Magic Love Hose

Improvise, Adapt, Overcome, Unionize

2011-06-09T16:10:00.001-07:00

In my D&D game a couple of days ago, the post-game chat turned to the economics courses that the GM was taking. The GM’s teacher is anti-minimum wage, anti-union and pro-Laffer Curve so the GM finds himself arguing a lot. This in turn became a discussion on the viability and necessity of unions.

It’s very nice to have friends who are willing to debate you in good faith on subjects of sincere disagreement – if nothing else, it makes you sharper when it comes to articulating your arguments, and it may even cause you to change your mind or come to a new realization about the issue. I’m still pro-union, but I think I’ve emerged from this discussion with a keener understanding of where anti-union sentiment comes from, in people who can stand to benefit the most from a union.

To my friend’s way of thinking, a union is actually harmful to a particular economy because it advocates for working standards that exceed what the company is willing to give, so the company moves its business elsewhere. His reasoning was that if the union hadn’t held the line the way it did, then the company would still be locally based. He’s right – but not in the way he thinks. He’s blaming the union for failing to adapt to a broadening of the theater of conflict between company and worker.

Let’s say you’re a business owner and you have enough power to base your operation just about anywhere in the world. You can either base your operation in Location X where there’s union protections and a long history thereof, or in Location Y where mercenaries are cheap to hire and willing to chop organizers up into dogmeat. I’m not saying that you, the person reading this, will pick Location Y – I’m just saying that you can probably know or have heard of someone who would. Furthermore, if picking Location Y makes the company more money than picking Location X, then the company that picked Y will eventually be able to outperform and undercut the company that picked X.

So the company goes with Location Y, and this was entirely their choice because this company has greater freedom of movement than a local union. The people over in Location X are unhappy, but you don’t live there so… eh. It doesn’t take too much effort to put some paid shills on the TV to dispense pearls of anti-wisdom and direct their anger at the unions, because there is a tiny, tiny grain of truth around which the pearls of anti-wisdom condense.

That grain is this: the unions aren’t thinking and working on the same scale as the side of the equation they are meant to counter-balance. The companies think globally now. They go anywhere that’ll improve the bottom line. For a union to compete, it has to be able to represent workers anywhere a company goes to get them, including the places halfway around the globe. A countrywide coalition of unions just isn’t big enough any more, in a world where no one country can contain a multinational corporation.

Unions have to adapt to the new theater of conflict, which is the whole world – if they don’t, then they will be flanked and outgunned and blamed for problems they are meant to solve, but aren’t large enough to. It’s a daunting task. Perhaps the most daunting is overcoming self-defeating thinking like “those foreigns are taking away our jobs” and “the union made the company leave.” These frames pit worker against worker, and the first, last, and only frame that matters to a union is “workers versus company.” They can get along – and the best of times for a union is when they do get along with the company – but they must always be prepared to oppose the company when doing so serves the interest of the workers. Most of all, they have to communicate, through word and thought and deed, that they, and not the company, are on the side of the working stiff.

My friend had belonged to a large, inefficient union and let the experience shape his perceptions. It’s inevitable that large organizations become cumbersome and build up systemic cruft. In this, unions are no different than companies. But with that out of the way, the union’s purpose is still to serve the interests of the worker when the company fails to do so. In other words, the unions might be sons of bitches but they are our sons of bitches. Their sons of bitches aren’t going to play fair and they’re all over the world. To survive, our sons of bitches have to fight on all fronts, because as the Japanese say, “business is war.”

Crossposted at Osborne Ink.

Pencils, Pens and Primaries

2011-06-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

A confession:

I actually don't have a problem with the idea of primarying a sitting President on its own merits.

The POTUS is an elected official who belongs to a political party. The party's will, being democratic, is expressed via votes and caucusing, and the opportunity to vote and caucus for your candidate doesn't disappear just because someone from your party is sitting in office.

So I don't oppose a primary of the sitting POTUS for that reason. I am opposed for purely practical reasons, instead.

The fable of the American space pen versus the Russian space pencil is a myth. But as Snopes.com reminds us, the myth serves a greater truth – that pursuit of a complex, effort-heavy solution that preserves our existing paradigm is sometimes inferior to a simpler solution that steps slightly outside of our paradigm. A pencil still writes, and it is far cheaper to manufacture, let alone develop, than a pen that writes upside down.

There are formidable obstacles in the way of primarying a sitting POTUS. First is the fact that no one's done it in the past century's worth of elections. The only time a sitting POTUS has lost the nomination in the year of their re-election is when they have voluntarily given it up (Truman, and LBJ.) The latter was the closest that a Democratic POTUS has come to being primaried, and LBJ didn't lose – LBJ stepped down, a detail that often gets lost amid the discussions of the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Some may say that that's a barrier that can be broken, and in theory it can, just as barriers like "Catholic POTUS" and "black POTUS" and one day "woman POTUS" and "gay POTUS" will be broken. But those barriers are soft barriers, based around social acceptance that changes over time. Barriers like successfully primarying a POTUS are less soft barriers, encoded into rules about how we elect our officials.

An incumbent goes into a primary with a lot of advantages. A POTUS incumbent, moreso. The POTUS is the most well-known member of their respective party and has made friends with all the kingmakers and support groups to get this far. They won the last primary so in terms of experience, are usually one up on the challenger when it comes to "number of inter-party presidential races run" – and "number of presidential general elections won," too. They are in a position to offer carrots and wave sticks at any challenger from within their party. They have the experience argument, the support argument, and name recognition. These are formidable barriers present in any POTUS who came from a political party.

But let's assume that a hypothetical primary candidate overcomes those barriers. They get a win. This will almost certainly be a close-fought win, and the wounds and fissures left in the party will make the 1968 and 2008 contests look like a land of bunnies and butterflies. Without the support of the entire party, the new presidential candidate is not going to win. To gain that support, the quickest way is outreach – bringing the outgoing POTUS' supporters and people on board with your effort. So right away, you haven't been able to cut out the influence of the former POTUS, not entirely, and probably not even significantly.

But let's assume that all fences are mended. Now you have to convince the independent electorate to vote for the same party, but not the same person. Remember that line about name recognition? The POTUS who just went down was intertwined with the party their replacement is part of through four years of brand reinforcement that the new candidate has three months to undo. The ads write themselves. Dig up any good thing the new candidate said about the old and paint them as a hypocrite, or any good thing the POTUS said about the new candidate and portray the new candidate as a backstabber.

And if you win? Congratulations. You got rid of that POTUS a whole four years before they'd have to step down any ways.

Assuming that you find a candidate willing to run against the de facto head of the party, andthey pull out a literally unprecedented win, and they mend fences with the loyalists, and they convince the electorate that all that talk about fissures within the party is poppycock, honest, we'll all get shit done when in office, your long shot is rewarded by getting rid of a term-limited elected official who was halfway to the end of their term limit.

Slow. Clap.

The reason I'm opposed to a primary of a sitting POTUS is because it strikes me as a tremendous waste of resources that could be better spent on more deserving targets, such as the legislature. Congresspeople and Senators do not have term limits, at all – they can get reelected as long as their brains generate electricity. Primaries against them have been shown to work. Most importantly, though: Congress and the Senate and the governor’s mansions across the U.S. are the soil from which the next POTUS will emerge. Presidents come from their party. If you want a better President, it is a smarter allocation of resources to make the party they come from better. A President is the culmination of a process – the end of a fight, not its inception.

That's why I'm opposed to a primary against a POTUS. It's short-term thinking that requires a massive amount of invested resources for a gain of dubious merit – resources that could be better spent making sure the field of potential POTUSes who follow this one are more to your liking. In other words, it's building a space pen versus using a pencil.

Crossposted at Osborne Ink.

Magic Love Hose Vs. The Asus Transformer

2011-06-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

Long story short, it's not a 10 - but a 9 is pretty respectable for a market that, a little over a year ago, virtually didn't exist.

The Asus Transformer, formally known as the Asus EeePad Transformer, is a tablet created by Asus and running Google's Android operating system. It is distinguished from other tablets by its price, and by its ability to dock with an external keyboard and battery. It competes with other non-iPad tablets such as the Motorola Xoom and the Blackberry Playbook; the demand for the Transformer is high despite a rather lackluster marketing campaign, proving that word of mouth really does matter.

Hardware

The Transformer is technically a tablet with an optional docking station, but both are sold seperately. Combined, the two fold up into a netbook about the size of an Acer AspireOne netbook (remember those?) with about the same thickness. The back of the dock and Transformer are ribbed slightly and have padded feet, which I prefer over the iPads I've played with. The tablet on its own is the thickness of the original iPad.

The screen itself is a nice big beautiful screen, very consistent. I noticed a little "light bleed" around the edges, but only when there is just about nothing but black on the screen. Otherwise it looks great.

There's a power button on the side that's easily recognized, and ditto for the volume controls. The microSD card slot on the other side, when loaded, is seamless - the bump that sticks out is just large enough to notice but otherwise unobtrusive. Well done there.

The keyboard is about half an inch narrower than, say, the standard aluminum Mac keyboard, with well-responding chiclet keys. Trackpad is smooth, and allows for multi-touch scrolling such as I am used to on my Mac and iPhone. It accepts taps as well as presses of the button underneath the pad. It locks in with a bit of wiggle room into the tablet - the slider will show you when it's clicked all the way in place, as it will slide all the way right. Slide left to unlock, and it pulls out fairly easily.

One key thing to mention is that the Transformer is slow to charge from USB - it will charge, but only when powered off. I'm told this is a common problem with tablets, but I still feel compelled to mention as I use the USB cable to sync files often and feel it's inconvenient to have to plug it in to get a quicker charge. If anyone out there knows a good way to get my tablet and my PC to talk to each other and send files back and forth, I'd appreciate it.

The speakers are a bit on the tinny side, but I hardly expect a tablet to match the subwoofer-equipped computer I have. Sounds just fine with headphones.

Camera takes nice pictures; the video could be frankly better. Haven't had much time to extensively test both.

Software

Used an iPhone or an Android? You're in luck. Slide to unlock, push app buttons, slide with finger, all that. Runs quite smoothly.

I appreciate that Android lets me view the contents of all interior folders on the tablet when I connect the cable. I don't like fussing with sync software, and this strikes me as the best way to get media onto and off the device. You can do it through Windows Media Player, I suppose, though I'd like to know why anyone would.

An important note: this does NOT come with sync software out of the box. I can't fathom a good reason why. I mean, yes, it gives me links to the website and all, but still, Asus, how much does it cost to stamp one CD?

Plays iTunes-purchased songs just fine. Movies, not so much - I've been able to play various non-copy-protected AVIs with a utility called RockPlayer, though. Picks up new songs the second they're brought in.

Dropbox works fine. Comixology is a revelation (comic books look FANTASTIC on this screen, with perfectly legible text, fast page loads and a lot of 'pop' to the colors.) The mail application is great, checking all accounts with regularity and letting you manage multiple accounts with ease. I am uncomfortable with the look and feel of Google Reader for RSS - anyone know of an Android RSS reader that essentially looks like NetNewsWire on the iPhone?

Sadly, Netflix does not work. I'm told that a rooted device can make it work, but frankly, I'm not quite up for rooting it yet.

Tethering with my iPhone over Bluetooth was a snap. Didn't need any extra utilities at all, though I did need tethering with my phone company turned on.

Finally, a nice touch: there is an 'active wallpaper' included that is ice floating in water, and the water level is supposedly tied to battery life. I'll have to test this out more when I get a chance.

Overall, I'm quite glad I bought it, and I couldn't beat the price. There are some "not QUITE there" hallmarks of a young market there, chief being no Netflix and a little trouble getting various video formats to talk to the Transformer without converting them. As I feel my way around the market and as the Transformer's popularity burgeons, I'm sure these issues will be licked. With that in mind, I would recommend the Transformer to anyone interested in a tablet and who's inclined to go with Android. It's not a 10 - a 10 would be a tablet with no disappointments and many "that's clever" moments. A 9 is still pretty all right, though, and the Transformer is probably the best competition the iPad 2's gotten yet.

EDIT: I would be remiss if I didn't also mention Anandtech's well-done reviews of the tablet, pre- and post-3.1 OS. Found here, and here, respectively.

Cana-DUH

2011-05-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

One of the things about living in Canada is that you get nearly all US media and all Canadian media as well, so you can look at everything the US media culture puts out and compare it to your own. When it comes around, I take special joy in comparing the inevitable Canadian ripoff to its American counterpart. You get to watch 24 take off in the United States and when Canada gets around to doing its own politically charged thriller for TV we get... a series about border security guards. Tough security guards, though!

Thanks to laws about levels of Canadian content that can be shown on Canadian TV, the Canadian television and film industry will never truly die - but as long as America exports so much media and does it as well as it does, it will never truly take off and will have its parasitic side. America gets MTV, we get MuchMusic. America gets the X-Men, with its Canadian super-badass turning into Marvel's most popular superhero - and we get Alpha Flight, which starred a hairy midget with a porno moustache.

On May 26th, the Canadian version of the Huffington Post launched, bringing this fine ripoff tradition into the field of "news and blog aggregators."

What's the chief difference? Well, the URL is one letter shorter. Otherwise, you got me.

Just like the Huffington Post, there is a giant-as-all-fuck tabloid headline that exaggerates the importance of its story. As of this writing it's about one hockey team going at it with another in a few days. Same basic layout, same structure. Most infuriatingly, it has the same "eh, whatever" editorial policy, that allows the newly elected leader of Canada's Green Party to share the front page with a debate about Canada's role in Libya, tips on how to burn fat and why raising the minimum wage is bad bad bad.

And that is my real issue with the Huffington Post. It's not that it's ideologically conservative - it isn't. It's not that it's particularly progressive - it isn't. It's that it'sincoherent, but claims to be progressive - or at least, is still regarded as progressive, even though they no longer self-identify as such. I'll allow a lot under the umbrella of Team Lefty, but Karabegovic and Veldhuis up there are over my line.

But more of all, Huffington Post Canada isn't Canadian. It's an American website aimed at Canada like it's a target market. Its parent company is literally called "America Online." (I know it's technically AOL now, but we all know what that abbreviation means.) It's about as Canadian as any giant multinational media-gobbling corporation can be, which is to say it's as Canadian as we let it be - corporations are amorphous legal blobs of smoke that fill all available space. But it's originating out of country, so I give it even odds for survival. Canadians can smell the phonies - it's just that sometimes we don't mind, and only sometimes we do. I might want to deny the existence of Canadian Idol, but wishing doesn't make it so.

I can't wait for the Canadian version of Cracked.com, myself, and lists of six reasons why Canada is secretly horrifying or something.

Crossposted at Osborne Ink.

My One Regret About Osama Bin Laden's Death

2011-05-04T10:17:00.001-07:00

... is that we'll never get to implement the Grant Morrison Playboy Solution.

Long since vanished from his website, but the Internet Archive sees all. Reprinted here, because this needs to be preserved for all time.

THE PLAYBOY PERSPECTIVE

Or...here's my favourite solution, which would actually be much more effective than any other but who's going to listen to a loony peacenik like me ?

We bring bin Laden back to the U.S. for trial and BEFORE locking him up, we keep him in house arrest.... IN THE PLAYBOY MANSION!

Can you imagine how rapidly and thoroughly bin Laden's fanatical following would collapse if they saw pictures of him sipping cocktails by the poolside, surrounded by bikini-clad airheads ?

Can you imagine him trying to espouse his fundamentalist doctrines to a gigling gaggle of sexy Playmates ?..

"You don't understand. This is jihad! Holy war against American imperialist hegemony."

Blank stares from six perfect pneumatic blondes.

"Wow! You're so cool! You're rilly, like, a famous terrorist ? That is sooo cool! Would you like a blow job ?"

"ALLAH AKBAR!!!!" screams Osama as all his dreams come true in a welter of flying cum and breast enhancements.

Subject the brutal bastard to the very best that the capitalist, hedonist western democracies have to offer. Give him endless offers of soapy tit fucks and baby-oiled five-in-a-bed romps and believe me, after enough time, he WILL succumb. He WILL embrace the glory that is western democracy.

And when he succumbs, the pictures can be shown worldwide. Islamic fundamentalists need sex and drugs to loosen them up; Dropping bombs on their friends only makes them angrier, harder, stronger and more determined. They won't kill George Bush or Tony Blair but they will kill more innocent people like you and me in the next big terrorist assault.

If we turn this into a war, only the innocent will suffer.

If we absorb bin Laden into our sexy, decadent culture we can ruin him as a figurehead and destroy the effectiveness of his cause.

For God's sake America! Let Hef take charge and SEND IN THE BIMBOS! Girls with big breasts are much better at changing men's inflexible minds than men with big guns are.

I¹m VERY serious about this.

Let us remember the words of the old Band of Hope hymn:

'Christ! Has eaten the Dehhh-vil!
He ate him like a plate of soup!
Christ! Has eaten the Dehhh-vil!
And now he'll do the same to you!'

And think about what they actually mean.

I endorse this man's product and/or service (and all of his comic books.)

Thoughts on The Finale to The Prisoner (1968)

2011-04-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

SPOILERS, obviously.

The basic premise of The Prisoner is an intriguing one - a secret agent resigns his post, is abducted from his home, and wakes up in the Village, having been assigned a number instead of a name. The newly christened Number Six matches wits with the head of the Village, Number Two, who wants to know why Six resigned.

This premise, however, doesn't quite accurately describe the show, which descended into surreality with frightening regularity. Even a man as steeped in Grant Morrison comics as I am was taken aback at how surreal things got. Entire episodes have a dreamlike quality to them - oddly enough, it's the episodes most often dealing with hallucinations that seem the most lucid, with the more surreal episodes often offering no explanation whatsoever, leaving the viewer to sort things out for themselves.

The Prisoner's final episode, Fall Out, is perhaps the most surreal of all. This is my attempt to form some sense out of it.

Unlike the other more dreamlike episodes, this one has a fairly clear potential cause - the invasive psychological therapy used on Six in the previous episode "Once Upon A Time." The episode chronicles Degree Absolute, a special means of invasive psychotherapy that has regressed Number Six to childhood. He regains himself in the end, triumphing over Number Two, and in reward, he is taken to see Number One.

It's not a stretch to think that a straight week of brutal psychological warfare would leave after-effects on Six's perceptions of the world. I believe that he perceived the events that followed as a waking dream - that he faced the core of Village society, was complemented on his individualistic fortitude, and rejected leadership and fled the Village after cutting out its heart, rebels in tow, but how he perceived these things happening is different from how others did.

In dreams, everyone is an extension of the dreamer. All of the roles seen by the non-faceless people in the dream are roles Six has inhabited. The youthful rebel was once Six, as shown in "Once Upon a Time." The revived Number Two, a man of authority, steeped in the rules of the Gentleman's Game, was once Six. The judge, vested with legal authority by the system he represents, was once Six - a spy gathers information, so it's not a stretch to assume that Six has gathered information that has put people in jail.

Building on this theme, people finish each other's sentences, adopting each other's modes of speech and mannerisms. The judge and the youthful rebel talk like one man with two voices, at one point. The underlying theme is that everyone plays the role of rebel and establishment at different points in their lives; we are all prisoners of forces beyond our control - and to others, we are those forces they cannot control. The Village mixes wardens in with prisoners for more than one reason.

Moreover, images from our lives are repurposed in a dream. The missile set from "The Girl Who Was Death" is the silo control room where Six meets One. The actor who played the heavy from "Living in Harmony" shows up again as the youthful rebel. You could say that they were on a budget, but considering how elaborate the final set was I think the re-use of these images is deliberate.

And of course, One has Six's face.

Does this mean Six was One all along? Possible - but it's interesting that One's face is only revealed after Six has accepted the globe from him. The globe represents a transfer of power - so after accepting the globe, Six has become One. ("Six of One" indeed.) If Six actually was One all along, I'm not sure how that's possible in anything resembling a real world - rather, the scene is meant to show Six being offered to become that which he despised. He rejects the power, leads a revolt, and escapes the Village, while the missile that One lived in blasts off from this Earth.

One also hands a globe off to Six, that Six shatters. I'll get to that in a bit.

In dreams, the ocean represents a spiritual journey or place, and ascending and descending also represents a journey upwards or downwards in our psyches. The missile is the ultimate means of escape, capable of escaping Earth itself; its departure destroys Rover in the heat blast, and Rover was formed from water, emerging from bubbles in a spring or in the ocean. So the departure of the rocket and the destruction of Rover represent the end of the spiritual journey of Number Six.

When Six returns home, he drops off his fellow rebels wherever they please, but the Butler that came with the job of Number Two is dropped off at Six's own home, which has as its street number "1." But - Six doesn't go in, the butler does. Six has rejected power, and I believe that the Butler represents this power just as much as the globe that One handed to Six does. The globe has the iconic image of Six's face behind slamming steel bars that bookended each episode of the series up 'til now - because power is a prison all its own. The Butler, as a constant manservant, represents the system that grants and administers power. Without this system, power is meaningless - and the system knows it, and exploits it. The Butler goes into the door marked "1" at the end, because the system, larger than any human in it, and outliving them all, is the only enduring Number One.

And the Prisoner drives off. We never know why he resigned, because he kept that a secret even from us - since if everyone is prisoner and warden, then the only way to keep something truly personal is to tell no one.

* * *

So why did the Village do all of this? They must have had a reason.

Even in this age of "everything that ever was, available forever" - tracking down a copy of the comic book sequel to the series, The Prisoner: Shattered Visage, has proven difficult for me. But I've read its synopsis and I think that there is something to the notion that giving Six authority was the Village's last-ditch effort to keep Six under control.

In giving him authority within the system but keeping the system intact - because it's the system that is really in charge, formed of humans but only barely controlled by them - they would make Six want to stay. And if he wants to stay, he will eventually come to trust them. And when he trusts them, perhaps his guard will slip enough to let them know why he resigned - or maybe it won't matter any more, since his expertise as a spy would be employed for the Village in any event.

McGoohan has said that the penny farthing bicycle, a ubiquitous symbol in The Prisoner, represents technology not fully under control of the people who built it. Matt Osborne at Osborne Ink says it represents a government. I hew closer to Matt's interpretation than McGoohan's, but I would substitute "system" for "government," because it's more universal. Corporations are not governments, but they have the same characteristics in common with governments that the penny farthing bicycle represents; constructed by human hands, moving us forward, but taking a great deal of effort to stay atop of. We could, I suppose, build a better bicycle - I own a better bicycle myself - but to do that we'd have to stop riding the current one, and is the time we lose worth it? We only have so much, after all. So we amble on with great effort atop an imperfect conveyance that still has us moving forward.

The Village attempted to keep Six imprisoned atop the bicycle, and tried to convince him that he couldn't step off. But step off he did, bringing the whole thing crashing down.

* * *

That's the bulk of what I took away from it. There are other bits and pieces - the presense of Beatles music is one of them. "All You Need Is Love" has the lyrics "nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you", and "nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game" that tie into the events of the episode and the themes of the series, and it's interesting to note that in the 60's the Beatles were the counterculture, wheras today nearly all pop music traces its lineage back to John, Paul, George and Ringo.

There is also the "Dem Bones" song - a curious choice, since it's about interconnectivity and is an explicitly religious song, and going to church is about the least rebellious thing you can do in Western society. But thinking on it, I don't recall a church anywhere in the Village, or at least, no church used for worship - so perhaps the theme is that rebellion is all about context - what you are rebelling against matters most of all.

My goofy side wants to say that the imagery of a giant phallic object flying into the sky, and in so doing, killing a rounded white blob, has obvious sexual undertones. My cynical side wants to say that Patrick McGoohan inhaled the contents of a pharmacy to get through a tight deadline and he filmed the result.

But these are minor complaints. Initially I thought that leaving so much to interpretation was a cop-out, making the television equivalent of a Jackson Pollack painting and leaving the hard work of "making it make sense" up to me. But on reflection, it makes perfect sense of the series. The Prisoner was always about the right of the individual to be individual, to rebel, to be your own person instead of an easily swapped number - and forming your own conclusion, from your own experience, out of the collective experience of a television show seen by millions? That's about as individualistic as mass media gets. Even when the medium fought him, McGoohan got his point across.

I don't know that I'd call The Prisoner the best television series ever filmed - for me, that honor goes to Stephen Moffat's "Jekyll" - but I can see the side of people who say it's the best. I never did this much analysis of The Avengers, that's for sure.

Found When Out Walking.

2011-04-15T18:08:00.001-07:00

Usually I buy someone a drink before an "@ss massage."

On Libya.

2011-04-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

Two things that need stating up front:

1) I think NATO intervention in Libya is a bad idea.

2) I don't think less of people whom I normally agree with, if they think it is a good idea.

With that out of the way, let me explain the why behind these points.

* * *

Why do I think the war in Libya is a bad idea? Because I think war, in general, is a bad idea. There are times when war is the least bad idea, a better idea than "let's not do a thing," but it still is bad news. No one's really that happy when they hear about a war, or at least, no one with a soul left.

To use an analogy, let's say that you have cancer. The good news is that you have the kind of cancer that chemotherapy can send into remission and that after going through chemotherapy you are going to be okay. Good news, right? Maybe - but you still have cancer, and you still have to go through chemotherapy. Chemotherapy doesn't suck as much as cancer, but chemotherapy still sucks. It's a painful, lengthly process that involves being injected with poison to make you feel better. It's by its nature counterintuitive, even when it works. Even in this hypothetical case where you definitely have cancer and you will definitely be okay after chemotherapy, you're not really looking forward to your hair falling out and losing half your body weight.

Now let's say that the doctor's not 100% sure. Let's say he's at about a 40% level of 'sure.' You might go through all that suffering and die of the cancer anyways. Your choices are worse. You might still take the chemotherapy, but you'll probably have to think longer about it, even if you do - it might be wasted time and money and a lot of needless pain with no result.

Now let's say that while your doctor is telling you about the necessity of chemotherapy, he's telling you that he's 100% sure, but other doctors say 60%, or 40%, or 0%. Let's also say that not too long ago, the previous doctor who worked at this clinic told a patient that he was 100% sure that chemotherapy would cure him, and the patient didn't have cancer at all but a burst appendix. Let's also say that in this world, you are aware that there is such a thing as the Chemotherapy Industrial Complex, or CIC, and that many of the doctors at this clinic have a History of putting the interests of the CIC ahead of the interests of their patients.

How sure are you of that chemotherapy now? That's how sure I am of the justness of NATO in Libya. Maybe the cancer is curable - but maybe it isn't, and maybe people with their hands on the valve of the information hose have a lot to gain from selling me on chemotherapy regardless of how much good it will do me. Now, this isn't like that time a few years back when one doctor prescribed chemotherapy for a burst appendix insisting that the burst appendix was some secret new form of cancer that would kill the patient stone dead - there are a lot of doctors this time, all telling me it's cancer. But can anyone really blame me for wanting to be sure it's cancer, and that it is treatable cancer, and that the chances of it going away are good, before I submit to another round of horrible pain, lost time and depleted money?

* * *

That's why I'm opposed. Why don't I hate many people, such as Matt Osborne, Shoq, and Dave Von Ebers - people who aren't opposed? That's a lot easier - because I think well enough of them to allow them their own opinion, but I think well enough of myself to allow myself my own opinion. (The latter is something I have struggled with, but I think I'm getting good at it.) And I also think that the world will not end, and on a smaller scale, the international progressive conspiracy will not unravel, and on the smallest scale a friendship (for the Twitter definition of friendship) will not be ruined, over something like a difference of opinion between people who agree on so much.

We're all in Plato's Cave - or in neuroscience terms, we all have cognitive biases. Selection bias. Confirmation bias. We all form tribes. When talking about neuroscience and how the human brain works, two things have to be kept in mind: that when they talk about these biases and social structures, they talk about everyone you've ever met, and that when they talk about these things, they are talking about you.

So I don't hate someone else for being Wrong on the Internet. So am I! We're all Wrong on the Internet. I'd bring up relativity except that I don't have a good enough scientific background to toss around a fifty-dollar word like it ain't nothing. I'll listen to their arguments that Libya is the least-bad thing that NATO and the UN can do. Just that right now, I don't agree.

EDIT: Added hyperlinks.

From the Introduction to the 'Gritty Reboot' of Axe Cop

2011-03-31T16:21:00.000-07:00

The first time I read Axe Cop, I knew I wanted to work on it someday.

The strip in question featured the titular character and his friend, Avocado Soldier, attacking an elephant. They used a giant robot and a sword that explodes. Your typical superhero fare? Hardly, because Axe Cop then realized he'd made a mistake – attacking an elephant at the normal zoo, instead of the fighting zoo.

That was when I grasped the true essence of Axe Cop – a flawed, deeply human, mature take on the superhero, its hero not invincible but instead, oh so prone to fatal, lasting mistakes.

That scene stayed with me, even when the comic turned back towards less mature pursuits. I entered the comics field, getting my big break on reviving the Legion of Super-Heroes for the controversial "thirty-threeboot," and making waves with my twelve-part maxi-series explaining why her mother's beheading from an out-of-control automotive aerodynamic device was the reason Stephanie Brown became "the Spoiler." My work, unlike anything that anyone else in the industry was writing about, was getting me noticed, and the call came down one day:

BD Media had acquired the rights to Axe Cop, and they wanted me to reboot it for today's audiences.

Being a lifelong fan of Axe Cop's grounded take on superheroics, I said 'yes' right away.

There's been some controversy over the reboot. On legal terms, some people feel that asking a seven year old to understand the papers he was signing when he gave up all rights to the strip was nothing less than thuggery and ask me how I can justify working on the series in light of the Nicolles being 'Shustered.' All I can say, or at least, all my lawyer will let me say, is that in the most important sense, the series will always belong to Malachai and Ethan Nicolle. (I define 'most important way' as the way that doesn't involve intellectual property rights to or financial compensation from present work, future work, past work, derivative works, movies, television, video games, emergent media and basically everything to do with Axe Cop forever.)

Other people feel that the fact that I'm forty-seven means that I'm unqualified to write Axe Cop, that Malachai Nicolle's strip loses its appeal when taken seriously. I don't agree with this sentiment; Malachai's strip about Axe Cop mistaking the normal zoo for the fighting zoo was just one of many strips that showed that Malachai had a maturity beyond his years. If your heart doesn't break when Army Chihuahua loses both his friend and his humanity, I just don't know what to tell you. It's this sentiment that I wanted to emphasize with the reboot, stripping away all the overly silly clutter that has distracted from this enduring quality.

To that end, the volume you hold in your hands doesn't hold back. Axe Cop's depression over accidentally chopping a mermaid's head off will drive him to the edge of suicide, as the terrible crime haunts him in a graphically ilustrated fourteen page sequence with a fold-out spread. His return from that precipice gives him no peace, as he must regretfully stop his old ally Abraham Lincoln, Explosion God from putting a bomb inside of everyone who might be a bad guy, in a analogue to state over-reach in today's post-9/11 era. The mystery of how Wexter survived the death of the dinosaurs is solved at long last, and Axe Cop, tempted with the power of Uni-baby's unicorn horn, makes a terrible wish that will change the world of Axe Cop forever. And Axe Cop punches out all the Beautiful Girly Bobs, because even in this mature, updated reboot, some classics need no updating for today's comic reader sensibilities.

Axe Cop 2020 has been a labor of love, and I hold that no purer expression of the message behind Axe Cop – that comic books are meant for adults – exists today.

In Which I Depress Myself About Politics

2011-03-13T16:43:00.000-07:00

Because I wasn't having a miserable enough weekend, staying up late worried about nuclear disaster and the thought of a chunk of central Japan being uninhabitable for the next few thousand years, I decided to turn my thoughts towards the problem of money in politics.

It's the big one. Of course, any system can be gamed. Any system game-able by money will over time, tilt towards those with the most money. Since I'm poor, I don't want that. So it's in my enlightened self-interest to prevent the gaming of a system or to minimize it.

So how to get the money out? Ideally, campaigns for office would be solely publicly funded. That's a pipe dream at present. Barring that, there's the small donor system, which is still game-able - a large amorphous blob of donors, all with different priorities, all with different temperaments, is extremely difficult to gauge the needs of, so the politician in question naturally drifts towards the needs of those who are going to deliver the most cash - i.e. those in PACs or who work as bundlers. And then it's drifting towards those with the most money, all over again.

New parties? Take all the times you've complained about how the parties in a two or three party system are "bought off for so little money." Ask yourself what the return on investment would be if instead of having to bribe two parties, the people with all the money had to bribe three. I'm thinking it'll still look pretty favorable.

And even if we get fully publicly funded elections, that's still not the end of it. Outside groups can buy ad space on TV just as well as any other. If you seen an ad 20 times a day for brand X and 1 for brand Y, then all else being equal you are going to tilt towards Brand X even if you don't consciously want to. It's the basic premise of mass advertising. You get carefully chosen marketing memes disseminated via direct mailings or Email, then by news channels that like to report on controversy because it's a low-effort way to fill a high volume of space. So even if the election itself is publicly funded, you'd need to regulate all paid political speech - and there would be ways around it. There always are.

And then I realized, "Wait, I need to go back to first premises." The first premise being, "those with the most money have the advantage in a political race." I asked myself why.

The answer is because we can be swayed, obviously. All that money goes towards swaying. Ads to sway. Image consultants. Mailers. Walking-around money. It's carefully measured and they know just how much sway they can get at different levels of investment. It's obviously not just politics - but politics, since it touches so much about our lives, is where it's the most odious. The world isn't changed too much why whether you drink Coke or Pepsi. It's changed a lot by who gets voted into office. And the last dozen or so presidential U.S. elections, with rare exception, have been won by the candidate with the most money.

We are in an age where they can measure, with accuracy as reasonable as you can expect from any social science, how much money it will cost to change your mind. I asked myself if we can really have a democracy when the means of implementation of a democracy, the mind of the average voter, is itself inherently game-able, and people with money know all the exploits.

And really? We can't. Democracy is the will of the people - but the will of the people without money is easily swayed by the people with it. It's broken at the root. It always was.

And that's why I am depressed this weekend.

Found On The Bus.

2011-03-10T22:34:00.001-08:00

Fact: if you don't like "The Princess Bride," there is something wrong with you.

When Is a Book Not a Book?

2011-03-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

Today I went to the library to check out some DVDs of "The Prisoner," a series I kept meaning to get around to but never did until now. Yesterday, I bore witness to a rant about e-readers by someone who has a flawed conception of them, thinking that you needed to push buttons to make the things in the book happen - which, while a legitimate for of art and gaming, is not a book and not how e-readers work.

He's not alone. There are tons of people like him. To them, I have a question about the horrors of the electronic book. It's a three word question:

Books on tape.

I have never, ever heard people get mad at books on tape as they get about e-readers. Not once. Yet books on tape are an entirely different experience than an actual book. You use a totally different sense. Your brain processes text differently than it does speech. The audio proceeds at sixty seconds a minute, unlike the pacing of a book which is at your own speed. If you are that concerned with the desecration of text, I would recommend starting with the experience the least like reading a book, rather than an experience that goes out of its way to be the most like a book, to the point of inventing an entirely new kind of display for the purpose.

There are legitimate concerns with e-readers, especially Amazon's - who can reach into your Kindle and remove books if it chooses, an action that cannot possibly have a positive use. That is a problem with design, not with concept, however - there are readers that are far less draconian, and that accept universal document formats. There's also the issue of electricity, though an e-ink reader is incredibly energy efficient and someday, someone smart will put a solar panel on the back of one. Those are about the only concerns I can think of. All others I've heard fall by the side.

"Electronic books are too easy to erase!" Because paper is apparently the most durable substance on Earth all of a sudden, invulnerable to fire, water, or being read too much. An e-book reads as well on the 100,000th read as it did on the first. Try that with a book, no matter how good the binding.

"It's not a book if it's not written on real paper!" Well, there you have it. All writing prior to the invention of paper is considered invalid. Captain Super Loves The Fuck Out of Books said so, so let's wipe out some more forests. Got plenty of those!

This isn't even going into the merits of electronic publishing - the low barrier to entry, for one. All I need is a book and I could publish it right now. I have a few terrible short novels on my hard drive I could torment the world with, but I think I will wait until my writing from further than six months in the past doesn't make me wince. E-books cost so little to replicate there is no overhead at all. No forest falls to print them. No gas is burnt to deliver them. Now, electricity and the means to generate it ARE burnt, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the electronic cost of the delivery of one electronic book is not in the same league as the delivery of a paper one. Anyone want to prove me wrong, go ahead - but show up with facts. I love those.

A book is, like any other kind of art, an amorphous object at the best of times, with a definition that was always loose and has just gotten looser as information's gotten less physical. A collection of essays is a book. A sampling of short stories is a book. A long epic novel is a book. A lengthly dissertation on aggregate demand curves is a book, and so is a children's story about a duck who hates to get wet. Even a book on tape, the least book-like object I can conceive of, is still a book. If they count, so do e-readers.

I've never listened to a book on tape. I don't plan to. To me, it defeats the purpose of a book, which is that it be read. But I don't begrudge the section of the bookstore and the library that stocks them and I don't feel the need to rant tediously about these darned kids on my lawn with their loud music and books on tape. It's all books. People need to stop confusing "method of enjoying book I don't like" with "method of enjoying a book that is invalid."

My Other Personal Inception Theory (Less Spoilers)

2011-02-27T15:00:00.001-08:00

Titanic is a dream world constructed by Cobb.

There's two layers to it - the surface layer, where Rose is an old woman nearing the end of her life, and the layer below, which takes place on the Titanic. In the flashback, Jack is a total cipher with no character arc to speak of - it's Rose who has to change and grow as a person.

Like in Inception, both dreams trend chaotic. The Titanic is destroyed. Rose eventually 'dies' in the present day dream.

Over the course of the lower-level dream, Rose falls in love with a lower-class man. In the higher level dream, Rose has apparently been hanging on to this super-rare jewel her entire life, waiting for a chance to toss it in the ocean, even though it couldn't possibly make less sense. The jewel had no connection to Jack - in fact, her romance with Jack was about the rejection of the Heart of the Ocean.

So the only way it makes sense is if in the lower level dream, Cobb incepted Rose with the notion that she should reject material wealth in favor of matters more romantic and spiritual (the ocean, in dreams, often symbolizes a spiritual place.) In the higher level dream, she carries this out, by letting material wealth be swallowed by the sea.

Is my theory bullshit? Maybe.

But every time you watch Titanic from now on...

... be honest. My version's better.

(EDIT: This post has been rough to format.)

My Own Personal Inception Theory (SPOILERS)

2011-02-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

The true target of inception is the audience.

If the movie had ended one minute sooner, we would not be asking the questions we ask about it. But it ended where it did, purposefully ambiguous, planting the seed of doubt in the audience's mind: this world is not real.

The same idea was planted in Moll's head, and with the same spinning, wobbling top. That seed of doubt is the driver of Cobb's character arc, and that seed of doubt in turn is the driver of all discussion about what in Inception is real, if any of it.

Once I realized this, it was like my own personal kick - I fell up a layer and looked down on the discussion about Cobb's disappearing/reappearing wedding ring, tops that are taken out but never spun, tight, constricting alleyways and how much a man can build down in Limbo, and realize that it's all a maze built by a master architect. Christopher Nolan wanted us to discuss it. He wanted us to doubt. He spun the top, let it spin long enough for the doubt to sink in, then - cut to black - and -

I N C E P T I O N

Now I feel dumber for not spotting it sooner.

If Inception doesn't walk away with at least one non-technical Oscar, the Academy Awards this year will be proven a farce.

"O-Bots Versus the Firebaggers" Would Be an Awesome Comic Book

2011-02-19T16:25:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, a blogger I follow, Bob Cesca, did a post on a feud between Paul Krugman and Glenn Greenwald. The germ of the feud is whether or not an economist who did health care modelling was somehow corrupted by accepting a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services.

I think this is not Greenwald's finest hour and I am more inclined to agree with Krugman on this, but I'm more inclined to worry too much about a problem rather than worry too little. If there isn't a problem, then perhaps debate can settle the issue, and that's what the blogosphere is all about, at least in theory. So I'm okay, if less than thrilled, with the debate purely on its merits.

On the timing, however? This war of words between Paul Krugman and Glenn Greenwald is over a year old. It came about just before the Scott Brown special election. If it feels like a long time ago, it is. You could have made an entirely new human being in the space between then and now. So the debate, apparently, isn't settled, since we are still debating it. (For the record, I saw the article bubble up on Shoq's firehose of a twitter stream, and it stuck out because I remember a thoughtful post from last year where John Cole went over it. John Cole does not disagree with Greenwald often, so I lend a bit of extra attention when he does.)

At the top of his post, Bob Cesca writes the following:

CORRECTION: This is from January of 2010. I didn't look at the date and and discovered it because Greenwald was debating @OTOOLEFAN about it on Twitter earlier today. Nevertheless, it's worth repeating anyway.

I agree with Bob on a lot, but on this, I have to disagree. I think the progo-blogosphere would be much healthier as a community if we let old feuds settle.

We're still debating health care. Still. Moreover, we are still debating along the same basic lines we were debating it over a year ago. People who think the bill's a good step forward over here, people who think it doesn't go far enough over there. (My take is that these are not contradictory opinions.) No one's opinions are really shifting after this long. And even if they were, the dent this shift leaves in the health care bill's standing is not visible to anything other than an electron microscope. We're stuck in a rut and life's gone on. The bill is a law, and even if the Republicans defund it, there's nothing stopping Dems from re-funding it when they inevitably regain the power of the purse. If it's struck down by the courts, that is beyond our ability to affect. I'm speaking as a Canadian here, and as a Canadian who thinks Canada's sun-dappled kumbaya health care system doesn't go far enough, when I say that this, for the next few years at the least, is a settled issue. It's time to move on. If you want to debate health care bills, debate what we should push for in the next one. That strikes me as far more productive.

This is hardly the first nasty split the progo-blogosphere's had. The split over Obama/Clinton was one that predated my heavy involvement in the blogosphere, but you can still see the scars all over the place. People still bring the '07 primary/'08 election up to make rhetorical points and I'm personally requesting a moratorium on them. Were you in Team O from day one? Great. Were you supportive of one of the other thirty-five people in the Democratic primary or a Naderite or a Paul crossover voter? Fan-tastic. All that mathematically ended three years ago. There's a reason they call it MoveOn.org.

"But," says the hypothetical reader. "Don't we need to know about past opinions to judge the validity of present ones?" My answer is threefold:

1) Holy shit I have readers?

2) Opinions change over time. I used to think that refocusing on the Afghanistan war was a good thing - now I just want my country and the U.S. to wash our hands of the place and never speak of it again. I was pro-life when I was 15, just like Justin Bieber, and I hope someday he changes his mind like I did. Changing one's mind has never been against the law. And if it has been, then that's a stupid law and fuck that law. I would be more suspicious of a person who doesn't change their mind - for one thing, why debate a person like that?

3) Even if this particular opinion hasn't changed, it feels hypocritical to selectively enforce it just so we can win a particular debate by saying "even Obama skeptic Paul Krugman says," etc, or dismissing Greenwald's extremely valid concerns over civil liberties erosions or government corruption because he is one of Obama's most frequent leftist critics and therefore he is somehow "blinded by hate." It feels like a cheap out - made cheaper all the time thanks to modern search technology. As I said in that link, the purpose of a debate is the same purpose as science - you don't debate to prove you are correct, you debate to become correct.

This is not the purpose of a movement, moreover - a movement is already secure that it is correct, and is now moving to enforce its views upon the larger body politic. The more debate a movement has, the less certain it becomes. The more infighting, the less momentum the movement picks up as internal tribes form and pit themselves against one another. This is a paradox endemic to the human animal and I don't have sure-fire way around it that retains social momentum and still encourages debate. I'm not saying that the answer is to kill all debate, because then we really would all be the unthinking automatons that people outside our tribe call us.

I'm saying that the good that a debate does must be weighed against the kinks it will throw into a movement, and on that scale, I rate "hey, let's all debate the public option for the fifty-thousandth motherfucking time" pretty goddamn low. There's a time and a place for this stuff. And when it comes to battles that happened over a year ago, we're way past it.

A Long Post About Arizona, Giffords, and Words.

2011-01-12T13:46:00.000-08:00

Let's say that someone, over a period of a few months or a few years, went through a remarkable transformation of character, giving to charity, volunteering for community service, and becoming more involved with political and activist issues. They become a pillar of the community and an example to be looked up to. Then, when asked what caused this metamorphosis, they cite a speech by Barack Obama, calling them to be better and to serve their community.

Would Barack Obama deserve the credit for this person's good deeds? Of course not. The person has agency and can make their own decisions, and doubtlessly this decision was the latest in a long string that led to this point. We can, however, credit Barack Obama with making the speech that inspired the newfound activist, as long as we don't get it into our heads that Obama deserves all, or most, or even a significant portion of the credit. Making a speech is nowhere near the amount of work it takes to become an activist. But it's not nothing. To put it this way, the speech sure didn't hurt.

That's basically where I stand on the current debate on political rhetoric and the recent tragedy in Arizona. It requires a finer gradient than binary "is guilty/not guilty." Not even our criminal justice system is a simple guilty/not guilty - there's plea bargains, commuted sentences, multiple charges. Binary gradients are easy, but too often wrong.

Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk did not pull the trigger or buy the gun. No U.S. court would convince them. (Canada, I'm not quite so sure, because Canada has hate speech law which is, to say the least, a touchy subject even for people like me who're repulsed by this rhetoric - but even then, the penalties for murder and hate speech are not comparable.) No one can sincerely blame them for the killing of half a dozen people including a nine year old girl, just like no one could lather the credit for a person's community service on the President speaking of its worth. But, to put it this way, their speech sure didn't help. Their words aren't the sole cause and not even the major one - but they're not nothing.

In an age where Twitter literally moves faster than an earthquake, words have more power than ever. 140 characters typed in haste can reach millions. It has never been easier to express yourself to the world at low or no cost in human history, and perhaps in this age, we falsely equate "ease" with "unimportance." But words still matter. In the information age, as much as ever.

I am not advocating censorship. Limbaugh and Palin and Beck have a right to their words. It is precisely because speech is important that they have a right to their words. If they want to, they can spout off gobbledegook all day and all night, just like I can choose to delete every political feed in FeedDemon and fill the whole thing up with Dungeons and Dragons websites and commentary on movies and comic books and forget about events of the day. I choose, instead, to be informed about the world no matter how much heartburn it gives me, because I feel a responsibility to it.

That's what I'm advocating on behalf of. I do not want people who use violent rhetoric to stop doing it because they have to by law, but because they choose to out of a sense of responsibility to the larger culture. Because even if no one could say their speech harms - it's tough to claim that it helps. Until they do this voluntarily, I voluntarily exercise my right of freedom of expression to criticize their speech, just as they'd doubtlessly criticize mine were they aware I exist.

* * *

So where does the blame lie, if it lies in any one place? (And the world is a complex place, so of course it's not any one thing.) Loughner is obviously not right in the head and it can be argued that he doesn't have agency. If he's not responsible for his actions, then who?

Gun control activists point out that he has a modified Glock that spat out thirty bullets and that this was a factor. I personally think that while fewer people may have died if he had a regular Glock pistol, it would still have been a horrific scene with 17 bullets easily on tap versus thirty. His first shot found its intended mark, after all. I'm doubtless that he went there to kill Giffords first and foremost, and if he'd done that with a Glock-17 we'd still be talking about it, and the rhetoric surrounding it.

The more extreme gun elimination activists will then say that we should start thinking about no legal guns, period. About a decade or so ago I might have agreed that banning all guns was a solution worth considering, but one thing that war in Afghanistan and Iraq has shown is that violence will find a way if the perpetrator is willing enough. Loughner said goodbye to his friends - that tells me he was willing to die, and so in a world without guns we may very well have been talking about how Loughner strapped a bomb made out of plant food to his chest and took half a dozen people out of this world that way. The history of humanity has been violent longer than it's had guns. Violence will find a way. I'm much more interested in finding out what makes men like Loughner do something that my gun-firing friends would never consider.

(This isn't the same as gun control. I think common sense gun controls are not only fine, but welcome. But there's a line between the control of firearms and the elimination thereof.)

The whole affair's been a Rorschach blot, really. "If people did things this way then this wouldn't have happened," where 'this' is 'whatever I already believe.' Many hardcore gun lovers think that if everyone there was packing there would be fewer people dead, an idea so ridiculous it doesn't deserve any mention beyond the phrase "look up what 'friendly fire' is."

I'm no different in that the approach I would prefer to emphasize is born from personal experiences. I know people who would be considered mentally ill. Never you mind who they are; that's not important. What I can tell you, from my experiences with them, is that it's a very difficult thing to deal with, even if your illness doesn't affect your behaviour too much (for some of them it does.)

A large part of it is the stigma - right now, public perception of mental illness is so inaccurate, "he's crazy" is still considered a fully formed motivation for a villain in fiction. Having a mental illness is like a stain on your public face. It colours everything you say and do, making it easier for people to dismiss your words because they aren't what they want to hear. I can't help but wonder if last Saturday could have been avoided, if only Loughner had found it easier to seek help for his problems, if mental health was treated with the same sympathy and care as a broken bone or cancer.

If we want to stop another incident like this, maybe we should start with that. There are mental health provisions in the ACA signed into law in 2010. That's a step. Only a step, but every journey is composed of thousands of "only a steps."

* * *

This is the music video for 'Imagine' by John Lennon.

Two things you need to know about me. The first is that I believe the world that John Lennon describes in this song is impossible.

The second thing you need to know about me is that I believe that, even though it is impossible, it is worth fighting for anyways.

Found In The Bookstore.

2010-12-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure that cat is having the opposite of fun.

The Least Wonderful Time of the Year

2010-10-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

Today is my least favourite holiday of the year.

It's not that all night I'm going to be fielding disruptions from people at my door. I will be lucky to get a handful, and in some ways that's the problem. It's not that Halloween costumes are kind of spoilt by dressing for winter - since that's no longer a problem for the trick-or-treaters I see.

I work in a building attached to a mall. I also work weekends. Today I went out into the mall to get some food, and I saw trick-or-treaters everywhere. I saw "no more candy" signs on two thirds of the shop windows. I saw all of this because in my city, trick-or-treat has moved mostly to an indoor activity. You get more in the mall than you do in the neighbourhood.

Why is this so? Well, this mall is part of a "safe walk" program, you see. Implying it's safe to trick-or-treat in here. The implication is that it is not safe on your street, with its razor apples and pot dealers and whatnot. You might not have any proof, but it sure feels unsafe, doesn't it? You can't argue against something as potent as fear, especially when we're talking about children here.

So the result is that your local hall of commerce, the place where you buy blue jeans and blu-ray and tacos, is safer than the street you live on, and the shopkeeps are more trustworthy than the people you live next to.

This is my least favourite time of year because that thought is too depressing.

All Hypocrites Together

2010-10-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

An argument on Twitter I bore witness to yesterday brought something that's been bubbling in the back of my brain into sharp relief. Several people were calling each other liars - yes, I know, shocking that people would argue on the Internet - and to prove their points, dredging up old tweets, old blog posts, old bits of whatever, all easily accessible with modern search technology.

Were they right to do so? Well, that IS how you win an argument. You point out flaws and inconsistencies in thinking. But 'flawed' is another word for 'human.' People say things they later take back. They change their minds, and we let them because just as they have the capacity to change how they think, we have the capacity to forget what they used to think.

I'm beginning to think that with search technology refined as it is and with so much of our lives online, and with online anonymity slowly but surely coming to an end, it is making it easier than ever for us to point out each other's flaws as a cheap shot. And therefore, the argument goes to the one able to utilize this technology quickest and best, and not to the one with the soundest reasoning in the present. And the one who wins the day most of all is the one who is the least flawed and who changes their mind the least - the former an admirable enough but rare trait, the latter not that admirable at all.

If you support, say, a piece of legislation despite flaws, and I can dig up a post from months ago where you say the opposite, and do all this within minutes - is the argument really served well? Does someone really deserve an accusation of cognitive bias or flip-flopping rather than a simple "what made you change your mind?" And do we have to post about it whenever we change our minds on anything? Is it even possible - or desirable? Forget it just being politics, too. If you're enthusiastic about Zack Snyder on the new Superman movie and I can, with minimal effort, dig up your review where you stated that 300's title must refer to the number of seconds they spent writing it - am I contributing anything to the conversation or am I just scoring cheap gotcha points?

People might reply, "well, the purpose of an argument is to prove your point." I'd disagree. The purpose of an argument is not to prove you are right, but to become right. To find out what the correct outlook is, whether it's yours or theirs. To take your ego out of the equation and to judge the statements on their own - hard enough under normal circumstances, but when the perfect gotcha is a few clicks on Google away, how much harder?

People change. Their politics change. Their tastes change. Search engines will notice, but they won't pick up on how important it is. Search engines don't pop up with a note saying "this guy later on changed his mind about Afghanistan" when you go digging for their 2007 post about the war in an attempt to call them hypocritical. We are all hypocrites together. It's just what being human is. Maybe we should start accounting for that, that behind those words is a human who forgets and has bad days just like you - even if what they wrote doesn't look too different than what a search engine robot spits up.

It's Not What You Say...

2010-08-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

Eugene Robinson is the latest to comment about Obama's record as we near the midterms. A lot of hay has been made over this over the past several months, since healthcare passed - how much is the new president really getting done, the promises he's keeping or breaking. Kevin Drum posts today on the same general notion. On the other side, we have Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone pointing out that good at FinReg is, it's not that good - and Digby commenting that the mess in Iraq is far from over, even if focus has switched to Afghanistan.

The key to this debate, and to me, the most distressing part, is this: neither of these stances are mutually contradictory. It comes down to a punctuation mark.

"This is the most accomplished legislative session in a generation!"

"This is the most accomplished legislative session in a generation?"

Consider where we are now and where we were two years ago, and compare them to where the standard benchmarks for Obama were (FDR, LBJ.) People are commenting that Afghanistan is this era's Vietnam. If that's the case, than Iraq is Vietnam Plus. The Great Recession, still not dispatched, is about a hair below the Great Depression. There's a strong case to be made that Bush was the worst environmental president since they started keeping track. These are very troubled times. People didn't expect Obama to be FDR, so much as need him to be FDR simply to solve these problems.

The stimulus package was one of, if not the biggest single spending package ever passed by the American legislature. It still fell short. The health care package is the biggest step towards universal health care since Medicare - and still isn't universal health care. FinReg doesn't break up the big banks and it still is going to clamp down on abuses and let sunlight into musty corners of the financial system. Drawing down troops in Iraq still leaves some behind for at least the next year, and there's still fighting in Afghanistan - dropping the list of "exceedingly questionable wars" down to one from two. (Think about how surreal that last sentence is.)

There's a strong case to be made that this is a steady stream of solid and productive and necessary legislation, the steadiest progressive agenda enacted since the Great Society - and it still isn't enough. That this is as good as it can get and it's still not going to solve that much. That the problems facing America are too damn big for even its government's best.

I know. It's depressing to think about, isn't it?

Man Vs. Movie: Inception (2010)

2010-07-21T13:04:00.001-07:00

Spoilers for Inception and (briefly) Shutter Island ahead.

This is the second psychodrama with Leonardo DiCaprio I've seen this year. Sadly, even though Martin Scorsese made the first one, there wasn't a lot there to really talk about. Either it was all fake or all real. (Personally, I think that the reality that DiCaprio's character chooses is more important than which one is 'real.' That he'd rather think of himself as a cop who will die nobly than an inmate guilty of murder and living with it.)

Inception is Christopher Nolan's latest film, in a world one step removed from our own, where the technology to project yourself into someone else's dream is real. This has opened up new opportunities in psychology, self-exploration, and as always, theft. DiCaprio playes Cobb, who leads a team of master 'dream thieves,' constructing artificial dreams that are designed to coax the dreamer to give up their secrets. They are approached by a powerful businessman who wants them to perform the theoretically impossible task of 'inception' - to plant an idea, instead of stealing one. Which is the difference between reading a book whilst in freefall, and writing one.

DiCaprio is motivated to try, and claims to have succeeded once before, and it's the process of peeling back the 'why' on both these things that is going to generate the most discussion and argument. The base 'heist' plot is of course, good enough on its own, descending through several strata of dreams-within-dreams, each occurring at a different speed, intercut expertly with each other. All the things you expect from a good heist flick are there - the assembling of the team, the planning, the inevitable complications, the constant oscillation between forging on and pulling out. If the movie were that alone, Inception would already be a fantastic film.

But as we descend further into the nested dreams, we also descend further into the psychological detritus that litters Cobb's mind, which has begun bleeding into the dreams he works in. The movie doesn't mistime any revelation, giving us enough time to chew on what we learn before we learn more. The further down we go, the more explicitly dreamlike Cobb's journey becomes, to the point we're never entirely sure if he woke up at all.

Most of the discussion of Inception will revolve around what in the film is 'real.' I think it's far too easy to claim it was all a dream, even if it ties up everything with a nice bow and helps us overlook some admittedly murky logic. (Shooting yourself is bad in some cases and fine in others.) Personally, I think Cobb's totem is the most telling as to what's really going on. A 'totem' in Inception is a small object that behaves in a certain way in the real world and another way in the dream world, so you can tell where you are. It's stated explicitly that no one in the field ever uses someone else's totem, because only one person should know the weight, shape, feel and behaviour of their totem so its can't be replicated in a dream.

But Cobb doesn't actually have his own totem. He's using his wife's, a top that will spin forever in a dream. This is taboo, but fits his character - Cobb is someone who will gladly tell you all of the rules just before he breaks them. It also may offer a clue as to what's really going on. It's entirely possible that the character we think of as 'fake' - the projection of Cobb's dead wife - is actually the real person, and everyone else in the dream is a projection. Or that Cobb has spent so much time breaking all the rules that he must live with the consequences - living in a world which lacks all the stability rules bring. Where he cannot be sure if his top is supposed to spin down or not, just as in the final shot, we see the top spinning, wobbling a bit - but we cut away before it falls, assuming it ever did.

Inception, then, on one level, is about how the freedom of a constructed environment - one with no rules except the ones we make, and even then, only so long as we feel like keeping them - can be the most insidious trap of all. A lot of jokes have been made about how the holodeck from Star Trek will be the last invention we ever make, because where is there to go after 'perfect worlds, on demand?' They're funny because they're true. Inception, being a story, is a constructed reality all its own, and it too has rules - rules of genre, and the rules of dream hacking. Throwing those rules out lets the narrative go wherever we please it - and since it can go anywhere, where it goes inevitably feels arbitrary. Inception realizes this, which is why it welds the psychodrama of the dreams to the structure of a heist flick, giving it a direction and purpose that serves as a needed anchor for when the rules of the dream are broken, or may prove to have never been real.

This year has been even worse than last year for movies, but Inception makes up for it all. It's a film on par with the original Matrix, enjoyable just fine as a genre movie with mind-bending visuals, but the depth is there if you want to dig. Just be mindful - like Cobb, it's possible to go so deep that things fall apart around you.

This Isn't a Photo-Blog, I Swear

2010-07-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

Found at the movie theatre. (click to embiggen)

Well, that's a load off. I'd hate to think Let's Go Jungle! was for reals.

The Sincerest Form of Plagiarism

2010-07-09T11:43:00.001-07:00

Found a few years back in the book store:

Found last night in the video store:

And I didn't even need the Internet to track down the "photo reference." Am I turning into an Internet myself!?

All I'll Say About the D&D Edition Wars

2010-07-06T23:14:00.001-07:00

"You, the player of the world's most popular role-playing game, are nothing but a mindless sheep while I, a player of the world's most popular role-playing game from a slightly different era am the most rebellious human being on God's own Earth."

Here's the deal, folks. You play RPGs? Welcome to Rebel City. The comic book readers are looking at you from the next town over and going, "not a lotta people there, is there?" You play D&D? Any version of D&D? You're playing in the popular kid's club, within the confines of Rebel City. So how about we give up on bullshit tribalism and just play the games we want to?

Clothes Make the (Super) Man

2010-06-23T09:32:00.001-07:00

So, at E3, we all got a look at the sequel to inFamous.

Like everything else on the Internet, Cole's new look has its haters. I try not to be a hater, but on this one, I have to agree: Cole's new look isn't as cool as his old look.

Infamous, for those who don't own a PS3, is essentially Grand Theft Superhero. The city that serves as the open-world playground is rocked by a devastating explosion and is quarantined. At the center of the explosion is a sole survivor, Cole - who has awakened with the power to command electricity. You control Cole as he runs around the ruined city, using his fantastic powers for good or ill, and tangling with supervillains whilst wearing a brightly colored costume. The fact that the brightly colored costume is a neon bike jacket is incidental; Infamous does a lot right and one of its inspired touches is how it uses real world elements that synchronize with the mythology of the superhero.

So Cole's new look is disappointing in a lot of ways, even though the game itself looks fantastic from what we've seen thus far. When you draw a picture of this guy:

You could be drawing anyone.

But a drawing of this guy:

Is unquestionably Cole McGrath. Forget having a superhero costume - having a distinctive look for your main character is important for ANY video game, to set you apart from the crowd and to give the player something interesting to look at since the main character is on-screen for 100% of the game.

If you click the first picture you'll see them comment that in the new city, Cole's ditched his jacket because it's too hot. Fair enough, says I - but if he has the power to control ice now, can't we just say he likes to keep his jacket on because it's kind of cold when he uses his powers? I realize it might be a stretch, but I don't think that such a memorable design element should be ditched so readily. It makes Cole look like a superhero without making him look like a superhero, and I think that is the core of Infamous's visual aesthetic.

(h/t to Game Informer for the first image)

EDIT: One thing I should say is that I like the less growly voice for Cole. This is a welcome change. But it sort of underscores the problem: we already have a different sounding Cole. A different looking one serves to weaken ties with the original.

You Know Not What You Ask

2010-05-29T18:55:00.001-07:00

Someone, somewhere else, commented recently that DC should bring back Ace the Bathound. I disagree, and here's why.

Ace would be brought into continuity with a flourish of trumpets as DC proclaims that it's giving the fans what they've long demanded. Ace would get his own series with great fanfare.

Five issues in the series would get a new writer. Six issues after that they'd get another new writer. They'd go through four or five artists after their super hot shit artist they launched with states that drawing a dog is hard work, maaaaaaaan, and that's why issue four is running five weeks late.

The book will shed half its readers in a year, for reasons that will mystify everyone and can't possibly have anything to do with late books or constantly shifting creative teams bleeding off the momentum of the book. So they'll decide to boost sales by having the book cross over into Holy Fucking Crisis for two issues, which will boost sales by 20,000 and after the crossover's done the sales will drop right back down to where they were before, if not lower, thus proving that crossovers bring new readers into lower selling books or something.

The book will be cancelled at issue #18. Ace the Bathound will be raped by Doctor Light about nine months later. Then we'll find out that Doctor Light has been raping Ace every year on his birthday since he was a puppy and that's the new continuity to the old Ace the Bathound stories and screw you if you don't remember Ace bleeding from the ass in the fifties because the writer says it happened. Ace the Bathound will become grim and dark and broody and in a tragic scene, Ace crosses the line and kills a man.

Because the darkest thing in this whole chain of events is that a dog killed someone. That's the turning point, motherfuckers. No going back.

He will be hunted down by all the animals of the DCU, and will beat up Krypto the Superdog because a Batman-proxy beating up a Superman-proxy reminds everyone of Dark Knight Returns and you liked Dark Knight Returns, right? In the end Ace will learn that killing is just plain wrong and will have a Redemptive Arc spanning four panels of someone else's comic book. Five months after that he'll be killed off in the opening pages of All-Anal Crisis.

Dan Didio will state that people getting upset over the story arc of Ace the Bathound is just a sign that they're doing something that people really care about. We will be left to contemplate which is the greater horror: that he is lying through his teeth to the fanbase, or that he actually believes what he says.

I Know.

2010-05-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

I know that they're unrealistic.

I know that there is no secret race of underground dinosaur people discovered by a brilliant man and his family of adventurers. I know that our sector of space is not patrolled by a Texas Ranger with a magic ring. I know our world is not home to a powerful, gentle alien who swore to love his adopted world as much as his native one. I know that one man with toys, toil and talent cannot stop a city's organized criminal empire on his own.

I know that evil can triumph and the good guys won't always win. I know that the definition of 'good guy' or 'bad guy' is so mercurial that it's meaningless. I know that we shun the different and are jealous of the powerful, no matter how much like us they really are. I know that we can't trust a well-intentioned man in a mask to safeguard us even if he isn't a police officer. I know that in a fight, people get hurt and can die.

I know that all of the quirks of the superhero world would never fly in the real world.

I don't consider that a flaw in their world, though. I consider it a flaw in ours.

Dispatches from Earth-OSX

2010-05-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

So this is the end of Week One as a Mac user. It feels pretty good.

The interesting thing about poking around in the MacOS is how it developed parallel, but separate, to the Windows OS. The resize/close buttons are on the other end of the window. File/Edit/Etc is always at the top. I remember this vaguely from my time on the toaster-sized Macs at school, but it's still taking some getting used to.

I'd say that about 20% of it is stuff I prefer on Windows, the rest I'm either apathetic about or I prefer the Mac method. Not too shabby. Not getting rid of my Boot Camp just yet, of course - there's a number of programs with no Windows equivalent, if nothing else - but I do like how the Mac OS sets itself up.

One thing that's struck me, however, is how little adjusting I've needed to do. I use a different Email client and a different photo viewer, but I use the Mac version of Chrome, FeedDemon, Trillian, and TweetDeck for the most important things I use. My other important programs are cross-platform, such as Dropbox and MapTool. Steam is coming to the Mac in a few days and with it, all of Valve's Source engine games. What strikes me is not how much has changed. What strikes me is how little.

Thinking on it, it's probably caused by the Internet. The Internet is the great leveller. No matter what your OS is, it better display a web page properly if it's to be taken seriously. Ditto for JavaScript, and with JavaScript a program can in theory run on any computer. Developing multi-platform computer software is easy now, made easier by Apple's adoption of hardware similar to that found in a Windows machine.

There's fewer reasons not to buy a Mac any more. Mouse has one button? Mine's got two, and a little wheel. Won't run Windows? I can run Windows inside the Mac OS. It accesses all my feeds, websites, IM contacts, and so forth with little to no issue. Can't upgrade? I can replace this thing's hard drive and RAM just fine, and everything else is stuff you can rarely replace in a laptop anyway. Cost? Okay, cost is an issue, but having used one I can see where every penny in this laptop went. Apple is still king of the "now that makes sense" little engineering and UI flourishes. All that's left is residual "mine's just BETTER" tribalism, and I'm trying to de-tribe as much as I can.

So thanks, Internet, for rendering the computing world's longest and bitterest feud increasingly irrelevant. I appreciate it.

"Barry Allen's Bowtie" Would Be a Good Name For a Band

2010-04-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

It's been about six months since I read monthly comic books. Since then I have bought trade paperbacks of The Losers, All-Star Superman, and Irredeemable, and that's it.

If you've poked around the blogosphere's comics community you probably have a good idea why. It seems like everyone's upset about something. I'm no different, except that while lots of other people talk a good game about quitting comics I actually have followed through.

If I had to guess where it started, it would be issue #2 of Civil War. It wasn't that I was offended by Peter Parker taking his mask off. It's that I wasn't moved at all. That was the point where I decided that me & "event comics" were going to have to part ways. When you're not deriving any emotional satisfaction out of a type of comic, it's time to go.

Clearly, I was in the minority. If people did leave comics over Civil War, no one noticed. The last five years or so has been one straight string of events, so numerous I literally cannot track them all. It all accumulated, for me, into the recent Flash miniseries by Ethan Van Sciver and Geoff Johns, which is everything I don't like about comics nowadays and has the dubious honor of straight-up killing the love I had for them.

I don't wish ill will on Johns or Sciver, and any fan who does needs to take a long look in the mirror and seriously re-evaluate their priorities in life. But I do wish that they hadn't done this miniseries. It's fundamentally misguided.

To begin with, this is a miniseries about the return of Barry Allen, except it's not. Barry Allen already came back in Final Crisis, one of those events I talked about. I read Final Crisis in hardcover months after the fact because it had Grant Morrison's name on it, and it felt a bit like a greatest hits album for Morrison mixed in with the bog-standard "event" checklist that comics go by nowadays. Here's some of Kirby's stuff! There's terms like "self-assembling hyper-story." Heroes die! We're meant to care, except that at their funeral they bring up the possibility of him coming back, and a few pages later Barry Allen's back.

This is standard in a modern event comic. Kill off some characters to create drama, and try to ignore how artificial that drama is when everyone and their dog knows they'll be back in about twenty minutes. Death can be a potent dramatic tool, but only when it sticks - and since it almost never sticks in comics, why use it? Doesn't it just become gore porn instead of a dramatic beat? Like those lightsaber fights on YouTube, which look cool and have the dramatic heft of a feather compared to the best of the Star Wars films. Surely there's other tools in the toolbox, ones that still work?

Nothing underlines this better than Barry Allen himself, who had quite possibly the all-time Greatest Death In Comics. He went out saving the universe, but he went out all the same. His sidekick took up the mantle, struggled with tremendous growing pains and eventually equalled his mentor, running his race with his own villains and own cast of characters. Wally West has been the Flash for nearly a quarter of a century, with the very occasional break. Twenty five years is a long time to be gone. If the fanbase of comics still remembers Barry Allen well enough to want him back, it'd have to be in its early thirties at the least; I question how healthy it is to aim your comics at that demographic.

But even then, I was willing to give it a shot. I was skeptical of Green Lantern's return, and it turned out okay, especially since Hal Jordan had the opposite of Barry Allen's end - an inglorious spiral into madness that was mandated from editorial. I may not have been the character's biggest fan but he deserved better. So I got the first few issues of the Flash miniseries, by the same creative team that revived Hal Jordan.

What I got, was a comic which took forever to come out - I honestly am not even sure if the final issue's even shipped yet - which is a symptom of how comics nowadays treat such trivialities as 'deadlines.' Imagine if your favorite TV show came out with a new episode once every three weeks instead of every week, and the excuse the creators offered was that they fell behind or that they made more money this way or that some other show twenty years ago fell behind so that makes it all okay. Yes, I know that shows go on hiatus in mid-season and between seasons, but that's a planned hiatus - the creators can bring things to an appropriate dramatic halt, such as Admiral Cain and Commander Adama threatening to destroy each other's ships in the second season of Battlestar Galactica. Being late is just plain being late, no matter how you slice it or how many times you try to compare your comic to Watchmen and the fact that its last issue was delayed (by a whole month, piddling by today's standards.)

The series is minutiae-focused to an embarrassing degree. There's several sequences centering around why Barry Allen wears a bow tie. Imagine if Doctor Who took twenty minutes out of an episode to explain the deep-seated psychological core behind the Doctor's decision to wear a bow tie, instead of his one-sentence answer, a slightly defensive "bow ties are cool." That one sentence explains it so much more neatly, painting the Doctor as a guy who doesn't 'get' fashion because when you can go to any time period - and therefore any fashion period - what's fashionable is meaningless. More than that, every panel and every word that focuses on stuff like bow ties is a panel or word not focused on superheroes doing superheroic things. The Doctor spends the vast bulk of Eleventh Hour interacting with his new companion and searching for an alien fugitive. "Bow ties are cool" is one line.

Johns seems to be pitching his writing at the younger set, which is fine - in fact, more comics should do this. I've come to this conclusion because he doesn't seem to bother with letting subtext be subtext - he has to spell it out. The Flash's home city, Central City, is very on the go, you see! Fast paced, just like the guy who randomly got superpowers there! Johns does this a lot, having a comic spell out explicitly his view that the founding members of the Legion of Super-Heroes each taught a young Clark Kent the values of Truth, Justice & The American Way. Again, that's fine! When I was young I didn't get subtext either. But when I was young I also didn't read comics featuring buckets of blood and a stabbing and beheadings, so I have to ask what the target audience really is.

But the capper was this: finding out that the reason that Barry Allen is all grimdark now is because his arch-nemesis traveled back in time, killed his mother, & framed his father. Which means that all those Flash stories that featured the Flash and his still-alive, non-incarcerated parents didn't happen or at least didn't happen how you remember them happening. In other words, this is Alternate Universe Barry Allen. Not the same character. Not the same character! Why go through all this fuss of bringing a character back if you're going to arbitrarily change him to a new character on the way back in? This is the worst of both worlds. It's unavoidably backwards-looking by virtue of starring Barry Allen, yet it shoves in a pointless retcon that makes the character different from how you remember him and makes DC's history even loopier than it already is.

And it sold. Like gangbusters, did it sell. More comics will be aimed at the readers who bought Flash: Rebirth, in contrast to the crumbs that seem aimed at me. People tell me to read Power Girl, but now that Flash: Rebirth has killed my love, all I see in Power Girl is a character who is distinguished by the fact that Wally Wood drew a version of Supergirl with really big tits. I know it's not logical, but emotional attachments aren't logical either. All the logic in the world won't make you get back together with someone when you just don't want to be with them any more.

So that's my tale. That's what killed the love for me. And the saddest part is that no one beyond the readers of this blog will notice, because by virtue of me no longer reading comics and participating in the community, my concerns become invisible. Moreso than they were already. Here's a good run-down why.

Comics don't owe me a thing. This isn't a boycott. A boycott is an attempt to change behavior in a company or an individual by not buying their product. This is me simply no longer wanting the product in the first place. I haven't fully quit. If a good graphic novel comes out I'll buy the shit out of it. JMS on Superman? The last Scott Pilgrim? Yes please. But I'm buying a lot fewer of them now. When it comes to the soap opera of the allegedly monthly superhero comic, though? With its unending stream of "who's dying this month, who's coming back, who's got a new origin, who's got their old one, who's raped, who's decapitated, who's left who cares?"

This is where I get off.

Fun With Health Care!

2010-04-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

I got a Thing that necessitated a doctor. Let me tell you about my experience with Canadian health care.

I do not have a primary doctor, because there is a bit of a doctor shortage in my province, due to America being right next door and paying more money due to the profit motive. I still can get a physician, however, by going to the local walk-in clinic.

Talk with doctor. Doctor recommends blood work. Since we are dealing with a muscle grouping in my left leg that feels numb I get a bit nervous. Words like 'cancer' and 'diabetes' get thrown around by the guy in the white coat. I wonder what the heck this has to do with numbness.

The next day, I went to a laboratory and got samples taken. I cry at the end of Iron Giant; I did not cry when I got blood drawn. I am macho and sensitive in all the right ways.

A week later, results come in. This is where I hit the only major snag, in that the clinic does not call me to tell me so; I have to check back. I get a different doctor. This doctor informs me of the problem to my great relief. I'm really low on vitamin D, which can cause pinched nerves due to its role in strengthening bones. Take a shitload for a few months and in 85% of cases I'll be dandy.

Cost of all this: $6.99 for bottle of 240 vitamins.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Ah, but you don't know how much you paid for this due to it being folded into your taxes." And I might very well reply, "holy shit, someone reads my blog," followed by "ah, but I do know due to the province I live in having asked for additional health care premiums up until a few years ago due to it being Texas North." The cost of this insurance came out to 40 dollars a month. It covers just about everything but glasses and teeth.

And since they dropped the premiums, my taxes have not gone up. At least, I haven't wound up with less of a rebate.

So yes. The wait times are a bit longer. The doctors a bit more rare. Canada doesn't have NetFlix Instant Watch too, which is the most painful part of all. But I'll take my health care system. I'm pretty happy with it.

Found at the Supermarket.

2010-04-14T19:08:00.000-07:00

So many jokes.

None of them tasteful.

On Open Systems

2010-04-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

Markos Moulitsas, it turns out, really really really likes his iPad. Fine by me. I don't see myself becoming rich enough that I can afford a coffee-table computer, but I might check it out for the comics applications once a) the price comes down and b) DC either gets its own app or signs on to another and c) Marvel & DC start making comics I want to read again. (So realistically: probably never.)

One thing I have to take issue with, however, is Markos evangelizing the closed system that Apple's taken to heart for the iPad. Markos claims that Apple going with closed systems has resulted in it making better computers. This raised both my eyebrows, since Apple's embrace of more universal standards is what's got me seriously considering a MacBook.

If I choose, I could use Boot Camp on a Mac to install any x86 operating system I feel like. I could install Windows and use it for those times when a program won't work in OSX; I could even load up a Linux distribution and claim Maximum Sexy Rebel Cred, thus ensuring I will never sleep alone again!* The fact that it can run any OS, and therefore any program, that I already have access to - plus a whole new OS I've only had limited experience with but am intrigued by - is a selling point for me. Apple is confident enough in its OS to let me choose it instead of binding me to it.

I wish they took this attitude to the iPad and its associated programs. But the thing about the iPad is this: it really IS a bigger iPod Touch. Same general UI, same aesthetics, runs the same programs. It traces its lineage in a different direction than the personal computer. Its grandpa isn't Hewlett-Packard or the iMac, it's Nintendo and the Playstation. (They advertised the Touch as a games machine for quite a long time.) Kos even points this out, comparing PC gaming to console gaming and favoring console gaming.

The thing is, game consoles are closed. Really, REALLY closed. There used to be a rule that if your game was on a Nintendo system it couldn't appear on another system for two years. The anti-competitive practices of console making companies have gotten better, to be sure, but only because they have such a sordid past. Just this past month, the PS3 released a firmware update that seemed to have as its sole purpose the disabling of the "Install Other OS" feature. This is hardly the first time they've removed a function on their own say-so - the PS3 used to be backwards-compatible and no longer is, which means that I'm gonna need to buy or rent a PS2 system if I ever want to play a game this awesome:

And the PS3 is actually MORE open than many other consoles. It has instructions for replacing the hard drive in the manual and doing so won't void warranty. I couldn't have done that on my Xbox even before it bricked (and Kos might change his tune on the dependability of consoles once he sees those little flashing red lights. God knows I did.) Nintendo is still up to ill practices, claiming that your DSIware downloadable games aren't replaceable if you switch or replace DS consoles, which means that if I want to play the Shantae sequel I have to accept that I won't be owning it forever.

(There's something to say about how transitional video games are, how the back catalog is never as deep as it should be, but that's another post.)

This isn't a necessary step for Apple to take, as Matt Yglesias points out. Obviously they are more open on their laptops and desktops, so why not on their new devices? Apple's restrictions on their app store, on what can and cannot be run on their device, are arbitrary and subject to change. You might cheer them butting heads with Adobe over Flash, but you might have a problem with them deleting apps from their store that you like. Even if you think they're great today, there's no guarantee that Steve Jobs won't be hit by a bus and replaced with a more draconic CEO tomorrow. iTunes used to love its DRM. It always could relapse.

So I won't be ditching my PC just yet. This doesn't make me a hater - I have an iPhone in my pocket and once the MacBook updates drop I may well be blogging on an aluminum super-thin machine. But I don't expect open systems just yet on cell phones, since that's not the direction the market took. The iPad seems like a machine with a cellphone/console outlook expanding into PC space, and I'd just as soon those machines stayed where they are, or at least made more of an effort to meet me halfway like the Macintosh has.

* Women love a man who dual-boxes

Don't Carry On

2010-04-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Oh God. Stephen Fry, I love your work and I love your blog, but I do not love you making an unpacking video for your iPad. *

Unless it's you and Hugh Laurie.

"Morning, Jeeves."

"Morning, sir. Sleep well?"

"Damnedest thing, Jeeves, I didn't sleep a wink all night."

"Sorry to hear that, sir. Was it insomnia?"

"No, it was crippling pain."

"Ah, crippling pain will do that, sir."

"Quite, Jeeves. It turns out that trying to make love to an Apple product has unfortunate side effects."

"Indeed it would, sir. Shall I fetch the burn cream?"

"If you'd be so kind. Carry on, Jeeves."

* I really, really, really, really, really hate 'unpacking videos.' Yes, you bought something! Well done!

Gateway Geek Drugs

2010-03-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

So I got an iphone six months ago. It replaced my rapidly aging Treo 650.

As devices go, it is pretty impressive, even years after its debut. Being able to hold a phone/web device/GPS/compass/video player/music player/camera in my pocket is something I'm still not fully used to. Its UI is the standout, simply working in that way Apple devices work. It understands the differences between a flick of the finger and a deliberate press.

It's effective enough that I am seriously looking at a MacBook Air.

Macs & me have had a relationship that consisted of playing with the toaster-sized Macs at high school and that's about it. Their "you are a sexy rebel if you buy our product" marketing schtick never sat right with me. The stories their users told of Windows computers bursting into hellfire at their very touch seemed to come from an alternate reality. In my reality, Windows works pretty well and I know the ins and outs of it and I had a Linux partition for those times I wished to call myself Captain Sexy Rebel.

Now, however, I see the appeal - especially since I can stick Windows on a Mac now. Apple does user interfaces extremely well. Never mind the "Windows totally ripped off MacOS" bleatings from people who never heard of Xerox and PARC. Apple's people look at how users interact, or want to interact, with a computer (or a phone) and they do a very good job of putting that in play. One of the neatest "undocumented features" I've noticed on my phone is that if I press the button to go to the home screen and out of a video file, when I return it will replay from a couple of seconds back, giving me a mini-recap linking the experience back to memory. It's touches like that.

I know that Apple is a coproration whose goal is to make money no matter what, and I know that Apple has, in recent years, undertaken actions that are downright Microsoftian. (That this passes most people by is a testament to that marketing I mentioned, and to the power stereotyping holds even when an entity acts outside the stereotype.) I still am not comfortable with the Apple philosophy of a closed little box - loosened up lately for the hardware (and how many Intel-basing Mac users refused to buy the Intel Macs, I wonder) but getting uncomfortably cloistered for the software on the ipod touch, iphone and ipad. Apple's hardware designers still fire off the occasional bonehead play, such as the Macbook air lacking a Kensington lock slot, which is almost a dealbreaker for me. (All time bonehead design play is a tag-team with Apple's stupid marketing, making an MP3 player with no screen and touting the lack thereof as 'a feature.')

Even so: in the worst case, this just makes Apple as bad as Microsoft, which has a Checkered History all its own. With Boot Camp and virtualization, the line between Windows and Mac is getting smaller, and that's a good thing.

I talked about my phone up above as the gateway to this. It occurs to me that this might be a big part of Apple's marketing for the Mac. People might not be up for replacing their entire PC, attached devices and loaded software, some of which have been accumulated over years - but if they're looking for an MP3 player or a phone they might look at that slick Apple thingme that came out. And through that they might gain a more favorable outlook on Apple, who in the meantime has made it easier to switch with dual-booting into Windows.

Cunning. And, soon as I get the dosh - possibly quite effective.

Learnin'!

2010-03-03T23:47:00.000-08:00

Any day you finally can put a name to a feeling you've had for a while can't be all bad.

I never had a name for the Nirvana Fallacy, but I had observed it. You see it a lot on the Internet, which can oftentimes seem about one step removed from sheer bloody nihilism. "If this action does not result immediately in the Promised Land then fuck it and fuck it hard." I even see it in debates over such piddly trivia as RPG systems, where apparently the lack of a perfect system means that there are no valid criticisms to be had.

I think the fallacy crops up a lot in academic debate because academic debate tends strongly towards the hypothetical. You can compare the perfect political system, or the perfect taxation system, or the perfect... whatever, to the imperfect, flawed, human kludges that we make do with in the real world, and of course the imperfect will suffer compared to the perfect. But the key is this: the perfect system of whatever exists only in people's heads, but the imperfect system is out there interacting with people right now, and that's the purpose for which these systems are devised. They were not invented just so you could win a debate.

The Long View From the Normandy's Deck

2010-03-03T15:14:00.000-08:00

If you haven't played through Mass Effect 2, be advised that I have, and I'm going to talk about it a lot. SPOILERS ahoy.

Like approximately half of the Internet, I've been spending just about every day since January 26th knee deep in the world of Mass Effect 2. The game is a quantum leap above the original Mass Effect, with sharper gameplay, better graphics, better voice acting, better humor, a conversation system that gives us the world's first enjoyable quicktime-event system and, most interestingly, an importable save system. Veterans of the original Mass Effect can bring their characters forward into the new game. What's interesting is what is brought forth.

If you import a top of the line character from Mass Effect you gain some bonuses that basically come down to a head start, nothing that can't be gained in a couple of hour's play, far less investment than the 10 to 20 hours needed to complete the original Mass Effect. Despite this, I took the time to do a runthrough getting things in place specifically for Mass Effect 2 - not because I wanted those bonuses, but because I wanted my decisions to carry over.

Not decisions like "I'm good with a sniper rifle and can turn off people's shields," since that sort of thing is one of the things you can change on import. (Bioware significantly reworked the classes and didn't want anyone to be tied to their old class should they no longer prefer it.) More intangible decisions, rather - decisions like whether or not I saved someone or killed someone, who I chose to help me in a particular situation, and who I had to leave behind to die. The kind of decisions that, in most games, are distraction from the important work of shooting an army's worth of bullets and killing an infinite amount of people.

Most games sidestep issues of morality. A very few, such as the games ejected from Rockstar Games, revel in it. (No, no one's forcing me to kill people and steal cars in Grand Theft Auto, but let's be honest: the vast majority of things you can do in those games are less than legal. Even driving a cab first requires that you steal one.) The reason is as simple as it is sad: gamers will gladly pay a virtual hooker with virtual cash for virtual sex then drive over her and ransack her virtual purse for their virtual greenbacks, because that's all it is. Virtual. All you're getting out of the game is the little adrenaline hit from solving a puzzle or gaining a level or surviving a combat. No one expects a videogame to say anything profound or challenge us in ways beyond how straight we can shoot or how fast we solve a puzzle.

So what Bioware's built with its roleplaying games is a minor miracle. It has enough fans to just about guarantee financial success for its games, and these fans love it when the game puts them on the spot and makes them think about their decisions, and live with the consequences. All that Bioware's learn about games bears fruit in Mass Effect 2, where the impact of your decisions in the first game has such an impact on the world that playing without an import feels like I've been projected into the Mirror Universe from Star Trek. (Mass Effect 2 presumes a 'default world' on a game created with no imported save.)

Death in a game is usually nothing more than a tap of QuickLoad away from being undone, but Mass Effect and its sequel have pulled a trick I wasn't sure was possible in a game; they have made death meaningful. No one gets out of the original Mass Effect without at least one fatality on the crew, and quite possibly two. What you choose to do or not do in Mass Effect can't be undone, at least not without investing effort in another playthrough or going the non-import route - and there are strong incentives to import even if you're not entirely happy with how you got to the end of the original.

Likewise, Mass Effect 2 makes a centerpiece out of death, or specifically, cheating death. The game opens with the ship from the original destroyed and your character, Commander Shepard, is killed. This would normally be the end, except that a shadowy "black ops" organization has decided that Shepard is too valuable to die and spends considerable effort reviving the Commander's body. Within twenty minutes, you've cheated death. You'll be asked to do so again by game's end.

(Even the game's metastory is, itself, about cheating death. All space-faring organic life in the galaxy should be in the process of being scoured clean by god-powerful ancient lifeforms.. This has occured without exception every 50,000 years and this time you've delayed it - you've cheated death for all life in the galaxy. So of course the final boss looks like a giant black skeleton. How else would you represent Death?)

The game can kill your squadmates, your support staff, and even your Commander Shepard off, all because of decisions made long before you undertake the game's final leg, a suicide mission into uncharted space. You're expected to lose people, but you can - with the right investment and the right decisions - bring them all back alive. Despite knowing this, I chose my first time through to go through the final level knowing that my crew wasn't fully up to snuff, and I lost a lot of people. Their deaths had an impact that a normal videogame death couldn't have, because they were not easily undone.

Their deaths will carry forward into Mass Effect 3 as well, which is all but a sure thing now that Bioware's rolling in it from this game. All told, the Mass Effect "Shepard trilogy" will comprise a significant investment of playtime for its most dedicated fans, with over 100 different decision points carried forward from the first game to the second and the first and second to the third. Faced with that it's little wonder its fans take their time before deciding how far they can trust the head of the Cerberus organization, or how much the lives of Citadel politicians are worth, or who is expendable when you storm the Collector's base.

When Bioshock first came out, many players were disappointed when the game's moral choice system turned out to have little effect on gameplay. I was disappointed too, but not surprised. The original pitch for Bioshock's "Little Sisters" was to have the player confronted with what they would do to survive. Not harvesting ADAM from Little Sisters would put the player at a disadvantage against the game's enemies, but in the final game the difference in ADAM is negligible - because, I'm sure, that very few would agonize over the choice, and instead choose to gleefully rip the slugs out of virtual mutated ten year olds if it made the game easier. (Again, videogames are a medium where players drive over a hooker without a second thought.) I'd concluded, then, that games may be a medium where morally challenging the player would be impossible, thanks to the wall between game world and gamer.

Bioware just may have proven me wrong. I'm quite happy they did.

Load Times Are My Kryptonite

2010-02-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

I've been playing Batman: Arkham Asylum in those moments where I want to play a game but aren't quite up for more Mass Effect 2. Everything you've read is accurate; the combat system makes a beautiful dance out of brutal battle, the stealth combat perfectly sells how scary fighting a man like Batman should be, and the game brings the world of the Dark Knight to life in a way no other game has before. It incorporates a staggering number of elements of Batman's world without making them feel shoehorned in - the Riddler manifests as a series of puzzles you can tackle or ignore as you wish, for example - and it serves the iconic universe well, carving out its own interpretation of Batman's world that visually is distinct, yet still recognizably Batman. (The redesigned Scarecrow is a revelation.)

I like Superman more, but I have to admit that Batman's universe translates better to a videogame. But I think a Superman game could have the same impact as Arkham Asylum if the designers were willing and able to tackle one of the white whales of modern gaming.

I'm speaking of course, about destructible environments.

The problem with a destructible environment is, "we may wind up screwing the player by leaving them in a pit they can't climb out of." With Superman, this is no problem. He can lift buildings and fly; being buried alive isn't going to stop the Man of Steel. Imagine a game where you can plow through Lex Luthor's town-sized floating super-destroyers and shatter them like glass. Where Doomsday can chuck you through a dozen buildings, all of them crashing to the ground. Where it's you versus Brainiac's entire robot army and you can drop a mountain on them.

Need extra replay? Earn side benefits by fixing the damage from your last battle between missions, and minimize people dying in super-conflict by containing a threat until the theatre of battle is cleared (you got super-hearing for a reason.) Player skill can come into effect by knowing how to get into a building without collapsing it, to grab the person trapped inside. Online multiplayer? Superman vs. Bizarro/General Zod/The Parasite/Supergirl/anyone who can fly and is super strong and tough, and tear through an entire city.

Open world games like Spider-Man 2 prove that this model can work with superhero games. The definitive Superman game is waiting to be made. We could even have a side mission where Superman does this.

Be Careful What Cult-Leader-Like Manifestations of Your Subconscious Wish For

2010-02-21T15:56:00.000-08:00

About halfway through Fight Club, Tyler Durden makes a speech about how his generation of men has never truly been tested; they have no generation-defining struggle, no Great Depression, and that in the face of all that they are going to waste. It's a well-written bit of cultish gobbledegook that serves its purpose - get everyone nodding along to Tyler Durden and making them more amicable to his proposal for Project Mayhem.

It's tough to look at that from the year 2010 and not shake your head, though. Fight Club is a great movie; it is also probably the last great pre-9/11 movie. After the towers fell and we all suffered through the bizarro funhouse of the Aughts, I don't think anyone's complaining about our lives having no hardships to test ourselves by. If Tyler's cult manifested today, it would need a different set of nod-along rhetoric to get its adherents.

It's easy to dismiss Fight Club as just the white guy whining, but that misses the points it has to make about the relationship men have with what we can control and what can control us. The cult rapidly grows beyond anyone's ability to control it; Tyler Durden himself is a figment of the narrator's imagination, and one that's beyond his ability to stop. The dialogue is endlessly quotable, but only because it says 'screw the man' in so many artful ways; it is ultimately as empty as Tyler himself is. It says a lot about the ultimate futility of nihilism, how quickly an organization can grow beyond its original bounds and mandate, and how anyone, even a straight white male who's well off financially, can have a period in their lives where they are vulnerable to a cult. But it's important to remember that it's saying this from 1999, and that not even Tyler Durden can predict the future, and that the universal truths that Fight Club imparts shouldn't be wedded to the situational ones it expresses.

"Prorogue" is Not a Ukrainian Pastry

2010-01-08T11:10:00.000-08:00

If I said what I'm really feeling about Harper's latest stunt, they would kick my door in and haul me off to jail.

Here's the Economist's rundown. I'll let MGK get pissed off for me. And this has just about the most depressing polling I've seen in years.

The worst thing is knowing, deep down, that the poll is correct and that Harper is going to crawl out of this alive and probably get a majority out of it because Canadians just don't care. We don't like Harper, we don't hate him, we just don't care. We're just as obsessed with Tiger Woods and Michael Jackson as the neighbors are - with the saturation level of American media just about total, it's little wonder. No one in the opposition parties is pushing back hard enough - this is about as strong as Ignatieff's gotten - and so he's just gonna get away with it.

I'm reminded of the Patrician's big speech at the end of Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, where he explains to Vimes why everyone so readily followed the dragon even though it was a giant fire-breathing monster that ate people. It was an incredibly cynical speech, illuminating the Patrician as an equally cynical man. Most days I'm not that cynical. Today, I might be.

Man Vs. The Top 5 Movies of 2009

2009-12-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

There was a writer's strike last year. Can you tell?

Oscar picked a hell of a year to bump up its Best Picture slot allotment to ten pictures, because this year's been dreadful. I see an average of one movie a week, and this year I wound up taking a lot of trips to the downtown arthouse theatres in search of something worthwhile. And even then, I wound up wandering into schlock like The Brothers Bloom, which has all the pretension of the worst arthouse flicks with none of the fun of a heist movie.

But there were bright spots in the year's firmament. Here's mine.

5. Star Trek

Yes, it's basically Star Wars in red shirts. Yes, the movie depends way too much on the speed of its pacing to cover up some glaring problems, like a warp beam that can travel faster than the newly minted Enterprise. Yes, Nero's motivation relies on the "he's nuts" excuse, and the red matter in the movie has inconsistent properties. But last year, Star Trek was a moribund franchise and now it's shiny and new again, having managed the impressive feat of getting new actors to play some of the most iconic characters in science fiction and not only pulling it off, but in the case of Zach Quinto as Spock, lending a new dimension to their characters. And they solve the prequel problem of knowing how it's all going to end, giving us iconic characters with an uncertain future where anything could happen. The rumors of Khan in the next film seem to be unsupported, too, with the writers saying they want to explore strange new worlds. I want them to, too.

4. Zombieland

Not as brilliant as Shaun of the Dead, but I hold the Wright/Pegg/Frost trinity in very high esteem. Zombieland breaks the unwritten rule of zombie films by directly, and frequently, calling the zombies "zombies," and that's pretty much the crux of the flick. The characters know that they're in a zombie apocalypse. They're not shy about pointing it out. They have adapted, to the point they can joke about "the zombie kill of the week." Pop-up graphics and a narrator are usually the kiss of death for a film but it works in this one, letting us see through the narrator's life - which, he points out, consisted of a lot of World of Warcraft before things went to hell, making the self-focused narration and the "achievement"-like popups appropriate. All this and the best surprise cameo since Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder.

3. Moon

If you haven't heard of this one, I wouldn't be surprised. This is one of those arthouse flicks I talked about, carried almost exclusively by Sam Rockwell as a lonely astronaut mining helium-3 on the moon, accompanied only by a Kevin Spacey-voiced robot that looks like an actual robot (blocky, one robotic arm, coffee stains and post-it notes on it.) I can't talk much about without spoiling its narrative, but in a year with thuddingly obvious movies about exploitation (see District 9 and Avatar, but not both since they're basically the same film) Moon crafts a much more personal, futuristic, and horrific story about the big guy's boot on the little guy's neck.

2. Up

It's a Pixar movie. Does it really need a justification for being in the top 5?

1. 500 Days of Summer

Unquestionably my favorite film of the year and maybe my favorite romantic comedy of all time. (It's a short list.) The tagline, trite as it is ("It's not a love story, it's a story about love") is accurate. "Love story" implies a structure that isn't there in 500 Days of Summer, which is a story of a man's relationship with a woman, told out of order - and with the first scene describing the breakup, the rest of the film filling in the pieces of events that led to this point and lead away from it. It's a movie where a man, after getting laid, bursts into a dance number and interacts with a cartoon bluebird of happiness - and for all that, it's probably the most honest film about relationships and how elated and gut-punched they can leave you at their peaks and troughs. Sublime from its first frame to its (perfect) last line. Absolutely wonderful.

Happy Something!

2009-12-16T19:49:00.000-08:00

Some day, I want to run into the kind of people that both the hardcore atheists and the diehard Christians complain about: someone who complains about someone who said "Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays" to them.

I want to because I want to explain my philosophy: that when someone wishes you a Merry Christmas, a Happy Holiday...s, or a Kickin' Katanaka, what they are really saying, regardless, of the words they use, is "I hope the rest of the year finds you well." And that if someone does that for me, I cannot take offense at it.

But I never run into these people. I'm starting to doubt their existence.

Anyways, I hope the rest of the year finds you all well.

Kingdom Come's Pacifist Subtext

2009-10-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was made aware of a comic book by J.M. DeMatteis and Michael Cavallaro called The Life And Times of Savior 28. After reading the premise - a man who's been a superhero for seven decades renounces violence in all forms and the world kind of flips out over it - I was instantly intrigued, and will of course grab this soon as I'm able. I love interesting spins on the superhero concept and this sounds like a hell of a good one, addressing the problematic core conceit of so many superhero comics: that a problem can be solved by beating the everloving snot out of someone.

It's not the first comic I've read or heard about that does this, however. That honor goes to Kingdom Come.

For the uninitiated: Kingdom Come is a story written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Alex Ross that takes place in an unspecified future where the classic superheroes - Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman - have vanished, retired, or gone underground, while the new generation that's emerged to replace them are superheroes in name only. They are indiscriminate in their violence and lacking in their character - post-modern superheroes, in an explicit dig at many of the hyperviolent comics of the 1990s. The book covers what happens when the old guard returns. I'm going to discuss it, with spoilers and all.

It's become fashionable to bash Kingdom Come for the crime of not being Watchmen, which as stupid reasons to bash a comic go is right up there. However, in terms of exposing the problems inherent to the "punch it" approach to saving the world, Kingdom Come is arguably superior to Watchmen. In Watchmen, ultimately the world is saved through an act of terrible violence; in Kingdom Come, the world is saved through repeated rejections of same.

The new generation of superheroes in Kingdom Come have embraced violence for its own sake; the notion of it being a regrettable necessity in service to a greater good is forgotten. Waid and Ross might have been taking a shot at the rise of the post-modern superhero, but the subtext is hard to miss if you know what to look for since the post-modern superhero often DOES embody "violence first and foremost." The old guard of superheroes left mostly because of Superman losing his way; we discover later in the story that Superman lost his way because he felt that a world that would cheer the execution of a prisoner in police custody was not a world he had any place in, tapping his deep-seated anxiety over his alien origins.

Throughout the story, Superman is hesitant to bring the full force of his power to bear against the threat of rogue superhumans; when his mistakes are made, they're made because if anything he uses too much force, such as in the creation of a superhuman prison where dangerous offenders are kept locked up. When the prison boils over, Superman fights to contain the violence; the ultimate choice presented to Norman McKay is the decision as to who deserves to die, and when the choice is made by Captain Marvel, he chooses to save as many lives as possible. The last crux point in the script is when an enraged Superman is talked out of violence by Norman, and in the end the superheroes take their masks off and pledge to find a new way forward; to choose life, as Superman puts it.

Meanwhile, the other principal protagonists - Batman and Wonder Woman - wrestle with violence in their own ways. Batman, always willing to scare someone straight, nonetheless briefly considers letting the superhuman conflict escalate for the greater good, until he's reminded that what drives him is not a desire for violence but a desire to avoid it. In the end he comes to battle attempting to do what Superman, contained by Captain Marvel, cannot. Wonder Woman is the most obviously torn between "an olive branch and a cestus" as she puts it, having been rejected by her people for relying too much on the former - consequently she overcompensates by leaning on the latter. She typifies the conflict between the nobler intentions of the superhero and the more questionable methods they employ. In the end, following Superman's lead, they cast these methods aside.

How the three of them choose to proceed, is telling. Batman becomes a doctor, much like his father. Green Lantern, a diplomat. Wonder Woman, a teacher. Superman dedicates himself to building monuments and farming fields. Beating the high holy snot out of supervillains is absent on these last pages, and refreshingly so; the never-ending battle has ended, at least for now. The superhero, at the end of this story, is different both from its post-modern mutation and its baseline concept. Things are not going back to the way they were before.

This is why I think it's a mistake to see Kingdom Come as "Mark Waid and Alex Ross play with all the old superheroes." Grant Morrison's JLA run, sure, that's "let's have fun with the superheroes," and still energetic, brilliant comics, but Kingdom Come aims to do more than that - it shows us, in the end, superheroes who have recommitted to finding new ways to serve the world they love, sloughing off violence in the process. If the post-modern superhero is "violence and nothing but," then the superheroes at the end of Kingdom Come are undoubtedly their opposites, rejecting not just purposeless violence but violence itself.

Pacifism makes people uneasy. Most of us know violence is wrong, but we still enjoy it. I'm no different. I have killed many a mob in World of Warcraft. But I realize that someone in real life who's killed as many people as my space goat has would be a mass murderer. We can say that violence is the least bad of several terrible solutions, or say that it's pretend violence in the event of fiction, but still: we know violence is wrong. We might feel guilty about enjoying it, knowing that it's wrong, and defensive when someone points this out.

I'm reflexively anti-war. I am not an anti-war absolutist - if nothing else, flaws in the human character make war an inevitability - but I do think that our culture marches off to it far too readily. Pacifism is something that's interested me for years. I'm glad that Kingdom Come took the time it did to explore this as one of the many themes in its pages. The fanboys can take their shots all they want, but amongst my friends who will read comics when prompted but don't know why Captain Marvel isn't a Marvel Comics character, Kingdom Come is held in high, and deserved, esteem.

EDIT: Despite my Superman fixation, I realize that Kingdom Come is not just his story, so I added some details on Batman and Wonder Woman's roles in the story.

Okay.

2009-10-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

I was wrong. About this, anyway.

I should give my American friends a little more credit.

Nobel Intentions

2009-10-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

Bet that's the first time today you've heard THAT pun! Ha ha! Ha.

So yes. Today the blogosphere's making me want to headbutt my desk into splinters. I'm gonna run down my take on the situation with Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize.

Firstly:

1. It's a PRIZE

It's a plaque with a name on it. Little bit of wood, little bit of metal. It doesn't have magical powers save what we ascribe to it, and right now everyone's ascribing such wildly varying things that there is no common ideological currency on this. His cachet isn't going to rise, or fall, on this award. Just as failing to bring the Olympics to the U.S. was if anything the minorest of setbacks, getting a Nobel will be nothing but the minorest of boosts, if that. Because...

2. The Nobel Committee's not the final arbiter of who's cool in Peace Town

They've picked some winners - see MLK, see Jimmy Carter post-presidency. They've also had some clunkers (see Yasser Arafat, see Henry Kissenger.) People going on about this diminishing the reward need to be a bit more mindful of its history. It will survive even if this is undeserved, and...

3. Maybe it is undeserved

Iraq's still on, if winding down. Afghanistan's still on, and is most pointedly NOT winding down. (This is probably because the debate was pretty much settled on Iraq but is anything but on Afghanistan.) Gitmo is still open, even though I read about them releasing a few prisoners every few weeks. This is less progress than I'd like, even though I knew going in that Afghanistan would be fought for a while yet since he said as much on the campaign trail. Regardless of the justifications for the war, and I'm shakier this year than I was last year, it is contradictory to have a President running a war and getting a Peace Prize. However, the blogosphere likes to focus on the negative - it's a byproduct of being internet based - so maybe...

4. Maybe it IS deserved

The criteria stated by the Nobel Committee include improving international relations, helping with nuclear non-proliferation, and environmental policy. According to Seymour Hersh, Obama's transition team helped persuade Israel to stop bombing the Gaza strip (scroll about halfway down.) This bit at ObWi flew under the radar but it is a significant development in non-proliferation. Rolling Stone - yes, I know, but this article had Krugman and Moore on tap - gave its highest grade to Obama's environmental policy. There's the engagement with Iran, with North Korea... if this is the criteria the Nobel Committee chose this year then I can see a case for Obama getting it. Of course, he's not the foremost actor in the world on any of these, but prizes don't always highlight the most deserving advocates but the most visible, and there are few more visible advocates on these than Obama.

5. People are projecting so hard there is a light bulb up everyone's ass

Everyone just basically nodded for two seconds and then went back to preconceived biases. People who want the Democrats to 'hit harder' act like this. People who, like me, are too wussy for American politics cringe. People inclined to criticize from the right will keep at it. People predisposed to doing it from the left will keep at it. This, more than anything, has me convinced that this will be a Friday news blip and nothing more.

There. Can we get back to making jokes about us shooting at the moon? They were so much more tolerable.

HOORAY

2009-09-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

Iggy says he won't support the government

See if it sticks this time or if he does his best Harry Reid impersonation

Sure am looking forward to an election every fucking year

Four straight minority government but still stupid americans lol amirite

So who the fuck gets my dollar seventy-five

Since I live in the most conservative province in the country that's all my vote counts for

Sure is gonna be fun watching the slimy incubus that is my MP beg for votes

Almost as much fun as watching him get them

WOO FUCKING HOO

fuck my ass dead

"We're Number Something!"

2009-08-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

So I'm thinking that this...

... is the reason health reform looks to be skidding off the road.

Other, better bloggers have covered the ups and downs and all arounds of the American health care reform process. Personally, I think Ezra Klein has a point when he says that when six different presidents have tried and failed to pass health reform, it might be an institutional issue more than anything. The furthest anyone got was LBJ, who was a) a legendary Senate arm-twister, b) had the ability to wave JFK's ghost around when needed and c) even then, only gave single-payer to the olds. I also think that Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone on how the whole process is lurching on, half-gimped by side deals from the White House and Senate, to be informative - even if it does lapse a bit into his trademarked "you're all dumb fuck you all" hyperbole.

But the issue I want to talk about is how it's being sold and how it's fought against. A lot of comparisons, some sane and some out of Fantasyland, have been made to the health care systems in Canada, in Britain, in France, and in other industrialized nations. Apparently we're either a land where health care grows on trees or a land where the hospitals are riddled with skeletons. Neither description is accurate, though I'll take Canadian health care over American health care any day. But I think that the fact that it is being compared to other systems is a sign of trouble, though no fault of its own - but through a fault in the American cultural character.

The picture up there is basically how most Americans think of their country. In America, "I live in the greatest country on Earth" is the default position. In some ways it's even true. And consequently there is a mental resistance against anyone telling an American that no, their country is not number one, at least when it comes to health care. They'll point out the few areas that American health care's profit motive does excel and pretend that's the whole system. And they can get away with this because there's a reason doctors have to study super-king-kong-hard to do their job, because medicine is really complex, and medicine-related bureacracies even moreso.

So a sales pitch on health care is, by path of least resistance, going to focus on areas of comparison with the other models out there in other countries, and that's where I fear the sales job keeps smacking into resistance, the down-in-the-bones ingrained mentality that if American health care becomes more like Canadian health care then American health care will get worse, because it's just not possible for America to be at any position but the top.

For the wonks pitching reform, it doesn't occur to them. A good system is a good system, regardless of its origin. For the liberal activists pushing reform it doesn't occur to them because they're operating from the mental framework that America is not number one. But I do think that this is ingrained deeply in the American character - at the least, from my observations of American media, where America tends to win World War 2 by itself - and it's partly why you see so much resistance to it. All the guy on the street hears is someone on the TV going "snobby snobbity snob America sucks" and that stirs the fire in the belly that leads to activism at town halls. This is a country where Obama not always wearing a piece of jewellry shaped like a flag was considered a legitimate point of controversy.

(Before my comments post fills up with Americans - as if that'll happen - let me hasten to add that it's not like Canadians are free of massive flaws in our national character either.)

I don't see a solution to it other than 'give it time.' It's tough to change the mood of an entire country. I do think that as people who grew up with the Internet fill out the population, this will shift. Just like I have a tough time dismissing Americans as a buncha gun-happy brutes now that I know over a dozen of them, people in America will have a tough time seeing Canadians as semi-socialists who talk funny once they know us. It's a lot easier to forge a friendship with a person in another country if it's via high-speed Internet. But right now, in this moment, I'm not sure how you sell the upsides of a complex overhaul of a massive bureacracy without taking the shortcut and comparing it to another - and I can't see how that comparison would be done so well that America gets over its pride enough to buy it.

Away From Blog

2009-06-05T14:38:00.000-07:00

I have taken on a big-ass writing commitment: I am running a play-by-post RPG game.

Consequently, blogging is gonna be mighty light for a while to come.

Man Vs. Tangent: A Post About Political Blogs As Touched Off By State of Play (2009)

2009-05-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

"Blogs suck, lol."

Okay, there's a bit more to State of Play than that. It has genuinely surprising twists and turns, pointed critiques of law enforcement, the government, and the newspaper industries, and no one's entirely clean in the whole mess that eventually tumbles out in the end. But it's easy to pick up a contempt for bloggers running through it. The one line that sticks with me is when the Plucky Blogger has finally learnt from the Real Reporter how to be a Real Reporter: that the story they have carefully put together deserves to be read by people with newsprint on their fingers. I had to laugh. It was the kind of status-quo reaffirming line that will sound amazingly tone deaf in ten years, assuming a miracle keeps the broadsheet alive.

I'm an RSS and blog junkie. There are sixty-five feeds in my FeedDemon folder. I freely admit that some of them could use a lesson in not shooting your mouth off before you speak. Newspapers have a normalizing influence there. Editors serve a valid function in getting a reporter to get their facts straight and not charge off half-cocked. But newspapers have a restraining influence as well. They are owned and operated by very rich people who can kill a story in their paper because they own the paper, and even if they don't use it, the threat is enough to cause a chilling effect against any story that conflicts with the publisher's interests. And considering how connected your interests can be if you're rich enough to own a paper, that can cover a lot of ground.

There are shitty blogs. Opening the publishing process to everyone causes that. I've seen paranoid scratchings that would make you throw your computer out the window even if you paid a great deal of money for it. There are also blogs that give me an insight into politics that can kick the ass of the local fish wrapper any day and twice on Sunday. One of my favorites, Ezra Klein, provides an insight into the wonkish side of policy that makes my head spin sometimes. And Ezra was employed by a magazine, and is employed by the Washington Post - as is the blogger in the aforementioned movie, undercutting the "blogs suck, lol" narrative ever so slightly.

But I follow Ezra, not the place he hangs his hat. Likewise for Glenn Greenwald, who took his position at Salon under the condition that he would brook no censorship. Yes, they've got their biases - but a) what passes for 'unbiased' news nowadays is framing every issue as "on one hand/on the other" which leads to arguments over whether or not torture is a good idea of a bad one, and I'll take a biased blogger over that horseshit, and b) everyone, everywhere, has a bias, and at least a blogger's biases are right out there in full view in contrast to a publisher's bias, which can be nearly invisible.

Plus, today in the lefty blogosphere there was a discussion on whether or not the prison system can hold supervillains such as the mutant terrorist Magneto or criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, touched off by Gleen Greenwald apparently Googling 'supermax' and finding out about a proposed Green Arrow movie. Find me a fish wrapper that can do that. (Wizard doesn't count.)

This Was 10% Week

2009-05-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

A while back, on a post I cannot find on DailyKos, Markos said that he expected the Obama Administration to follow a 40/30/20/10 rule on policy - 40% good stuff, 30% all right stuff, 20% questionable and 10% "hell, no."

It's held up remarkably well. I've said before that Obama is to my right and that still holds true, but taking that into account it's been a pretty good four months. Good stimulus, awesome budget, realigning the military budget towards something that makes sense, expanding Americorps, making diplomatic inroads all over the globe. All good stuff, and yes, I know that Bragham prison is still open and that he's not putting Bush administration motherfuckers in handcuffs, but I can push for 'perfect' and still enjoy 'good.'

But this week? Jesus.

Waffling on Don't Ask, Don't Tell and on the Defense of Marriage Act? Refusing to release torture photos on pretenses so thin I could read a newspaper through them? Reinstating military tribunals for Gitmo? Good lord. This has been by far the worst week of the administration. It's made me want to put a fist through a wall. The good stuff this week has been the kind you have to squint to make out, like cutting off nuclear arms production.

My mom asked me last night if I was going to throw out my Obama shirt that she got me while she was in the U.S. I said 'no' and I meant it - putting aside the fact that it was a gift, I'm not about to join the ranks of the people who think they are Captain Clever by busting out lyrics from Won't Get Fooled Again and claiming with a straight face that there's no daylight between Bush and Obama. (No daylight between Clinton and Obama, sure, I'll listen to you there, but if Bush ever declassified a quarter of a million documents I'm unaware of it.) I'm not ashamed that at the three-quarter point of the primary (just after Super Tuesday) I went with him over Clinton and Edwards, and I'm glad he won. But I'm not surrendering my right to get pissed off when he fucks up unjustifiably and he did that a lot this week.

That doesn't mean I can't understand a particular play - lowballing the stimulus a bit because bills typically puff up as they go through the Congressional disgestive system, for example. And it doesn't mean I end a screed with "and you're all responsible because you voted for him" because I don't believe that a candidate's supporters are complicit in the candidate's mistakes. Otherwise you'd have to lock up a third of America. My continuially re-elected Member of Parliament is useful as a bag of dead donkey dicks, but I never hold it against all the people on the block who doubtlessly voted for him. But it does mean that what Howard Zinn writes about is the truth: voting for him and then expecting him to do it all without prodding is naive and displays no knowledge about the history of the U.S. It takes pressure, activism, and organizing to get your voice in there, and Obama's greatest strength as well as his greatest weakness is his willingness to listen, give serious consideration to a position, and change it. It's why I'm pissed off at him this week. It's why there is a blogosphere and there is Organizing for America. It's why there is freedom of speech, and why we need to use it when the guy we cheered on in the election screws up. I support my local sports team, but that doesn't mean that when they put the puck in their own net I can't let them have it.

Man Vs. Movie: Star Trek (2009)

2009-05-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

This is gonna be a long one, because a) this is a movie that I've been looking forward to a while, b) I loves me some Star Trek only slightly less than superheroes and c) there's a lot to this movie.

A few years back, a proposal by John Michael Stracynzski floated around on the Internet that was basically "Ultimate Star Trek." It proposed making the old universe complete and putting it away, and then focusing on a revamp of the original series, recasting Kirk, Spock, McCoy and all the others with new faces. It had some good ideas mixed in with some iffy ones; I wouldn't be surprised if a copy of this treatment landed on J.J. Abrams' desk as he was knocking around ideas with his script monkeys.

It's difficult to talk about the premise of this movie without spoiling it, so the hell with it: this review has spoilers in it, so stop reading after that red tag over there.

The premise of Star Trek, the series, is tackling relevant social issues through the metaphoric lens of aliens and starships; it's been so successful that this is now the benchmark for successful science fiction. Consequently, Star Trek is mostly remembered for its other thematic premise, that the future was not Utopian but optimistic. We had left Earth and were exploring a vast universal tapestry, and so many of the problems of our normal world had been left behind. Star Trek was a world where a team of professional geniuses from different nationalities and planets flew faster than light and did the impossible, and I and so many nerds wanted to live in that world. We wanted to see it built - it's no accident that so many people in the space program grew up on Trek.

So what's interesting about Star Trek, the movie, is how little it has to do with those premises.

To be sure, they are there. Spock wrestling with his divided heritage is something any immigrant or child of mixed cultures has to deal with. But the story ends with billions of people dead and a major race in the Star Trek universe facing extinction, with their numbers reduced far, far below the remaining humans in the other big allegorical sci-fi work of this decade, Battlestar Galactica. It's tough to hold onto any hope for the Vulcan people. And while you can draw parallels between it and 9/11, 9/11 was a blip compared to an entire planet being wiped out. The broader themes of Trek seem in short supply in this film, although they could have been brought out a bit with a couple of rewrites (which I'll get to.)

The focus is more in the characters than on the plot, which actually may be a wise decision, since by far the biggest hurdle this film has to clear is convincing us that the new actors are these characters, rather than the famous actors who played them forty years ago. No other franchise weds its actors to its characters like Star Trek does, and the greatest fear that I had was that the new actors couldn't cut the mustard. I needn't have worried; they're all fantastic, never stooping to parody or slavish imitation, all of them lending a refreshing take to the characters of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Chechov, Sulu, Scotty and Pike. Of all of them, Quinto as a younger Spock is the standout; very much a man of mixed heritage, embracing one side of himself but never fully letting the other go. In many ways this is his story, especially since Leonard Nimoy shows up as an older Spock to explain the villain's backstory.

Elder Spock explains that the moment the villain was thrown back in time along with Elder Spock, time split off from that moment, creating two timelines - one in which Nero destroyed the U.S.S. Kelvin, and one in which he didn't. This is both a continuance of the old universe and a new universe of its own, an elegant solution that honors Trek history and doesn't erase it, but isn't beholden to it either. The prequel comics, which are a fun if light read, take place a few years after 'Nemesis' and feature a few of the TNG players, establishing that this flows out of the universe we all know and love. Call it a backdoor reboot.

I can see the appeal. I'm not 100% sold on where it's all going, though - something tells me that each subsequent movie is going to either a) try to up the stakes by having lots and lots of planets blow up to the point where in ten years the Trek universe's inhabitants will all be shellshocked, or b) try and do it all over again - I'm already hearing rumors about the next one featuring Khan, and if there was ever an example of going back to the well, it's that. Nemesis is widely regarded as either the worst or second-worst Trek film - depending on how good you feel about Star Trek 5 - and it was a transparent attempt to clone Khan. Even J.J. Abrams' villain borrows more than a little from Khan. The purpose of a reboot should be to take us to new places, not just give us a version of Khan that's never going to top the original.

Anyways, enough about the plot and the characters. The movie itself is very tightly packed, zipping from location to location with a breathless speed. It's so packed that I wonder if it wasn't cut for time - I swear I saw Klingons in tham thar trailer. Everything occurs so quickly, and with such staccato timing on the dramatic beats and the jokes, that any plot problems are demoted to fridge logic. (Where were the shields? They talked about them but I didn't see any. That occurred to me the day after seeing it.)

There were a couple things the writer in me would tweak. I would have held the revelation that this is not the Star Trek universe we know much closer to my chest, saving it for the scene where Elder Spock shows up. Let the Trek nerds go "wait, Vulcan BLEW UP? But if this is a prequel - " for twenty minutes before the exposition train pulled into the station. I also would have rewritten Elder Spock's final scene, have him impress upon his younger self that yes, these are dark times, but the history of both of his peoples are filled not just with tragedy, but with triumph - over emotion, over war, even over racial strife as he himself was a testament to. Telegraph it a bit more, because as it stands that sentiment is surprisingly lacking in the film.

Those are quibbles, though. Taken for what it is - turning the Trek Classic crew into icons that different actors can play, establishing the foundations of a "universe B," featuring lots of people getting punched and things exploding gloriously - it is a standout film, probably the biggest one of the summer, and I had a great time. It's still not my favorite Trek film, though - that honor goes to First Contact, because First Contact was very much a battle for the soul of Star Trek and I like that sort of metaphor-writ-large as a movie plot. I could make a case for them being mirrors of each other - both involve time travel, both are about keeping the universe on track (in a more metafictional sense in the case of the Abrams flick) and both have outstanding action and well-timed humor and a menacing foe. But TNG was always "my" Trek, just as hopefully this movie will be to some young geek who thinks Star Wars is better and needs a schoolin'.

Oh, I went there.

Man Vs. Movie: X-Men Origin - Wolverine (2009)

2009-05-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

Summer has begun as it's done so for years now, with a Marvel Comics superhero on the big screen. This time around, it's a prequel to the X-Men films, starring its main character, Wolverine - a mutant able to heal from any wound, with keen senses, and with...

*sigh* With bone claws.

People who've been away from X-Men for a while might be going, "wait, bone claws? Weren't Wolverine's claws bionic?" I remember those days too. I miss them. I think bone claws are silly, and yes, I know we're talking about a Canadian super-lumberjack with a pointy haircut. Everyone's got their limit. Bone claws are beyond mine, for purely thematic purposes - I liked that Wolverine's most visually iconic power was something that had been done to him, rather than something he was born with. It was a reminder that even among the outcasts that banded together to form the X-Men, Wolverine stood apart, not quite one of them. Bone claws came around because they did an extended story where Wolverine lost his adamanatium, and since comics are visual and Wolverine's out-the-knuckles claws are a terrific visual no one would want to lose, they decided that he had bone claws as a mutation that the adamantium coated (quite evenly, as it turns out.)

I could get off on a comics tangent here, but I should stick to the movie itself. The movie starts with the first manifestation of Wolverine's powers and progresses through a hundred years of history in the opening credits, showing that Wolverine and his brother Sabretooth have fought in a shitload of wars. The first major rift in their relationship came in Vietnam, appropriately enough, and they are recruited into a special team of mutants in exchange for their freedom from prison. The team is not, and never will be, the X-Men - this is the world beyond the walls of Xavier's house.

The movie is good, to my thinking. Not X-Men 2 good, which I think is one of the best comic book movies ever made, but not X-Men 3 either, which pretty much ended the franchise. (It's no accident that every single upcoming X-Men film in development takes place before it.) Hugh Jackman exhibits the same charm that made him an instant star in 2000 when Bryan Singer exceeded expectations with the first X-Men film. His co-stars know that this is his film and wisely keep out of the way, with the exception of Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, who utterly owns the ten minutes of film he has to shine. This gives the film a different vibe than the team approach of the X-Men films, which clashed somewhat with Hollywood's need to elevate its rising starts such as Jackman and Berry. About the only sore spot to me is Danny Hudson as William Stryker - he's all right, but he doesn't own the role the way that Brian Cox did in X-Men 2, where I believed, utterly, that a normal man with no superpowers was more dangerous than all of the X-Men and the Brotherhood put together.

The action sequences are very well directed - action was never really Bryan Singer's strength, so Wolverine probably has the best action sequences of the film on pure technical merit. Singer has a firmer grasp of coaxing a good performance, though, so the sequences had less emotional impact for me than the imperfect "half the team stands there" ending to the first X-Men film, which still builds to an emotional high point that makes me remember it keenly. When a charming character meets a gruesome fate in XMO:W I found myself apathetic.

There are some dumb parts. One character has retractable arm-swords - one-upping Wolverine's claws in about the dumbest way. A lot of characters have "hey look, it's X!" cameos that serve little purpose other than cramming in fanboy moments. And there's a cameo by one of the actors in the original X-Men films that, thanks to de-aging CGI, gives a creepy vibe rather than a joyful one. Overall it's a solid but unremarkable film, a well-directed shit-go-boom flick that is, on that front, better than the first two X-Men films, but lacks the good heart that made me care for the Singer films more. (I will remember Jean's end in X2 far longer than I will her end in X3, for example.)

Plus it has bone claws. If there were ever a golden opportunity to excise the demon of bone claws from Wolverine...

The Worst Part Of My Job. Part 1

2009-05-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

The worst part of my job is when I want to help someone, but everything goes wrong from the word go.

Today a guy asked where customer service in the store was. Now, where I work is laid out in about the most bass-ackwards fashion possible. There's no one customer service. You go to one place to do returns, another to pick up orders. So when I asked what he was looking to do, he just repeated that he was looking for customer service. After we each repeated ourselves more times than we had to, he said he was looking to pick soemthing up.

Aha, thought I. Only two places you can do that: the catalogue, and the docks. So I ask him if he got the item through cataloge and he just rolls his eyes and walks off.

Not his fault our store is screwed up, and it's not the fault of anyone working here either, and I hope it's not mine because all I was asking for was more detail - I get this question once a day and 99% of the time it goes smooth as shaved ice. Still, I feel like I screwed up. I hate feeling like that.

Don't Trust Any Superhero Under 18

2009-04-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

If you've listened to a writer for more than ten minutes you'll have heard the phrase 'suspension of disbelief.' In short, it's like this: any time an element in a story is introduced that is not a part of the world as we know it, we sometimes have to suspend our need to analyze the element and instead enjoy what it brings to the story. A good example is super powers - there's no way anyone could lift a truck without it snapping in half, or fly without a jetpack or wings. But it's cool that they can, and in the face of that we accept it.

But there are limits. And nowhere are these limits tested than in superhero comics, which are so fantastic it's practically a requirement going in that you accept that a guy puts on a pair of glasses and he looks different. (They've tried to give it a more technical explanation, ranging from muscular ontrol over Superman's face to hypnotism amplified by the glasses, but the more technical it gets the more the glasses lose their elemental simplicity - they're a mask that doesn't look like a mask, and that's the beauty of the disguise.)

Superhero fans often laugh at proclamations that there's an element of a story that a reader can't buy other than the presence of the superpowers. "You can believe a man can fly," they chortle, "but not that parting your hair differently will fool your closest friends?" I think these people are just doing it to score Nerd Cred which is the worst cred; surely there is a finer grade than an either/or choice between a story so much like real life that the narrative is boring, and a story so fantastic the narrative is nonsense. Every superhero fan has their pet element they can't buy into - some minor, some so major they are barely fans of the genre at all.

For me, it's underage superheroes.

I can buy that Superman's glasses fool everyone. I can buy that the Flash can run at superspeed without a stray grasshopper blowing a hole in his head. I can buy that the Hulk's rampages rarely kill anyone (this is a HUGE debate in comics, beyond the scope of this post.) But I can't buy that any responsible adult or society would be fine with a twelve year old getting shot at and beating up criminals. That's where I get off the fun train.

I barely trust the average sixteen year old to not fuck up my order at A&W. I'm not gonna trust them to stop a bomb about to blow up the world, or an invasion by telepathic space dinosaurs, or the underworld machinations of the world's deadliest rodeo clown. Think about when you were a teenager. If you didn't wince once, you're a liar. Imagine that version of you in charge of anything.

This is why I could never get into the Teen Titans or the Legion of Super-Heroes like so many comics readers my age, and why my affection for Spider-Man begins the moment he gets out of high school (Brian Bendis, let my Parker go... to college) and part of why I like Superman over Batman, because no matter how many "Superman is a dick, lol" jokes you make at least he never sends his adopted son out to get shot at, so Supes is one up on Bats there.

There is a place for young super heroes out there - just not in any pull list I've got under my name. I realized that some kids will more readily identify with someone closer to their own age, but I was never one of them. I never had a problem connecting with a Russian farmer or an African tribal goddess, and I don't think that held anyone else back from enjoying the X-Men's most fruitful creative period. So with reader identification out of the way I'm left with how they fit into the world, and a guy who can control gravity is something I buy far more readily than him being sixteen years old and doing the work of cops.

Man Vs. Movie: Crank 2 - High Voltage (2009)

2009-04-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

People sometimes say that American filmmaking is all craft and no heart, that it lacks the manic energy of films like Oldboy or Run Lola Run. This is because all of the mania allocated to the American filmmaking community was funneled into the two Crank films.

I'm not the first person to make this observation, but the original Crank was really, the first good video game movie. It's not based on a video game, but it plays out like one. The main character is a semi-generic hardass, living in an over-the-top version of Los Angeles where evil lurks around every corner. He has to collect 'power-ups' to keep himself going in the form of any activity that will keep his adrenaline high enough to counter the effects of super Triad poison. He kills a staggering amount of people. The last shot of the movie, post-credits, is of an NES style side-scrolling brawler featuring Chev Chelios versus everyone.

Crank 2 starts out with that, with Chev and his rival from the first film beating on each other in pixelated format. Chev - played by B-movie god Jason Statham - begins this film the way he ended the last one, bouncing off a car from a height of 14,000 feet and hitting the ground. Nothing that pussy-assed can kill Chev, however, and neither can the Triad poison he'd been filled with in the first film - which is why his heart is stolen and replaced with an electronic one, that he needs to keep charged through pumping electrical current into his body once the belt battery dies.

Obviously, this is not a serious film. It might surprise you how unserious this film really is. If anything it's more of a video game than the first one. Chev literally is a cyborg, and he literally has to 'power up' his heart. He whistles in tune with the background music. He grabs a gun, then a bigger gun, in a sequence reminicient of every first person shooter ever coded. There is a brain in a tank at one point.

It's impossible to give any kind of objective review to Crank 2 because you either love the "WTF" subsection of cinema or you don't, and even if you love WTF cinema it's a toss up whether you'll click with any individual film. I thought Speed Racer was two hours of joy; few others did. All I an do is give my impression of the film, which is this: it's not as cohesive as the original Crank was, lacking its oddly sentimental ending, but it's far more manic and tounge in cheek, never for one second pretending that Chev's quest to recover his heart is something we should take seriously. Give the original Crank a rental and find out if this sort of thing's for you.

Found In The Loonie Store.

2009-04-18T13:48:00.001-07:00

"Star Trek/Gundam: A Crappy Fanfic and a Crappy Toy."

One Of Me a Minute

2009-04-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was talking to my mother. Occasionally - okay, a lot of the time - when I do this, the conversation turns to politics. My mom and I are both lefty, so most of the time we just echo chamber each other. She surprised me, however, by saying that she was a contrarian by nature, dedicated to opposition.

I thought, "Wow. That is utterly not me."

I'm the opposite of an iconoclast. I'm credulous. I am, in point of fact, even a little bit gullible. (You can insert your own jokes about Obama supporters here. I've heard them all.) I'm the opposite of a guy from Missouri. If a member of the Flat Earth Society came up to me and said "have I got a pamphlet for you," my first thought would be "well, I should hear him out, he might have something interesting to say." You know the saying "Venture no further with your mind closed, but don't be so open minded that your brains fall out?" There's grey mushy shit all around my boots, and it's not the mud.

People tell me this is a good thing. However, I'm sure this is a personality flaw and not a positive thing. The thing is that I'm credulous about all the wrong things. I'm deeply a creature of habit when it comes to routines - I see a movie a week with just about clockwork precision, usually at the same time of day. I work the same shifts week after week. I'm incredulous about lifestyle choices and habits, but when it comes to things such as ideology or a way of looking at the world, I saw her face and I'm a believer.

This probably makes me a good writer (or at least a better one) - it's handy to be able to delve into the mentality of, say, an intelligence agent who is paranoid and whose loyalty is conflicted if you can retrain your brain to accept that mindset as 'correct.' This is also why I should not be put in charge of anything, because the person who shouts at me the loudest would get their way just about always, and that's no way to run anything.

Found While Getting a Haircut.

2009-04-15T19:10:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm a child. I know.

Man Vs. Movie: Adventureland (2009)

2009-04-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

If you were eighteen in 1987, congratulations: you are a target market, and have we got a movie for you! Also, you apparently review movies for a living.

Everyone else, don't bother. The one joke I remember was a running gag about 'Amadeus' playing 20 times a day. When your best joke boils down to "80's music, lol" it's not a good sign.

New Words I Hate #1

2009-04-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

"Octomom."

Because I think giving a woman with a lot of problems a name that sounds like a supervillain is maybe a little bit crass.

"I Want My War Back."

2009-04-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

Reading this post by John Cole where he shares a little of his Email from Clinton supporters made me shake my head a little bit. Now granted, John might deserve it a little for his infamous drunken rant about Clinton supporters, but in hindsight, the rift was more between supporters from either side than the candidates themselves. Clinton offered the Veep spot to Obama. Obama gave the SecState position to Clinton. These two obviously get along better than their supporters do. They probably share a laugh about the whole state of affairs, if they actually still care.

Rick Mercer - the Canadian equivalent to Jon Stewart, if Jon spoke with the greatest Newfie accent ever - commented in his most recent book that during a general election the parties turn on each other, but during the primary or the leadership conventions they turn on themselves. No greater proof of this exists than the great primary clusterfuck of '08. There are people out there still fighting this battle - and not just the losers, either. People will reflexivly defend Obama even when he does something dumb, or something questionable. (Although I never actually expected it to happen no matter who won in November '08, I would love to see Bush administration motherfuckers in handcuffs, the more the merrier, and Obama's administration defending them is by far the biggest pissoff in what's otherwise been a decent couple of months.)

Because let's be honest, folks. Let's address the elephant in the room. We all miss the election, don't we?

Try reading through this website without grinning. I sure as hell can't and it's not even my country. The Democratic primary and the general election of 2008 was the most enthralling election I've seen in my lifetime. Every time I thought it couldn't get more insane it somehow did. Everyone remembers how wacky the GE got but for me the one I remember was the primary. Someone close to me whom I care about very much preferred Clinton; I preferred Obama. The fight between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters hit very close to home for me as a result. It got to the point I claimed that I wasn't paying attention any more - conceding the argument in a really pussy-ass way - just so I wouldn't have to engage in the endless back and forth over two candidates, both of which would be too conservative for my tastes were they running in my country; both of which were close together on so many issues that any difference came down to either pet issues or gut feelings; both of which I would have been fine with as President of my next-door neighbour. So I said I was opting out, and I really did try to - but I couldn't look away.

The election was such a landmark, and so insane, and so hard fought on all fronts, that even now that it's been over for months some people are still fighting it. People claiming that the election was stolen or that the primary was. People reflexively shooting holes in everything the President does as if he were Hitler * Satan, or alternately defending it as if he were Jesus * Superman. I can see that attitude in the election, because in a two-party system the ages-old tribalistic issue of Us vs. Them has fertile ground to grow. But the election's over. The winners took office. The losers conceded defeat. To continue fighting it is to be that one Japanese soldier they found after World War 2, waiting for orders and unaware that the world had moved on.

I'd denounce it more thoroughly, but that'd just make me an immense hypocrite. I miss wearing the paint off my F5 key to update all my political RSS feeds. I miss logging onto election discussion threads or checking the news. Now it's all important stuff, like health care and nuclear disarmament and diplomacy and war and state secrets and trying to blunt the tip of the Great Recession's spear. I miss the Bestest Election Ever, even though I'm glad it's over and the new American president is someone I'll only be pissed at some of the time.

I Grab The Low-Hanging Fruit

2009-04-04T14:34:00.000-07:00

U.S. President Obama says (paraphrasing) "America is sometimes arrogant."

Half of America exclaims "What do you mean, 'arrogant!?'"

The other half exclaims "What do you mean, 'sometimes!?'"

Found While Shopping.

2009-03-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

Someone, somewhere, decided these two topics deserved to share the shelf. I'd like to meet them. I really would.

The Plural of "Leftist" is "Argument"

2009-03-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went poking around the lefty blogs you don't see too much, the ones where they still claim there's no difference between the Democrats and Republicans and that Nader is the only way to go. The ones who were loathe to even type "eh, I guess he'll be a little better" on November 4th last year. It was a learning experience.

They're not necessarily wrong. Not automatically right, but there is a legitimate point of view there. You can state that there's not enough of a difference between, say, John McCain and Barack Obama - 'enough' is a relative concept though, whereas 'none' is absolute. I've no problem with people who don't think that Obama is left wing enough, since where I come from he'd be a conservative. But I do think it's a bad idea to ignore the fact that there are concrete differences in policy between Republicans and Democrats - see John McCain's reaction to the stimulus, for example - and I think that blogs and columnists to the left of the current makeup of the U.S. government spend too much time waving the stick and not enough with the carrot. Even Glenn Greenwald, not exactly Obama's biggest fan, praises Obama when he believes it's deserved. The purpose of these blogs, these columns and these opinion-makers is to influence behavior, and to do that you need positive as well as negative reinforcement.

But I'm winding a bit far away from my intended point here. The reason these people are voting Nader is because they don't feel included in the coalition that the Democrats have put together as their base. They believe the party is too right-wing and have broken with it. And Nader was a factor - not the only one by far, but a factor - in the Democratic loss in the year 2000. Many Democrats are pissed at Nader for peeling off enough liberal votes that it was Bush and not Gore sitting in the big chair when the towers fell. I don't think they should be. It's the nature of the party.

This article (h/t to Andrew Sullivan) explains a lot of it. The moderates are in charge of the party. There's a lot more of them than there are out and out liberals. The coalition of the Democrats is much more fragmented than that of the GOP. Without the 13% of Obama's voter base that ran conservative, he would have lost, which is why he reached out to them; he has spent less time reaching out to liberals because in a two party system they have nowhere to go. It's not surprising that on the face of that, many liberals said "screw it, I'm voting third party. At least I can say I didn't support any of what the new guys threatened to do." Which means fewer liberals, which means less say in the coalition, which means more frustrated liberals leaving... it swiftly becomes a snake eating its tail, depleting its base.

The party is strongest when there is something unifying its leftist, centrists and center-right elements. In 2008 that something was George Bush, who was loathed so keenly that chunks of his own party ran from him. Now that it's in power in the legislative and executive branches, I've noticed it starting to fragment already, with the looming budget showdown being between Obama and the more fiscally conservative Democratic elements, with Obama's recent feet-dragging when it comes to repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" pissing off the gay activist wing, with the PAC "Accountability Now" gearing up to replace non-progressive Democrats in primaries, because if 2008 taught us anything it's that Democratic primaries are composed of pure sunshine and lollipops.

Politics comes in cycles in America; the Republicans will eventually regain power. I'm worried it will happen sooner rather than later, and that the reason behind this will be the fragmentation of the Democratic party. It'll happen if its leaders can't keep everyone on board, since if the party loses any one element it will take a drubbing at the polls. Take it from someone who supported a coalition government in his own country, guys: you'll gain much more together than you ever will apart.

Man Vs. Movie: Duplicity (2009)

2009-03-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

Spoilers as usual.

A lot of the time people say, "Why don't movies feature unhappy endings more often?" The usual reply is commercial - in an industry where your product requires an up-front investment of millions of dollars, people are leery of unhappy endings because they rarely test well. Unhappy endings tend to be messy, unresolved... narrative poison, in some ways. This isn't the same as, say, an ending where a hero dies, since we all die someday and not all of us get to hit the universe-saver button on our way to the floor - I'm talking about an ending where the goals of the characters are never accomplished regardless of the sacrifice. It takes an exceptionally skilled creator to take characters you really like, boot them to the curb and make you love it. (Which is why I loved Battlestar Galactica so much.)

I'm not sure if Tony Gilroy is that kind of creator or not, but Duplicity makes me think he might.

Duplicity is a movie about two spies, one CIA, one MI6, who have crossed swords and shared beds many times over the past five years. They've both quit their respective organizations and have entered the cutthroat world of corporate espionage, as they both try to get the secret to a new product out of a company. The two of them are in love, because they each understand the paranoia and distrust that goes part and parcel with the other's life; they are at each other's throats for the same reason.

It's a tight, brisk story, shining a light on corporate espionage from the perspective of ex-government spooks, an unilluminated corner of the genre (mostly because when constructing spy stories everyone starts with "how are we different than James Bond," and James Bond is primarily a product of country-versus-country conflict.) It has genuinely surprising twists and turns, and an ending that is unexpected yet somewhat inevitable. It uses flashbacks to good effect, much like Lost - though Duplicity is a bit jazzier with how it signals a time-frame change, using split screens to 'recede' one moment and make another prominent. The music and the directoral style is reminicent of heist films like the recent remake of Ocean's Eleven, which might be why the ending feels so out of place.

The twist is this: the two spies think they stole the secret formula, but they were actually used as unwitting dupes to trick their employer into embarassing himself with a product that doesn't exist. They get no money and have quit their jobs for nothing. There's no "well, we have each other moment" - or rather, the moment comes before them finding out they were duped, so its impact is blunted rather than the other way around.

I have to give it points for bravery, at the least. Not many films do that to their characters. What's questionable is whether or not the film gets away with it, and I'm still not sure how to read it. I mentioned Ocean's Eleven before, and the premise of Ocean's Eleven is "these are thieves, but they're GOOD thieves, you can cheer for them." The tone of this film sets you up to think the same way, but thinking upon it, we shouldn't think the same way. The two leads think they're stealing a product that a company's been working on for a long, long time; not a noble act no matter what. Their immorality as they play with each other's emotions is transparent. Them getting double-crossed means that in the end the "good guy" wins - or at least, the "bad guys" lost. But Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are really charming bad guys. We want them to win purely on the strength of that.

The movie doesn't give us that. I left the theatre feeling sucked-punched and let down, and that's exactly what the characters felt. Tony Gilroy got me to empathize with them even when I knew I shouldn't, just by focusing on their story and the chemistry Clive Owen and Julia Roberts have (and they have a lot.) Gilroy's one to watch, and so's this film. Just don't expect them to play the Team America anthem at the end.

The BSG Finale In Three Words

2009-03-21T20:45:00.000-07:00

MOTHER

FRAKKIN

PERFECT.

(apologies to Chris Sims for stealing his bit)

Man Vs. Movie: Watchmen (2009)

2009-03-13T12:32:00.001-07:00

This review gonna have spoilers. Proceed accordingly.

One of the purposes of an adaptation is to bring the source material to a different (and often larger) audience, so I'm not really the intended target of the film adaptation of Watchmen. I also can't review it with any degree of impartiality - I'm too close to the source material. I think Watchmen is brilliant - not just one of the best comic books I've ever read, but one of the best books I've ever read, period. It might be the reason why I found myself slightly dissatisfied with Zack Snyder's take on it.

Watchmen takes place in a parallel world in 1985, where the presence of superheroes - and one superhuman in particular - has altered the course of human history, and where the murder of one of them is the catalyst of the plot. It's a very complex work, with a slightly nihilistic bent and it takes a deconstructive eye towards the genre of superheroes - specifically, that anyone motivated to put on a mask and fight crime would be a little outside social norms, and someone with actual powers would be really out there. Its other themes range from destiny and the nature of time, to imposing one's morality on the world, to utilitarianism, Objectivism, and how we relate to our parental figures. I can recommend the book without hesitation; the film, not so much.

Part of it's the length of the film, although not in the way you think. The film is nearly three hours long, and even then, a lot had to be cut. I knew going in that the story-within-a-story "Tales of the Black Freighter" (a pirate comic, since pirates replaced superheroes as the dominant genre of comics in this world) would be turfed, and I was down with that. I was less down with the omission of details like where Rorschach got his mask and his reason for wearing it. (By contrast, what pushes him over the edge into the kind of man who would continue to fight crime even after vigilantism is declared illegal is reproduced very faithfully, even though his key monologue is shortened.) All of the major scenes and sequences are there, and reproduced slavishly - I don't doubt for a second that Zack Snyder loves comics and loves Watchmen. But without the connective tissue of the missing scenes, it occasionally feels like a clip show. Stuff From Watchmen That Zack Snyder Liked.

It's okay to cut stuff like that out if you build new connective tissue that's leaner and more efficient and fits the medium of film. They didn't really do that. When New York is wiped out at the end, we never get a sense of loss at the deaths of so many, because all the characters we care about are far far away. What the film could have done is featured Hollis Mason a bit more, then shown him dying in New York (instead of at the hands of a gang earlier in the narrative, like in the comic - in the film he's barely there in the present, getting more screen time in flashback) which would underscore the horrors of Ozymandias' plot and the impossible choice Nite Owl faces in whether or not to expose it. However, building this tissue would probably mean altering many scenes, and considering the hue and cry raised about the film's climax, it's not surprising that Snyder and Co. decided to just put as much of the book on screen as they could.

Mission accomplished there. The shots are well-composed and sharply filmed, many of them so close to the comic it's as if they used it as a storyboard. Each actor inhabits their character so fully that I could imagine no other actor in their boots. The film's highlight is early on, with the opening credits acting as a montage of the world's history set to Bob Dylan's classic "The Times, They Are A-Changin'." Visually, thematically, they nailed it. I'm just unsure of whether or not they nailed Watchmen's level of sheer craft, which is most of what I admired about it. (I like comics where superheroes fight viking biker gangs and intergalactic space cabbies, myself - so realism and deconstruction's not high on my priorities list.)

One thing about Watchmen is that reading it just once isn't enough. My first trip through I thought it was good, even great, but not the towering height of incredible people painted it as. It wasn't until subsequent reads that I picked up the hundreds of interconnected themes, storytelling techniques, and callbacks peppered throughout. Maybe I was wrong and the tissue is all there up on the screen, I just failed to see it the first time. (I was battling the Cold From Hell which only now at the end of its third week has faded in any meaningful way.) However, a movie costs money to see it each time unless it's on a DVD you own, and the book can be read and re-read forever. In that sense, like many others, I'll always consider the book superior.

How I Learned To Hate The Fans

2009-02-28T14:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, popular comics website scans_daily got taken down.

The lionizing and demonizing of the site - a LiveJournal community that shared scans of panels and pages from comic books - has already begun. The usual arguments in favor of it are out ("it got me into comics again!" Well, X-Tinction Agenda got me into comics when I was a teenager, that doesn't make X-Tinction Agenda a worthwhile comic book crossover,) as are the allegations that it crossed the line in terms of copyright (there's a case, but a shaky one.) Everyone's line on what constitutes a violation of the spirit of copyright is different, and copyright law is notoriously fiddly. How many panels count as fair use, any ways? (Addendum: According to Christopher Bird, about two pages of a 22 page comic would count as fair use. I think you could make an argument for more than that - most previews for upcoming comics on sites like Newsarama are three to four pages, and while that's at the company's discretion it does lend some weight to a higher number of pages being considered fair use.)

But that's not what I want to talk about. Scans_daily occupies a special place in my heart, beause it shattered all illusions I ever had about comics fandom.

For a while there I thought comics fans were the coolest and brightest people in the room. They knew what they wanted and were informed about their purchases. They were dedicated and demonstrated an understanding of how comics worked that wasn't present in, say, the average moviegoer. (Nowadays the average moviegoer seems to have the social grace of a meth-addled skunk. I've seen people converse on their phone during a film, and that shit don't fly in MLH's hood.) I had the privilege of hanging out almost exclusively on a comics board filled with lots of people who genuinely were like that, so my view was myopic. (It rhymed with Filler Hurled.)

Then I found scans_daily, via posts of a long-out-of-print dictionary full of DC comics characters sounding out words as if they'd been hit in the head. Instantly I was a fan. For a few blazing months I was a fan, scanning stuff I found funny or that I found cool or that I found touching. In each post I could count on at least one smarmy asshole commenting that ha-ah, what I loved either sucked or reminded them of something else that sucked, but I ignored it. We always ignore the early signs, don't we?

As time wore on I noticed the trends - that what was obscure in Larger Culture was always terrific and what was popular in Larger Culture always sucked, that creators were either deified (if they were on their way up or on their way down) or vilified (if they were at the top.) That "what they did to my favorite character" was a crime against God and for the crime of writing an ending that was unpopular said creators should be killed. The death threats were what floored me. I have read some skull-fuckingly bad comic books, especially ones featuring my favorite characters - but I never felt the need to state, even in jest, that John Byrne deserved to die for implying that Superman starred in a porno with a character based on Jack Kirby's wife.

Eventually I hit my limits and I stopped posting and reading, but by then the scales had fallen. I noticed that the type of fan that drove me off scans_daily was also prevalent on the board I hung out on, I'd just chosen to ignore them. They're everywhere - in blog comments, in blog posts, on every message board, even the good ones. The Cult of Everything-Sucksism. The Church of They Fucked It Up.

None of this was unique to scans_daily, although being heavily based around LJ scans_daily picked up a lot of the worst excesses of LJ - the tendency towards grand hyperbole that seems tamped down slightly on the blogs and message boards. For example, Newsarama's message board posters are so bad I have to scroll very carefully on news pieces in case I accidentally read something I can't un-read. BSS on the SA Forums, great as it is, has its own pet hates it goes utterly insane on, such as Jeph Loeb - who has written some head-scratchingly bad comics lately, yes, but cracks about dead children are over the line for me.

I know that scans_daily's general attitude was nothing special, but you don't remember all the times you steered your hand clear of the hot element on the stove - you only remember the time you forgot and you burnt your hand so badly you won't forget for a while. That's what scans_daily was to me. The time I got burnt and learnt, hey genius, fire is bad. Living proof that many comics fans, the worst comics fans, aren't posting online because they love something. They post because they once loved something, the love left them for whatever reason, and now it's just out of empty habit that defaults to the usual Internet snarkfest, because really, the Internet just hasn't got enough assholes already.

We all lose our illusions sometime. People will read this and think "it took you this long to figure this out?" This is just the story of how I lost one of mine. My reaction to the loss of scans_daily is, "Good. Maybe another site about sharing comics panels will arise that isn't polluted by absolute waterheads."

EDIT: As noted above. I remember MGK back when he started every post with "Wherein I..." and I ran into him on scans_daily where we got in a few Internet Fights over the merits of the Mark Waid LSH and the quality of Mark Millar's work. We both agree that Superman is awesome, however. I guess we got that.

O Solo Mio

2009-02-04T22:10:00.000-08:00

I like to be alone, yet I live with my parents.

I know it's pathetic, being the age I am and still living with your folks. I try to do something about it, but things keep getting in the way. So I spend a lot of time outside the house, which costs money, which delays any kind of outwards movement that much more... it's a vicious cycle, really. Again, I'm trying to end it, but I've had little luck.

But right now I'm on vacation, and so are my parents. They are down south - I think my mother is dreading being within touching distance of an American for ten days - while I've got two weeks off. It's two weeks I had to fight for, since my workplace is very, very short-staffed and can't even fill all the hours in a day. If you want a job and are legally entitled to work in Canada, come to where I live and where I work. Just be advised, my boss is such a nice guy that you'll feel terrible about wanting a better job (assuming you are a ball-free wuss like me.)

So right now I'm alone in the house. I like to be alone. No one to disappoint, no one to ask things of me... just me and my thoughts. And a blog.

There's worse places to be.

Don't Wanna Be a Canadian Idiot

2009-02-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

And I'm off to pissing people off already.

Before anyone gets too incensed at what I'm about to type, bear in mind I'm an anonymous schmuck in a sea of anonymous schmucks and I'm definitely not a political sciences major or sociologist, so any observation I make is by definition that of an amateur. However, if there's anything the Internet in general and the political blogosphere specifically has taught us, there's no harm in letting your voice be heard.

So that out of the way, there is one thing about the Canadian political character that annoys the sweet piss right out of me, and it's this: we compare ourselves too often to the U.S. and not enough to ourselves.

Yes, we have a better health care system, and with single payer more or less off the table with the new U.S. administration odds are that this'll continue. But when I have to take my father to the emergency room for treatment of a bacterial outbreak and we wait half the night to be seen, we could still stand to improve it. We boast about how we stayed out of Iraq, while ignoring that both current leaders of our two major parties supported it. Yes, we had a female PM before the US did, albeit one that was elected in an inter-party election and lasted less time than Cop Rock did, but the most prominent current female politician in the country is the head of a party that doesn't have a single seat. We are content to be a little bit "more enlightened" than the U.S. - for a given, left-leaning value of enlightened - and I think that's a defect in our character, because whenever I bring up some problem in our system odds are I'll hear a response that starts with "Yeah, but in the States..."

Comparing yourself to others, either as an individual or as a group, is understandable but I think it's a bad thing to do, especially if the one you're comparing yourself to doesn't really care what you think. Your standards wind up tied to someone whose behaviour you don't affect. I saw this happen with the torture debate, statements that started with "Yeah, but the terrorists..." And it's true, terrorist organizations don't have rules about the treatment of prisoners, but defining ourselves as "better than people who blow up other people" isn't a high enough standard. We should seek to define ourselves as "better than who we were yesterday." Our own behaviour we can control. We have less control over people halfway around the world whose modus operandi is "hide and hide some more."

Part of it's the age old problem of tribalism - Canada is the Us and the U.S. the Them and bashing the Them always lifts the Us up. But most of my social life is online and I know more Americans than Canadians via online networks, so my Us is cross-border, and I'm beginning to realize that the divisions built up by patriotism are largely false. So I get faintly annoyed at hearing Canadian criticism of U.S. attitudes towards, say, the Gaza Strip conflict while our own leaders are barely more even-handed. For better or for worse we've tied ourselves to the U.S. and are happy with calling ourselves a slightly 'better' version of it. I'm not sure that's a good thing at all. After all, they elected their last leader, and we were reminded painfully in December that we are still subject to an unelected monarch. They got out from under the British crown centuries ago and maybe we ought to get cracking on that.

Alpha Blog

2009-01-31T16:28:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my blog. This is the first post.

I'm a Canadian by birth and by choice. I am a dweeb, by any definition commonly accepted. Yes, I know, a geek on the internet, how soul-shatteringly shocking. My hobbies include RPGs, comics, movies, and some TV. My occupation is currently "fixer of stuff" and hopefully I can learn to do more with myself.

I follow current events in Canadian politics (though not enough) and American politics (too much.) Religiously I'm agnostic, which is partially code for 'leave me out of the arguments, all of you.' Politially I'm centre-left, although this is the Canadian political axis and such a position would make me a long-haired hippie were I to head south of the border. (I could handle that. I'm already shunned constantly and I could use more hair.)

This blog will cover everything I want to write down in blog format. I like 'focus blogs' but they tend to die when the author's love of the blog's focus hits a dry spot. I hope you enjoy it. I hope I do too.