• 2023-2024 -- 405 posts
• 2022-2023 -- 410 posts
• 2021-2022 -- 279 posts
• 2020-2021 -- 265 posts
• 2019-2020 -- 55 posts
• 2018-2019 -- 178 posts
• 2017-2018 -- 368 posts
• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Anyone who cared could track my level of ennui, at least on a yearly level, from the above. I will note a remarkable consistency over the past four years: I've figured out a habit that works, and I am a creature of habit, so...let's see how long it can last.    

I had a second blog - I know, but that's just the way we lived then - for a few years in the teens. It was called Editorial Explanations, and was snarky comments about editorial cartoons. I included those in my Post-Count KPI for while, but now I don't.

The Inevitable Links: Posts About Books

Antick Musings did turn into a book blog, first gradually (when I thought I still had a chance to get another editorial job) and then all at once (when I realized that would never happen).

Most of the posts here, for the last decade or more, are about books. So the bulk of this anniversary post, every year, is links to those posts, using sentences I wrote that I'm still inordinately fond of. Yes, this is a hugely self-indulgent thing - I do it every year, and I'm going to do it again.

Comedy duos have to be contrasts - the wacky one and the one that tries to keep it together, for example. The optimist and the pessimist. It doesn't have to be a gag man and a straight man, but that's pretty common.

It's my blog, I can do it however I want.

Heavy Bright is a positive, mostly uplifting story about fighting evil by whacking it with a spoon.

But the thing about life is that you can always do something today, even if you haven't done it for twenty years.

It isn't, in any appreciable way, the end of a trilogy, mind you. But you can definitely think of it like that.

We are all prisoners of the people we actually are, as we keep trying to be the people we want to be.

As I said, this is a horror story, so our main characters don't gather their forces and battle the monsters to save the world - that would be fantasy. They also don't find out exactly how it works, figure out how to counter it, and do so - that would be a thriller. And they don't gather evidence and present it to some authority who can shut down Home - that would be a mystery.

The promiscuous must always want to have sex with us, right? Since we are clearly wonderful and special, since we are us.

Some SF novels seem to predict the world we actually got, and are brought back out of the depths and lauded for that, as if being right was the point of fiction.

Digital books have a lot of advantages - they can be cheaper, they're definitely lighter, you can fit many more of them in the same space, they can be accessed almost immediately from almost anywhere, and so forth. But they can also mysteriously disappear in a way that never happens with physical books.

Prime has become a legend, off doing whatever in the hinterlands, but the Last Good Ruler calls him, using the Secret Codes of Yore, and tasks Prime with finding a new home for humanity among the stars, because that's exactly the kind of job where you want a murderous and unimaginative centuries-old cyborg inculcated with a toxic mindset.

That could be one marker of liberal vs. conservative, I suppose: the cartoon version is that liberals bend over backwards to "include" others, no matter what convolutions they have to go through from moment to moment in doing so, while conservatives refuse to change anything about themselves ever, gleefully doubling-down on their worst aspects and making those the core of their personalities.

Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course they beat the old man who is an alternate-world version of their father and grandfather to death. That's much better.

With translations, there's a lot of "I think" and "here's what has made it to my side of the ocean" - it's a big world, and how someone looks at home is not always the same as how he dresses up to go visiting.

If your world has dozens of races, all hugely distinctive from each other, the fact that some of them have darker skin than others will tend to seem somewhat less important than the fact that, for example, some of them are mammals and some are herptiles, or the whole predator/prey thing.

There's one exceptionally circumlocutious section almost smack-dab in the middle about the word "queer" and whether or not it applies to Gorey, which I take to mean that Gorey was probably gay but either led a mostly celibate life as an adult or that his affairs were so scandalous and so well-hidden that they can't be discussed in public even fifty years later.

In her wanderings, she needs to do quite a bit of bending and stretching, squeezing through tight spaces, lying languidly reading or tossing restlessly while asleep, standing thinking with hands on hips or reaching over her head to get something. Did I mention she does all of those things naked? She does them naked.

As long as we can understand how this world works, it can still be funny: we don't need to live in that world ourselves, or, frankly, for that world to have ever existed.

Sometimes you just want to be convinced that the old verities are still true. The sun rises in the east, robins nest in the early spring, and Andrews McMeel publishes cute little books of relationship cartoons for impulse purchases.

If you have the visual tastes of a hyperactive fifteen-year-old-boy, this will be the greatest comic in the history of everything. For anyone else, adjust your expectations accordingly.

It's not that I don't think CEOs aren't sociopaths who would take any action that benefited themselves; it's just that it's so criminal, and would be massively obvious in retrospect, that I don't believe he would be stupid enough to believe he could get away with it as depicted.

Meanwhile, behind all this, the general public - as always in superhero comics, a stupid mass of sheep-like morons who can't understand that superpowered people are better and special and their rightful masters - has responded to the Second Cataclysm by turning against all superheroes, on the grounds that alien gods never seem to try to eat planets that don't have superheroes on them.

There's a kind of mom who has five or more kids, all named things like Jacob and Hannah. There's a kind of mom who has two or three kids, with names you can't predict. And there's a kind of mom who has just one, with a name like Magnus or Tinkerbell.

But that is their plan, and they insist that it requires a giant robot crab, and, like all fiendish plans hatched by secret societies of multiple villains, it works pretty well for a while.

As often with Hernandez, his pages are interesting and his artistic choices bold - sometimes bold in the "that is great" sense; sometimes in the "why on earth would he expect that to work?" sense - and I do believe that he thinks these pieces come together to form an overall narrative.

As my old boss would say, why spend a year writing a novel when a really good one only costs a few dollars?

The world is big and full of things, some of which are vaguely familiar even if you've never seen them before - I guess I find that weirdly comforting.

Stories don't have to be true to be good stories - frankly, it's more often the opposite.

Supremacists who make up lies about a minority to foment anger and try to get them thrown out of the country are common in many places.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the children yearn for stories of old werewolves and ominous tigers. Stranger things have happened.

And, lastly, I occasionally give up on a book mid-stream: I don't have to love a book to finish it, but I think if I find myself talking to the author, in my head: "Jesus Christ, Hughes, read the fucking room," then the book has lost an essential connection to me as a reader and I shouldn't try to make larger statements about it.

The Inevitable Links: Everything Else

I have posts about other things - not as many, and not as much as in the early days of the blog. In 2026, for the fourth year in a row, I had a series of posts about songs on Mondays. I think I'm not as good at writing about music as I am about books - some of you may have unkind thoughts, wondering if that is even possible, but I will ignore you - but I do it because I like these songs and I want to surface things I like here.

I post lists of new books - only physical books, but however and whenever I get them - here, under the overall title Reviewing the Mail (which I stole from Chuck Klosterman, who doesn't seem to be using it anymore). I've called those posts different things occasionally, too, mostly by mistake.

I also do quotes from the books I read - every Saturday as Quote of the Week, and twice a year in a closet-cleaning exercise. (Also available from that link, in big clumps on New Year's Eve and the Sunday closest to Independence Day.)

As The Blog Lurches Into a Twenty-Second Year

I gave up on big pronouncements and predictions long ago. Given my druthers, I'd be coming up on my fifteenth year or so as Editor-in-Chief of the SFBC. But they never were my druthers: that's the lesson life teaches us all.

I do expect to keep doing whatever you call what I do here. I am massively a creature of habit, and this blog is about five of those habits at this point. Take that as a promise, or a threat.

But it's good that the blog is old enough to drink, now: it takes pressure off me. I've been on a blood thinner - for six or seven years, I think? I can't even remember; I've been on various heart meds since '02 - which has meant that I can't drink. But, maybe, in some odd way, I can think that Antick Musings is doing it for me.

May your own creative endeavors similarly take over aspects of your own life, like kudzu in the summertime: that's my valediction this year.