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Comics Reviews (October 26th, 2016)

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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 still good, but because I just don’t think the Squirrel Girl style is suited to that sort of longform. This felt like a flabby and overlong issue as opposed to an OGN. Still good, but definitely not $20 of good. 

New Avengers #17

Apparently this is a Civil War II tie-in? This isn’t even a red skies crossover. This is just an issue of New Avengers. Of course, since Civil War II is a car crash and I’m kinda less than impressed with Bendis’s “let’s tell the female writer who’s being harassed off Twitter that it isn’t comics fault” schtick today not actually being a tie-in as advertised in the cover fails to lose this book any points. Which means it gets to stand on the strength of its gonzo Al Ewing plotting, which is a perfectly good thing to rely upon. Nice emphatic twists that point towards an exciting resolution for the story Ewing’s been telling for more than a year here, and that presumably sets up U.S.Avengers whenever that starts. 

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #12

A delightful wrap-up to the second arc, which maybe on the whole feels like it went on longer than it needed to (the first one did too, actually – six issues is a rough length for a superhero book). There’s really nothing but good things to say about a comic that involves a rampaging lego triceratops. But as it happens there’s top notch character work and some of the funniest responses to a profession of love in comics to boot. 

Ms. Marvel #12

A tight and charming done-in-one with a shockingly good guest artist in Mirka Andolfo. Kamala goes to visit family in Pakistan and, inevitably, ends up fighting crime. Good character beats, a delightful opportunity to see a superhero story in an unusual setting and dealing with different issues.…

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Big Window

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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 refresher.  Though I think you should probably just re-read Phil’s Theses on Trump instead.

 

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“You got the book then.” said Iza’s father. “Good. Happy birthday darling.”

The massive man was sat in his massive chair behind his massive desk in front of his massive window. Iza could see the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater, the Gherkin and the Shard behind him, all glittering wetly in the drizzly sunshine like freshly-washed utensils on a drying wrack. He seemed entirely at home amongst them. Anybody else would’ve been dwarfed by the office and the furniture and the window, let alone the view. But Iza and Ria’s father was big. Broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, shaggy-bearded. His gigantic hands were like strange five-legged animals which seemed to have decided – for some reason best known to themselves – to live on the end of his arms. They moved almost constantly, as if they might conceivably decide at any moment to simply detach themselves and wander off to explore the rest of the world on their own.

“It’s not my birthday,” said Iza.

“Isn’t it?” His wide, sun-browned face crumpled into confusion. “Are you sure?”

“I know when my own birthday is,” she said. “I thought maybe you did too. Perhaps that was optimistic of me.”

“I do know,” he said, and recited it. He looked down at his desk calendar. “Why did I think…?” he asked himself. He looked like someone who’d just walked into a well-lit room and automatically flicked the light switch, and was now standing in the dark, wondering what had happened.

“Um, sorry,” he said. It was almost a question, as if there was an unspoken ‘Will that do?’ appended. For all his vastness, he seemed lost and helpless. Iza had seldom seen him this way before. She always thought of him as a great enthusiastic sheepdog of a man… which wasn’t a comparison original to her.…

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Nintendo Switch Reveal: First Impressions

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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 side. Those controllers, called JoyCons, are detachable, and use an advanced form of motion control and force feedback similar to what was used on the Wii Remotes, except they can also double as traditional gamepad inputs by being snapped onto a kind of controller shell (and can I rave about how thrilled I am they finally got the controller layout right this time?). The system uses high-capacity cartridges instead of optical disks, which is going to be a godsend for storage and loading, and Nintendo has also kindly left us the headphone jack. Although Nintendo seems to be trying to sell this as a home console first and foremost, it really isn’t: While it does have a dock so you can play games on your TV, it doesn’t offer the system any additional processing power, so the Switch is fundamentally a handheld that can be played at home instead of a home console you can take with you. This is a great idea in my opinion, and for a whole lot of reasons.

I’ll get the uncomfortable truth out of the way right now. The home console industry is dying. From the start of this generation, publishers were extremely reluctant to support even the XBOX One and the PlayStation 4 with new releases, primarily wishing to focus on smartphones, tablets and, weirdly enough for anyone who’s followed the industry for as long as I have, the PC. A lot of this was initially due to the plateaued sales of the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 at the end of the last hardware cycle, but that hardware cycle was abnormally long and need not have been a barometer for how this generation was going to fare. Publishers started to take notice once the PlayStation 4 began selling like gangbusters and there’s been an uptick in support as a result, and yet even so…Home consoles on the whole have failed to get a real foot in the door in the three years since then.…

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Theses on Trump 16

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This essay is going to need some substantial (though obviously not total) revision, and keeping the original in circulation feels wrong. A revised version will appear in the generally available edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk that will come out in 2017. …

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C-Beams Glitter (Mega Man X3, Rockman and Forte)

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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 hated my 7th grade math teacher. (Meanwhile, I got on quite well with my 7th grade English teacher, and ran into her at the supermarket earlier this year.) From there I’d gradually deflect from aspiring towards fiction to realizing a greater strength in criticism, a bias I’ve yet to correct despite occasional efforts.

But my exile from the Super Nintendo era was short-lived. The summer of 1997 introduced me to the wonders of NESticle, and I dove happily into the suddenly opened archives of my childhood. Then, in the fall of 1998, I got my learner’s permit, and early in 1999 could drive. This being western Connecticut, the main available attraction was the same thing it had been since the 1980s evenings spent with my mother: the Danbury Fair Mall. Or, in my specific case, the Funcoland about a block further down Backus Avenue, where I dove into a more materialist phase of retrogaming by picking up a NES and, not long after, a SNES.

Which is to say that there was a period of my life these games belonged to. Both of them were admittedly on the tricky end. Mega Man X3 was late enough in the SNES lifecycle that it was a relatively rare cartridge that coust upwards of $40 – I didn’t get to it until college when I’m pretty sure I drove upwards of forty-five minutes to a Gamestop that had one. Rockman and Forte, on the other hand, was originally an emulation concern – I remember playing it on the eOne my mother had bought on a lark, which probably means in early 2000. (I remember being baffled by a bug where jumping would simply fail on occasion, which I finally, after extensive testing, traced to the cheap keyboard that shipped with the flagrant iMac knockoff, which was apparently wired so that a particular key combination that was common when playing a side-scroller with the arrow keys would lock out a handful of other keys.)…

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For Tonight We Might Die & The Coach With The Dragon Tattoo

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Right, so apparently we’re doing these by a margin of $3 on the Patreon. Cool. Thank you all for your support, and if you enjoy the reviews please consider supporting Eruditorum Press.  

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 Jane Adventures?” In the first episode this all gets a bit oppressive, and the show can fairly be accused of trying too hard, but even there it’s got some real charm.

The second episode, meanwhile… I mean, there’s just so much potential in that cut from a Hannibal pastiche to the (one fears over-)aggressively youth-friendly credit sequence. And the episode mostly aims to pay that off. Its denouement is genuinely ballsy, underplaying the way in which it subverts a genre standard into something much smarter about masculinity and abuse. And this is typical of the comparison. Where the first episode seems at pains to make sure it lampshades all the moments where it’s being derivative and struts at all the moments where it’s not, the second is much smarter about what it overplays and underplays. The moment where it kills Mr. Armitage does some varied heavy-lifting, both from Buffy and in terms of ostentatiously establishing the show’s “anything can happen” cred. But what’s interesting is how the show revels in the transgressive glee of ripping apart the sympathetic headmaster inherited from the parent show but then undersells the degree to which doing so genuinely alters where things are going.

Which feeds into the most interesting card the show plays, Miss Quill. Like everything in it she’s cut from existing and well-defined cloth, but putting what we might describe as the “Moffatrix” trope in the Sarah Jane role is an inspired choice. She’s consistently the thing that most enlivens the first episode, at times managing to make even Greg Austin’s character (basically the Luke Smith role, only actually gay not Dumbledore gay) seem interesting. I don’t think Jack’s watching this, and he’s probably happier that way, but I admit that I wondered what he’d think of the ex-revolutionary who openly and not without reason accuses her situation of being slavery.…

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Meanings, Mirrors, and Modernism (a fragment)

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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 that it must be findable, and thus also that the failure to find it represents a tragedy or an injustice. Or the idea that meaning does exist ‘out there’ or ‘up there’, but that it is beyond us.

We see so many things around us.  They are “snapshots of processes”, as Lewontin and Levins said, but this is hard for us to believe in our guts, even if we understand it.  The things we see are inherently symbolic to us because that’s just how we think. We could hardly do otherwise: all thought is symbolic. We see meaning thus endlessly and omnipresently implied by everything around us. And then we realise, or feel, that our very awareness of such things is based on interpretation, and interpretation that can never be settled because it is all and always based on endlessly recursive series of reflections. And thus, once again, we become certain that meaning exists; that it exists ‘out there’; that the symbols which make up the world must ‘mean something’; but that we are incapable of grasping those meanings. The ultimate meaning, or meaning repository, must be. And it must be somewhere where we can’t see it. And it must be greater than us.

We then give ourselves permission to fall into a great chain of suppositions, all underwritten by the great conscious meaning that must be out there. Even if we call it something other than ‘god’, it doesn’t matter. And, of course, there is always a temptation to start using this ineffable and unknown underwriter as a prop. The symbol becomes the thing (the essence of magical thinking… which shows how grounded magical thinking can be, if used correctly). The absence of an explanation, the gap where we put the question of meaning (as if on the eternal back burner), becomes itself the explanation.…

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Comics Reviews (October 19th, 2016)

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Rough week. Let’s get started.

Black Panther #7

Ta-Nehisi Coates doesn’t actually think that ending works, does he? I mean, everything else is the sort of thing he usually does, which is to say use an issue to advance each of his plotlines a few pages with no real thought to the issue’s overall cohesion and often minimal thought to whether the events depicted form a satisfying chunk of story in their own right, but as I’ve been saying for, well, seven issues now, that’s legitimately hard stuff that I’m willing to give him time to work out. But come on. Other than that, no new problems here and no new merits either.

Patsy Walker aka Hellcat #11

Another oddly organized issue – the cut away to Black Cat for the final cliffhanger scene is jarring and ends up feeling underweight just by dint of the lack of scene length and the fact that we skipped over Bailey actually getting captured. And it’s not like the previous scene ends on a particularly good end-of-storyline-for-the-issue note either. As always some lovely bits in the middle, but the overall messiness detracts.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13

The best of a weak bunch – this isn’t a particularly extraordinary issue of Squirrel Girl. The Ant Man jokes mostly fall flat (although I liked his bewilderment that Doreen actually talks to the squirrels versus bossing them around), consisting as they do of “major guest star acts one way the entire time.” There’s wit and charm, and an actually competently structured issue, but it’s still nothing near this comic at its best.…

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Myriad Universes: Hearts and Minds Part 1: For the Glory of the Empire

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Major Kira is holding down the fort in the Ops office, having a heated argument with a woman who demands she be allowed to open an establishment on the Promenade, even though there are no vacancies. It’s Maura, but if you didn’t read “Requiem” you wouldn’t know that. Just as things are about to get ugly, Jadzia Dax pages the Major to tell her they have a little situation she might want to take a look at. The situation in question is a fleet of Klingon warships, who have Deep Space 9 surrounded.

Kira orders Commander Sisko to be brought up to Ops at once, forcing Ben to give Jake and his baseball game yet another rain check. While still in his baseball uniform, Sisko meets with Captain Kol, the commander of the fleet’s flasghip, the ‘Avwi. As a staunch ally of the Federation, Kol offers his support and protection to Deep Space 9, which he claims will be the most strategic location in the forthcoming war with the Cardassian Empire. This takes Sisko somewhat by surprise, as he had been unaware there was a war between the Klingons and the Cardassians. Kol recaps the events of the prologue for anyone who might have missed it, explaining how their cruiser the K’Tang has been missing for several days, and an investigation has led the Klingon High Council to the belief it was destroyed by a Cardassian Galor Warship in an unprovoked attack. While Sisko presses for evidence, Kol is reluctant to provide any, but declares that he and his crew will stand by him no matter what. As Kol leaves, Sisko and Kira are unconvinced even the Cardassians would be brazen enough to provoke war with the Klingons, and they summon the senior staff to conference.

Over subspace, Commander Sisko express concern to Admiral Kernwill that the Klingons will expect the Federation to support them, and the admiral asks him to hold on until the Cardassians can send a delegation, and they can get negotiator Tal Berel to come out of retirement to sort things out. In Ops, Odo complains his security staff is overstretched dealing with the Klingon delegation, let alone having to handle a Cardassian one on a Bajoran station. Miles O’Brien pulls some people from engineering to help in the meantime, and Doctor Bashir offers his help too. Although Odo brushes him off with a snide remark, Sisko says he has a special mission for him: He and Dax will take the Rio Grande into the Gamma Quadrant to conduct their own independent investigation into the K’Tang‘s destruction to find out who really destroyed it and, if the Klingons are right and it was the Cardassians, why. But before they can take off, a Klingon named Koleth reports for duty. He was assigned to the mission by Kol, which annoys Commander Sisko because he didn’t go through him first. But Sisko lets him on, so long as he agrees to be subordinate to Dax.

As Dax, Bashir and Koleth depart through the Bajoran Wormhole, the Cardassian delegation arrives.…

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Pex Lives 36: The Curse of Peladon, or, #imwithher

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We’re pleased to announce a new episode of Pex Lives. The description follows:

Look! Just when you thought we were down and out, we leap off the canvas and throw a few more hits.

We spend our first half catching up, then have an extended chat about Kevin’s hero Mike Love of the Beach Boys before dropping into ever cheerful Current Events. After that, we talk about a western from 1951 called the Furies and then just a little sprinkling of your Doctor Who content with the topical Curse of Peladon.

You can download that here.

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