JJ Abrams vs. Moratuwa

Fringe has a comic-book prequel, scans of which can be seen here.

This comic is supposed to be giving us more background on “the pattern” -a series of inexplicable, seemingly paranormal events- that will presumably be the central mystery of Fringe. This preview describes several such events, including:

• 200 mysteriously dead cows in Kansas
• a tsunami that wipes out Moratuwa and kills 83,000 people
• a missing American kid re-appears (nobody dies) in Munich
• a man wakes up from a decades-long coma in Lisbon (nobody dies)

Is there anything about these events that seems just a tad unbalanced to you? Eh? Eh?

Yes, it’s this: where all the dead white people?

Now, I know this is a preview of a comic which is a prequel to a tv show, which means it is probably complete throwaway handwaving, just part of the hype machine -I don’t even know who writes it.  And I’m not saying that JJ (or whoever) can’t kill a whole buncha fictional Sri Lankans in any way he pleases. I myself often fantasize about The point is -well, if JJ Abrams had, instead of an inexplicable tsunami in Moratuwa, had a mysterious plane crash into some towers in an American city (and casually named a death toll more than twice as high than that of 9/11, to boot) would that have been an equally acceptable “mysterious disaster” to the audience of Fringe? I imagine not.

JJ has used Sri Lanka as shorthand before; in Lost’s “Sri Lanka video” thing this place was just, almost literally, a certified sticker of exoticity. It was just a way of saying “somewhere far away and inconsequential”. Now, in Fringe, the place and the disaster are conflated together into a convenient package -emotional shorthand layered on top of the geographical shorthand. And that would probably have worked fine in my head if he had made it, e.g., a volcano. Or an invasion of marauding carnivorous platypuses, whatever.

Ah, well. When you’re brown and poor, you take what you can get, amirite? Moratuwa should be thankful just to have been mentioned.

We Are Golden

Add Art is a Firefox extension that replaces ads on websites with art, built on top of AdBlockPlus. Now this I have to see.

Five Superhero Movie Scenes They’ll Never Let You See is hilarious, and oh so true. “Kiss me, Mallah!” Ahahahaha. I must reread the Doom Patrol for the fifty-ninth time. Actually, this is just an extension of the general trend of movies to fail at translating books or comics into movies that convey anything at a similar level. For example, I just watched the first half of the Stardust movie, and while I can’t remember the Neil Gaiman comic all that well, I already have the distinct impression that there is not just a lot that’s missing, but a lot that’s missing that’s important. I rather liked the Stardust story when I read it -it was funny and clever, sweet but not saccharine, gentle but not naive. And the movie is both saccharine and naive, I think, deliberately so- sacrificing all kinds of reasonably clever subtleties for inconsistent, clumsy “adaptations”, making pretty much every character simpler and stupider. And that’s just the first half of the movie -I have a horrible suspicion the second half will be worse. As a serendipitous gift from Great Mother Internet, here is a downloadable copy of the four-volume illustrated novel: Stardust by Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess. File’s about 45M, get it while stocks last, and read that instead of watching the pitiful movie. (“Graphic novel” means “comic book, but posh”. “Illustrated novel” means “regular book, with some pictures in it.”)

In other news: Get Your War On is actually hilarious. It’s about the Americans and their ridiculous war, not ours… of course. Whoever is the first to start a locally-themed webcomic on these lines will win a THOUSAND Internets. Muxfind is pretty nice, if you like Muxtapes. Grabb.it/tv has videos for the 20 most popular songs of every week from the day MTV launched in 1981 to the day Napster shut down in 2001. (That’s… interesting. Now, what about all the unpopular videos?) Ah, the day Napster died. I still remember the horror… Actually, by that point we had switched to Audiogalaxy, I think, but it was the principle of the thing. And yes, I agree that Robot Brain Monkey is awesome.

The Kill Your Boyfriend Quote Generator …

The Kill Your Boyfriend Quote Generator is making me want to go dig it up and read it again.

The Comic Book Scripts Archive has a few gems -it’s surprising, when you look at the ones you’ve read, you realize that in some cases the writer laid it all out exactly, and in some cases the artist did pretty much everything except plot and dialogue. The “Archive” is sadly incomplete, of course. Some day people will start publishing the scripts as an art form in themselves, but that day doesn’t seem to be here yet.

The Almanac of Precariomancy is yet another tarot deck (featuring The Intern, The Manager and The Conspiracy), simplified in the service of political idealism and in many ways gutted of much of the ambiguous symbolism that makes the older variations so interesting.

A hand-drawn tree of life can be strangely compelling.

I assume you’ve all already seen Weezer’s Pork and Beans video. It’s so viral I feel ill.

Musical hallucinosis is worse than earwo …

Musical hallucinosis is worse than earworms.

The mighty Dresden Codak on Jen Wang, who draws pictures and comics and things.

Todd Moody, Thomas Nagel (naturally), Daniel Dennet, Jaron Lanier, Elizier Yudkovsky and Ryan North on p-zombies, consciousness and what-it’s-like-ness. This was going to be a rant, but it seemed redundant.

Post titles are apparently passé. Get u …

Post titles are apparently passé. Get used to it, internets, and I will try to do the same.

Rice Boy (a webcomic previously mentioned last December) is finally complete, at 400-plus pages.

Webcomics that are unlike Rice Boy, which go on indefinitely with multiple story arcs (say, Achewood) may eventually become the longest-running type of serial storytelling ever. TV shows generally run out before a decade. Many regular dead-tree comics have been running for many decades now, but those are mostly corporate properties that get passed from writer to writer every few years; the ones written by a single writer tend to be self-contained semi-coherent stories (Gaiman’s Sandman, say, or Preacher by Ennis) that tend to not last longer than five or six years.

On the other hand, newspaper comic strips can be the product of a single writer and can run for an awfully long time – the oldest is The Katzenjammer Kids, which I have not read but has been ongoing since 1897 (it does include a lawsuit, a competing strip done by the disgruntled creator from 1914-1979, and other such entertaining diversions). But webcomics are much easier to produce and distribute than newspaper comic strips. Will there still be an Achewood in 2080, or will I have to blog a miserable requiem for it sometime before that?

Rice Cream

If you happen to be a user of Cream/Vim, and you were used to having multiple sessions and opening new files by just typing cream filename, then you may have noticed as I did recently that this no longer works. Apparently multiple sessions are gone, even though the option is still there in the Settings menu. Fortunately, as the previous link points out, if you enable tabbed documents on top of single session mode, things start to behave semi-normally; you can use cream filename from anywhere and Firefox extensions like It’s All Text start working again. And then you get used to having one big Cream/Vim session sitting in a designated workspace all day while the tabs come and go, instead of opening and closing dozens of separate sessions.

Recently discovered the strange and compelling Rice Boy. It’s a webcomic, yes, but quite unlike most other webcomics. I would say it was surreal or fantastic, but that could be said of practically any webcomic for a given flavour of “fantastic”. For some reason Rice Boy reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki films -not in the sense that it’s manga-like in any way, but in the sense that there is a very similar sense of the fantastic. Something that almost hints at the numinous.

Iboga, Or The Joys of Gødland

I’ve just discovered Gødland by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli. I don’t think I’ve been so taken aback by a comic in ages.

Gødland is a seemingly retro superhero comic in the idiom and style of the great Kirby. Actually, as the co-creators point out, it’s actually in the genre of Kirby. Think New Gods or early Fantastic Four. It’s big, it’s cosmic, it’s shiny, muscular, craggy-jawed and beetle-browed. Kirby arms and shoulders, eyes and foreheads. Jesus christ, the KIRBY DOTS. I can’t believe how much I’ve missed Kirby dots. And Kirby motion lines; thick and solid, almost physical. Unashamed Kirbytech, giant god-machines of COSMIC SIGNIFICANCE. And thought balloons. I actually hadn’t realized until now that thought balloons had largely passed out of style.

It’s magnificent.

Naturally, if for some insane reason you didn’t like Kirby at his trippiest, it’s unlikely that you’ll like Gødland. Not that Gødland is particularly trippy -it’s actually less far-out-cosmic than, say, New Gods. (So far. Though the Iboga mythos was pretty far out.) Comparatively down-to-earth. But by the standards of the modern grim-n-gritty-verse, it’s way out there. Everything old is new again. Yay.

Soaking It Up Like A Sponge

I don’t know how I forgot this one, but in the last few weeks I also finally got around to reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was every bit as good as everyone says. It doesn’t hurt that I’m a comic-book geek in any case.

Speaking of comics: I’m enjoying the SMASHiness of World War Hulk, god help me. And I see Thor’s back. Wasn’t gone for very long, was he? Yawn. The Dark Tower comics are more like the books than I expected, which is a good thing. I keep obsessively re-reading Kabuki – The Alchemy by David Mack, though this one isn’t new. And in current DCdom, I’m not terribly impressed by Sinestro Corps and still not following Countdown properly. Evil Kyle is so totally not working. Also, why are they shuffling Flashes like a deck of cards? Just pick one… Any one. Joss Whedon’s Buffy Season Eight is … well, it’s okay so far. Vaguely Buffyesque, though I’m having a little difficulty recognizing people beyond the core characters. I’ll tell you what’s good, though: Mike Carey’s Crossing Midnight is really going places. I missed the entire Annihilation mega-event, and perhaps because of that I was pleasantly surprised by Annihilation Conquest: Prologue. Not least because Moondragon and the new Quasar -of all people- as a gay couple seems to actually work, and hopefully will not end with one of them getting killed and the other one crying in the rain. Arcana is rubbish. Avengers (both New and Mighty) was a little meh for a while, though I do want to try and follow the upcoming Skrull-invasion mega-event. (Why? I don’t know, I’m compelled. Anyway, it’s not like I’m buying this stuff for money or anything.) Oh, and another unexpected treat is Shazam – The Monster Society of Evil by none other than the magnificent Jeff Smith, he of Bone fame. And I actually am enjoying the extra-vile The Boys by Garth Ennis. It’s very Ennis, only more so.

Television: watched Battlestar Galactica season three. Weak overall with a few nice episodes, I thought. So… goddamn… cheesy. I seem to remember liking the early part of  the season better, but it never really recovered from all the filler episodes in the middle. Unfortunately, I could give a fuck whether Adama Jr. and Starbuck end up boinking or not. And I like All Along the Watchtower as much as the next guy, but that was a rather bad cover version. That said, the finale was… an interesting choice of last-minute-twist. Tigh and the Chief are the only characters I actually like, so expect me to be voting Cylon from next season onwards.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Heroes-hate on certain feeds of my acquaintance. After watching Heroes and Battlestar Galactica back-to-back in the last few months, I have to say: man, I wish Lost was back already. Or Prison Break, or something. Or I need to start watching this Dexter thing everyone’s on about. Or Bones. People are recommending Bones. If it sucks, please, people, tell me now before I risk my fragile brain.

And speaking of risking my fragile brain, isn’t there another Harry Potter coming out or something? Ugh.

Warm Reboot

The attempt to catch up on my reading continues. It’s what I’ve been doing of late, mostly, instead of blogging. Or writing, if it comes to that. But let’s not even go there.

During the un-blogged gap: first, finished Accelerando and another Charles Stross, Glasshouse, which I liked better. I found the former book a little too “yay, Singularity”. No, I’m not even sure what I mean -it’s not that he didn’t manage to surprise me, because he did. But the rapidly telescoping timeline of the story gave me a weird sense of vertigo. That said, Stross is very good, and I’ve long since added him to that list of writers whose books I will buy on sight. And I need to re-read both those books while sober.

Later, rooting around a book sale with very little to say for itself (and also, inexplicably, buried in abridged editions of David Copperfield), found a Stephen King going a-begging, a nice, fat Hearts in Atlantis- which, King-like, is overwrought in spots but sweet and sad, also King-like. Or at least, like King at his best. Also found Peter Straub’s Lost Boy, Lost Girl at the same book sale. Now, I’d been eyeing this in various bookstores for quite a while now, but as it turns out, I didn’t like it much. Seemed too formulaic, not like Straub at all. Not that I’m in any position to judge, having only read one other book by him -and that may well be the problem, that I was expecting something like the magnificent Shadowland and got, instead, a retread of a generic Stephen King story.

A week or two after the book sale I went a little mad and spent a fat wad of cash buying books. Read Ursula Le Guin’s Changing Planes, a little book but a tasty morsel. I almost wish it had gone on in that vein for a little longer, but that might have become unpalatable. Something almost Borgesque there. Moved on to a Dan Simmons-fest, with Ilium, Olympos and Hyperion. No, I really had not read Hyperion before… I’ll not comment, since as far as I know pretty much everyone justifiably loved that book. Ilium was actually a re-read, but I had forgotten almost everything about it except that it was some sort of remake of the Iliad, and was pleasantly surprised. Actually, because I read Ilium and Olympos back-to-back, I can’t remember where one leaves off and the other begins. I remember being just a tad melancholy when Olympos started explaining away all the sheer weirdness -I wouldn’t have minded not having some of the exposition in exchange for the sheer sense of wonder, you know?

The last book in the pile, which I’m just starting on and trying to make it last until I get my hands on the Hyperion sequels (so that I always have something to read next, of course), is Justina Robson’s Living Next Door to the God of Love. Justina Robson is another writer whose books I have resolved to buy on sight. This particular book, I’m not clear yet on what the hell is going on, but this is in no way a bad thing.

I’d post at more length on some of these stories, but I’m not much of a reviewer. For one thing, these days I’m instantly awed by anybody who ever actually finishes writing a book.

Forgot one book from my buying spree: Alastair Reynolds and Absolution Gap. This is actually the last book in a series, which I didn’t know until I was halfway through it. I just picked it up at random, just to test the waters. Amazingly, despite being at the end of a series, Absolution Gap is great, no sense of missing context. Solid, hard sf, with a sort of slightly campy gothic-horror feel surfacing every now and then.

Really, all I have to say is: I like all these books. Read them if you find them around.

Meanwhile, in other news: while not quite as dramatic as some previous online “housecleaning” sessions, I’ve just been cleaning out my online presence, mostly by deleting half a dozen old accounts on various unused or little-used services; one notable casualty being my five-year-old Blogger blog. Amusingly, it was only today that I realized that this WordPress blog is now a year old, give or take some days. I suppose I should stop thinking of it as the “new” blog, eh?

Tumblr and Twitter, the short-attention-span twins, both survive the cull, as does Last.fm. I’d add Last.fm and Twitter widgets to the sidebar here, but -to my mild shock- apparently WordPress.com doesn’t support them yet. What is this, the Middle Ages?

Meanwhile, over at Achewood, hilarity ensues as Ray lolcats Roast Beef. I find this extra amusing because of the use of “lolcat” as a verb. THE HELL WHY DID YOU LOLCAT ME YOU SON OF A BITCH!? Heh.

I/O Error

So my hard disk crashed and I lost all my stuff. Ho hum.

As Drac noted, I am comparatively calm about this -mostly because I didn’t lose all my stuff. Both work and personal email is in Gmail these days, so that’s fine. A gigabyte or so of work-related data is rsynced daily to a server at work, so that’s fine. Novel and associated notes are tarballed and emailed to myself on a daily basis, so that’s fine. Most everything else important is on a weekly backup, which means I’m losing precisely a week’s worth of data, given that my weekly backups go on Fridays and the crash happened Thursday evening -but nothing life-threatening. Apparently backing up really is a Good Thing.

There was a hairy moment with some freelance writing work I’m doing these days -I’d forgotten to back that up. I’d only been on it for two or three days -it just didn’t occur to me. I should have put it in one of the directories which are automatically backed up, but I set the backing-up cron jobs a long time and had mostly forgotten about it. Still, working at a tech company has its advantages. They dug out the external USB cables for me and I managed to recover those precious twenty-eight kilobytes. (OpenOffice makes very small documents… the plain-text version is only a little smaller)

The deadline for the freelance job was Friday, so I had to temporarily put my hard drive troubles on hold, borrow the flatmate’s laptop and stay up till 3am on Friday morning, accidentally pressing F1 far too often on that stupid Thinkpad keyboard. Still, no harm done.

They had a replacement hard drive by the time I got to work Friday morning, and I’d gotten around to reinstalling Ubuntu (from a Dapper CD that was lying around) by noon. Since then, I’ve been

• re-upgrading Dapper to Edgy.
• Firefox 2 and setting up my handful of extensions again -I always forget how to get Gmail Manager to show up in a toolbar of my choice as opposed to the bottom corner of the status bar. Every time.
• doing things like this, every ten minutes: Hmm, let’s watch a movie. Wha- where the hell is- oh, right. New install. Sigh. apt-get install vlc. Hmm.

That’s all the good news. The bad news is, I can’t seem to wedge the old hard drive open long enough to fish out all the shit I had in it -the stuff that’s was never backed up because A) it was always going to be moved to DVD, in a few days or weeks and B) because it was just too goddamn big to back up in the meantime. This means maybe five gigs of music (Goddammit! I just got that Thunderbirds are Now! album), maybe twelve gigs of comics (Goddammit! I was really and extremely looking forward to reading Wood’s Local over the weekend) and of course, the next two episodes of Prison Break- so there goes my stash of weekend entertainment.

Of course, a digital packrat’s hard disk is usually littered with obscure goodies. There may have been gigabytes of interesting stuff in there I’d just forgotten about (I know I save a lot of stuff off the Internets to read offline… I just never see it again once it goes into the “Crap off the Internets to read” subdirectory.) Non-critical stuff, of course. Anything you can’t remember is there probably wasn’t important in the first place. No, I’m sure they weren’t important. But they might have been interesting.

Living By Architecture Alone

Cities make an ideal laboratory for evolutionary biologists to watch adaptation happening before their eyes
Evolution gets busy in the urban lab – life – 26 April 2006 – New Scientist

Yeah, no shit. Oh, wait… you didn’t mean people, did you?

Naturally, most of the rapid adaptation that happens among humans is cultural/psychological rather than biological. I assume there are keen-eyed memeticists and anthropologists watching the urban evolution-o-rama and taking notes. on this somewhat more immediate (and therefore more interesting in an instant-gratification sort of way) level of variation and selection.

[I]t often becomes noticeable the extent to which rural towns and villages are constructed against the nearest city. Rural inhabitants’ own understandings of themselves continually exist in relation to nearby cities, with their potential to symbolise modernity, allow alternate social spaces, create different possibilities for personhood and social life and range of diverse phenomenological backgrounds and neighbourhoods.

Moreover [...] the very existence of cities is dependent upon the differences between the persons who inhabit them. It is a foundational diversity that is responsible for bringing the many different types of city into being; the discursive city, the mythical city, the physical city, the poetic city, the underground city, the late-night city, the working city, the women’s city and the men’s city. To this list we might also add [...] the ethnic city, divided city, gendered city, contested city, de-industrialised city, modernist city, postmodern city, fortress city, sacred city and traditional city [...]

Thus the city does not exist in an individual’s mind or ‘out there’ as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people’s emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being being. Or put another way the city is not simply architecture alone, but a curious melding of ‘flesh and stone’.
Cities: an Anthropological Perspective

And to this profligate proliferation of cities we might add at least one more: the mundane city, the everyday city, the one that faded slowly when you stopped seeing it and just isn’t there any more.

Jack Hawksmoor in The Authority by Warren Ellis is a subspecies of human hyper-adapted to living in cities. Ellis interprets this in a delightfully cartoonish way, but that’s an interesting notion anyway. In a way it begs the question. Cities themselves evolve, I suppose, at least in a metaphorical sense. There’s variation and selection of a sort. But maybe we’re mistaken and they’re not all beasts of the same stripe. Could be cities are more different than they are alike, and to adapt to one is to lose another. Would I call myself a human adapted to living in cities? Maybe not. The city bothers me. It’s messy and noisy and dangerous and full of strangers. The city gives me adrenaline poisoning. I’m sure it’s killing me, sure and deadly as the cancer sticks. But I couldn’t leave it, either -I mean, maybe I could leave this city, though I don’t want to, but I can’t really entertain the idea of living outside cities altogether. I can’t take bucolic romanticism seriously. I may not be very well adapted to the city, but I’m addicted to it.

Or take Tom O’Bedlam in Morrison’s Invisibles, who declares that cities are a viral parasitic superspecies from outer space whose sole purpose is to drive their host -us- to create more cities, until we choke the earth with urbanity and take the virus away with us in spaceships to infect other places. (Of course, he was mad as a hatter. Poor Tom.) Not cities that we live in, but cities that live through us. Pirsig says something like this, in New York at the end of Lila -the city as super-organism, overtaking, overriding. Maybe it was just NY getting to him, eh? It seemed to contradict his own thesis, his Metaphysics of Quality, what with him placing the Intellectual so clearly as a product or output of the Social.

Writing about cities is hard. Small towns, world-spanning uber-megalopolises, it’s all been done to death. And when you’ve lived in a single city all of your life, in a way the city is writing you. Your perceptions of cities in general, no matter how coloured by what you’ve seen pictures of or what you’ve read about, fall back on the defining reality of your own blood and brick, flesh and stone. That’s where all the real building blocks come from. The smells and textures. The feeling of walking down the street, paranoid or pronoid by turns.

Who Loves Bill Sienkiewicz?

Vertigo comics with sample downloadable PDFs of first issues. Good for a preview, if you’ve heard people raving about these and haven’t got around to checking them out. The available first issues include Moore’s Swamp Thing, Morrison’s Doom Patrol, Gaiman’s Sandman, Willingham’s Fables and some newer stuff like The Exterminators and Rushkoff’s Testament. The first four, at least, are all magnificent must-reads. I’d pick Doom Patrol as a personal favourite, but it’s a tough choice.

Comics I’ve just got my hands on but haven’t gotten around to reading yet: DMZ, Pride of Baghdad, Casanova, Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewicz and a neither here-nor-there issue 6 of Local, which I have to now somehow resist reading until I find the first five issues.

I’m also half-heartedly trying to follow the Wildstorm reboot, with a fairly predestined pairing of Garth Ennis with Midnighter. Formulaic Ennis so far, only without so much overt piss-taking. I suppose that’s what he’s got The Boys for. Now I’m wondering if the faux-Justice League blowjob scene is a pastiche of Worldwatch (which is itself a soft-porn pastiche of Stormwatch, which is itself being rebooted, though not very interestingly so far) or whether both of them were a pastiche of something else, like the Comedian’s almost-rape-scene in Watchmen. (Well, probably not that one. But still…)

I’m even more half-heartedly trying to follow the current Big Crisis War Mega Crossover super-stunt-a-roos in both Marvel and DC: Civil War and the post-Crisis One Year Later/52 respectively. A lot to wade through and surprisingly trivial to keep track of, which suggests somehow that not a lot is going on. I liked the Thor clone, in principle, but dude, enough clones already. As if. They’ve got Ultimate Spider-clone-saga happening in fast-forward and now Emma Frost clones by the thousands off in one of those interminable X-series. A good Cassandra Nova comeback in Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, though, which remains the only readable thing in the X-universe ever since Brubaker lost the plot with the Vulcan/Shiar thing in Uncanny. Outside the big events, Morrison has been writing Batman since 655 or so and its rather good. Actually, the immediate previous story arc wasn’t all that bad either. There’s a new Aquaman. (But really, who cares?) Looks just like the old one and has the same name, but isn’t the same one. Meanwhile, Neil Gaiman’s very promising take on Jack Kirby’s Eternals seems stalled at issue 4 of 6. Did 5 come out while I wasn’t looking?

I recently read David Mack’s entire Kabuki canon: all seven story arcs, all the way from the clumsy early black-and-whites to the magnificently gorgeous Alchemy, with which I would wallpaper my room if I had enough energy to do such a thing.

And the answer to the question is: everybody loves Bill Sienkiewicz. Or they should, at least. Or else I’ll know the reason why. Bill Sienkiewicz is the kind of guy you want to illustrate your life in startling angles.

Phonographic

Kieron Gillen’s Phonogram is a comic that sounds like staying up nights in the 90s listening to Suede and the Manic Street Preachers.

Also, it makes me want to get drunk.

And now I can’t sleep.