MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios 🔗
I’m one of those people who has felt the glow of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) dim a little, but even if I’m not as into the product as I used to be I am pretty fascinated by Marvel Studios as a matter of operational excellence. MCU is a history of Marvel Studios that starts back in the pre-MCU ’90s and ends some time earlier this year.
It’s an interesting book!
I didn’t understand how toy-driven Marvel was in the early going, nor how far into the MCU era that toy-making imperative drove thinking, nor how much the sexism of the toy industry delayed the introduction of women characters. Similarly, the weird split between the movie and tv properties that never made any sense to me is laid bare as run-of-the-mill corporate foolishness. It ends up answering a lot of questions about why it is that an outfit so excellent at execution did so many weirdly non-excellent things.
The book ends on a hopeful note, suggesting that the overexposure, the sheer glut of product, and the downward creep in quality are all the result of overextending leader Kevin Feige, but that Marvel may be taking a step back and slowing things down enough to restore a little brand equity.
Doing nothing 🔗
It was a good weekend to do pretty much nothing. Rainy, chilly, dark. It made more sense to just button up and hide out. So I read, played a few games, and fiddled with a Linux PC in my office. It was all pretty aimless, and that felt pretty good.
There’s a part of me that is beginning to feel a little restless. Work has taken a lot of energy, but the very busy annual planning cycle is over and I made it a point to go pretty easy on my team this quarter: We need to move our endpoint management system out of self-hosted infra and into the vendor’s cloud, and I didn’t want much else cluttering up December and January.
So, things are slowing down and I’m getting some mental bandwidth back. I miss writing regularly, even if I wasn’t writing much. I don’t think about photography much these days. I feel due for a project or pastime.