My dreams lately have been full of shootings, stabbings, and death, but I wouldn't say I was having nightmares. Any outright horror in them has been subdued, like in a classic Hollywood crime story. I generally feel tense, not afraid. Using the language of movie genres, maybe I should call them suspense-mares.

One thing they seem to have in common is that many are set or begin in Victorian houses chock-full of bedrooms with dark-stained wood wall paneling, well-worn hardwood floors, cast-iron beds, chamber pots, and ornately carved fireplaces with roaring fires. And when I say houses full of bedrooms, I mean exactly that: the only rooms in these houses are bedrooms. Even the hallways, stairwells, and closets seem to have been adapted to bedrooms.

To be clear: these houses are not scary to me. I'm not trapped; I can leave the building any time I want. And I almost always approve of the tasteful layout, furnishings, decor. I'd willingly live in any of them. (Though, as my family will attest, I have unusual taste in residential architecture. Mom has long called eclectic houses with outdated designs "Walter Houses." Finances aside, I've never been able to understand why anyone would want to live in a house that looked like anyone else's.)

According to a quick Googling of the dream symbology of bedrooms, "a bedroom in a dream symbolizes your private inner self." Okay, if you say so. But what if it's all bedrooms all the way down? Am I just an especially deep person? Or so narcissistic that I'm just a Droste effect of navel gazing to infinity?

If my brain is trying to tell me something, I wish it'd just come out and say it.

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In the Year of the Pandemic, 2020, "friend" Keith gifted me a copy of the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for PC. Keith likes it very, very much. I did not like either the first or second Witcher games, and after playing for a grand total of 6 hours, I decided I liked The Witcher 3 just as little. This is how I summed up that first experience for him back then:

So far there's only 1) a lot of talking with a bunch of characters who are all fucking assholes I want to kill (especially protagonist Geralt), and 2) me getting my ass handed to me (which isn't entirely unsatisfying because it means Gerald has died too).

Sounds like I had fun, no? But for various reasons, including a new and deep appreciation for another game from the same studio, Cyberpunk 2077, and the lingering doubt that I hadn't given it a fair enough shake the first time around, I decided I'd try Witcher 3 again on the Xbox this past week. My mistake. I made it a full 8 hours this time.

If you're unfamiliar, the game is 33% guiding your obtuse horse through bleak war-ravaged countryside modeled on the original Grimm brothers fairy tales (you know, the ones where witches pick their teeth with the bones of sugar-glazed abandoned children), 33% talking to assholes, and 33% being ambushed combat. I'll admit up front that even on the console I'm still bad at the combat. Very bad. Literally every type of enemy I have encountered in the game has killed me at least once. Some of them have killed me three, four, or more times. I'd finally had enough when the game sent me to a cave to be ambushed by a little goblin and his evil magic shadow... who together proceeded to kill me eight times in a row. With enough effort, I'm sure I could find the right tactics to eventually kill him (just like I eventually survived the mob of bandits who ambushed and killed me nine times in a row) and be rewarded with information on how to make killing him easier in future encounters. But I could get as much enjoyment from slamming my fingers in a car door, and I certainly don't look forward to whatever trick the game is planning to use to kill me next.

The only up side to this is that it appears to be a shared experience; if you Google reviews of this game, they will universally mention the lackluster and frustrating combat mechanics. That's definitely a feature, not a bug.

So if you're not supposed to play this "adventure" game for the killing, what's left? Those same reviews, including Keith's, universally applaud the storytelling. I cannot agree. Maybe I've never gotten deep enough into Geralt's quest to piss off everyone he meets, but I cannot buy in. Granted, this is a common Walter problem, especially with movies; I don't like spending any time with unpleasant characters. Does the story get great if I make it to the end? Sadly, like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, I'll never know.

Related side note: The characters most relevant to the story are all physically attractive (compared to most NPCs, who look like lepers who bathe in pig shit). And the cutscenes are frequently constructed with a pornographer's eye for finding ways to show these attractive characters naked. (I've never seen so many bare breasts in a video game that wasn't specifically about bare breasts.) Therefore, I'm suspicious that many of these glowing story reviews are influenced by something other than shallow characterization and the repetitive "fetch quest" plotting.

Now, I've been playing video games since before the country's first pandemic (1981's "Pac-Man Fever") which means I've played a lot of games. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but with so many games available, I don't understand why anyone would spend the time to get better at this one. Keith, I don't know who hurt you badly enough that you find this kind of torture entertaining (you do know that the Internet is full of naked tits on demand, right?), but I'm done with The Witcher no matter how many they make.

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"I talked to God, and He told me it’s time to take a new step."

—New LSU Head Football Coach Lane Kiffin
in response to ESPN reporter Marty Smith's question
"Why was LSU the right choice for you?"
while standing in an airfield on his way out of Mississippi
which he abandoned before the 2025 postseason started
November 30, 2025

I'll be the first to admit that I have never been privy to any conversations that Lane Kiffin has had with his God, but I'm skeptical that any god really cares enough about Kiffin's financial situation to give him professional advice.

Kiffin is a football coach, not a preacher. At the risk of sounding blasphemous, it strikes me as no coincidence that Kiffin's new job is paying him $4 million more than the old. If money wasn't an issue, LSU could certainly save some of that cash for the players. Or even their students. Maybe pious Kiffin will share with the less fortunate.

Maybe I'm just jealous. God never tells me which jobs to take. (If God has been giving me career advice and I haven't heard it, whose fault is that?) I suppose it remains possible that Lane Kiffin has been hoarding God for himself. I bet $13 million a season buys a lot of divine advice.

And although this sounds to me like a con man's rhetorical trick to avoid honestly answering a reporter's nosy question, you can't argue with God. That's why there's a whole Commandment instructing not to take the Lord's name in vain. I'm sure Kiffin wouldn't break a Commandment any more than he'd break a contract. (That's probably why he coaches college and not pro ball; gotta keep that Sabbath day holy.)

Whatever the case, I'll just thank God that Lane Kiffin isn't coming to coach Georgia, home of the 2025 SEC Champion Bulldogs and the highest paid college football coach in the country. Go Dawgs!

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Netflix animation fest 2025!

110/2542. The Wild Robot (2024)
I spent too much of the movie wondering how the engineering of the robot was supposed to work, but once I got past that (or, more accurately, once I forced myself to recognize that the talking robot was just as unreal as the talking animals), I was charmed by the characters and appreciated how genuine the sentimentality felt compared to too many other tear-jerkers. A great piece of art and a worthy Oscar rival to Flow (which I still liked better).

111/2543. Paddington in Peru (2024)
By far the worst of the three Paddington movies but only because the first two are so truly great. This one remains quite watchable, especially thanks to Olivia Coleman's over-the-top surreality and Hugh Bonneville being Hugh Bonneville. (Although honestly, given the choice, I'd much rather re-watch either of the others for the tenth time than this one again.)

112/2544. Nimona (2023)
This might be my second favorite movie seen in 2025 after Kpop Demon Hunters, though I admit this is tailor-made for my specific interests. Nimona literally takes every medieval fantasy RPG-genre cliche and turns them inside out yet (mostly) avoids the cynicism that typically accompanies such deconstructionist approaches. Pay attention, Disney: this is the right way to turn a villain into a protagonist hero! I really, really liked it.

113/2545. Dog Man (2025)
Some children's animated movies manage to give something to the adults in the audience. Not this one. Though the art design is clever, the plot is just too thin (and the mute protagonist too bland) to hold my attention. If it had been an hour and half shorter, it could have made several amusing shorts. But as a feature? Yawn.

114/2546. Klaus (2019)
I watched this animated Christmas movie only because Netflix recommended it after I watched the series of animated movies above. I admit it's got some great animation and design (and Jason Schwartzman is perfect for his part), but Christmas... bah, humbug.

115/2547. The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
Despite being a COVID-era movie, the "Evil Artificial Intelligence delivered through social media conquest the world" angle of this otherwise boilerplate coming-of-age adventure story could have been pulled straight from any 2025 clickbait article. None of the characters struck me as particularly unique or memorable, but maybe I've just seen the basic Hero's Journey plot too many times. I suspect this really sparkled with its target audience of tweens, as I would have loved it if it existed when I was twelve.

More to come.

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I finally found a Christmas ornament I want.

Not to hang on a tree, mind you. There is no tree. There's never a tree. No, that one just needs to sit on my desk below my monitor where I can look at it often, nod, and sigh.

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Mister Trouble never hangs around when he hears this Mighty sound: "Here I come to save the day." That means that Mighty Mouse is on the way!

He gets the situation well in hand!

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Following up on yesterday's post about the S-shield on Superman's cape: it has never appeared on any of the Superman balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.

I previously posted about the very first Superman parade balloon from 1940 back in November 2008. That original balloon, used for only one year and record holder as the tallest balloon until 1982, had a loose red cape that came down just to the seat of its pants. The second Superman balloon (a particularly ugly one with a round chest) debuted in 1966, and its cape was a little longer but just as solid red. The third Superman balloon, the largest balloon since WWII and the one I painted in 2020, entered the parade in 1980, and despite several mishaps, flew each year until 1987. This last one also had a solid red cape, though it was a horizontal "flying" pose, so the back was never seen from street level.

The parade balloons are expensive to create and fill with helium (though the people who walk them through downtown Manhattan are all unpaid volunteers), so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the balloons that make the annual cut are the ones that Macy's can make money on. That was true even in 1940, when Macy's had a sponsorship deal with National Periodicals to produce exclusive Superman merchandise, as you can see from this advertisement from page 21 of the May 16, 1940, edition of the New York Daily News:

If you look at those illustrations of Superman, the S-shield is clearly visible on his cape. However, the "playsuit" that Macy's sold to kids, not so much. It was just a solid red sheet with a comics-inaccurate blue drawstring. (The pants featured pictures of Superman around the waist, so comics accuracy was clearly not a big concern.)

For the record, the very first Superman to ever appear in a parade was Ray Middleton, who dressed the part as the Metropolis Marvel for "Superman Day" on July 3 at the 1940 New York World's Fair. The event was created to promote the New York World's Fair Comic 1940 Issue featuring Superman (and Batman and Robin!). In the comic, Superman very clearly has a shield on his cape, but Middleton's costume didn't. If the "real" Superman had a solid red cape, the kids at Macy's couldn't be too disappointed.

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As I usually find when I already have an inkling of the correct answer, Google's AI response is wrong. (Is it ever right? What's the point of having access to the accrued knowledge of the human race if you never actually read it?)

I've read a lot of Superman comics, and I know that Superman has a yellow S-shield on a cape. However, I'll grant that not a lot of people actually read comic books anymore, Google apparently included. I'll also grant that Superman's cape in the influential 1940s animated Fleisher Studio cartoons was solid red (to make the animation easier and less costly), a trend that has been followed often in animated adaptations for similar reasons. But every live-action adaptation since Kirk Alyn's 15-part 1948 Superman serial has an S-shield on his cape. Maybe Google needs to watch more television.

Google's obviously wrong answer sent me looking through old comics for the real answer to my question of its first appearance, and the earliest I could find the cape shield in my copies of The Superman Chronicles reprints was in the historically significant¹ untitled Superman story² in Action Comics #13, cover dated June 1939, published on April 14, 1939.

Here's a sample panel, easily found in a Google Search™ (once I knew what I was looking for):

And, as if I needed any further confirmation, here are the issue's indexer notes from the fantastic (and Google-able) Grand Comics Database (GCD), online at comics.org since 1994:

The "S" symbol first appears on Superman's cape. ... Paul Cassidy is credited with adding the "S" symbol to the cape (but it only appears in some panels and not others), and the pencils and inks here look like his work. Note in particular the odd flying poses of Superman in panels one and five of the final page, which are characteristic of Cassidy. He claimed that [Superman creators Jerry] Siegel and [Joe] Shuster gave both he and Wayne Boring free reign to interpret the scripts as they liked.

Old school library for the win. Why did you make that so hard, Google?

¹ Action Comics #13 is most famous for being the first appearance of Superman's first recurring super villain: a bald criminal mastermind who vowed to "use this great intellect for crime" who called himself The Ultra-Humanite. (What, did you think it was Lex Luthor? That second-rate knock-off wouldn't show up for another 12 months.)

² The original publication has no printed title, which is not uncommon at the time. Modern reprints often refer this story as "Superman vs. the Cab Protective League," named for a protection racket organized by, you guessed it, the Ultra-Humanite. His criminal genius obviously didn't extend to naming things.

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