Unsought Input

  Over on Neil Gaiman’s web journal there is all sorts of news about his newest novel, The Graveyard  Book, due out by the end of the year. If you weren’t sure, I am pretty excited about this whole affair with Mr. Gaiman being one of my favorite authors of all time. A quick little quote from his site quoting Kurt Busiek talking about the novel:

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK’s title is an homage to THE JUNGLE BOOK, since TGB is about a boy whose family dies, and who winds up being raised in a graveyard, by ghosts, and the other things that lurk there.

The boy, named Nobody (”Bod” for short), learns many things, discovers odd places and curious people, deals hesitantly with the world outside the graveyard and eventually has to deal with the forces that killed the rest of his family, and who are still looking for him. I won’t say much more about the plot, because hey, it’s not going to be out for months.

But I think it’s likely Neil’s best novel yet. It has a great deal of warmth, whimsy, dark fantasy (verging on horror), adventure, charm, suspense, monsters, ghouls, a witch, school bullies, policemen, ancient burial mounds, knife-wielding killers, dancing, mystery, trouble, a dash of romance, life lessons, and a creature named Silas, who is both what he seems to be and not. And the most endearingly dangerous and threatening ancient terror you’ve ever met. The story’s engaging, there’s a real sense of menace, and it builds to a strong and satisfying climax.

Either way, it’s in my things to check out list. If you are unfamiliar with Neil Gaiman’s work you can read American Gods for free on line. Personally, I like American Gods and it’s sequel Anansi Boys the best of his work. You can read the whole novel. In fact, I insist you read the whole novel. It’s free. The whole book. And it’s a pretty big book. You can read a few pages a day while at work or before bed. Whenever. But it’s free and it’s available and it would be a shame not to take advantage of it.

Which brings me to my next little subject, has anyone heard of Endless Reflections, the Sandman graphic novels? That link right before this sentence was something I stumbled upon which makes me think that there might be a TV series for the Sandman comics. How cool would that be!? If anyone has any news, please post in comments. I looked all over wikipedia and his site with no avail. I really hope this isn’t just a joke, I think this would be the coolest TV show.

A few months back we wrote about the comedic possibilities of super heroes confronting real life.  In the last few years there has been a flood of super hero comics, movies, and TV shows and many of them place people with extraordinary abilities in ordinary situations.  Witness the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, or heroes like Hiro from Heroes.

But beyond the world of fiction, what kind of super powers can we find in real life?  Sure, it’s fun to come up with speculative pseudoscience explanations for Superman’s heat vision, but that’s not likely to produce any results.  Even non-powered heroes like Batman rely too much on poor comic book physics and unrealistic survivability to produce real-life counterparts.

We’ll find our real-life super powers in less obvious places.  In the 1980s Marvel had a character named Cypher, or more properly Doug Ramsey.   Doug wasn’t known by his super hero name because his power wasn’t flashy or very useful in battle - Doug was genetically gifted with the ability to understand languages.

This amazing ability to learn languages (along with numbers, dates, etc.) is something you can find in real life, often linked with disabling autism.  Often, but not always.  Watch the video to see the life of Daniel Tammet, the boy with the incredible brain.

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Who says that nerds won’t make good parents? Oh, no one said that? My bad. I guess I misheard, but here is a list anyway. Oh, and I am too lazy to prioritize these, so they are in no particular order.

1. Who has cooler toys and gadgets than nerds do? I can tell you my husband has three little man armies downstairs that he built from models, a million dolls-oh, I mean action figures- all over the place, card games, board games, you name it. As far as gadgets, how about good computers, video games consoles, large televisions and home theater systems? And let’s not forget about the plethora of DVDs or Blue Ray or whatever you happen to own. The child of a nerd will want for no awesome toys, as the nerdy parents will have already bought them all for themselves.

2. The children of nerds will not be left to watch TV alone for hours on end while the parents ignore their children. Oh no. And I can guarantee you that these children will not be watching The Doodlebops, either. These kids will be watching DVDs of G.I. Joe, Transformers, Thundercats, Sesame Street, Voltron, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and many more of our childhood favorites. And we will be sitting right beside them reliving our childhoods.

3. A Surplus of old comic books to read. Your nerd child is years behind on the X Men Series so you had better start reading him/her in the womb. Think about it, if you had the comics you had now as a child (all of them at once, I mean) you may have never left your room. Nerd children will be able to read by the time they are in kindergarten and they will have already read the entire Phoenix Saga. (more…)

Spider-Man 3 seems like a shoo-in to join Spider-Man 1 and 2 in the top ten highest-grossing films of all time, but reviews have been mixed. Right now it’s running about 60% positive at Metacritic and 61% positive at Rotten Tomatoes.

So is it any good? I thought so, but this isn’t a movie review. As an internationally-recognized expert in Spidey Studies, I thought it would be important to point out where Spider-Man 3 gets it right, and where it get things wrong. I’ll start with the bad news first, with the good news to follow in the next day or two.

Please note: this is not a series of gripes over deviations from the “cannon” of the original Amazing Spider-Man comic books or anything like that. Spider-Man, like many of his his comic book and other literary brethren, has been written by many different people over the years in many different media. Instead, I hope to point out where Sam Raimi deviated from the crux of the characters or missed opportunities that presented themselves.

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I ran across a great post at Technocrat titled If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics.

“Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists — you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably hate the subject.”

This is a great point, and the post goes on to talk about why it’s not just a lack of “real world” examples that makes math and science such boring, intimidating subjects.  Here’s the perfect example of how a real world example definitely did not help one student with physics:

So if memorizing facts and formulas is no use, and contrived, often bizarre examples are no help, how should we teach math and science?

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The movie 300, based on the Frank Miller graphic novel, has earned $70 million at the box office, breaking some records. But if you read some of the commentary out there you might not be too interested in seeing it.

All the villains are gay. All the good guys are white and the bad guys are black. The whole thing is just Frank Miller’s thinly-veiled cheering for Bush to invade Iran. Etc.

Now, 300 is definitely not a historical documentary. But I don’t think the criticisms mentioned above are completely true-although I can certainly see why many people may have jumped to them.

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Super heroes. We see them in movies, watch them on TV, and if you’re a nerd, read about them in comics books. The Internet is home to countless arguments over which super hero has the best powers, whom could beat up whom, and what would happen if Lois Lane and Superman finally did hook up.

It used to be that the life of a super hero was predictably unrealistic. Most super heroes are more likely to travel through time and fight dinosaurs than run out of toilet paper. In the past decade there have been a number of comic books that took on this dichotomy and tried to depict what life would really be like if you were invincible, but otherwise just a normal guy. This hasn’t really filtered down to popular television and movies, with the possible exception of the TV show Heroes and to some extent the Spider-Man movies.

That’s why today, we’re going to look at some of the rare depictions of the real life of super heroes.

There is nothing more real than the Real World, so we need look no further than Real World: Metropolis:

[youtube]C1Ic1eaUVOE&NR[/youtube]

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An artist named *spacecoyote posted two “fan-fic” anime-style drawings of The Simpsons and Futurama characters to the popular art site deviantART.com. Less then a week later, she was signed on to work for Bongo Comics - owned and created by Matt Groening (creator of both series) on anime-style Simpsons comics. She also might be working with 20th Century Fox as well.

How’s that for a nice little bit of happiness from this “Web 2.0″ world? Post some junk online that you think your friends might dig and instead of a lawsuit (more common) you get a job?

Please do check out *spacecoyote’s drawings - I especially like her realization of Marge, Patty and Selma in the Simpsons drawing.

Here’s the official deviantART posting on the topic if you’d like to leave her some props.

In a recent artIcle on i-mockery.com, superheroes said what they are thankful for this Thanksgiving. In order to give equal time I recently asked supervillians what they are thankful for this season.

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Large moving sale.

Everything must go!!!

All items as is. First come, first serve. Everything has been time tested against arch enemies (and some family members). Prices are negotiable, everything must go! Let’s make a deal!
-Pulverizing Pillars, 995.00 each. (No pictures available, must see to believe) These are designed to crush an unsuspecting dungeon siegeist to a small bit of jelly and crushed bones. Some mess to clean afterwards but a great investment for any sewer tunnel that mysteriously leads into the lowest bowels of your castle or evil lair. Easy maintenance and payment plan available.

-Assorted Torture Devices, 500.00 for whole lot. Can be sold separately as well if desired. I am not sure why I picked these up, really. I got them cheap, thought to myself “hey, this could be good for my goody two shoes hero-enemies” but then I never really used them. I mean, they are kinda complicated and I am not really sure what to do with some of them. So, these are for the really avid collector/evil genius. (more…)

I’m a programmer, so I read a lot about programming. One of the writers I always end up coming back to is Steve Yegge. He works for Google, and I hear they only hire geniuses, so I must have good taste in bloggers.

In a somewhat recent post, Steve talked about how he and his wife discoved Anime, or Japanese animation. This might not be shock to most people, since programmer == nerd == likes cartoons with robots, but it was interesting to me for two reasons: first, because he tried to clue everyone in to Sturgeon’s Revelation, and second, because he asked for recommendations and got a flood of comments.

I want to give some recommendations (Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain) and talk a little about the odd position Anime has in American culture. First, though, is Theodore Sturgeon’s* famous Revelation: 90 percent of everything is crud.

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There are a lot of Family Circus detournements* on the Internet. I chalk it up to two factors: 1. The strip is annoyingly, cloyingly terrible. 2. It has decent art and lots of characters. The former provides the impetus, while the latter increases the interesting options. Proof: Ziggy is equally, if not more, terrible,** yet it only ever really features Ziggy, so manipulation possibilities are less dynamic and therefore less interesting.

My favorite Family Circus mash-up is The Nietzsche Family Circus, which combines random Family Circus panels with random qoutes from that powerfully impotent philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The combinations often seem surprisingly deliberate and relevant, but that could just be the pattern matching module in my brain creating meaning out of nothingness.

*This is a fancy way of saying “fucking around.”
**I once thought of a really great Ziggy cartoon: Ziggy is standing on a slightly bowed horizon while a crudely drawn smiling sun sets (or is it rising?). Ziggy is looking directly at the reader and the word balloon says, in shaky, trembling lettering, “Everytime I think I am in a groove, it turns out I am just in a rut.” I am truly an ubermensch.

Now, If you were to know me personally you would know that I enjoy to watch two guys kiss. And touch. And have sex. Now, I have to make two disclaimers before we even begin.

Disclaimer #1: I don’t like porn made for gay guys. That is not what I am talking about. What I am talking about is gay porn made specifically for women, usually by women. There will be no licking of the armpits for me, thank you.

Disclaimer #2: I am going to have links to stuff you might not want to see, so if you are a little queasy, don’t click on the links. Or do, everyone likes to live life on the edge, right?

So, read on, my privliaged guests. But be warned, there is adult content ahead! (more…)

Well its official the lead villain for the next Batman movie will be the Joker, and will be played by none other than…. Heath Ledger?!? First off am I supposed to believe that this was the director’s first choice. There are literally dozens of other actors I can think of who would be far more likely to be cast, Hugo Weaving, Crispin Glover, Bruce Campbell, anyone else really. This leads me to my assumption that the casting was studio driven. Batman is a huge franchise and millions of dollars have already been invested in it. So obviously the studio wants a bad guy who will appeal to a large audience, and not necessarily be the best fit for the part. Obviously coming off of the successful movie Broke Back Mountain, Heath ledger would be high on their casting lists. He has high female appeal, which would in their minds help a movie with a primarily male audience. Obviously no one at the studio has ever read a comic book, they were probably too busy in school getting laid, so they don’t have an idea what the Joker is like and why Heath Ledger will suck as him.

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One of the more interesting aspects of the Batman / Bruce Wayne character is that in addition to fighting crime, he also runs a large, multinational corporation. Actually, it’s not so much interesting as it is an excuse for him to have enough money to constantly buy bat-supplies.

But you have to wonder what it must be like to work for Wayne Enterprises. Since you are reading this, instead of doing work, it is probably more pertinent to wonder what it’s like to get fired from Wayne Enterprises.

Below are 10 ways to get fired from Wayne Enterprises. Note to fanboys: all the items below are strictly in canon (see references in (parenthesis)). (more…)