Bourgeois Passtimes

Well, Promised Monies have still not arrived, so it looks like another weekend without a computer of my own. Well, Pooey on yooey, feckless fate, I have plenty on my plate to tide me over.

For one, even though my last couple of attempts at it have left me cold, I have checked out two books without pitchers to read. Man does not live by Power Man & Iron Fist alone, it turns out.

Both of these received great reviews at Boing-Boing, which is one of my traditional morning stops. The first is Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan, which is classed as a “Young Adults” book but is an imposing tome nonetheless, at 440 pages – until you notice those pages are 1.5 spaced, not single-spaced like an adult book.

I am told this is an alternate history-type book in a steampunk pre-World War I world where the Brits are “Darwinists” whose weapons of war are “fabricated animals” while the Prussian forces are “Clankers” with steam-powered mechs. There is literally nothing there that doesn’t sound great to me.

The second is Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim, which sounds like a post-punk black magic film noir directed by Sam Peckinpah, and which was, needless to say, in the adult section.

I guess in the interest of honesty I should mention that the reviews I read were both for these books’ sequels, but hey. I like things to be in sequence.

Which means I’m sad about the library presenting me with Volume 15, the last volume of Path of the Assassin, skipping over 13 and 14. I suppose I’ll just wait patiently, hoping the missing books will magically appear, a strategy which has worked stunningly for that computer money, after all.

I made a snarky comment about the new Twitter in my feed this morning (because I was finally offered it), but with a recommendation from Chris Magyar @icrywolf and another Tweet who mournfully proclaimed it “just like the new Google Image Search” – I hit the preview button and immediately liked it. For the record, I also preferthe “new” Google Image Search.

However, the IMDb redesign sucks worse than a black hole in the center of the Festival of Suck.

Also on my weekend agenda is the usual show which will take up my Saturday from 5 till midnight. Saturday morning, however, I will be covering the Houston Comic Con, so I would appreciate it if all attending cosplayers would put on their ill-fitting and/or slutty outfits and be there between 10 and Noon. And if the Westboro Baptist Church is planning to protest this one, the same time frame goes for them, too.

Of course, ladies like these will be at the NEW YORK Comic Con. Dammit.

October 8, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Archeology Solitaire

So. I’ve taken a couple of trash bag’s worth of stuff out of my crowded office and placed them by the curb. They’ve been taken to tsotchke Valhalla or wherever the garbage truck takes such things. So far, no real tragedies or instances of “Oh crap I really need that now!” Then again, my experience is that such things take a week or so to occur, when the disposal of the material is really, truly permanent.

Eventually I hope to carry this crusade into the office closet, which contains stuff so old, it will seem as if it is from another civilization, I am sure. Then I can move my video workstation – which has lain  pretty much fallow the last few year – up against the closet itself, enforcing a Cask of Amontillado-style fate for the stuff that remains in said closet, but will open up a good deal of room around my desk, and even grant access to a bookshelf that is currently closed off. And I need that bookshelf.

The triage of stuff that goes into the trash bag isn’t as brutal as it should be, but more draconian that I usually manage in such instances. There’s a lot more “Why the hell did I ever think I’d need this?” and less tolerance for obsolete technology. But dammit, I am still keeping that folding keyboard for the Handspring Visor because I think it looks cool. The extension cord for Playstation I controllers? Not so much. I also seem to have less tolerance for my own sentimentality these days.

Another trash day tomorrow, another purge tonight, dusting as I go. Yum, dust.

Man, the crap I get up to when I don’t have a computer.

Up 'n at 'em, my minions of horror!

October 7, 2010
Categories: Uncategorized . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Oddly, the subject of women keeps coming up

You know, I was actually pretty sure that you could get through your day without hearing me whinge about something. I guess this proves that I can’t get through a day without whinging about something. In print, no less.

I finished the story on the Women’s Shelter today; not as troublesome as I had feared, once I decided no, dammit, I want to see the passion and conviction on the shelter director and the executive director’s faces when they talk about their missions in life. I did the minimum of cut-aways, a few phone numbers and websites, and called it a day.

Guess I’ll find out tomorrow if that was a good call or not.

My week, otherwise, seems to be dogged by Superman. The week started with the news that Zack Snyder – you know, 300, Watchmen – would be directing the next Superman movie, which seems to me sort of logical. Given the venom that was sprayed over the Twittersphere – and yes, I first heard the news in Twitter, sue me, I’m a busy man – from the outraged reaction, you’d think that the announced director was M. Night Shymalan (another subject I’ll have to return to someday).

I actively hated 300 and was ambivalent to Watchmen – I’d have felt much more charitable if they’d had the balls to do the squid. I find it hard to believe that a CGI painting of a squid is more expensive than a CGI hole in the ground, but aaaaaaaah I’m not gonna fight that fight right now. The best comment I’ve seen so far is Kurt Busiek’s, who pointed out that it would at least look right and there would be some good action in it. My own best comment is that I want to actually see a movie before I condemn it. I know, I know, color me nutty.

I finally watched Superman/Batman: Apocalypse last night, and it did not suddenly convert me to the Supergirl camp. The pacing seemed rather uneven to me, but then, the last few DCU movies were damn near non-stop punch-fests, and not only were we doing a *choke* origin story with incumbent exposition, we had to have what passed for character development.

 

No Barda In A Towel images. This is as close as I could get (Plas, too).

 

To help Kara – Supergirl – become acclimated to life on Earth, Clark takes her shopping. She takes to it swimmingly, with ostensibly hilarious results. Okay, alien girl who still remembers life on super-scientific Krypton suddenly turns into a 90210 character when confronted by boutiques. Haw haw! Wimmen! They got the shopping gene!

I’m a man and I was insulted.
Then again, I felt much better when Big Barda showed up only wearing a towel. So I’m also a pig, but I was a happy pig.

October 6, 2010
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics!, Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Work work drudge work

Okay, so I’m going into one of my edits knowing that I’m going to get a headache.

1) It’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month (also Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Arts Appreciation Month, but that’s neither here nor there). Ergo, I’m putting together a story about a women’s shelter.

2) For reasons that become obvious, I can’t show any pictures of the shelter’s exterior, nor any of the women or children actually housed in there.

3) I don’t really need any reminders that mankind in general is a large festering cesspool of violent shitheads, control freaks, and people who are not worth the meat they are printed on.

The balance to that, or course, is that the women I interviewed who run the shelter and associated services are good, passionate, concerned people who are doing worthwhile things with their lives. Out of nearly fifteen minutes of prime interview material, I have to boil out four minutes of absolute gold. And then find pictures to cover the edits, and because today’s TV audience can’t look at the same picture for more than 15 seconds without clicking the remote.

I Googled “drudgery” and got this. Greaaaaaaaaat.

This sort of thing is the bread and butter of community-level TV. Well, that’s not true, that’s probably the interminable city council and budget meetings, but you get my drift: we’re covering a small community with very little int he way of actual news, and getting the word out on worthy services is a Good Thing.

Manufacturing images to comprise B-roll is not. Pulling some generic public domain images, making the move and spin and zoom in so I can plaster some CG text over them gets a bit labor intensive, especially on a part-time job.

Well, the stories can’t be all Hot Sauce Festivals and robot dinosaurs. At least this weekend, I’m covering a local comic convention. That might prove interesting.

October 5, 2010
Categories: Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Brief Book Report: Color of Rage

So I finished the stack of volumes of Path of the Assassin the library had saved for me, and now I have to wait for the last three – possibly last two, because for some reason the catalog does not list vol. 14, and therefore I cannot reserve it. In any case, while casting about in the stacks, I found another volume written by Koike that I also checked out as insurance against just such an event: The Color of Rage.

Color of Rage has a good hook: two men escape from a slave ship and wash ashore in Ed-era Japan. One of the men is Japanese, but the other is black, a slave from America, it seems, which puts the story near the very end of the Edo period, just before the American Civil War. The clues are not plentiful.

The Japanese man is named only “George”, and the American “King”. Having bonded on the ship, the two are determined to find a peaceful place to live where people are nice to each other, and such places are not plentiful in a country with a heavily stratified caste system. King does not speak Japanese, and has to wear a disguise to keep his dark skin from attracting attention. George is suspiciously knowledgeable about the ways of the yakuza, and tries to use that knowledge to at least get them back to his home village. Of course fate, and the two men’s sense of outrage at seeing peasants and the like being treated like slaves, means the trip won’t be easy.

The real problem is, the stories never truly gel, at least not in the way Koike’s other work does. Lone Wolf and Cub and Path of the Assassin are rife with historical detail and character interaction that lives and breathes; Color of Rage is fairly one-dimensional at best. We see a slight intimation of what it could be in George’s brief lectures to King of how the yakuza system works and how it will help them, but those are few. When King starts raging, saying “Rargh!” and punching trees – all but literally chewing the scenery – because “I WANT A WOMAN!”, one can only say, “Really? This is my character moment?”

So, alas, I’m pretty disappointed with Color of Rage. It ends on a very ambiguous note – hell, it doesn’t end so much as stop – so maybe the domestic readership agreed. I shrug and move on. I don’t and can’t like everything even my most favorite of writers have written, that’s only natural. It’s finding the stuff that you do like that makes reading new things worthwhile.

But really, Dark Horse, I have to ask – what was up with that cover? It’s gorgeous, but outside of the horrid stereotypical horniness off King, it has nothing to do with what’s inside.

October 4, 2010
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics! . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Author Cleans, Film at 11

I finally, and most unfortunately, have time to start mucking out my home office. Something I’ve been wanting to do for months, but golly, always had something else pressing to do.  Since most of those pressing things had to do with my recently departed computer, I had run out of excuses. Dammit.

In the course of a little over an hour, I had tossed away a fair amount of crap (wow, a classic PlayStation controller extension cable. That will come in handy some day. Toss.) and straightened out my reference bookshelf.  Tossed out some hopelessly outdated material, discovered I had two editions of the same book and gave one to my wife’s school.

Three shelves of books became two. And then that extra shelf got loaded down with Marvel Essentials. I see a lot of hatred pointed toward the Marvel and DC phone books in the land of Internet Comics Journalism (a term that makes me giggle) but I love them. Yes, I  once went on record as hate, hate, hating them, because they had no color, but then I bought one out of curiosity at  Half Price Books and got hooked. Hooked bad.

I’ve got several longboxes of comics in my closet. They have only a fitful amount of organization about them, because keeping a continually-expanding assortment of magazines in any sort of order requires time and room; I don’t have either. But there on my shelf: The entire Lee-Kirby run on Fantastic Four, taking up a foot of shelf-space, and bought for what I likely would have spent on a Good Quality copy of FF#1.

Worst. Simulation of me. Ever.

I admit, I have the Completist Disease. If I have one piece of a collection, I’m likely to seek out the rest, within reason. I always found a reason to visit Half Price and other used book stores before, but now it’s with a definite mission, a database in my phone, and let’s not even talk about my Amazon Wish List.

I wish DC had followed Marvel’s model, but their Showcase Presents books seem to start at somewhat arbitrary points for their Big Three, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, concentrating on the Silver Age. Then, they also have their Chronicles line for those characters, slimmer volumes that are reprinting the Golden Age stuff from the very beginning, and those are in color.

As you might be able to tell, I love my comics. I was taught to read at age 4 with them, and I carry them in my heart. And my bookshelves.

Oh, yeah, I watched Iron Man 2 last night. Liked it, felt it was a little scattered. As with the first movie though, the suit action scenes were top-notch. Hey, we have a lot of big metal things pounding on each other, and I can tell what’s happening! Does Michael Bay even watch other peoples’ movies to see what works?

I need to go shower and haul my butt in to work to run the floor for the weekly newscast. This evening I cover an art show opening, and suffused with Iron Man 2, I have a nagging feeling there will be some manner of super-villain attack during that. I hope I have enough tape.

October 1, 2010
Categories: Hey Kids! Comics!, Life's Rich Pageant . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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