Skye Amounts to a Hill of Beans--Bold Beans

I just made a trip to the grocery store, and as I walked between the grocery store and the Starbucks, a homeless man, as I passed him, in a voice like Tom Waits' but slightly deeper, "Tch"ed derisively and said, "Shit. Like Bonny and Clive, man. What d'you, shoot bullet holes in French cars?"

At Starbucks I bought a bag of their Pike's Place coffee beans, each bag bearing a label marked with the signature of the person who scooped the beans and the date the beans were scooped--in my case, 3/12 and "Skye", and Skye put a little heart next to her name. Thanks, Skye. I hereby pledge to love you with the boundless love of a man who's never met you, knows nothing about you, and intends to grind and percolate your beans.

Actually, I do like to imagine Skye is some incredibly beautiful and affectionate beatnik. I guess Skye sounds more like a hippy name. That's cool, too--whatever you're into, babe.

Machines to Communicate and Manifest Thoughts and Feelings

So much for not needing to go out again for several days--I was out of hummus yesterday, so I had to go to Ralph's to get more. For lunch, I went across the street to a mall called Fashion Valley. I had a really nice spinach stromboli.

Before I left the house, as I was getting into my car, I took a stereo out of my car and gave it to some kids playing basketball on the street. I'm having some space issues right now, so I need to get rid of some things, and this stereo, which I've had for maybe fifteen years and which I haven't plugged in in ten, I figured I couldn't get more than ten dollars for. I was just going to throw it away, but the kids were near the trash can.

It feels like a big event just talking to any of the neighbours. I guess I really am just not that in to people. On The Howard Stern Show the other day, there was a discussion about a BBC documentary Stern saw about people who fell in love with, and had forms of sex with, inanimate objects. One woman was an Olympic gold medallist archer who fell in love with her bow, only to break up with it and begin a relationship with the Eiffel Tower, which she considered female, which I guess means she's a lesbian now. Artie Lange made a good point about how it's more work to love a person, and that these people are running from that. This is why even just thinking about having more than a few friends starts to give me a headache. I'm not even that great at keeping up with the few friends I do have, to be honest. Which probably is a big strike against any future I might have in entertainment media, which seems to be largely dependant on networking.

Just working on my comic takes so much time, I'm astounded creative people ever have time to forge relationships with others. I've been trying to do this new chapter Boschen and Nesuko style--normally with Venia's Travels, I tend to draw a lot of the pages, and then colour them in groups. With Boschen and Nesuko, I'd draw, ink, and colour one page a day. I think I'm going to go back to that permanently--it's a lot of more satisfying, and I have a better idea of how the chapter's shaping up along the way.

I watched the tenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night, featuring the discovery of a devastated, possibly post-apocalyptic Earth. They ought to've shown the Statue of Liberty, just to go all the way with the Planet of the Apes homage. Of course, if this is anything like New Caprica, they'll talk now about how inhospitable and irradiated the planet is, only for a couple episodes down the line to show tropical foliage and Apollo and Starbuck running around naked in the middle of the night. It was a good episode--the whole airlocking standoff was nice and tense, though I didn't quite buy Adama's super dramatic reaction to finding out Tigh was a Cylon. It felt a bit too much like, "The show's going away for a while, so give it all you got!" It was nice to see Baltar switched back to being a more thoughtful character.

Typewriter Ribbons

The version of Final Fantasy VI I've been playing is the old Super Nintendo version that was renamed Final Fantasy III for the U.S. release because the actual Final Fantasys II, III, and V hadn't been released in the U.S. and IV had been released as II. But in recent years, the games have gotten U.S. releases on Play Station and Game Boy Advance under their original names and with improved graphics and sound.

So, last night, I decided to try out the Game Boy Advance version of VI, figuring it would be kind of a pain in the ass tracking down the emulator and rom. Instead, I was surprised to find both, virus free, after two very quick google searches; I got the GBA emulator here and the Final Fantasy VI rom here. The sites don't even have popup ads. Either Nintendo just doesn't give a fuck or these sites are based outside of the country or . . . Hell, I don't know how this works.

Wikipedia has a vague, almost answer for me;

Another legal consideration is that many emulators of fifth generation and newer consoles require a dumped copy of the original machine's BIOS in order to function. This software is a copyrighted work and in many cases not accessible without specialized hardware, often requiring the user to obtain the file illegally. However, several emulators for platforms such as Game Boy Advance are capable of running without a BIOS file, using high-level emulation to simulate BIOS subroutines at a slight cost in emulation accuracy.

The obsolescence of the Game Boy Advance probably has something to do with it, too. Anyway, I still think Final Fantasy VI is the best Final Fantasy game, so I recommend giving it a try. The Advance version also has a much better translation than the version I'm used to, though all the nudity's still edited out.

I've gone back to reading War and Peace over the past couple of nights now that I'm in a place where I don't have to read as much for my comic. I keep having to put the book aside for long periods, but it's amazing how easily I remember what's happening and who the characters are, particularly considering this novel is constantly introducing characters. Tolstoy seems to have not needed much space to make character full and distinct. Last night I read a bit where Rostof, a young soldier finding himself in the heat of battle for the first time, is confused by not finding enemies to "cut down" and how he'd always thought fighting would involve cutting down enemies. The nice thing about this is that, while we believe it, Tolstoy didn't feel the need to establish beforehand that Rostof felt this way--we realise his misconception at the same time he does. It was one of those moments that remind me good storytellers are able to strike chords all the way at the bottom levels of our conscious processes.

I watched the ninth episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night. What a base ship of missed opportunities that episode was. Instead of having a nuanced dialogue between Baltar and Roslin where conflict emerges from both characters' maturations and unacknowledged pettiness, Baltar becomes a two dimensional foil for Roslin, as his character completely changes, as he often has this season, to suit the individual episode. And now Roslin's got a hallucinatory angel of god companion--it's like they accidentally hit on compelling stuff with Balter, get worried we're liking him too much, and artificially grafted the same stuff to Roslin. Gods, I hope she dies soon. I can't take many more of her typewriter line readings. I don't remember her being this bad in the miniseries--I think maybe the actress is just completely tired of playing the character.

And nice work trying to monopolise Xena Warrior Cylon on a Cylon ship. Yes, let's risk bloody conflict between two already tense groups for very little reward. What the frak does Adama see in her? It's definitely nice to have Lucy Lawless back--she elevated the performance levels just by walking into the room to meet Roslin.

I just got my copy of Watchmen back from my sister. Looking at the end, I see I remembered correctly that Sally Jupiter didn't have the corny line she spoke in the movie about how she couldn't hate The Comedian completely because he gave her Laurie. Once again, we can see the marks of Zack Snyder's big ham hand--gotta make sure we don't have too much moral ambiguity at the end of our movie. Remembering how Carla Gugino talked at Comic-Con about how she saw Sally as someone whose light had gone out a very long time ago, it seems to me she and Snyder had contrary purposes for the character. Maybe she should've directed . . .

Genetically Engineered or Toasted

Just did a YouTube search for a clip from The Misfits I wanted and didn't find. But I did come across this beautiful little thing;



The first voice is John Huston and the music near the end is some rather perfectly chosen Thelonious Monk. Normally for something like this, there'd be goopy melodramatic sad music, but the Monk music is so much better. It's what Kerouac meant when he said "beat"--beautiful and not yanked, sad but not false.

And The Misfits, I've long believed, is the most underrated movie in film history. Partly I think it's just that it's too big--directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller, staring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, it's too good to be true, so most people assume it isn't.

I didn't have much time for anything but comic yesterday. Lately I've been eating ambrosia apples, which I'm digging. They seem to have a mildly cinnamon flavour, which maybe ought to seem suspicious. They've only been around since the 1980s, who knows what kind of experiment wrought them.

I watched the eighth episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night--at last, we finally got a look at what appeared to be typical living conditions for a civilian living on a ship other than Colonial 1 and the Galactica. Still not quite enough, but it was something, at least. It's disappointing to see Adama behaving like a teenager, but it's coinciding with something I forgot to mention about the previous episode;

Colonel Tigh was right about something.

I've been keeping track, and I believe this is the second time in the history of the show where this has happened--first it was on New Caprica when he knew there'd be a raptor to receive transmissions from the occupied colony, and then it was calling for a weapons hold when the damaged Cylon base ship jumped into range. Of course, Tigh's probably mainly getting smarter because Adama's getting dumber. It's the inevitable seesaw of smarts--no two people on shows like this can be right at the same time and hold a conversation. But I'll take what I can get.

Well, I'd better start drawing . . .

Life Is and Is Not How You Dress It

I had a lot of errands to run yesterday, keeping me out of the house all day. But hopefully it's gotten me to where I won't have to leave the house again for several days while I draw the next chapter of my comic.

I went back to Mission Valley Centre mall yesterday and got actual Indian food from the Indian place where actual Indians work. It's really an anomaly in the food court--there's Taco Bell, Burger King, and this place with a massive, almost impossible to read menu and "Namiste" over the register. It's certainly not fast food in any literal sense, either. It took ten minutes to get my food. I got the mushroom masala with curry sauce. Good, and very hot.

Of course, I could not resist stopping at the arcade again and beating Soul Calibur III. Just a nice little boost to the ego during my journeys. Last night, I followed a link on 4chan to this flickr account of a cosplayer named BelleChere in an excellent costume of Ivy from Soul Calibur. By far the best Soul Calibur costume I've seen and I have certainly to agree with one flickr commenter who astutely told BelleChere, "u have so beautiful tits..... they are perfect ones!"

Knights of the Old Republic 2 crashed my computer twice last night. That is one buggy motherfucking game. I'd had too much sake to do much else but play video games at that point, so I reinstalled Final Fantasy VI. Yes, I went from a game that looks like this;



To a game that looks like this;



A lot of modern gamers just don't get it, but I'll take a better game with better writing over one with prettier graphics any day. Though this Final Fantasy VI cosplay I came across while doing the image search for that screenshot certainly qualifies as beautiful. If I were a woman, I'd cosplay every day.

I watched the seventh episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. It featured one of the Cylons explaining to the human government that the Cylons needed to be able to die in order to give life meaning. It's weird how eager a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors are to knock immortality without ever trying it. Just once, I'd like to see some character say, "I'm six million years old and it fucking rules, man." Trying to rationalise the negative aspects of existence generally has the aspect of cheapening them for me. I don't mean one should revel in despair, so much. I think my way of thinking goes to the concept of mono no aware. Sometimes, things are bad, sometimes they're good. They are, in any case.

No-one seems to be bringing up Baltar's miracle cancer cure, either. So much of what happens on that show makes everyone seem amazingly lazy.

Dialogue Choices and the Insurrection of the French Fry

I had to get a new coffee bean grinder to-day. It's exactly like the old one, except not broken. I threw the old one away, wondering if I could make some kind of handy gadget with the old motor if I were some sort of gear head. Maybe just a propeller beanie, like the kind Calvin wanted in Calvin and Hobbes.

I actually ate breakfast at a McDonald's inside a Wal-Mart to-day. Yes, that's white trash times two, but I needed the oil changed on my car. The big, pale guy at the McDonald's behind the register wore a Captain Picard tie.

I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic 2 over the past couple nights, for about an hour a night. The writing's better than the first game, and the dialogue trees to comply with different character paths are more complex. The game's notoriously unfinished state is more than a little noticeable, though--for some reason, LucasArts wanted it released when Obsidian were only about two thirds finished making it. So there are things like doors that won't open, subplots with no resolutions, and a lot of very low-res backgrounds, most noticeably star fields comprised of big blue jelly beans on black.

I watched Tim playing System Shock 2 a couple weeks ago, a game with even more flexibility in character creation and dialogue options, but with absolutely terrible writing. But I don't think I've come across any American game with a heavy focus on dialogue having genuinely good writing. I think maybe part of the problem is the writers think their job is to anticipate as many of the player's possible responses as they can. In reality, that's impossible. Focus needs to be placed on options of character paths that are interesting before credible. Assume the player is interesting, and your game will be interesting, too.

I was having a fantasy about directing Meryl Streep for voice acting work in such a game. I was imagining explaining to her her character's motives to say, "Nice shot!" and maybe saying it slightly differently depending on whether the player had chosen to be a Jedi or a Sith.

I watched the sixth episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night, featuring one of Ronald D. Moore's old Deep Space Nine cohorts, Nana Visitor. Yes, she was Just Visiting. *cough*. But I liked Deep Space Nine, it was nice to see her. She quickly out-acted Mary McDonnell. Anyone remember McDonnell from that big Miller's Outpost ad Kevin Costner did called Dances with Wolves?



That's authentic period early 1990s hair right there. Classy.

Anyway, it was a good episode. Starbuck and gang on the Cylon base ship was good. I liked the standoff between the sixes and the woman who was in the resistance on New Caprica.

The Small Despair

I have fake insomnia thanks to the time change, so I've just been re-watching some Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei. Who wants some satire of pop paedophilia?

I've Been Watching the Watchmen for a Long Time . . .

Since I attended the Watchmen panels at both the 2008 and 2007 Comic-Cons, I thought some people might like me to re-post my impressions from the time, so here you go;

2008

2007

Nebula Nymphs

Speaking of superheroes and perversion, you may want to have a look at some of the fetish art of Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman.

Looking for some Pre-Raphaelite desktop wallpaper to-day, I found doing an extra large image search for "Bouguereau" turned up pictures of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

I think I've finally taught myself to write "Barack" instead of "Barrack". I could've been a right wing spin doctor;

"Sure, Obama is similar to Osama. Sure, his middle name is Hussein. But has anyone considered his first name? Barack? Like a barracks? An entire legion of al Qaeda are inside this man! Your friends on the Endor moon are walking into a trap!"

Maybe not. I guess with President Obama we can finally retire the Star Wars metaphors for political figures. Of course Cheney was enough of a douchebag to actually embrace comparisons between himself and Darth Vader. Tone deaf . . .

I neglected to mention watching the new Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles with breakfast yesterday. It was actually one of my favourite episodes of the series, featuring a lot of great showcases of dialogue where you can see the people talking trying subtly to test each other out, trying to figure out what's going on inside them, inside themselves, and deciding how much they can reveal or are revealing without realising it. And the aesthetic of Summer Glau with the pigeon was so perfect. There's something very pigeon-like about her face. Maybe more owl-like, but she has those delicate looking bones and very round eyes. Gods, that girl's fingers seem impossibly tiny.

I watched the fifth episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night. The show's internal sympathy seems to have moved completely from Roslin to Baltar. I like it--I kind of wish it had been done a little less broadly, but it's still pretty good.

Dreams of Assassination and Creation

Another dream last night--in this one, I'd gone to live with a woman in a gaudy bright yellow and red house. She was never around, so I pretty much had the place to myself, and one day I started noticing scraping sounds and footsteps just outside. This was followed by daily discoveries of small handwritten notes threatening my life. So I started carrying a rifle with a scope whenever I went out, and when one day someone started shooting at me, I shot back at my attacker killed him. Instead of walking up the hill to where the guy's body lay, I ignored it and continued home, figuring the less attention I gave to the incident, the better.

I saw Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen last night. It was almost exactly what I thought it would be, which is not to say I thought it was a bad movie. Even having seen it, I feel curiously unqualified to assess it, mainly because Snyder's style, which most people find beautiful and innovative, seems to me unremarkable at best and distracting at worst. The cinematography, which Roger Ebert praises in his review, seems muddy and lazy to me, at times borrowing directly from the comic, and at other times simply almost completely draining the palette of colour. This is a better adaptation of an Alan Moore comic than any that's come before, primarily because Zack Snyder managed to minimise his presence better than anyone else, but the stylistic decisions he had inevitably to make detracted, for me, substantially from the film.

But surely, you may say, Snyder's technique of speeding up and slowing down the footage at key moments, of focusing on the blood spilling out from the face at the impact of a punch, surely that gave you an impressively visceral impression of the violence.

Before I respond, I ask that you be sure you've seen this;



That's a scene I find very effective. Obviously, Snyder took a lot from it. But he missed something very important, and something rather crucial for Watchmen--the human vulnerability of the fighters. The Raging Bull style is mixed oddly with the fighting style of Matrix and Sin City, the latter film about revelling in continuous, improbable violence, and the former about long, dance-like sequences of flurries of punches. In both cases, we understand the violence as artificial and being conducted between beings who would be superhuman by real world standards.

But things happen in Watchmen that depend on recognition of the characters' truly human vulnerability. So when a scene switches abruptly from patently artificial fighting to what are supposed to be undeniably credible suppressions of the fighters, it feels completely arbitrary. Things don't happen because the story's convinced me they would naturally lead there, but because the script has dictated it. What this means is, something like Rorschach's unmasking, which was gut-wrenching in the comic, just feels like another item of development in the movie, catalogued and noted. Also, the scene of prepubescent Rorschach attacking two teenage boys feels tremendously artificial and merely funny, rather than giving you any real impression of Rorschach's frightening capacity for violence in the real world.

In the comic, yeah, I could sort of imagine the kid taking the two older kids through sheer tenacity and by taking advantages of their limited imaginations. But in the movie, the choreography obviously employs some artificial lift on the kid's sneakers and some complicity from the older boys. However, although Dr. Manhattan is supposed to be the only Watchman with superpowers, even in the comic the other characters are capable of fighting that's virtually unattainable in real life. The difference, perhaps, is in the innocence of the mid-1980s comic that people like that could exist. The audience is too cynical for that now.

I often had the impression that the people sitting around me were seeing an artefact from another world of artistic conceits than they'd never considered before. Maybe that is a good thing.

The other problem with Snyder's style I had was in his compulsion to punch up the emotion in many instances. I think a lot of filmmakers might think that to-day's audiences aren't capable of reacting emotionally to things unless they're very explicitly led to those emotions, which may be a fair point, as, during the rape scene there was inevitably one pleased sounding guy in the audience who said "Yeah", reminding me of the men in the audience who'd vocalised their pleasure during 300's rape scene. I don't think these men are necessarily rapists, or would become rapists. I think it's more likely a case of to-day's rampant, insecure machismo that prevents a lot of young men from sympathising with young women under the fear of being seen as weak. Of course, Snyder's unrealistic style also does nothing to impress viewers with the reality of what's going on onscreen. In addition to this, the punching up of emotion in early scenes of the Comedian probably left quite a few people exhausted, as slow motion and music ask us to care about the major problems of someone we barely know.

One of Alan Moore's objections to the comic being turned into a movie was, "With a comic, you can take as much time as you want in absorbing that background detail, noticing little things that we might have planted there. You can also flip back a few pages relatively easily to see where a certain image connects with a line of dialogue from a few pages ago. But in a film, by the nature of the medium, you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."

One could say much the same thing in terms of the contrast between prose and film. One of the tasks of the person adapting a work from comic or prose to film is knowing how to pace it, knowing where to linger, and knowing where the audience wants to process the information quickly. Early in the comic, I don't remember having the intense sympathy for the Comedian that Snyder evidently desired to convey early in the movie, so much of that business was lost on me. I'm not saying a read of Watchmen that sympathises with the Comedian more is wrong, but rather that the book allows us both to experience it either way, while the movie staples it down, in the wrong place from my perspective. Though maybe not from everyone's.

There are a lot of smaller things I didn't like. That the cops didn't shout homophobic slurs at Rorschach while beating him missed the opportunity to ironically contrast Rorschach's own homophobia with the reality that he is at least as much of a deviant in society's eyes--this is a change perhaps resulting from Snyder's more right wing sensibilities that were displayed more prominently in 300. The catastrophe at the end of the movie was changed to only address part of the original content of the comic's ending, losing the more textured manipulation of humanity's horror and perception of perversion. The lack of most of the prose content was one of many aspects that deprived the movie of the comic's scope and also lost the relationship of the heroes' compulsions with the fundamental and natural human perversity of the mechanic wearing the fake breasts. The reaction of general humanity to the Watchmen is almost totally invisible.

The most effective parts of the movie involved Dr. Manhattan. By retaining much of his dialogue, and Billy Crudup's performance, his otherworldliness was perhaps easiest to translate for its strangeness.

There's stuff in the movie that I can see being genuinely elevating for the audience, a real, valuable artistic experience. This is a movie for the people who skip the prose sections of the comic. This is a movie for a larger group of people than the comic's readership, a group with a shorter attention span. With any luck, maybe it'll be the first step in broadening the attention spans of a lot of people.

I didn't like the movie, but Zack Snyder didn't make it for me. He didn't make it for Alan Moore, either, and what should we make now of Alan Moore's desire that this movie should not exist? Perhaps it's reflected in the comic's theme of good things coming from bad things. Whatever affection Moore has for his own work, whatever effort he put into it, these things have been deemed irrelevant by the world, and the world has moved on. Moore has no say in how the things he values are treated, but isn't that just the way? I still reserve the right feel sad about it.

I watched the fourth episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night. I guess Baltar's Jesus now. Well, it's been building up to it for a while. It's kind of fun. Still no-one's noticed the two dead guys. Callie sure was lucky people noticed she died. Even the president was at her funeral--not too shabby.

Getting Happy

Last night I dreamt a bar opened across the street from Tim's house, which is odd since Tim lives pretty deep into a residential area. The bar was between two houses, had an extremely phoney looking Arabian theme, and was called something like "The Drunken _____". I went in and ordered a scotch--all they had was Glenfiddich and it was served in a cup sized ceramic jar. I had to stop the bartender from putting raspberry juice in it, and every drink you ordered came with three tiny ceramic jars of the house's own brand of fruit flavoured rum. Tim was with me, and he ordered a tuna sandwich.

I actually haven't had any alcohol since a glass of wine I had on Sunday. Maybe I'm overdue. Tim keeps showing up in my dreams this week. I guess I oughta stop by his house to-night.

After uploading the new Venia's Travels chapter last night, I went to The Living Room and had a latte and a scone while reading the end of Moyoco Anno's Happy Mania, volume 1. It took me forever to read it, entirely because my own comic's been occupying a lot of my time in a lot of ways lately. Happy Mania's actually quite absorbing and, under normal circumstances, a quick read. It's also a fascinating deviation from nearly all anime and manga I've experienced--because both media are predominately aimed at male audiences, they tend to be told from the POV of one luckless guy and the beautiful girls he tries to forge relationships with, or who are wildly attracted to him without ever actually consummating the attraction in any way.

Happy Mania is josei, as in, deliberately aimed at an adult, female audience, but is enormously more intelligent and daring than the few other examples of josei I'm familiar with. Instead of the young man or woman unable to even begin a romantic relationship with someone, Kayoko Shigeta is constantly having sex with men she barely knows under the frenzied delusion that by doing so she's moving closer to the relationship of her dreams. The title of the comic, which is also in English in the Japanese edition, is perfectly appropriate, as is the artwork that gives Shigeta intensely large irises and lips that aren't necessarily pretty, but instead seem inclined to explode out of her face as her manic attempts to find satisfaction entirely through physical sensation pull her past her own reason. She's shallow, but so fascinatingly and endearingly crafted along with the other characters in the comic that she's not despicable, even when she steals someone's boyfriend, only to hate him immediately after they've had sex. Much as we feel for the young men in shounen or seinen manga who, because of some mental block, can't actually ask out the girl who clearly likes him, we feel for Shigeta for being so urgent that she can't even slow down to have a reasonable relationship.

When one character points out Shigeta might be unhappy because she doesn't like the men she has sex with, she barely seems to notice the comment, caught up as she is in her own internal schemes. It's a comedy, and situations both funny and heartbreaking continually arise, as when Shigeta feels utterly betrayed that a guy she had sex with before he knew her name was also sleeping with two other girls, revelations handled where he, Shigeta, and one of the other girls have automatic, awkward breakfasts together while everything goes unspoken.

Shigeta's fear of being with a man she's forged an actual connection with might not be so strange as it might seem--her string of shallow physical relationships pursued under the impulse to find something deeper may be a strange permutation of more traditional Japanese relationships that encouraged very little psychological intimacy between spouses. It's complexes borne of tradition conducted through modern sexual liberation on autopilot. Good stuff--I'm definitely getting volume 2.

And I watched the third episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season, wherein we learned Starbuck took most of the Galactica's pilots with her on the rogue sewer vessel mission to find Earth, including both Helo and Athena, neither of whom apparently wanted to stay home with their child. And, of course, the people Baltar's follower killed in the head continue to rot unnoticed.

But I did enjoy the fate of Callie and the brief flirtation with a return to the Baby Killing Well.

Venia's Hungry

Ten hours of colouring later, the new Venia's Travels is online.

Impulse Power at Your Discretion, Mr. Sulu

Last night's dream involved a bright, labyrinthine, concrete college campus. There were thousands of people rushing busily about, including every United States president. Tim and I were playing cards somewhere when he and I started loudly criticising conservatives until I spotted George H. W. Bush behind Tim. I kept up what I was saying, but I toned it down a little to be polite to him. The younger George Bush kept trying to approach people and hug them, but people kept ignoring him. Not so much because they hated him, but because everyone was in too much of a hurry. He had a confused grin on his face the whole time. There were also subway monorail systems at the college and I thought somehow I was responsible for making sure there wasn't a bomb on any of the monorail cars.

While colouring yesterday, I listened to Monday's Howard Stern Show, and George Takei was on again, as he often has been over the past couple years. I got angry again about Proposition 8 as Takei talked about how much had changed for him since he'd married Brad, his partner of more than twenty years. He talked about going to the Oscars and how, before, when the celebrities would get separated from non-celebrities at a certain point, he and Brad would end up having to sit in different parts of the theatre. Now, since they were married, they could be seated together.

And I wondered why they hadn't been allowed to sit next to each other when it's quite common to see stars bringing dates with them and I realised it was because they were gay--the heterocentric theoretical viewer eye is less interested in two people of the same sex sitting next to each other. Even in Hollywood.

Of course Stern asked about Takei's sex life as well, and Takei did say he and Brad had been having a lot more sex since they'd gotten married, probably because Brad felt more secure in the relationship. So there are all kinds of societal and psychological layers that are addressed by marriage that aren't by civil unions. That conservatives probably at some level sense this is why they're so hell-bent on defining marriage to exclude homosexuals. It's one of those things that make me pessimistic about the culture wars--the issues so often can only be discussed while only acknowledging about one percent of each ice berg.

I watched the second episode of Battlestar Galactica's fourth season last night. Some absolutely cringe-worthy scenes of Lee leaving military service filled with pomp and circumstances that can't help but feel ludicrous in the environment of the desperate band of surviving humans. And I guess we just have to take Lee's word that one of the best pilots among a group that had been so desperate to recruit that they had taken raw amateurs before better serves the fleet by starting a new career as a lawyer.

And, um. Anyone notice the dead guys in the head? Hello? There's one with brains splattered everywhere? Beaten with a metal pipe?

I like that Baltar's having hallucinations of himself now. Considering that, while everyone else seems to be in Saving Private Ryan, he seems to be in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, it makes sense for him to have delusions of grandeur.

I have a lot of colouring to do to-day, so I'd better get to it . . .

What to Do with the Time that is Given to You

I'm tired of not being ahead of schedule on my comic. I drew and inked the seventh page of the next chapter last night and coloured the third and fourth. So I need to draw and ink a page to-day, colour two to-day and two to-morrow. I didn't have time for much else yesterday--I went to my parents' house for lunch, and my mother and I got into a sort of argument about the economic crisis. She, and a lot of people, are saying the Democrats and the Republicans are equally responsible for the current situation, but I'm not completely sold on it yet. I don't pretend to know a whole lot about economics, but it seems to me the Democrats loosening qualifications for people to apply for home loans was done under the condition that the government had a massive surplus at the time--the idea being that there wouldn't be so many people defaulting on their mortgages or banks willing to take in so many subprime mortgages that the government couldn't make up for while still maintaining a surplus--sort of a backdoor socialised real estate.

The real debate there, then, would be whether or not everyone deserves a house. Left would say yes, right would say no. But I don't think anyone could've imagined Bush turning the budget so upside down. If anyone wants to tell me how my thinking's flawed on this, or point out where my ignorance is showing, please do so. I have a lot to do to-day, though, so my replies may be a long time coming.

I decided to hold off on watching the Battlestar Galactica flashback movie, Razor, until I had more time, so I was going to watch the season premiere of season four last night. I held it in front of me like a carrot the whole time I was working on my comic, only to find I'd gotten high def versions of the fourth season episodes--audio seems to get out of sync completely when I try to watch high def video on this computer. So I had to wait until breakfast this morning to watch a smaller copy of the episode.

Does Baltar ever get into situations that don't end up with him getting tortured or laid? I've said I like his character, and I do, but it seems like every episode casts him as a completely different figure in the eyes of human or Cylon society, always with the result of him getting tortured or laid. But I love seeing him find new reasons to be bug eyed.

It seems somewhat unlikely that a hippy commune would form undetected on the Galactica. But it'll be interesting to see what the crew makes of the two dead guys in the head.

No-one seems to want to point out Starbuck's new haircut. But, while I laughed out loud when Starbuck volunteered to Sam that she'd shoot him if he was a Cylon, I like the discussion of the value of people regardless of their species.

"You Wanna Buy a Waffle, You're Playing by My Rules"

Ran afoul of one of the new coffee pot's problem areas to-day. My grandmother keeps buying new coffee pots that are slightly more fragile or prone to malfunction than the last--there was the white one that didn't make coffee hot enough for her, so it was replaced with a black one which switched off automatically after a couple minutes, occasionally puked up from its top black sludge it'd digested from the grounds and water, and made coffee not hot enough for my grandmother. This new one seemed okay, but my grandmother told me the base could not be wet under any circumstances. To-day I discovered the tiniest bit of water causes trouble--as in, what remained after I'd rinsed off the interior, had gotten a tiny splash on the exterior that I thought I'd wiped off with sufficient thoroughness with a paper towel. Not sufficient thoroughness according to the smoke and frightful gurgling noises like a drowning hyena produced by the pot moments later.

I love the sounds coffee pots make. They're comforting and sinister at the same time--slightly like cymbals lightly brushed for jazz with more bass combined with a wet popping. I like how David Lynch used it in Mulholland Drive.

I saw a couple days ago that David Lynch finally has coffee in stock again. If you're wondering if it could possibly be any good, I tell you, yes and jump on it before it's out of stock again for ages. Don't expect to see him going out of his way to plug it in his movies, though;



I read the new issue of Caitlin's Sirenia Digest while eating breakfast to-day, featuring a 2005 story of hers called "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" and a new vignette called "The Bone's Prayer". The juxtaposition of the two pieces highlights some of the differences between what has become typical of the Sirenia vignettes and Caitlin's longer stories. "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" spends more energy in conveying distinctive personality through the reactions characters have to things--it feels more like a story of these people and the mystery they're involved in is an exterior thing, making it a slightly more unnerving tale than "The Bone's Prayer", which focuses less on character and more on sensation. Most of the characters in the Sirenia Digest stories are essentially interchangeable, far more importance being placed on the experience than on the people doing the experiencing. This does give "The Bone's Prayer" the freedom of having a more static, colder beauty. "From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6" strives to create Hitchcockian tension with the strange people its protagonist meets on the train frightening her before the actual villainous figures apprehend her--a tension dispelled somewhat when one wonders why the priest didn't try to speak more to her sooner on the train ride. It doesn't make sense, much as Lacey's unquestioning complicity in the mystery's secrecy at the end of the story doesn't make sense, but that doesn't really matter, since Caitlin's more interested in constructing atmosphere and mood. So one could say she's freed herself over the course of the last four years from some devices that constrained her.

I couldn't help thinking of the sushi restaurant I ate at yesterday at around 5pm. I had a massive pile of vegetable tempura that was supposed to be an appetiser but nonetheless left me more than sated for the rest of the day.

I choked down spaghetti at 1am while I watched the season finale of Battlestar Galactica's third season. Colonel Tigh . . . Oh, the poor bastard. The guy who's wrong about everything, of course he wouldn't even be right about his own species. Though I'm not quite sure how four people hearing a lousy cover of "All Along the Watchtower" is supposed to make them absolutely certain they're Cylons. In a universe where the President can have visions that lead her to the Tomb of Athena, surely there's more than one possible explanation for this sort of thing, at least enough to make the typically obstinate Tigh doubt it.

I guess I liked the story of Baltar's trial. Lee's speech was great--yes, he was pointing out a lot of really obvious things, but think of all the really obvious wrongs the Bush administration committed that no-one called them on. But I wished Baltar had gone on the stand once and the Six as well.

Maybe Roslin's a Cylon, too? I loved how the scene of her and Athena confronting the Six about their shared dream abruptly ended after the Six said, "It's not possible!" I like to imagine how it concluded;

SIX: It's not possible!

ATHENA: And yet it happened.

ROSLIN: Either of you know why?

ATHENA: No.

SIX: Nope.

ROSLIN: Ah. Well. Gotta go.

I got the feeling we were really supposed to see Baltar as more cowardly than the other characters, though. What cowardly behaviour was he actually displaying? Being afraid of getting shot when he was no longer under guard after the trial? Jeez, who wouldn't be in his position? I think the writers must have realised part way through season 3 we were getting too close to Baltar--as I said, the fact that we see inside his mind a lot automatically puts him as the show's POV. After I realised this, I noticed there were a bunch of episodes that made us privy to dreams or hallucinations of Adama and Starbuck. Trying to put the Baltar back in the box, eh? Good luck, guys. He's one of the best and most complex characters on the show, whether you like it or not.

Threads of War Tapestries

Harry Knowles likes Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie with some reservations, which is a sign to me that the movie is absolutely horrible. It's so rare to see that guy anything but ecstatic about any Science Fiction or Fantasy movie.

I suppose I really ought to wait to see the movie, though. Just because I found 300 dull, just because the stylisation in the trailers for the Watchmen movie seems counter to the point of the comic, just because Terry Gilliam believed the comic couldn't be properly adapted into anything shorter than a miniseries, and just because the viral marketing people are saying looks like authentic late 1970s/early 1980s contains obvious CGI and isn't particularly clever, doesn't mean the movie must be bad. Nope.

Last night I went to Tim's and played more Fallout 3. I'm having a lot of fun with it--it feels pretty much like Oblivion but with guns. I love the targeting system carried over from the previous game that allows you to target specific parts of your enemies' bodies, though I was disappointed to find you're unable to target people's crotches anymore. Nothing beats the sadistic pleasure of some gangster calling you a sick motherfucker after you've blown off his junk. It's an interesting reflection of the morality at play--Fallout 3's perfectly happy to let you blow someone's head off, cripple them and leave them alive, but the genitals are off limits now. I wonder if it's even possible to become a prostitute or a porn star as you could in the previous game. Somehow I doubt it--the game's rated M, but there's so far no hint of any sexuality. You can't even take all your character's clothes off, and people won't even react to your character differently if he or she is running around in his or her underwear, the way they would in Morrowind.

And, yes, I miss the killable children in Fallout 2. I suppose the idea in Fallout 3 is that it's okay to influence people to kill adults, but killing children is going too far? It gave the world a real feeling of brutality in Fallout 2 that children might pick your pocket or accidentally get caught in crossfire. I mean, when a game has something like that that automatically makes you feel sort of bad, I find that interesting. And it's added potential for immersive motivation. But when you see an indestructible child hanging out around the mutilating corpses of his parents, and he behaves no differently than when they're alive--well, that's interesting in a way that's not exactly immersive.

But it is a good game, especially for how difficult it is. I was wandering around some ruined buildings yesterday with one hit point left trying desperately to evade the bandits and hermits with sniper rifles as well as the mutant moles, dogs, and berserk robots. The strange 1950s atmosphere is in tact from the previous games, too--I think the concept is that, though the nuclear war which devastated the planet took place in something like modern times, it was a version of modern times based on projections of the future in the 1950s. Which means fedoras and stiff hairstyles, yes, but also that there are atomic engines in all the cars, which can be another interesting element in a fire fight.

I watched the first half of the two part season finale of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. Which was good. It was a great idea to put Baltar in black clothes. I like Lee sort of losing his mind.

Committed to the Meaty Ether

Last night I went to my parents' house where my sister and I watched Shaun of the Dead and part of Swing Time before she got too sleepy. Not a bad pairing of movies--I guess the only thing they really have in common, though, is guys who work harder than they're given credit for and their loveable slacker friends.

I was led to think once again about how we really don't have Fred Astaires and Ginger Rogerses anymore. Just look at Hugh Jackman's dispiriting Oscar performance. Can anyone sing, act interestingly, and dance inhumanly well anymore? Standards have fallen like Wile E. Coyote.*

I see Mike Nelson's held a press conference regarding his month of consuming bacon to the exclusion of all else and a possible compromise to that mission. All of our heroes are flawed now. Time was a young bacon eater'd have someone to look up to, and now there's this. I still have faith in him, though. In my mind, there's still an affable, apple cheeked Mike Nelson and his awe-shucks bacon eating grin, the grin of a man who eats bacon because that's what he said he'd do and, heck, the boy doesn't know anything else.

I forgot to mention watching Friday's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles yesterday with breakfast. It was a good episode--it featured two alternate realities posed for you to guess which was the real one, and neither was irrelevant by the end of the episode. To one reality, the other was an unavoidable and terrible dream, and to that reality, the other was a mix of Sarah's uncertainty and buried desire for a world where she was crazy. My only quibble with the episode was that I felt the latter reality shouldn't have deviated from Sarah's POV.

I watched Friday's Dollhouse to-day. I still think the show has potential, and the attempt to discuss the idea of alternate interpretations of subliminal directives was nice, but the show still feels a bit jittery somehow. Friday's episode also featured a pretty big, gaping, continuity error, and a Britney Spears style pop star. The Spears ilk is pretty annoying in themselves, only slightly less annoying than their seepage of acceptance into all levels of culture, but this was awkward imitation mixed with uninspired parody. I think I did a much better job with Quelti Ripieli in Boschen and Nesuko if I do say so myself.

And I watched the eighteenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night. I quite liked it--it introduces a new character, a Mr. Lampkin, acting as Baltar's attorney, and I liked his mission to explore darker human and Cylon nature without bias. Though the episode highlighted again a major problem with the series--that we still don't have a clear idea of how civilians are living on the other ships. Lampkin seems to have materialised out of a grey void--he seems like he lives relatively comfortably, and like he comes from a world where publicity for lawyers is useful, a world very different from the refugee camps on Galactica. So it seems there must be a sort of middle class somewhere, but we have only very fleeting, seemingly accidental glimpses of what these people are like. It feels very much like lazy writing. But I did enjoy the episode.


*Why the fuck does Wile E. Coyote not have his own Wikipedia entry?

Post Apocalyptic Gender Issues

I received my copy of Caitlin R. Kiernan's short story collection, A is for Alien, in the mail yesterday. I bought it quite some time ago--I'm not sure why it took so long to get to me. Not that it matters, since it'll be a very long time before I have a chance to read it, but it's a nice looking book. I see there's an afterword by Elizabeth Bear, which I'm sure is filled with insight.

I put coffee in my oatmeal this morning. I've been eating plain oatmeal for breakfast for several years now, and every now and then I reflexively try to spice it up. I ought to've known coffee wouldn't have much impact since I drink coffee with breakfast anyway.

I've finally gotten the chance to play a bit of Fallout 3 at Tim's house, and I'm enjoying it so far, though it's still not as fun as Fallout 2. But its speech skill and dialogue so far are enormously better than I'd hoped--instead of Oblivion's ridiculous and tedious colour wheel, Fallout 3 has different dialogue options for charming or provoking characters.

Oblivion and Fallout 3 are both made by Bethesda, so there are a lot of similarities, including the game engine. Oblivion looked better than Fallout 3, mainly because it took place in a fantasy world filled with forests, meadows, and grasslands while Fallout 3 takes place in the blasted landscape of post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. But both games feature extremely large and detailed three dimensional lands to explore.

Unfortunately, with Oblivion's game engine comes all the problems Oblivion seemed to have on the computer I use at Tim's house once the weather starts to get warmer; random restarts of the entire system that corrupt saved games in extreme and often hilarious ways--I'd load up games and NPCs would be missing random articles of clothing, doors would be missing, day would turn to night, my character would be invisible, and some people would start falling through the ground. This was particularly funny early in the game when guards escorting the emperor voiced by Patrick Stewart are engaged in a battle with some assassins. Sometimes, the whole melee would drop through the floor into a grey void where everyone would start swimming around, still trying to kill each other.

In Fallout 3 last night, my female Asian character turned into an African American man in his underwear in a completely different location. He also didn't appear to have a name. This could have presented some interesting gaming opportunities in itself, but who knows what else was missing.

The game also has Oblivion's somewhat unrealistically proportioned violence, as in my next attempt to play the game, I was a small blond woman in a leather jacket who went around beating to death cops in riot gear who were firing pistols at her at point blank range. My character was wearing nothing more protective than a cool, 1950s style, leather jacket and wielding nothing but a baseball bat or sometimes just her fists. Which is a lot of fun, especially since, like in Fallout 2, you're able to cripple specific parts of your foe's body.

Sometimes you wish life worked that way, as you might if you watch this sickening video of cops beating up a fifteen year old girl in Washington. Careful watching that video, it'll make you sick. There's no ambiguity about it--the girl kicks her shoe off towards the cop, and he responds by punching her in the face before he and his cohort throw her to the ground.

This cop's defence?

Schene told investigators through an e-mail conversation with his lawyer that once he was assaulted by the girl kicking her shoe at him, he entered the cell to "prevent another assault," according to court documents. Schene also said that the girl failed to comply with instructions in the holding area.

What a fucking scumbag. And who knows how much of this behaviour isn't caught on video. I remember a girl from Seattle several years ago telling me about even worse treatment she'd received from police, and of course they'd told her she wouldn't be able to report them and expect to be believed. Gives you the feeling this is institutionalised brutality, guys making each other feel better about being inhuman.

I watched the seventeenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season last night, which I mostly liked. Again, focusing on Starbuck's personality is the show at its best, and it was nice to have a scene between her and Apollo that didn't make me cringe. If I were in charge of that show, those two would've never even considered having a relationship or having sex with each other. I hate the notion that this is the inevitable course of events between men and women who happen to be close. But I guess most people keep their brains between their legs, as Morrissey said.

Impediments to World Domination

I had a pretty long and involved dream last night wherein, driving in the evening, I spotted a nice looking young woman and offered her a ride. She got in the car, and we flirted, but she never seemed to be particularly interested in me, the conversation, or her surroundings. We stopped at my friend Tim's place, where she walked away to talk to his sister--apparently they knew each other, and neither seemed very surprised by how she'd gotten there.

Tim was doing something in another room, so I was just kind of hanging around his house when I saw a massive raccoon in the backyard--it was just slightly smaller than one of the gargoyle dogs in Ghostbusters and its fur was very dirty and big patches of it were missing, revealing pale, beige flesh underneath.

Raccoons seem to be taking on a monstrous quality for me lately--first there was The Montauk Monster, which many people have speculated is a raccoon. Then I heard a story on The Howard Stern Show about a drunk guy in Russia who tried to fuck a raccoon only to have his genitals torn off by the little animal--I can't say I blame the creature. I've always heard raccoons can actually be pretty dangerous beasts and that they have very sharp teeth and bad tempers.

I saw a couple of raccoons outside the house a couple weeks ago stealing into a sewer drain, so maybe that's why I was thinking of them, too. Anyway, in the dream, the raccoon got inside Tim's house somehow, and I started taking pictures of it as it waddled about. I was trying to avoid it, and it seemed it might be trying to get at me while inspecting everything it walked past, in the way animals do. But I tried to carefully plot photos. Somehow one picture ended up with two children standing behind the raccoon; an alien child in a cartoonish space suit and a human child in fuzzy grey mouse pyjamas.

I had a flask of Johnnie Walker with me--which is odd, because I don't particularly like Johnnie Walker, but maybe that explains I wasn't as afraid as I ought to've been. I remember trying to find one of Tim's Japanese swords to fend it off, and I think there was a fight. I remember at one point the raccoon had me pinned to the ground but I managed to use one of the swords, sheathed, to shove it off me. I woke up before the battle was resolved, but I seem to remember Tim thought I was more afraid of the raccoon than I ought to have been.

Maybe it's Bears I need to worry about--I seem to have gotten myself banned from another live journal, this time that of author Elizabeth Bear. Here's the conversation that did it.

I don't mind being banned in this case. Halfway through the discussion, I'd decided to avoid Bear's journal from then on, but people kept replying to me, and I just can't resist getting the last word. I avoided mentioning the conversation yesterday because I thought a lot of people talking to me would be embarrassed by their comments once they cooled down, but I don't think that's in the cards. I've seen people rally around the nucleus of a clique before with ludicrous arguments, but this was nothing sort of astonishing. What began as a pretty innocuous conversation between me and Bear wherein I asked her about the feminist literary critical term "male gaze" rapidly devolved into people discussing my poor etiquette for not googling it and even accusing me of deep-seated, sexist arrogance for not googling the term. I found it nearly impossible to take the conversation seriously, especially as the people I was talking to took it more and more seriously. I made a joke about putting a saddle on Bear and striking her with a riding crop whenever I wanted a definition for a word, which I ought to have known would have sent these people into fits, but I was being too much of a goon at that point. One guy (or gal) actually accused me of treating people like beasts of burden. I've rarely come across such an irony challenged group of people. I referred to myself as "the secret world king" at one point, and I'm pretty sure people thought I was serious.

I so don't mind being banned from that journal. I only read it occasionally, and Bear seemed to have a lot of pent up resentment for me I didn't quite understand--probably having something to do with a conversation we'd had wherein I'd thought people were perhaps being a little too bloodthirsty about the incident where Harlan Ellison grabbed Connie Willis' breast. I guess it was probably pretty lazy of me to even continue reading the journal, especially after I wasn't tremendously impressed by her work and she'd been a dick to my friend Moira. I guess I had some vague idea of making inroads in the modern society of fantasy literature. So much for that plan.

I watched the seventeenth episode of Battlestar Galactica, which was a pretty sad specimen of allegory. Just about every character had a completely new identity for the episode--Adama became a thoughtless tyrant, Baltar became a hero to the working man--even for guys who'd gone on strike against his government on New Caprica--and Roslin became a completely delusional monarch. Well, I guess it wasn't a big switch for her--the change was just in that the writers they decided they agreed with me for a moment. I don't think they realise how eerie it is that that woman can not stop smiling, no matter what happens. People being forced into hard labour? Spilled milk. Unchecked injury and violence? Something distant and inevitable.

Hi How are You I'm the President Are You That's Good Well It was Nice Meeting You

Oh, I forgot to mention how particularly bad Laura Roslin was in that last Battlestar Galactica I watched (the fifteenth episode of the third season). This time it was more the actress's fault than anyone else's--Mary McDonnell has this thing where apparently she uses white-out on all the periods in her script because she runs all her sentences together. It comes off as some sort of bad Christopher Walken impression spliced with William Shatner at the best of times.

In the last episode I watched, she had a line that was something like, "It would've been hard because of the terrain. At Baltar's ground-breaking ceremony . . ." And it was like she was reading off cue cards because she stopped at "ground" like she clearly thought it was a sentence about some ground Baltar possessed. She's just all kinds of annoying.

It smells like something's burning around here--I dusted because I thought that might be it, but I went outside and smelled it too . . . I hadn't dusted in weeks, so maybe the dust was just in my nostrils.