Off the Wish List and Into the Archive

I am slowly but surely regaining my mental equilibrium, mostly through a great visit with my brother John over at his house yesterday, where he bought us Chicken Express for supper (for which I made some of Pop's old-fashioned BBQ sauce), and we watched The Ten Commandments in the amazing transfer he owns. There was much nostalgia mulled over (we always watched it when it came on around this time of year, and our Mom had actually seen it in theaters and had an old souvenir program) and we passed along much movie trivia to Kameron and Joey. Then today I was heartened again when I received (at about 5 PM) an order from Amazon that I had only made about two days ago.

There have been many 'add-ons' to the Gravity Falls franchise (comic books, journals, and such) but the only item I thought really checking out was this one, Gravity Falls: Lost Legends, written by the series creator Alex Hirsch himself. The four tales therein span time periods from when Stan and Ford were kids until right before Dipper and Mabel leave the Falls. The collection ends with the ostensible narrator, the gnome Shmebulock, more or less advocating another season. A tease, or a sidelong hint from Hirsch?

Rick and Morty: Season Six (DVD)

We come to the rather complicated Season Six of Rick and Morty, where the stories become a little more convoluted and the personal development of the characters deepens. It seems over time the writers are growing more tied to these instances of the iterations of the cast and their growth; in the old days any Beth, Jerry, or Summer could be replaced by one from another dimension. This season has been plagued by drama offscreen as well, with Justin Roiland (who voices both Rick and Morty) facing accusations of sexual misconduct, being canceled from his various projects, and then having the charges against him dropped for lack of evidence. What will happen now is anybody's guess, though Roiland's character still seems problematical, and the studio appears intent on re-casting the voices of Rick and Morty.

I ordered this book on a whim. I had been kind of nosing around Clark Ashton Smith for quite a while, my interest aroused by the high regard H. P. Lovecraft and others of his circle held him in. The only other books I had of his were Hyperborea, a short story collection edited by Lin Carter in the Ballantine Books Adult Fantasy Series and The Abominations of Yondo. The Dark Eidolon and other Fantasies seems to be an interesting anthology of his better short stories and poetry. It is edited with notes by S. T. Joshi which should help guide me through the tales. But what really put it over for me was that cover illustration, which I suppose to be a drawing by Smith himself. It recalls for me the sort of 'hieratic' art of the kind that fantasists of all stripes were probably scribbling in their high school notebooks in every age of time.