I missed the turn of the year and decade* here on the old blog, so best to dispense with the year in review (you're welcome) and look to the year ahead (sorry).
Another Day, Another Doctor:
Spoilercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
First off, big props to BBC America for not making us wait to say goodbye to David Tennant as The Doctor. Both episodes of The End of Time aired Stateside the day after each did in the UK. It was a fitting sendoff, taking a darker turn than usual as The Doctor grappled with his mortality right up until the very end. Tennant's last words as the Doctor took the form of a haunting final plea: "I don't want to go."
Heavy stuff, and a hard act for the new Doctor, Matt Smith, to follow. Mercifully, the slate seems to have been wiped clean for his new incarnation, Tennant's Doctor having given his goodbyes to every major supporting character from Sarah Jane Smith to Rose Tyler. Thus we might be spared another unwieldy "Companions Assemble!"-style mashup in the style of The Stolen Earth/Journey's End.
The BBC has also posted a preview of Smith's upcoming turn as The Doctor to YouTube:
My first take is that I really, really hope there's a Plan B after "hit the Dalek with a stick." The Doctor looks like a tweedy college professor (even with the gun; remind me to introduce you to some of my old professors), and that seems to work for him. After all, call yourself "The Doctor" and eventually I suppose you can expect an occasional academic turn.
As with all Doctors before him, fandom seems to be taking a "wait and see" attitude for Smith's following Tennant's wildly successful run. I'm eagerly awaiting it myself.
More Human than Makehuman:
My favorite piece of software still under development, Makehuman, seems to be back on track after two setbacks in 2009. The first came from without, as their original site was attacked by hackers, necessitating a time-consuming move to Blogspot. The second was self-imposed, as the original mesh model was replaced with a newer one. The alpha 4 release just came out a couple of days ago.
According to the road map, alpha 5, originally planned as the final alpha release and including the pose engine, has been bumped down the hierarchy, with the pose engine and transition to beta now set to follow alpha 6. Perhaps wisely given the events of last year, Makehuman has declined to set a date for future updates. But barring disaster the end of the year should find us, if not at, then at least much closer to the final release version of an open source alternative to Poser and DAZ3D Studio.
Comic Relief:
More and more I feel like it's time to explore alternative outlets for my favorite medium, comics. As I get older, big crossovers in superhero books feel less like events and more like attempts to pick my pocket. Don't get me started (again) on the meaninglessness of a character dying. At least The Doctor has a built-in "out" for that.
More and more it looks like the only thing I have to look forward to in the comics realm this year is another visit to Wizard World Philadelphia, which seems to have learned its lesson from last year's fiasco and looks to be putting a good show together this time. Of course, given the current financial realities, I can't say if I'm actually going just yet.
Still, a guy can hope.
Here's to 2010. May we all see 2011.
UPDATE: Forgot something else planned for the year ahead, assuming the principals can stop fighting in court and take it to the ring where it belongs. My call for Pacquiao vs. Mayweather is Pacquiao. He's got the speed, and I don't think Mayweather has the tools to counter him. Hopefully they'll take their corners on March 13th and we'll see.
* - I know, I know, math purists, but what can I say? People like watching multiple digits roll over (cf. the Millennium).
Monday, January 4, 2010
Thursday, November 5, 2009
PSA: Just Say No.
The holidays are looming large ahead of us. That means celebration, festivity, and frolic.* And as always, when we gather with friends, there's always the possibility of temptation, of doing something that we know we'd later regret.
So when your host opens that drawer and pulls out its contents, it's perfectly natural to want to go along, to not be the party pooper.
But this is not the time for comity or compromise of principle. As your friends and loved ones plunk down on the sofa, ready to take in the offered contraband, it is time to take your stand.
Warn them.
Stop them any way you can.
Under no circumstances can you call yourself a friend if you let them watch The Star Wars Holiday Special.
I'm serious. There are good movies, bad movies, so-bad-they're-good movies, and awful movies. Then there is The Star Wars Holiday Special in its class of one, where we can only dream of it being merely awful. If the dread Necronomicon came with a dvd insert, the first selection on the menu would be The Star Wars Holiday Special.
I have come back from that dark land, where Bea Arthur tends bar at Mos Eisley, and where Harrison Ford joins the final sing-along at the end looking like he wants nothing more than for a very heavy set piece to fall on him, to warn you.
Don't do it.
* - Whether you want to or not. FROLIC, DAMMIT!
So when your host opens that drawer and pulls out its contents, it's perfectly natural to want to go along, to not be the party pooper.
But this is not the time for comity or compromise of principle. As your friends and loved ones plunk down on the sofa, ready to take in the offered contraband, it is time to take your stand.
Warn them.
Stop them any way you can.
Under no circumstances can you call yourself a friend if you let them watch The Star Wars Holiday Special.
I'm serious. There are good movies, bad movies, so-bad-they're-good movies, and awful movies. Then there is The Star Wars Holiday Special in its class of one, where we can only dream of it being merely awful. If the dread Necronomicon came with a dvd insert, the first selection on the menu would be The Star Wars Holiday Special.
I have come back from that dark land, where Bea Arthur tends bar at Mos Eisley, and where Harrison Ford joins the final sing-along at the end looking like he wants nothing more than for a very heavy set piece to fall on him, to warn you.
Don't do it.
* - Whether you want to or not. FROLIC, DAMMIT!
Friday, August 21, 2009
My dream library project: Putting tools into as many hands as possible.
A public library, a good one, is always more than a mere collection of books. Libraries are a hub of the communities that have them. They act as founts of knowledge, crucibles of human thought, and the foundries of creativity. In a library, one seeking the tools to engage the world will find them.
With that principle in mind, picture, in the lobby of your local library, a box. It's open, with the top torn off like a supermarket candy display. A hastily-scribbled note taped to the box simply says: "FREE! TAKE ONE!" You reach into the box and, instead of candy, you pull out a flash drive. A cheap one, say, no more than 4 gigs in size. The kind they hand out as promotional items at trade shows.
You take it home, plug it into a USB port on your computer, and (perhaps against your better judgment) turn on the machine.
It boots up to a desktop that you've never seen before, but this is no hijack. You're clearly still in control of what's on the screen.
A quick exploration of the menus reveals what you suddenly have at your fingertips.
A full office suite. Powerful Photoshop-level graphics programs. 3-D applications, both simple and complex.
Game engines of all sorts.
And that's not all. There are audio and video editors.
And so much more, that it seems like, with time and application, one might be able to create almost anything.
A box full of these little drives, there for the taking on a library table, all free and legally available. All unasked for, but discovered by people who had never thought to seek these tools out.
Putting aside, for the moment, matters of funding such a project, or its feasibility. What wonders would grow from such a scattering of seeds?
With that principle in mind, picture, in the lobby of your local library, a box. It's open, with the top torn off like a supermarket candy display. A hastily-scribbled note taped to the box simply says: "FREE! TAKE ONE!" You reach into the box and, instead of candy, you pull out a flash drive. A cheap one, say, no more than 4 gigs in size. The kind they hand out as promotional items at trade shows.
You take it home, plug it into a USB port on your computer, and (perhaps against your better judgment) turn on the machine.
It boots up to a desktop that you've never seen before, but this is no hijack. You're clearly still in control of what's on the screen.
A quick exploration of the menus reveals what you suddenly have at your fingertips.
A full office suite. Powerful Photoshop-level graphics programs. 3-D applications, both simple and complex.
Game engines of all sorts.
And that's not all. There are audio and video editors.
And so much more, that it seems like, with time and application, one might be able to create almost anything.
A box full of these little drives, there for the taking on a library table, all free and legally available. All unasked for, but discovered by people who had never thought to seek these tools out.
Putting aside, for the moment, matters of funding such a project, or its feasibility. What wonders would grow from such a scattering of seeds?
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Don't try this at home.
When a shitty, inexplicably popular franchise needs to be bashed, sure, you could just sit on the couch and mock it between handfuls of Doritos. But are you really bashing it? Are you applying the full spectrum of sheer scorn that needs to be heaped upon this insult to the collective intelligence of humanity? Or are you just winging it as best you can within your limited scope of insult humor while trying to avoid choking on a Dorito?
In cases like this, it's best to call on the movie bashing professionals at RiffTrax, for quality MST3K-style acts of cinematic destruction:
In cases like this, it's best to call on the movie bashing professionals at RiffTrax, for quality MST3K-style acts of cinematic destruction:
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
I am that which I used to mock.
So yesterday morning I found myself alone with both breakfast and the remote, my wife still feeling tired and having gone back to bed. I'd had more than my fill of Michael Jackson coverage (here's the latest: He's still dead), so it was time to head into the outer limits of basic satellite service.
At 5 AM it's mostly a trip into infomercial hell, of course. I had no urge to have the question "Is Colon Detox Hype?" answered, and so too did other such siren calls go unheeded. My normal refuge, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, was showing something like Home Movies, a crudely-drawn sitcom featuring annoying kids, self-absorbed adults, and not a single speck of actual comedy. Plus for some reason everyone on the show, from the tall to the small, wears footie pajamas 24/7. Seriously.
Finally, shelter was offered in the form of VH1's 120 Minutes, which used to be the MTV show for the latest in alternative rock and pop. Now it's a nostalgia show, its content very much unchanged from the days when it came on after Headbangers Ball.
I had just taken a sip of my coffee and was nodding my head to the beat of the Pet Shop Boys when realization hit me: Here I was, wallowing in nostalgia for my youth, just like the forty-somethings I used to make fun of during my youth. Only now the bands in question were Sonic Youth and Depeche Mode rather than the Grateful Dead and Manfred Mann.
Ah, well. I guess somewhere in my brain it will always be somewhere between 1987 and 1991. It's the karmic price I pay, I guess: Leaving myself an open target for the next generation of smartasses, as those middle-aged men before me.
I won't be going so far as posting "The Circle of Life" or "Sunrise, Sunset" here, but I am willing to throw out some Love and Rockets:
And if I'm playing Love and Rockets then I have to follow up with Sonic Youth (with special guest Chuck D):
And follow that up with XTC:
And end it all with a bang with Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics:
At 5 AM it's mostly a trip into infomercial hell, of course. I had no urge to have the question "Is Colon Detox Hype?" answered, and so too did other such siren calls go unheeded. My normal refuge, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, was showing something like Home Movies, a crudely-drawn sitcom featuring annoying kids, self-absorbed adults, and not a single speck of actual comedy. Plus for some reason everyone on the show, from the tall to the small, wears footie pajamas 24/7. Seriously.
Finally, shelter was offered in the form of VH1's 120 Minutes, which used to be the MTV show for the latest in alternative rock and pop. Now it's a nostalgia show, its content very much unchanged from the days when it came on after Headbangers Ball.
I had just taken a sip of my coffee and was nodding my head to the beat of the Pet Shop Boys when realization hit me: Here I was, wallowing in nostalgia for my youth, just like the forty-somethings I used to make fun of during my youth. Only now the bands in question were Sonic Youth and Depeche Mode rather than the Grateful Dead and Manfred Mann.
Ah, well. I guess somewhere in my brain it will always be somewhere between 1987 and 1991. It's the karmic price I pay, I guess: Leaving myself an open target for the next generation of smartasses, as those middle-aged men before me.
I won't be going so far as posting "The Circle of Life" or "Sunrise, Sunset" here, but I am willing to throw out some Love and Rockets:
And if I'm playing Love and Rockets then I have to follow up with Sonic Youth (with special guest Chuck D):
And follow that up with XTC:
And end it all with a bang with Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics:
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wizard World Philadelphia: The belated con report
Yes, Bill, I'm posting it now.
Pre-Con:
I can be hard on my friend Bill, a cataloguer in Technical Processing, the department across the hall from mine. When I agreed to go with him to this year's Wizard World Philadelphia I had actually broken precedent by agreeing almost immediately, without hemming and hawing for weeks while he nagged and cajoled me, as I had done in previous years.
By affirming that this year I was in almost as soon as the subject was brought up, I had, in essence, taken all of the fun out of it.
Sorry, Bill.
After I ruined everything by being so goddamn cooperative, our preparation for the convention mainly consisted of me checking in at his workstation to take a quick inventory of the guest list. We checked to see who had been added and who had been dropped almost every day. I personally kept an eye on Artist Alley, scanning it for names I recognized and doing a quick calculation of how much I'd be willing to pay for a sketch balanced against my budget for the day.
Thus were the days passed until...
The Day of the Con:
Bill picked me up and we headed down to the train station in Bryn Mawr to catch the R5. Despite just having had breakfast, my stomach felt like it was going to eat itself, so I went into the station and ordered a toasted bagel from the snack bar. The proprietor was a nice, sociable fellow, who even sat down with Bill and me to chat while we waited for the train.
Great bagel, too.
The R5 came and went with us on it, and we headed toward Center City with great feelings of anticipation.
Once we reached the con we checked in quickly and headed toward the main floor. The Convention Center staff kept the lines moving, though each and every one of them looked like they had been forced to eat a bug after clocking in.
The first thing I usually notice upon entering a convention is the costumes. This time was no exception. Harley Quinn and Emma Frost arrived together and posed for pictures (no doubt fueling many a fevered fanboy fantasy). There was a striking Black Manta costume, in the helmet of which the maker had installed a voice changer, making him sound much like the way the villain did on the old Super Friends show. Fan anticipation for the upcoming GI Joe movie was evidenced by the clusters around Snake-Eyes and The Baroness. And movie quality renditions of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and an entire platoon of Imperial Stormtroopers were an inescapable presence.
Bill and I tooled around the floor a bit before separating to pursue our parallel lines of fandom. He headed for Autograph Alley while I started scouting out the bargain bins for trade paperbacks. I kept my focus on series that I had already started to collect instead of trying to break new ground. I was rewarded with a copy of Grendel: Devil's Reign, which rounds out my Grendel reprints from the original Comico run. Other books were had, but Reign is the day's crown jewel from the bins, as far as I'm concerned.
From there I went to Artist's Alley, where I found the booth of my favorite cartoonist, Evil, Inc.'s Brad Guigar.
By a weird little bit of serendipity, I was actually standing by, waiting my turn, while this video was being shot:
I love meeting Brad Guigar. He's a great guy, and gracious to his fans, even refraining from telling them outright that the gag they thought of for his strip was too awful to use (cough-cough). I make a point to seek him out whenever I'm at Wizard World and this year his book was the only one for which I paid cover price. For each book purchased he added a quick head sketch on the flyleaf for free. Like I said, a great guy.
I was a bit boggled to find only one vendor - Krypton Comics - actually selling comic art supplies. I mean, it's a no-brainer that artists and artist wannabes like myself are drawn (heh) to these events. You'd think more vendors would have twigged to that. Still, that one did was enough for me, even if they had run out of non-photo blue leads for automatic pencils, thus forcing me to buy the old-fashioned variety (grrr...).
On the downside, scarcity seemed to be an unintended underlying theme to the convention. There were hardly any freebies to speak of, mainly due to the absence of the companies in the best position to hand them out. DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, none of the major publishers had a booth there and pickings were slim. I attributed it at the time to the economy, but that wasn't the whole story.
More on that later.
Well, Bill and I fulfilled our various personally-assigned missions and headed home. We were generally satisfied with the day, having both gotten what we'd came for.
Post-Con:
After plowing through the adventures of the Ultimates, John Constantine, and the Justice Society, and beginning to savor the story of the rise of the Grendel-Khan, I got to wondering about the absence of the major publishers. And not just in comics, either. When I had last gone to Wizard World there were a couple of game companies taking up a lot of space that dealers and artists were then noticeably spread out to fill.
With the high of the trip having worn off, I thought about some of the rumblings I'd heard from the fans and vendors. I was hardly the only one to notice the big companies' absence. One or two gone might be attributed to economic forces, but all of them?
Something was up.
I'm sure this is old news to fans who follow the politics of the convention scene, but I'm an occasional con goer, and my eye was completely off of this ball. Happily, I wasn't the only one disturbed by the omens and portents.
My go-to guy for the day after turned out to be the same as it was the day of: Brad Guigar. You can just hear the scribbling of signatures on restraining orders right now, can't you?
The fans had, indeed, noticed the absence of DC, Marvel, et al., from what was supposed to be a major East Coast convention. It boded ill for the future. Fans had even gone so far as wearing "WWP-RIP" t-shirts on Sunday, the con's final day.
Apparently Wizard had tried out its 800-pound gorilla status in the comics industry and came up about 500 pounds short, scheduling the Philadelphia con on the same weekend as the venerable HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina. It blew up in their faces as DC, Marvel, and more took their toys down south, deciding that the Charlotte con was a better use of their resources.
This led to some bloodletting on the Wizard payroll, as the people responsible for the fiasco were sacked and their replacements were left to try to salvage the mess left with only a few short weeks to go.
So the egg on Wizard's face was unavoidable by that point. In retrospect, it was clear that this year's Wizard World Philadelphia was a holding action. That notion was reinforced by the fact that Wizard couldn't even staff its own booth, leaving only the merest fraction of a display in place (never has the original cover art for Watchmen looked so lonely...).
The day after the convention, damage control was already underway. The Wizard World site put up next year's dates as June 11-13, a full week earlier than HeroesCon's traditional Father's Day weekend dates. So it's a first step in a walk back from previous mistakes.
Time will tell if the show redeems itself in the eyes of the fans.
Pre-Con:
I can be hard on my friend Bill, a cataloguer in Technical Processing, the department across the hall from mine. When I agreed to go with him to this year's Wizard World Philadelphia I had actually broken precedent by agreeing almost immediately, without hemming and hawing for weeks while he nagged and cajoled me, as I had done in previous years.
By affirming that this year I was in almost as soon as the subject was brought up, I had, in essence, taken all of the fun out of it.
Sorry, Bill.
After I ruined everything by being so goddamn cooperative, our preparation for the convention mainly consisted of me checking in at his workstation to take a quick inventory of the guest list. We checked to see who had been added and who had been dropped almost every day. I personally kept an eye on Artist Alley, scanning it for names I recognized and doing a quick calculation of how much I'd be willing to pay for a sketch balanced against my budget for the day.
Thus were the days passed until...
The Day of the Con:
Bill picked me up and we headed down to the train station in Bryn Mawr to catch the R5. Despite just having had breakfast, my stomach felt like it was going to eat itself, so I went into the station and ordered a toasted bagel from the snack bar. The proprietor was a nice, sociable fellow, who even sat down with Bill and me to chat while we waited for the train.
Great bagel, too.
The R5 came and went with us on it, and we headed toward Center City with great feelings of anticipation.
Once we reached the con we checked in quickly and headed toward the main floor. The Convention Center staff kept the lines moving, though each and every one of them looked like they had been forced to eat a bug after clocking in.
The first thing I usually notice upon entering a convention is the costumes. This time was no exception. Harley Quinn and Emma Frost arrived together and posed for pictures (no doubt fueling many a fevered fanboy fantasy). There was a striking Black Manta costume, in the helmet of which the maker had installed a voice changer, making him sound much like the way the villain did on the old Super Friends show. Fan anticipation for the upcoming GI Joe movie was evidenced by the clusters around Snake-Eyes and The Baroness. And movie quality renditions of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and an entire platoon of Imperial Stormtroopers were an inescapable presence.
Bill and I tooled around the floor a bit before separating to pursue our parallel lines of fandom. He headed for Autograph Alley while I started scouting out the bargain bins for trade paperbacks. I kept my focus on series that I had already started to collect instead of trying to break new ground. I was rewarded with a copy of Grendel: Devil's Reign, which rounds out my Grendel reprints from the original Comico run. Other books were had, but Reign is the day's crown jewel from the bins, as far as I'm concerned.
From there I went to Artist's Alley, where I found the booth of my favorite cartoonist, Evil, Inc.'s Brad Guigar.
By a weird little bit of serendipity, I was actually standing by, waiting my turn, while this video was being shot:
Meeting Brad Guigar from Rafael Irizarry on Vimeo.
I love meeting Brad Guigar. He's a great guy, and gracious to his fans, even refraining from telling them outright that the gag they thought of for his strip was too awful to use (cough-cough). I make a point to seek him out whenever I'm at Wizard World and this year his book was the only one for which I paid cover price. For each book purchased he added a quick head sketch on the flyleaf for free. Like I said, a great guy.
I was a bit boggled to find only one vendor - Krypton Comics - actually selling comic art supplies. I mean, it's a no-brainer that artists and artist wannabes like myself are drawn (heh) to these events. You'd think more vendors would have twigged to that. Still, that one did was enough for me, even if they had run out of non-photo blue leads for automatic pencils, thus forcing me to buy the old-fashioned variety (grrr...).
On the downside, scarcity seemed to be an unintended underlying theme to the convention. There were hardly any freebies to speak of, mainly due to the absence of the companies in the best position to hand them out. DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, none of the major publishers had a booth there and pickings were slim. I attributed it at the time to the economy, but that wasn't the whole story.
More on that later.
Well, Bill and I fulfilled our various personally-assigned missions and headed home. We were generally satisfied with the day, having both gotten what we'd came for.
Post-Con:
After plowing through the adventures of the Ultimates, John Constantine, and the Justice Society, and beginning to savor the story of the rise of the Grendel-Khan, I got to wondering about the absence of the major publishers. And not just in comics, either. When I had last gone to Wizard World there were a couple of game companies taking up a lot of space that dealers and artists were then noticeably spread out to fill.
With the high of the trip having worn off, I thought about some of the rumblings I'd heard from the fans and vendors. I was hardly the only one to notice the big companies' absence. One or two gone might be attributed to economic forces, but all of them?
Something was up.
I'm sure this is old news to fans who follow the politics of the convention scene, but I'm an occasional con goer, and my eye was completely off of this ball. Happily, I wasn't the only one disturbed by the omens and portents.
My go-to guy for the day after turned out to be the same as it was the day of: Brad Guigar. You can just hear the scribbling of signatures on restraining orders right now, can't you?
The fans had, indeed, noticed the absence of DC, Marvel, et al., from what was supposed to be a major East Coast convention. It boded ill for the future. Fans had even gone so far as wearing "WWP-RIP" t-shirts on Sunday, the con's final day.
Apparently Wizard had tried out its 800-pound gorilla status in the comics industry and came up about 500 pounds short, scheduling the Philadelphia con on the same weekend as the venerable HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina. It blew up in their faces as DC, Marvel, and more took their toys down south, deciding that the Charlotte con was a better use of their resources.
This led to some bloodletting on the Wizard payroll, as the people responsible for the fiasco were sacked and their replacements were left to try to salvage the mess left with only a few short weeks to go.
So the egg on Wizard's face was unavoidable by that point. In retrospect, it was clear that this year's Wizard World Philadelphia was a holding action. That notion was reinforced by the fact that Wizard couldn't even staff its own booth, leaving only the merest fraction of a display in place (never has the original cover art for Watchmen looked so lonely...).
The day after the convention, damage control was already underway. The Wizard World site put up next year's dates as June 11-13, a full week earlier than HeroesCon's traditional Father's Day weekend dates. So it's a first step in a walk back from previous mistakes.
Time will tell if the show redeems itself in the eyes of the fans.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Stalking ≠ Romance
I'll get to the matter of Wizard World and the good time that was had by all momentarily. First, as a lover of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a loather of Twilight, I wanted to share this video that was posted up at Pandagon.
Without spoiling it, let's just say that one Edward Cullen picks the wrong teenager upon whom to try his creepy "stalk ya/control ya/maybe wanna kill ya" shtick.
I really don't know how Twilight manages to get pushed off as "romance." Vampire, shmampire, the dude is a stalker! Even in these little re-edited snippets the guy is giving off a vibe of genuine danger. Not the old writer's crutch of "bad boy with a heart of gold," but an actual predator to whom the only logical responses would be restraining orders, arrest, and/or the business end of a shotgun.
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