Want a sneak peek at Grimm, the comic Erika and I are working on? She’s been posting pencils, and they look balls-out amazing.
Category: Connections
In which scrolling through Google Reader gives me a mild heart attack
Rian Johnson is posting like twenty pictures a day to the just-created Brick tumblr, for some reason. Happily, today he included this DVD-cover fan art that I did back in 2005. I always meant to clean that up and redo it; I had a couple other ideas for doing similar treatments of different scenes, but I don’t remember what they were now.
I’ve been thinking about Brick a lot the last couple of days, actually, because it’s occurred to me that I have pretty simple tastes in terms of plot. Give me any of the following and I will squeal with delight (double points for setting it in high school):
- Emotionally crippled badass tries to get to the bottom of things (Brick, Neuromancer, Veronica Mars)
- Young woman comes into her own and learns how dangerous she can be (Howl’s Moving Castle, The Privilege of the Sword, Bone, everything by Robin McKinley)
- Tenuous network of friends and lovers collapses under the simple pressure of human desire (Lovebot Conquers All, Battlestar Galactica, Magic for Beginners)
And, of course, the latter is why I love Scott Pilgrim. Take away the video-game trappings and the fight scenes and the hipster music references and the fourth-wall humor and… okay, don’t take any of those, they’re great. But the real reason I have such an aching priapism for those comics (which I didn’t pick up until 2008! GAH) is the way O’Malley spends so much care and attention setting up what we in the Indie RPG Club call a relationship map. He gets you to like everybody in it, gives them each their own petty little wants, and then lets them tear each other apart.
Not that I would know anything about what that’s like.
My sister got married!
I have to write about that, but first I have to pull some wedding pictures off the camera, which is way over there.
So instead, a quick navel-gaze: according to fan mail and a vague sense of the Ommatidia Facebook community, my writing tends to attract people who are a) very clever and gifted and b) much, much younger than me. Like, around a decade younger than me, because a lot of them are in late high school or early college.
Does this say something about the genre-trappings of the stories, the methods by which fandom propagates, or just the appeal of the format? The hoary journalistic trope to fall back on here is a bunch of rumbling about Kids These Days and Short Attention Spans and Nothing Longer than a Text Message, but I am resisting that because it’s dumb.
I suspect the reason is simpler: many of my favorite books are YA novels, because those are the best ones to read if you like stories where people do stuff and things happen. I write stories that I think I would like, and the influence of YA authors is heavy upon them. By definition, then, they appeal to young adults.
I think that is awesome. I wonder how long I can keep getting away with it?
Speaking of decades and youth, I’ve been a fan of Erika Moen’s for almost ten years now, since Scott Thigpen linked to Vera Brosgol who in turn linked to her. (Man, look at the arc of those three careers alone!) Erika just ended DAR, her autobiographical webcomic; it was sometimes explicit, always brutally honest, and very, very funny over its six-year run. I’ll miss reading it.
But I’m very excited about her new projects, in part because one of them is a graphic novel that I’m scripting! This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened! Erika broke the news first, and I’m not going to give too many more details than she did: it’s called Grimm, it’s YA, and it will probably run around six to eight “issues.” Not sure yet whether she’ll be posting a weekly page or one whole arc at a time a la Octopus Pie. Very sure that it is going to be great!
Told you I was lying
High-text, low-art comics like Narbonic and xkcd are fine for what they are, but the four panels of today’s Bobwhite are all anyone should need to understand exactly what a skillful artist can do with fifteen words, some posture and a few carefully rendered facial expressions. The second panel alone! Man!
It even stopped airing in spring of this year!
Wait. Hold on. Comedy Central has a pseudo-cinema verité show about a radio program? A radio program where one of the hosts is relatively grounded and knowledgeable and the other is the wacky, grating narcissist? And then there’s a new guest every week and things go poorly? And the jokes depend heavily on bleeped cuss words? And nobody’s ever heard of it?
WHAT THE FUCK.
I saw Snüzz live in concert solo only once, last year, while I was living in North Carolina with Jon and Amanda. It was some kind of multi-band benefit thing, and the Brasfields, ardent fans of his, convinced me to go and take a cute girl from OKCupid.
The show (like the date) was a mixed success. It introduced me to Midtown Dickens, my favorite lo-fi act, but while Snüzz was great, he only played for about twenty minutes. Afterwards he sat next to us in the audience, and I mentioned that I was a friend of Jon’s; he smiled broadly and said hey, yeah, Jon and Amanda were awesome, he hoped to see them again sometime. Then I said I’d enjoyed the show but wished it had been longer. He opened his mouth, hesitated, then smiled (less broadly) and just said thanks.
Turns out he was probably forced to stop early by the symptoms of his then-undiagnosed lymphoma. I wish I’d known to say something more tactful. He’s holding the second of a couple benefit concerts himself now; the first was to raise funds for his medical bills, and this one for a group that helps buffer cancer victims against unforeseen costs.
It’s not like I have many non-Brasfield contacts in North Carolina, but hey, if you like good music you should go and toss some money in the hat. It’s this Sunday night at the Blind Tiger in Greensboro.
SO EXCITED
GUYS! GUYS I FINALLY GOT A DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE. I feel like I’m a grownup on the Internet. It only took seven years!
Hello,
We have received a formal DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice
regarding allegedly infringing content hosted on your site. The specific
content in question is as follows:
The party making the complaint (Deborah Sykes, e-mail:
websheriff@websheriff.com), claims under penalty of perjury to be or
represent the copyright owner of this content. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §
512(c), we have removed access to the content in question.http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap5.html#512
If you believe that these works belong to you and that the copyright
ownership claims of this party are false, you may file a DMCA
counter-notification in the form described by the DMCA, asking that the
content in question be reinstated. Unless we receive notice from the
complaining party that a lawsuit has been filed to restrain you from
posting the content, we will reinstate the content in question within
10-14 days after receiving your counter-notification (which will also be
forwarded on to the party making the complaint).In the meantime, we ask that you do not replace the content in question,
or in any other way distribute it in conjunction with our services.
Please also be advised that copyright violation is strictly against our
Terms and Conditions, and such offenses risk resulting in immediate
disablement of your account should you not cooperate (not to mention the
legal risk to you if they are true).http://www.dreamhost.com/tos.html
We also ask that if you are indeed infringing upon the copyright
associated with these works that you delete them from your account
immediately, and let us know once this has been done. We also ask that
you delete any other infringing works not listed in this take down
notification, if they exist.If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Glen,
— DreamHost Abuse/Security Team
Web Sheriff is, Google suggests, a DMCA gun-for-hire firm that Van Morrison has been employing for a couple months to hunt down those damn pirate MP3s on the Internet (along with, quite zealously, people saying mean things about him).
Now, my having posted that song seven years ago was unquestionably infringement, and I’d rather not see my hosting service get terminated, so I won’t be filing counternotice. Of course, the explicit purpose of posting it was to get a noncensored version out on filesharing networks, and I think that work is as done as it’s going to get.
So congratulations, Web Sheriff: you did it! You managed to Google “brown-eyed girl mp3,” send a stern email to the ISPs for all the results, and charge a pathetic, aging musician tens of thousands of dollars. Now no one will ever be able to illegally download his songs again.
I think I’m going to print this thing out and frame it.
Biting the wax tadpole
This piece of xenophobic garbage was the top Google News story under Sci/Tech as of a few minutes ago. It makes me so angry I want to blog.
Basically, ICANN–the governing body for domain name registration–finally got around to saying people could register domains with country codes in their own character sets. Country codes are the national domain endings, like .tv (yes, Tuvalu) and .kr, that until now have been abbreviated in Latin characters for absolutely no reason. Thanks to ICANN’s legendary corporate/Western bias, people in those countries have been forced to use kludgy keyboard settings to type in Latin characters when they want to go to a website. Is it any wonder search engines were desperate to do business in China? It’s easier to click through to your site via Google than it is to type its name into the damn address bar.
And so far, country endings are still the only part of domain names to which the change applies! You still have to type the rest of the domain with Latin characters. The rest of the domain scheme is coming, but only ICANN knows when.
So naturally it makes sense for David Coursey to start mongering fear. Oh, sorry, I meant “Tech Inciting.”
“Is this a change for the better? Perhaps, but is there any doubt that if another country had ‘invented’ the Internet–say the Russians–that we’d all have had to learn to type Cyrillic characters by now?”
Jesus Christ, what decade is it? C’mon, “journalist!” LET’S GO TO HISTORY SCHOOL. Setting aside your blazingly simple-minded assertion that “the U.S. invented the Internet,” if you’d bothered to go even Wikipedia-deep in your research, perhaps you’d remember–or learn–that the URI addressing scheme was invented by a British scientist working at a lab in Geneva. Unicode’s been around since 1992, two years before Berners-Lee’s RFC 1630 and RFC 1738 formally set out URL syntax. ICANN’s policies have restricted, not fostered, the Web’s growth into a truly worldwide entity.
“How many new domains will be needed to protect international brands?”
Oh, I take it back! I hadn’t considered the possible damage to brands!
“Will there be hidden domains that cannot be displayed on some computers or typed on many keyboards?”
HEY DIPSHIT! See the fifth sentence of this entry, because THERE ALREADY ARE.
“Will cybercriminals some how [sic] be able to take advantage of this change?”
This sentence is so stupid that it must have set some kind of Internet record.
“Practically, I am not looking forward to perhaps someday having to learn how to type potentially 100,000 non-Latin characters that ICANN has embraced. How many keys will keyboards need to have?”
Record broken!
Go ahead and read the article–it’s a cornucopia of minor idiocies in the same vein. This guy is, to all appearances, a professional blogger published by a real-world magazine (albeit one with a circulation smaller than some webcomics). In a world where major news organizations fight and win legal battles in defense of their right to knowingly lie, I suppose I should be expecting media of every vintage to continue stoking the terror of small minds to drive their dwindling profit engines.
This has been Brendan Makes Fun of Something on the Internet! I will now return to my usual activity of narrow-eyed hunting for the tilde key. And hey, David Coursey: Φάτε ένα εκατομμύριο πέη.
The second sentence coming up here is a lie
Look. I’m only going to say this one more time. Magnolia Porter is the most exciting comics creator on the Internet and YOU HAVE TO READ BOBWHITE.
Nononymity
Carrie Fisher blogs, apparently, and the evidence suggests that she’s been doing a bit of back-and-forth with the Internet in her own defense. Basically, people think she doesn’t look like she did in 1983. I will allow you a moment of shock.
On my west’ard migration a year and a half ago, while I was bumming around San Francisco on my own, someone–Sumana?–suggested that I take a night and go see a play. By happy coincidence, I was in town at the same time as Fisher, who was doing her show Wishful Drinking at the Berkeley Rep. So I got a ticket and went.
I learned a great deal about Fisher that evening (I hadn’t even known she was married to Paul Simon), and in the process saw probably the only good one-person show ever. I also laughed a lot. How can you avoid laughing at the image of Cary Grant calling up a teenage girl, at her parent’s slightly deranged request, to lecture her soberly about the dangers of LSD–twice? Or at a still from the bridge of the Death Star about which she noted that “I weighed about ninety pounds here, eighty of which I carried in my face?”
It’s one thing to know somebody is a writer; it’s another to see her perform in a self-written multimedia showcase that includes jokes about her own electroshock therapy. I liked Carrie Fisher before then, almost as much for her guest spot on 30 Rock as for Star Wars (and that was all before I knew she tried out for Han Solo). After that show, like became admiration, and she was elevated to the selective ranks of people who have secured my loyalty pretty much for good. Even if her blog posts are littered with unnecessary punctuation.
(In case you’ve noticed that I started dating a short girl with a screenwriting degree, a taste for wine and a sardonic sense of humor within months of moving to Portland: shhh.)
It’s not as if I think the people reading my blog are among those going “oh no how did princess lea get fat :(.” But I feel the need to state this anyway: Carrie Fisher rolls with my crew. And before you write a word against her, consider the fact that fuck you forever, and die in a hole.
Shitcock.