After coming off a long period researching slavery in antiquity for my new series, it’s very difficult for me to go all rah-rah empowerment when I see folks trying to make perfection and/or subservience sexy. There’s too much horrifying history behind that. At the end, McClane says "You got a warranty for this (Holly's watch, a gift from Nakatomi Corporation)?" to which Holly laughs. Extended/alternate dialogue in McClane/Powell conversation after McClane uses the plastic explosives. Thank you again for supporting the original designer and creator of the Die Hard Advent Calendar - everyone else is just a copy 😉

You can add a little fun to your Christmas season with one of these advent calendars. / Daniel Brandt of Brandt Builds (formerly Leatherhead Laser Works)

Let your friends know that you’re the most die hard Die Hard Christmas fan with the Hans Gruber falling advent calendar, and maybe you’ll finally get lucky on the good Secret Santa gift.

Fun fact: if you decide to buy from me you are buying an ORIGINAL Nakatomi Plaza Die Hard Advent Calendar. I'm like the Banksy Picasso of pop culture tchotchkes for the holidays. I have a lot of copycats out there this holiday season.

Because women, in many cultures – and in the history of many cultures – are seen as commodities. As objects. Their worth is measured in beauty. Whether you’re selling me your idealized form yourself or someone else is doing it, the sad fact is that pushing these types of fake bullshit on us is part of a larger history of commoditizing people. And yes, blah-blah people can be sexy in many! Different! Ways! – yes, that’s wonderful. People are sexy. But *this* type of representation of “sexy” doesn’t look like actual bed-time sexiness any more than your typical porn movie actually looks like you and your partner(s) getting it on. It was in staring at that picture that I became angry again at the idea that pin-up calendars were being used to support literary foundations. Because it was in that moment that the whole complicated hand-wringing I’d seen so many do in support of the calendar just fell apart for me. But what she’d actually done is take her clothes off, not to be pin-up sexy, but to be real about what bodies which have survived three types of cancer actually look like. She’d had reconstructive surgery on her breasts, which were missing nipples. There was a broad scar across her belly from her hysterectomy. More scars on her legs, her arms; there was loose, stretched skin from rapid weight loss related to her illness. And though her face was carefully made up as any pin-up’s would be, her body showed us a much realer picture; her body carried the record of what she’d been through. Hers was the body of a person who’d been through the shit and survived it, not a body we were invited to own.Standing with Bruce Willis, celebrating an enduring icon and his invaluable contributions to cinema. Context is important when we choose to make a piece of art. Knowing and understanding how our piece of art will be read or viewed within the historical context of other pieces of art is vital to both understanding how others will read it and formulating the defense of our choice despite that context. As someone who wrote a very violent series of novels featuring a cast of characters who use Arabic words on occasion, I’m pretty familiar with the importance of this process. And that’s just the one who doesn’t give a toss for being naked. There are a million other characters who would spit in your face before posing as objects, to be drawn out and commoditized; it would mean rejecting everything they were, everything they believed in, to pose as some perfect, pawed-over item in a stranger’s inventory. I tried to imagine Lilia, the primary protagonist in my new series, with her scarred face and clawed hand and bum leg, whose entire existence has been within in a consent culture where people retain absolute autonomy over themselves and their bodies and their desires, getting pitched this idea, and I could just imagine her screwing up her face like, “You want what?” I hadn’t much thought about the annoying literary pin-up calendars in a while – not since January, when Justin at Staffer’s Book Review brought it up again as being intensely problematic. As I told Justin at the time, it was one of those low-level annoyances I’ve learned to live with over the years. I try to save my ire for the truly egregious things these days. I only have so many spoons.

There are two types of people: those that believe Die Hard is the best Christmas movie ever, and those that are wrong. Even if the non-action parts are a tad slow in comparison, that is more than compensated by so many things that makes Die Hard so brilliant. I than added 2mm high lettering for the numbers (1 counting up to 25, and later 25 counting down to 1). And just so it was more obvious "Nakatomi Plaza" and a logo in SVG imported into TinkerCAD (adjusting the extruded height). The lettering is raised higher than the rest of the surface to facilitate two color printing, on a single color extruder. Make it feel like Christmas is getting near by watching Hans Gruber fall off of Nakatomi Plaza for 25 straight days! These calendars were completely designed by me and are made by me in my garage shop in MD.Die Hard is an 80’s movie, one with a core emotional conflict that centered on real social change happening at the time – women moving into executive positions who had begun out-earning their husbands. Where was the place for men, in a world like that? How did you define being a man, when it wasn’t through being a bread-winner? What does it mean to be a dude when there are no more monsters to fight and your wife is a CEO?