The Ultimates #12
Well, they solve the artist-swapping problem that's been killing this book, but the solution - getting Christian Ward in to do the final issue - is an odd one. Ward's great, but he's great at weird cosmic psychedelia, and this is an issue pretty heavy on people sitting in hallways and offices of government buildings. With a ton of plot information offloaded to, basically, "see other comics." And a setup to The Ultimates2, which I admit I'm not immediately excited by. The result is one of those very comicsy things, a final issue that fails utterly to bring anything to a satisfying conclusion. Still, the Ms. America stuff was nice, as it always is.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe
Finally got to check this out. Good, and at times delightful (the "draw Squirrel Girl" activity pages were brilliant), but I definitely came out of it feeling like an OGN was more Squirrel Girl than I necessarily wanted in a single dose. By the end it's just not sparkling anymore, and the laughs felt fewer and further between than they did at the start. Not because the book isn't ...
Once again, I have nothing for you. What I laughingly refer to as 'real life' has been hectic for me lately, full of obstacles both expected and unexpected which have required some heavy duty navigation. Plus, in terms of my online career, I've been working on so many projects simultaneously that none of them have come together on schedule. Bad time management, thy name is Jack. So, to fob you off again, here's the second chapter of the novel I kid myself I'm writing.
Oh, and in case you missed it, I was recently a guest on the lovely They Must Be Destroyed on Sight movie podcast again, this time talking with Daniel and Lee (two of the nicest, smartest movie podcasters you could ever hope to listen to) about both versions of Nosferatu. Spoilers: we all like both of them. Get that here. Quite pleased with my showing, though there were times during the recording when tiredness and alcohol consumption made me only semi-coherent. But I'm often told I'm more palatable that way.
Chapter One of my 'novel' can be found here, if you need a ...
This past week Nintendo finally put over a year of rabid speculation to rest by revealing its next console, previously known only by its codename NX, as the Nintendo Switch: A high-end handheld game console that can be plugged into a dock for home play. Nintendo forwent the expected routes for hardware reveals, even the famously unorthodox Nintendo hardware reveals-In lieu of a press conference or media event of some kind, Nintendo revealed the Switch to the world by way of a 3-minute teaser trailer on their YouTube channel. Although the video re-confirms the system's previously announced March 2017 release date, Nintendo later stated that this is all the information on the system we're going to get until then, so let's jump on the hype bandwagon and play armchair speculative analyst with the Nintendo Switch.
First of all, the trailer confirmed most of what the many rumour mills were saying about what we then knew as NX in the months leading up to the reveal, and I for one couldn't be happier about what we saw. The Nintendo Switch is a handheld console that rather resembles a tablet computer, except with controllers on the ...
“Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man.” - Terrance Dicks, 1977
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Let us accept that categorization is pointless, and that any attempt at it will eventually collapse under the basic fact that he is contradictory and in his own way even contains multitudes. He is what he is, in his own way as deific as that makes him sound. He does not have immediate political analogues in 1930s Germany or 40s BCE Rome any more than he does in 1650s Britain or 2013 Australia. Similarities abound, but every case is unique. That’s what Great Man Theory means.
It is not even useful to call him liberal or conservative. He is right-wing, but only in the sense that he poses an existential threat to the left. On the whole, however, he is not particularly ideological. He is an aesthetic wedded to a perversion. In the end, most people are, and virtually all politicians. Still, one has to start somewhere.
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It is not quite possible for anyone who did not grow up in the greater New York area to understand him. It is not that rich idiots in the general case are unique to ...
Hello again. Where are we now, January 1996? Best we start wrapping this up, I suppose.
In a sense I never left, of course. Let’s see. Summer of 1995 was the first year of CTY, the big nerd camp that was the defining social framework of late middle school/early high school for me. Place those three weeks between Civilization and Chrono Trigger. I was still playing video games, but favored the PC - I got a Playstation around the time of Final Fantasy VII, and would get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas at the end of 1996, in my first year of high school, but neither captivated me. I was starting to intellectually specialize - at CTY I’d taken what was basically a college-level intro comp course, and was beginning to think of myself as, if not “a writer,” at least “a guy who could write.” This coincided with the regression of my ability in math, previously my best subject, as the handwriting requirements of algebra and ADD-taxing nature of drilling a problem over and over again made the subject stop favoring me. Indeed, the best paper I wrote at CTY was a descriptive essay about how much I’d ...
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When I was waxing rhapsodically about Mr. Robot a few weeks ago I praised it for being a show that didn’t feel done revealing its range. By that standard at least, Class is a rousing success. The downside of this is that it also doesn’t quite feel like it knows what it wants to be, but that’s not inherently a bad thing for a show about teenagers. It’s smart and full of ideas, at least, and if these first two episodes don’t contain any moments of outright genius they at least clearly belong to a show that could deliver some.
It’s also a show that’s acutely aware of the expectations that are going to be put on it. Its opening gag is a Bechdel test joke, it namechecks Buffy with aplomb, it’s got the obligatory Peter Capaldi sequences, it’s given ostentatious levels of thought to its notions of diversity, and there’s almost a conscious sense of “OK, what’s the exact halfway point between Torchwood and The Sarah ...
So, I disappeared into that k-hole (does that make me sound old yet) that is Twin Peaks for awhile and apparently that stopped my writing full stop. Things I have watched since we last talked, you can just imagine Twin Peaks is gettting watched in the background the majority of the time:
Meaning, as distinct from information, is an entirely human creation. It does not exist ‘out there’. It is an emergent property of human existence, of animals which have consciousness, which is itself a system of reflections of reflections. The essence of conscious human awareness is the experience of looking at something or someone, and knowing that you are looking at them, and thus looking at your own looking. It is the awareness of a hall of mirrors inside your head. And then one becomes aware of the returned look of the other, and the implied hall of mirrors inside their heads. And then one imagines their mirrors mirroring your mirrors. Their infinite regression amplifies your own. And it is this multiplicity of reflections, and of reflections of reflections, that ignites the quest for meaning.
There is something in the very act of looking that entails or demands interpretation. The eye delegates a great deal of the task of looking and seeing to areas far further back inside the head. The interpretation of this inherently incomprehensible chaos of multiplying reflections is going to bring about an attempt at finding meaning, or at least a feeling that meaning must be possible, and ...