Eccentric Flower:200907/Jupiter Bears Etc
From Eccentric Flower
Jupiter, Bears, Etc.
I hadn't thought I had slept that badly last night, until I got to work and found that my eyes will not focus on the computer screens without watering and itching. I may have to go home and take a nap and see if I can salvage the afternoon.
I've been taking melatonin. Half a milligram every night shortly before bed. It is extremely helpful but apparently not infallible. Last night and Saturday night it failed utterly. I'm hoping this is not a sign of diminishing returns already.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
(If Lyn hadn't said it, I would have.)
Silly designers do not realize that any allegedly "bear-proof" container simply hasn't found the right bear yet. I'm with the gent at Consumerist: The problem here is that you people keep insisting on trying to go eat and sleep in places with bears. Stop trying to eat food in places where bears are and this wouldn't happen.
(I believe that the urge to camp outdoors - or, frankly, to spend the night anywhere which does not have running water, proper toilets, and real beds - is some sort of atavism, possibly even a sign of dangerous insanity. I mean, we evolved so we wouldn't have to sleep in the rain and shit into a hole. I inherit this trend from my grandfather; like him, my idea of roughing it is when the room service is slow. My maternal grandmother was a wonderful woman, but she was a Camper, and as a result some of my earliest memories of family vacations are traumatic ones.)
As long as we're talking about my beliefs in the way some of you are insane: I can't abide Subway, I can't understand how anyone eats at Subway, and I love to collect anti-Subway stories. My basic policy on Subway is that if I want to get poor quality cold cuts on bad bread with second-tier condiments, I can go to the grocery store and get the same horrid, bland experience for less cash per pound. If I get a sub somewhere, the idea is to have something that's better, or has better quality ingredients, than I could make myself.
The story about the death of Sue Dibny and its repercussions, in the text below this week's Kimono's Townhouse, is absolutely true, and is why I don't read comic books anymore or participate in comic book culture. Oh, I don't mean just this one example - although it's pretty egregious. I'm referring to the tendency that comics titles have these days where once a year or so they have to upend the entire universe, kill all the characters and revive them, reveal that good characters were secretly evil and evil characters were secretly good, fracture the title into seventeen titles, refute all continuity, or otherwise change all the labels around in some unexpected way.
When I was a kid you knew what was consistent and solid in comic books: Superman was always going to be squeaky clean and the biggest square on the planet, Batman was always going to be just this close to dangerously psycho but basically a good guy, Peter Parker was always going to be the whiner who you should be sympathetic for because nothing ever broke right for him but whom you instead wanted to punch in the face, the X-Men were always going to be kids who had much more interesting lives than you did, et cetera et cetera.
But I grew up in the days before everything had to be ironic and people got bored after seventeen seconds of something, before John Byrne made comics safe for frothing egomaniacs, and before the stench of desperation was wafting so strongly from the corridors of the comic book industry. Nowadays the irony is that the only comics I ever read are the formerly edgy, disreputable indie books - because they are the only ones which keep to a consistent story or characterization. Only the indies can afford to treat comics as some sort of literature - ironically, because they have so much less to lose.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in Fifteen Minutes. As usual, see the movie before you read this - although I guess we were the last people on the planet to see it. (It was good. In fact, like Dolores Umbridge and the Novel of Interminability, I felt the film improved on the book by condensing it and cutting the fatty bits. I don't know what crack some of these film critics are smoking.)
I note with some minor anguish that Cleolinda comments: "In the 15M itself, I have now changed 'wireless' to 'radio,' since people were having such a hard time figuring out what was going on there." I realize the web is filled with idiots, but I had sort of expected better of Cleolinda's audience. I gather we are now raising a generation which believes that "wireless" has never meant anything but a type of internet connection.
Every couple of months someone new discovers Action Park, and every couple of months I go and reread all the pages about it simply because they intrigue and astonish me. Then I end up diving back into the list of amusement park "incidents," even though I have read about some of the major ones a thousand times, and then I always inevitably end up at Yesterland and there goes my morning, even if it is mostly dedicated to the inferior of the two Disney parks.
Actually, Disney has been so busily ruining the Florida park over the past few years - from that same misguided impulse to shake everything apart that plagues comic books - that in some ways the teeny, tiny, crowded, older, cruftier California version is the better one, because it's purer - still has Mr. Toad, has not sullied the Tiki Room with Gilbert Gottfried, et cetera, et cetera.
Fortunately, I was in no fit state to get work done anyway, so perhaps it's for the best that I'm looking at web pages I've already seen many times instead.
And now, I shall link two completely disjoint items! Nothing up my sleeve ... presto! ("That trick never works!") I can't decide whether this is a spectacularly bad idea or a spectacularly good one.
You may have noticed that entries here have been fairly pleasant and polite of late - because I have been sleeping. You may thank the past two nights of sleep failure for the (hopefully temporary) return of the crabbiness which you love so much. I'm sorry I'm less interesting when I get sleep!
P.S. Not that anyone cares, but I promise that there will eventually be a new Photo of the Day. It hasn't been apathy; it's been a lack of good photos.
Oh yeah, there's that. Other than their sausage biscuits there is very little I am willing to ever eat at McDonald's.
I cannot imagine going to a Subway in Montreal.
(Incidentally, I am assuming that for any number of reasons you will not be going to this year's Worldcon. Is this a correct assumption?)
-- 17:15, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Mankind invented shelter, what, a million years ago or so? Indoors: Not Just a Fad.
Subway is good for the quick $5 foot-long meatball and provolone sub. Their cheesesteaks aren't bad, either.
-- 18:47, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Addenda
A Few Questions. I don't know why, but I really liked these. My answers: B, C, B, C, E.
"I know shit about Star Wars, but this little blue man with the white hat and the dead ram is kinda cute." Aaaand that sound you heard was Carrie McLaren getting pigpiled by Star Wars fans. But the softwork is undeniably cute.
-- 19:22, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Aaaaand ...
The official video for "88 Lines About 44 Women."
(As BB says: "NSFW in a 1950s National Geographic sort of way.")
-- 19:27, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Joy:
Camping is fun! Especially after a few days when you get used to the pace. I grew up sailing, which I prefer to camping since you get many of the benefits (away from people, out in nature, fresh air, etc) without the drawbacks (still have plumbing, no dirt, no schlepping gear, and importantly NO BEARS).
-- 19:57, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Oh, I should properly write up My First Camping Trip story someday -- I know I've told Columbina, but the rest of y'all would enjoy it. There were BEARS. (My first camping trip was when I was...hmm. Twenty? Hrrm. No, maybe 21 or 22. And there were bears. I've never been camping since!)
However. HOWEVER. I will be going to Burning Man this year! I am honestly excited about this. There will not be bears, and Rich and I will sleep in his RV, and I think we will split the difference just right between playa and posh. I observe very few societal restraints on my Rose-ness as it is; I just can't resist the call of a place where there will be NONE.
-- 21:01, 27 July 2009 (BST)
oh dear, the poor Dibnys. you know that the point has really been missed when they're being resurrected as part of a zombie horde for this summer's big cash-grab. i'm not in the camp demanding my personal childhood nostalgia regurgitated with better colouring, but there does need to be a middle ground.
i'm stifling the recommendation machine--quick, tell me which comics *you do* enjoy.
-- 21:20, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Chip eats salads at Subway and McDonald's, when he's in a hurry, and says they're not bad. But then he likes camping.
And SOME film critics agreed with you on HP6, Columbine ... or do you not count online film critics as being as valid as print critics? I saw that comment a few entries back.
What amazed me about HP6 was the sheer number of comments on my review from fans who hated the movie passionately because their character was diminished or their favorite scene on page 296 was missing. I can understand that to a certain extent, but the sheer numbers and level of passionate hate was a little surprising.
-- 21:22, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Settsimaksimin: I don't read anything in single-issue form anymore. Life is too short. I wait for arcs/stories to be bound into "graphic novel" or trade format, and buy those.
I am generally willing to risk any title which bears one of the following author's names on its cover: Mike Mignola, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis (although I can't get into Transmetropolitan), Kyle Baker, Jeph Loeb, Daniel Torres.
I will almost always stop to investigate the work of the following artists I love: Tim Sale, Brian Bolland, Michael Kaluta, Charles Vess, Jon J Muth, Rick Veitch, Alex Ross ... and Daniel Torres.
Nearly everything that comes out of Dark Horse or America's Best Comics is worth at least a look to see if it's worth buying. Usually it is.
Apart from that, I generally buy only one-shot, encapsulated Batman stories (I particularly like the weirder alternate-history ones, what DC used to call Elseworlds). I grew up on the angular Jim Aparo Batman, and that's what Batman "looks like" to me. I have several books of Aparo arcs from the eighties.
However, the single greatest stretch of sustained Batman storytelling and art was Detective Comics #471-476, writer:Steve Englehart pencils:Marshall Rogers inks:Terry Austin, which DC has collected (on inferior paper, alas) in a book called Strange Apparitions. All Batman fans should own that, The Killing Joke, and the first Frank Miller Dark Knight Returns set (the ones he did before he lost his mind).
Other than that I tend to collect older stuff (I can always use more Will Eisner Spirit collections, for example) and material from my childhood which is not quite as good as I remember (the Perez/Wolfman run of Teen Titans, groundbreaking then, reads as Cheese Whiz now, and my thoughts about Trevor von Eeden's Thriller will make an entry one day).
-- 22:58, 27 July 2009 (BST)
Jette: The problem is that I don't include any online film review sites in my regular orbits and probably should, but there's a set of print ones where I essentially see every review they write.
-- 23:02, 27 July 2009 (BST)
So, I'm going to speak again from my vantage of the one person on earth who hasn't read all the Harry Potter books. I found the plot of this movie to be completely impenetrable. I didn't get some of the key plot points until I went back and read a summary on Wikipedia. (For instance, if they explained why Dumbledore's hand is like that, I totally missed it.)
And then some things seemed to be handled so clumsily. I gather that, in the books, Snape's motivations and allegiances are unclear until the end of the series. Here, they're so transparent that I thought it sucked all of the emotional resonance out of the last ten minutes of the film. (It also didn't help that I thought, "Ooh, it's a Journey concert.")
And don't even get me started on teenage romantic comedy.
-- 02:24, 28 July 2009 (BST)
You're not the only one. My brother-in-law has deliberately not read any of the books before seeing the films and he didn't even know the major spoiler on this (how he managed to avoid it, I do not know). He seemed to like it.
Snape's motivations and allegiances, and whether he can be trusted, are more complex than they appear. I didn't think the film overly simplified that (or at least not fatally). Of course Harry has made up his mind, but that's Harry.
The teenage romances were actually the bits I liked best of this film. And that's me saying that. Sorry, I think they're all cute kids and watching them be hormonal and such is entertaining to me.
As for Dumbledore's hand, they did explain it, sorta, but you had to really be looking for it. When he shows Harry the two Horcruxes he has already found and destroyed (well, Harry destroyed the first one), he says something like "Destroying them isn't easy," and he gestures to the ring, then displays his hand prominently. But I agree that's a little too subtle.
Thing of it is, I don't think these films are really aimed at people who haven't read the books. Both of you.
-- 03:46, 28 July 2009 (BST)
I'm the other one. I've only read the first two...
But then, I didn't even notice Dumbledore's hand.
Aaaand, there does not exist a long enough extension cord for me to go camping. I completely agree with your abhorence for pooping in holes, etc. Mrissa has it right. Roughing it is when there's only one TV in the suite. Or no wireless access...
-- 06:14, 28 July 2009 (BST)
Peebles: Dumbledore's hand gets a much fuller exposition in the last book. I remember it being referred to in No. 6, but I don't think it was explained what had happened.
I haven't seen the movie yet (have to find a babysitter one of these days), but Snape's motivations aren't clear up until the end of No. 7.
-- 15:12, 28 July 2009 (BST)
i got sucked into (Tr)Action Park and need boggle support for the concept of a *vertical loop* water slide. my brain refuses to process it even though there's a photograph. ow. ow. ow.
-- 17:06, 28 July 2009 (BST)
Mrissa:
Camping is when you go all the way down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast instead of ordering up. Also, if the hotel pool is outdoors? Camping.
Subway is something I will eat if I am traveling in an emergency and did not pack food and the other alternative is McDonald's. Otherwise no. One of the very few things I miss about Omaha is that it had independent sub shops of pretty good quality.
I hear that Subway's bread is about a million times better in Montreal. I believe this report but still have not felt the urge to check it out, because hey, there I was in Montreal--why on earth would I eat Subway?
-- 17:09, 27 July 2009 (BST)