Completing THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT!

Halldeckers! Merrymakers! Gay Apparel-donners! It’s been another exhausting journey, but my 2022 yulemix, The Airborne Yuletide Event, is now complete in its two-sided analog entirety. And I only cheated on the length a little.

Longtime listeners may spot nods to installments past here and there, because to neglect such a long and rich and long and storied and long history would be ungrateful, somehow. But the vast majority of these 103 minutes — 54 percent of the run-time of Avatar: The Way of Water by volume — are comprised of entirely new old material. There’re even four actually new, released-in-2022 yuletunes strategically sprinkled throughout this most festive and beguiling of sonic canvases.

Listen close, my dear ones, and listen loud. Merry Christmas.

ctklimek · THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVII [Side B]

Homage Control: Wherein I attempt to catalog all the shoutouts in "Avatar: The Way of Water" to Cameron joints past

My man Big Jim Cameron isn’t just a vegan pea protein farmer, he’s a committed recycler. Hey, at least he’s got the good taste to steal from the best.

This exhaustive-and-yet-surely-incomplete list I made of his many self-homages in the new Avatar: The Way of Water is up at Vulture.

POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR: "Avatar: The Way of Water" and What's Making Us Happy

Kate Winslet, Cliff Curtis, Zoe Saldaña, and Sam Worthington shooting one of the current or forthcoming Avatar sequels at some point between late 2017 and early 2020. (Fox)

James Cameron only releases a new feature film every dozen or so years, so you’ll forgive me if I’m excited. My Avatar: The Way of Water media blitz kicks off with a fun PCHH wherein Stephen Thompson, whom I’d incorrectly predicted would hate this movie, Reanna Cruz, and I talk through our reactions, and I plug my holiday mixtape.

Vibranium v Unobtanium: A Slate Investigation

Hey, what's my costume made out of again? (Disney/Marvel)

Most of Black Panther is set in the imaginary African nation of Wakanda, a technological utopia whose monarchs have for centuries observed a strict policy of isolationism, keeping would-be colonizers at bay by hiding their nation’s wealth and scientific advancement from the outside world. We’re told in the movie’s very first minute that Wakanda’s prosperity derives from its abundance of Vibranium, and that this bounty was delivered via meteorite long before humans walked the Earth.

And for a resource they're trying to keep secret, the Wakandans sure talk about it a lot. 

Even more than the characters in Avatar (Remember Avatar? Nominated for nine Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for my boy James Cameron? Still the highest-grossing movie in the history of movies?) speak the much-derided name of that movie's extraterrestrial miracle metal, Unobtanium.

A lot more.

For this Slate piece, I did the transcription. And the math.

Field Notes. I should've let my mom teach me shorthand like she wanted.