odd ends

First off, let’s just get this out of the way (because it relates to nothing else I’ll say today): Just because something you saw didn’t make you (a) racist, doesn’t mean that thing (that thing you saw!) isn’t in itself racist.

[I mean.  The ocean.  It’s over there, right [[we pretend to stand against the shore/adrift amongst the dunes/dry feet like crones’ eyes/toes riddled with cracks without answers/blue meets blue/clouds flee]]?  And oceans are wet.  But I’m not wet, so it’s clearly not an ocean!]

This is “duh”?  Right.  Kinda in reference to the Tom & Jerry BS, but also: because people have said it a million times before.  “I saw/read/consume X and it didn’t make me racist so how can it be racist?”  See.  I want to call that shitty logic.  But I can’t.  BECAUSE I DON’T THING IT’S LOGIC AT ALL.   Does it count as a “divine fallacy“?  I don’t know, my logic is old and rusty, but even I can still smell stupid.  (Yes, I know that statement in itself was illogical.  Move with me.)

OK, now what else?

Life

In general is good.  Babies are coming!  Soon.  Excited.  Stressed.   Compressed.  Elastic and ecstatic and everything around the edges.  Jen is doing amazing with the whole thing.  Prepping and transporting 2 kids to school and handling #3 at home AND carrying #4 & #5 around in her bellah like a champ.

#3 fell his ass off the chair the other night.  Totally his fault…he’s a daredevil.  Anyway, said fall left him with a nasty little gash (fingernail sized, eye-shaped) on the back of his head that required a trip to the doctor the next day (yay, no emergency room!) and I think they glued his head shut.  Which is interesting.   I had a similar thing happen around his age and the doctor just died a knot in my hair to hold it together while it healed.  Poor little dude though – he called it his “crack”.  As in “I have a crack in my head” and “The doctor fixed the crack in my head.”  So sad/funny.  Oh, and it was scary.  Lots of bright blood.  But not the worst thing that’s happened to him.  I dread his teenage years on a regular basis.

#1 & #2 are doing great in school – it’s always scary/wonderful to see them grow and change in response to all that outside input.

 

Music

I need to buy the new Rentals album.  (I think you can stream the whole thing from there!  It is good.) Well.  “want”.  “badly want”.  You know.  Not need.  I just haven’t yet.

The new Gaslight Anthem album is quite good.  Different.  But/And good.  Here’s Helter Skeleton.  You can play it whilst you scroll downwards, toward some kind of nirvana:

(The) Pixies put out a new album too.  And it’s not bad!

Those are the 3 blips I can think of at the moment.  Oh, Rancid just announced they have a new album coming out this year, so that might not suck.

Yard/plants

Because I know you wanted to know, right?

OK, so my current state of mind is: I FUCKING HATE CATS.  AND SQUIRRELS.  They tear up my planters daily and it is incredibly frustrating.  I’ve been trying to find some kind of “natural” way to deal with them (yes, I know death is natural, but that’s not what I’m talking about).  Supposedly rue keeps cats out…but can also cause nasty infections on human skin!  And: kids.  So I don’t want that…

Stuff is cool though.  I’ve been growing some sedum clippings.  That’s kind of neat seeing whole plants grow from pieces of stem:

That’s a week or two out of date, but still pretty neat to see all sped up.

Blogging in general

I’ve been feeling burned out on blogging lately…I mean, next month it will have been 10 years that I’ve been grinding away at this.  10 YEARS.  I have children younger than that.  Ahh, my first post.   I was so young and me then.  Ish.  So yeah, 10 years of doing this and I almost never have new visitors – outside of the 4-5 RL folks I know who still read this occasionally  I mean – we can have separate conversations, so what’s the point of all “this”?  I’m trying to figure that out.

[Sidenote: I think I used to have some kind of blog before this one, but I can’t remember what or who it was.]

Creation

I haven’t written much of anything in a while.  It’s depressing, but it is what it is.  Time is in short supply these days.  I’ve got two things I’m reading from other people, and that’s pretty much it. I’ve done an occasional poem, so at least that’s something.  I had a couple creative days where I came up with several new things for the mud I still code on (also when I have: The Time), and those are kind of cool if I ever get around to finishing.

Here’s a poem:

fast/hall of leaves
08/12/14

My brain doesn’t remember the sunny nights of my youth
but my body does like an egg now goosed in a bottle
pushing
My ribs are old
best if they don’t break

I do fly down the hallway of leaves
Autumn always at my feet
cackling
gleeful

We’ll fall in love somewhere further
and I’ll skin my knees

Thoughts of thievery in thieves cant
Thoughts of things that cannot be stolen back
A wisp of pressure and tricks of light
Deep into the memory hole I

Flung from the hall of leaves
a toddler in the Stream
I
Into the night
-unstuck-
carry me once.
Me.

 

Visual consumption of media that moves

I’ve been slowly working my way through the 5 years of Futurama that I missed (now that it’s available on Netflix), and there are some pretty funny bits in there.  I think I’m up to season 10.   Or 9.  I’ve tried a couple other random things on Netflix, but nothing has stuck.

The last movie I saw was Guardians of the Galaxy and it was wonderful.  (Wait!  That’s not true, we took the kids to a dinner theater (no, not that kind, the kind where you can eat dinner at a theater) and watched How to Train Your Dragon 2.  Which was entertaining for all.)

Um.   Since the last book review I posted I’ve read a collection (Long Hidden) edited by Daniel Jose Older and his collection (Salsa Nocturna) of short stories.  Both were good, his collection was better as the other one, as it was hit or miss as those things tend to be with some stories being amazing and some being meh.    I think I have some issues with the short story format in general, as more than a few of them felt like they were trying to hard to jam some twist/brilliant ending into too small a package.  I was going to write individual reviews for them but it’s been too long and I’ve pretty much forgotten them.  My brain is awesome :(.

We are watching the following with the kids: Cosmos (the new one), The Life of Birds (might be done with this, I’ll have to check) and Avatar (the cartoon one).  All are interesting in their own way.  I love it when Cosmos keeps the kids attention, as there is so much cool stuff in there.  The Life of Birds has had some pretty neat bird stuff in it (also very sad, like the bird that hatches 7 chicks, then kills them one by one until its down to 2 or 3.  And cuckoos.  Seriously.  FUCK CUCKOOS.  Hate those guys.) and Avatar, while problematic in some ways (long other topic that I’m too tired and just google it), is an entertaining show with some positive example behavior type stuff  in there.

Cool Comic Art

Some of my favorite artists currently making comics:

Click to make bigger.

 Jamie McKelvie (tumblr)  So amazing.  His Young Avengers Run as well as Wicked + Divine are so crisp and clean and amazing and creative.  Single images really don’t capture as page/panel flow are such a part of what he does well.  Check out any issue of the above.  Also, the colorists on those two books are amazing too.   Picking single panels is like chopping out one section of painting…but I’ll do it anyway:

Also fun stuff like this:

Click to make really big.

Oh hey, here’s a whole page from W+D:

Does what you expect when clicked.

Sara Pichelli (of Ultimate Spider-Man fame)

To me, they both share a sense of just…I dunno… “cleanness”.  Like everything feels real and vibrant.

Then, there’s the “weirder”/more stylized stuff, like Skottie Young (deviantart), who can have a pretty varied style (he’s the one that does all those “baby Marvel” style covers):

& Chris Bachalo:

 

There are better examples in the actual comics, but that’s what some speedy googling turned up.

So.  Yeah.  There’s 1500 words for you (guys/girls/nons) instead of a month or two’s worth of scattered posts.  WITH PICTURES.  (I’ve been told by the impression left in the comment threads at various places that pictures mean things.  I think they are supposed to have captions or moving parts.  One of mine moves!  Hopefully that’s enough).

-Until next time

MBP of the week: Obama?

MBP = misidentified black person, courtesy of the late David Mills/Undercoverblack man.

So yeah, the Washington Post, Obama & Malcolm X? :

Maybe, as the link above mentions, it’s just some kind of web display flub but uh…?  K.

Closing the refrigerator & goodbye to comics

No, not goodbye from me.  I’ll get to that in a sec.

First off, via Rich Johnston @ Bleeding Cool, I found this post re: the return of the refrigerator.  It probably won’t make sense if you’re not a comic geek, but the references are in the post and the whole story is very interesting.  Not to mention all the conversation/thought/paper fodder re: the role of women as creators & characters in comics.  Oh look, here’s the handy wiki page for Women in Refrigerators.  Oh, and the original site itself.  Duh!

So yeah, when I saw the scene I thought it was rather tasteless – but hey, I’ve thought many of the black lantern/zombie things were tasteless.  Making Donna Troy kill her own (zombified) child?  Making Katana do the same?  Yeaaaaaaahh.  Not cool.  So yeah, refrigerator scene.  Check that out.

THEN.  When you feel like reading some more, check out Valerie D’Orazio’s (ex (?) DC assistant editor, and assistant editor on Identity Crisis in particular) series of blog posts about her time in comics.  It’s a fascinating look at the chauvinism and banality of the comic industry. And god dammit I want to know WHERE DID CHAPTER 6 GO!?

I don’t have anything intelligent to say about the Marvel+Disney thing

Or should that be Disney -$ = Disney + Marvel?  See – that’s not even a passable math joke!  I told you I had nothing smart to say.  Now uninformed rambling – that’s something I can do!

Drawing on my vast amount of industry insider analyst drunken guesswork, I suspect that it will either be:

• really good for Marvel : better funding & distribution
• really bad: content restrictions, editorial mucking about in attempt to capitalize on certain properties
• really, really bad: one business insider comment (see here, Dan Vado’s reaction)  I saw suggested shutting down the publishing wing as a possibility.  Evidently Disney killed a magazine they were publishing with circulation over 200k, and no Marvel book has circulation over the low 100ks beyond very special events (death of Captain America maybe?) AFAIK.

Now, I think #1 is the most likely turn out.  Because I’m a hopeful kind of guy.  Also because Disney has a decent history of leaving owned properties alone to do their own thing (Miramax?).  Also because you don’t buy a goddam comic company and stop making comics.  WHO DOES THAT?  Even if they turn out shitty comics with Mickey hugging Wolverine, they’ll still be turning out comics.

I’m thinking that Disney wants to get a lockdown on tweenage boys like they do on girls (man, I bet they wish they had Twilight! hah!).  Evidently Disney has a boy targeted TV channel (I did not know this), but it mostly runs sitcoms (this probably explains why I did not know this – as the person who mentioned this said “boys don’t care about sitcoms like girls do”), with some Marvel licensed stuff.  So now they’d be able to really fill the shit out of that channel with boy-targeted comic stuff.  Because fabricated music-oriented-autotuner-fests just don’t do it for boys like they do for girls.  Thank cultural evolution for that I guess!

I’ll take my giant robots with a helping of super-heroes please, hold the whiny blonde bitches.

I really shouldn’t feed the Rushtroll

but the fact that he has so much influence makes this all the more baffling.

Andrew Sullivan posts an exchange from Rush’s show where you can see how crazy he’s gotten.  Look, I remember hearing the guy at a friends house pretty regularly as a kid, and he’s always been crazy.  But, you know, it was a mild kind of crazy – or at least that’s all my young mind could pick up on.

This shit is real crazy son.  Subtle crazy, but still crazy.

I don’t see how he can have any pretense at being any kind of serious commentator, or even a serious Republican…but maybe he’s ok with that.  Maybe he’s incredibly self aware and the entire thing is an act almost beyond the bounds of Colbert to satirize.

Comment #1 on the root link:

So this guy is NOT a republican because he doesn’t want the US to torture people? OK Rush. Once again, proving to the world, you’re an idiot.

I think it should be obvious by now…but people still adore the guy.  Is it just because they are angry?  Are they clinging to whatever presents itself?  I mean, there’s always going to be that fringe, but the Right fringe is getting BIG.  Is it bigger than the Right itself these days?

Sounds like a good argument for a 3rd political party finally…Dems/Reps/Trolls ftw.

I will buy your album digitally for $3.00

Really, that’s somewhere close to the magic number. $.30 per song or $3.00 album (regardless of track count.  Maybe $4.00-4.50 for a double album.)

When allofmp3.com was functional, I bought many albums at their lower-than-that-magical-pricepoint of $.70 or so per album..that was sweet.  But alas, nothing gold can stay.

The bullshit iTunes price of .99/track & 9.99/album (although I think that is tweaked a little by now) and Amazon’s .99/track & ?6.99-9.99/album is just too much.  I can buy 2 used cds at those prices.  and frequently do.  It is in no way worth $6-10 for something that provides no physical medium or physical art/textwork to digest. I can’t see how the record labels fail to see this.  They save MASSIVE amounts of money on not producing & distributing the physical medium – how can they think it would be a value to us to pay close to the same price?

But once that number comes down…I mean I can see like $2.00-3.00 for old albums and $3.50-4.50 for new realeases, that would be ok too.  Once those numbers come down to something closet to what I think most people already subconsciously realize is “worth it” – THEN the online music sales are really gonna blow up.

Because everyone loves a good deal.

And you, fucktarded record labels, are dying.  So – have some money and survive, or sure as many people as you can and desiccate.  Your call.

You didn’t really think that Palin kid was getting married did you?

I’m sure she really wanted to though.  Really.  It’s not like she was pressured into it by her mom or anything.  I’m sure that’s not the case.

Good thing her mom’s not the VP in a re-election year or we probably would have seen the country’s biggest shotgun wedding huh?

the New Zealand alcohol/kid throwing PSA

I may have posted this before.  I wish I could embed it but alas, a link will have to do.

I don’t *think* it’s fake.  I kind of hope it is.  Fucking bizarre.

Coates on the Palin bastard

Link.  I think he covers it pretty well.  The whole situation cracks me up – hypocrisy playing itself out in the national media.  Good times.

I only add “bastard” because it’s technically true.  I completely disagree with all negative connotations associated with the word: single parents can raise wonderful and loving children.   Good luck to Bristol though with that (now?) power-hungry manipulator for a mommy though.  Then again, I’m sure she’ll never have to want for money, so she’s already massively better off than most other young, single mothers.

minor update on the Dymond/Galveston lawsuit

more info from the original blogger/reporter (?) is here.

Excerpt:

So let’s clarify some misconceptions…

It’s all a hoax.

The lawsuit is very real. It was filed in August of this year.  Here’s a write-up from the Courthouse News Service from the day it was filed.  Here’s a copy (pdf) of the complaint.  If this is a hoax, Milburn, her family, and her attorney are going to great lengths to pull it off. Yes, her complaint likely paints what happened in a light quite favorable to her, and unfavorable to the police.  But I’d be very surprised if the major components of the complaint weren’t true.

This happened two years ago.  Why are you posting about it now?

The incident happened in August 2006.  The lawsuit was filed in August of this year.  Milburn’s attorney tipped off Houston Press reporter Chris Vogel, who wrote about the case yesterday.  I saw Vogel’s story, and blogged about the case today.

This is just one version of events, from Milburn’s lawyer.

Yes, and I made that clear in the post.  After I put up the post and talked to Vogel on the phone, he posted a response from the police officers’ lawyer, William Helfand.  You can read that here.

Here’s what isn’t in dispute:  Milburn was wrongly targeted during a prostitution raid.  The police were looking for white prostitutes.  Milburn is black.  She was apprehended by plain-clothes narcotics officers who emerged from a van as she stood outside her home.  She resisted.  The police have acknowledged they targeted the wrong house.  Three weeks later, Milburn was arrested at  her school, in front of her classmates, for “assaulting a public official.”  At some point, her father was arrested on a similar charge.  The judge declared a mistrial on the first day of Milburn’s trial.  According to Vogel, she’s scheduled to be tried again in February.

Milburn and her family are now suing the police officers who apprehended her.  They claim she was severely beaten during the raid.  According to the compliant, two hours after the raid, Milburn’s parents took her to a hospital, where doctors documented a host of nasty injuries.  I haven’t seen documentation of the hospital stay or the injuries, but if that’s all included in the complaint, I would assume it exists.

I called the Galveston police department and the Galveston district attorney’s office for comment.  I haven’t yet heard back from either.