I've been meaning to do this for a bit now; a list of the more interesting, funny, or just plain likable posts I've made (in my opinion) since getting a LiveJournal back in 2001. Maybe it's a bit conceited of me, but if you've only been reading this journal occasionally or recently, it could be helpful/interesting/amusing.

Note: This has only public posts; anything behind a friends lock has been omitted.

( The List )

I'm going to post-date this so it stays at the top of my journal page.

When I was a kid my father bought a pencil sharpener and mounted it on the side of the basement staircase. When you needed to sharpen a pencil, you had to climb all the way down the creaky wooden stairs and walk about three steps around the railing to where the sharpener was. Then you could insert a pencil and turn the crank to your heart's delight. I remember the scraping and grinding sound it made with each turn, the slight squeak of the parts as they moved. My parents didn't bother putting a wastebasket beneath it, so little bits of shavings would just tumble to the floor and gather in a small pile that periodically got swept up or blown away.

No point to all of this really, just that I was reminded of pencil sharpeners and got sentimental for the act of turning a crank. I also miss having a proper basement, filled with dust and boxes and roaches and the stale stench of despair. Well, I don't miss the roaches. Or the despair.

BoingBoing posted this yesterday:

Homophobic murder in Puerto Rico. Cop: "he deserved it" for his lifestyle

They've arrested a suspect and the cop who made the disparaging remark is being disciplined. (His remark may have been mistranslated as he was talking about the kid being a prostitute, but regardless, it was still out of line.)

It's a horrible crime and my heart sank when I saw it was in Puerto Rico, but sadly, I wasn't surprised. (However, according to the original iReport article, it's the first murder ever classified as a hate crime in Puerto Rico.)

Comments on the Internet are usually toxic, so maybe it was a mistake to read the comments on BB. But since I did, and it seems like it's going to come up often, as a Catholic and a Puerto Rican, let me say this:

This murder had nothing to do with Catholicism. Catholicism is not a big fan of teh gay (as the recent Anglican mess confirms) but for the most part it's not a defining issue either. I don't remember the issue ever coming up when I went to church, mostly because the majority of the hand-wringing was over abortion (as seen by the Stupak Amendment, which was backed by Catholic bishops) and interfaith relations (no seriously, the Protestant hate is pretty strong).

This murder has everything to do with Machismo. Machismo is excessive masculinity to the point of chauvinism. This is a word I heard a lot as a kid—A LOT. It comes up all the time; the entire culture is very testosterone-driven.

Homophobia tends to be rooted in perceived threats to one's masculinity; "you're so gay" has replaced "you're such a girl" or "you're a sissy" as a favorite taunt of boys. In the case of this horrible murder, they have arrested a suspect, and no surprise, he's claiming self-defense because the victim tried to have anal sex with him (after he picked him up thinking he was a female prostitute).

http://www.towleroad.com/2009/11/killer-of-puerto-rican-teen-says-gay-panic-made-him-murder/

I'm not excusing this guy because of the culture nor am I bashing on Puerto Rican (or Latin) culture in general, but machismo tends to come up whenever a guy does something stupid and if you want to point fingers at *anything*, that's the place to do it.

Oh, right. So last weekend—or rather, the weekend before last, as in the weekend that did not just pass but the one before that—so the weekend before I finished up another book, pretty much polishing it off between the flight to Seattle and the flight back.

Fanboy and Goth Girl
by Barry Lyga

The story of a boy, his comic, and the crazy girl he meets one day. Maybe there's a bit of a Haruhi/Kyon dynamic in there, I don't know, but our (for the most part) unnamed hero has a bit more ambition. There's something faintly hilarious about his goal to meet Brian Michael Bendis, mostly because we know something that the main character does not. Sure, we all dream of meeting our favorite writer/artist/actor/director/etc. and totally hit if off with them because hey, we have so much in common and we appreciate their work like no other. But we also know it's never going to happen. And that's both the good and bad of this book—you know this will not end well, but it's still a great ride anyway. And there's still a bit of surprise in there, too.

High school life, as presented in this book, is pretty much the same as we've always seen it—the in-crowd and the outcasts, overseen by uncaring or misunderstanding teachers. Oh, it's accurate at times, but still a cliché in others. Toward the end it kind of redeems itself as our hero comes out of his shell to discover that not everything *is* a cliché, and I appreciate the bildungsroman aspects of that.

This awakening also applies to his family, who are also portrayed as uncaring and misunderstanding. He sort of learns to live with them, as a sign of growing maturity. But even considering that their portrayal was tainted by his immature point of view, there are still moments where his mother is outright wrong, and her issues are never really dealt with in the book (a problem I have with a lot of YA fiction—the parents are dysfunctional in some way and it's up to the kids to either adjust or rebel rather than the other way around).

The comic book aspects were for the most part, accurate and funny. There were a few glitches here and there—the main character doesn't recognize Gwen Stacy, improbable even for a 15-year-old; and he spots "the writer who brought back Phoenix" even though at this time, the character is still quite dead. It's interesting that the protagonist dislikes single-issue comics and prefers trades, though it's never addressed exactly how he pays for them.

His interactions with Kyra were fun to read even if all she seems to do is scowl and growl a lot; I appreciated a female character who didn't always overreact to a guy being a guy, even if she ended up doing that by the end anyway.

I found out a sequel just came out, focusing on Kyra instead of Donald (Don? Donnie? Fanboy.). I'm interested to read it even though I'd rather just find out what happened to Don. I don't know if I want to read another book about a suicidal teenager.

Meant to post this last night. I hate Delta Airlines, but where else would you get to watch this:



The cheekbones. The finger.

"Smoking is not allowed on any Delta flight." I'll spare you the slow-mo version of it. Oh, Deltalina.

To follow up on the TSA thing—

Predictably, I got searched on the way back too. Except that the Sea-Tac people were a lot less nice about it. Not that they were nasty, but that two of the gentlemen felt the need to lecture me about getting a new ID and kept asking why I hadn't noticed it was expired after a year. The answer being, "Because I don't actually need it except when going through security."

I double-checked the DMV website yesterday, and it turns out you can renew an expired ID up to two years after the fact. Two years. So it's not even that big of a deal to the people who actually issue the IDs.

At least the woman who searched my stuff was very nice and didn't feel the need to lecture me, though she did swab every single god-damned thing in my bags.

I'll get my ID renewed when I get a chance, but maybe I'll just carry around my passport for a while.

I like traveling by plane, for the most part. I hate going through security, even if I manage to do it without incident most of the time. I hate that no matter how early you get there, something will always happen to eat up all that extra time. Yesterday I got the dreaded "SSSS" on my boarding pass because my ID expired (last year, but apparently you get an extra year... which also expired 3 days before). But that didn't even matter in the end, because once they finished screening me I had to wait for heehaw_tng anyway, who was back in the line. And the TSA people were really nice, even when I pointed out, "Hey, I'm still the same person I was when the ID was valid."

I assume that the reason IDs expire is that they want more money from you. I would have originally said it was to make sure people took new pictures as they got older, but that's not true—they let you reuse the same picture to save time.

The flight was fine, for the most part. heehaw_tng and I were bothered by the presence of a woman with two dogs across the aisle. Now, we both like dogs, we're not allergic, we understand why people would want to take their dogs with them, and the dogs were well-behaved. But she had one dog in the seat next to her, one on her lap (and later on the other seat in the row after a passenger vacated) despite the fact that pets are to be kept in their carriers at all times. And even if they were service dogs—though you're only supposed to have one and they should be wearing obvious service tags—the rules state that service dogs are to be on the floor at all times. I don't know what magic spell this woman wove to get this much leeway, but on a safety level it bothered me because people are supposed to be buckled in and bags stowed away under seats or in overhead bins, and yet these dogs were just sitting there with nothing to protect them or others (from being hit by a furry projectile). Oh yeah, apparently your word can be good enough to get a supposed service animal on a plane too, which is just crazy. It's like we're becoming so oversensitive to the needs of the disabled (or potentially disabled) that we've thrown all accountability out the door.

Oh, and because it was JetBlue we had DirectTV on the flight, so we saw the news about the shooting at Ft. Hood when it happened. I'm a bit sad that that shooter isn't dead, not because I want revenge, but because I just want this to be over and now it won't because we have to have a trial and so forth. I think back on other shootings and I wonder if it's better if the gunman dies, or if there's too many unanswered questions when they're not around to provide answers. Then we spend the next 10 years wondering if they played too many violent video games and come up with so-called "solutions" like zero-tolerance policies that just make people more miserable.

This week's Chrono Trigger reference:



No, it doesn't make more sense if you watch the entire episode.

Finally watched last week's episode of Dollhouse, "Belonging." It was really good. And from me that's saying a lot, considering I don't like the show all that much, and watch it out of, I don't know, a misplaced sense of loyalty to Whedon?

There are three problems I have with Dollhouse, two of which were addressed by this episode, but I'll save spoilers for a cut.

I've said it before, but my first major problem with Dollhouse, the one that arose early-on, was that the show broke its own premise. A corporation that mind-wipes people and then downloads new personalities into them depending on the job they're being asked to do each episode? That sounds like a great premise, and that's the show I wanted to see. Not the show about a girl who lives/works in that Dollhouse and just happens to break its hold on her and now everything's going to hell. That's fine for a later season, I suppose, but not from the beginning. You have to bring your audience into that world and let them settle in if the changes you're bringing are to have any impact. You waste your premise by not exploring it fully and the changes that you make are unsatisfying. I think FOX had the right idea by asking that the first few episodes be about standard Dollhouse missions; it's not their fault if the episodes weren't any good. Dollhouse has a good premise, there's no reason a writer can't turn out a good story with it.

( Numbers 2 and 3, with spoilers. )

...here's why you couldn't (bold added for emphasis):

Dear Customer,

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We are aware that you have been frustrated with the services provided to you by
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As you know we have recently changed our customer support operations to a
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We have been trying to recover segment by segment of our network from the
aftermath of this attack. The task has been so enormous and we where not been
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initial estimations proved futile. We are still confident of bringing back the
network to our earlier glorious days. We request you to bear with us in our
distress and assure you to extend a credit of $10 to all our customers in lieu
of the frequent outages for the past 2 weeks.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you and assure you the same quality
of service to be restored at the earliest. We are grateful for your cooperation
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Warm Regards,

Thomas


Just... damn. I wonder how they figured that out. I mean, it's a pretty serious accusation to make... and utterly INSANE.

Finally finished this book on Friday. In all honesty, this took way too long to read.

The Book of Fate
by Brad Meltzer

The other book I picked up at New York Comic-Con this year, thinking, "Oh, it's that book by Brad Meltzer, I liked Identity Crisis, it can't hurt to give this a shot!"

Except it really could.

Judging by the cover design and the back cover copy, the book is marketed toward people who liked The Da Vinci Code. I've never read The Da Vinci Code (and at this rate I probably never will) but somehow I get the feeling that the two aren't all that similar. There's some religious overtones but this book is very political while Da Vinci Code is more about the Catholic Church and there's an actual code in it. I would assume that constitutes a major part of the book.

Meanwhile, the back cover copy of Book of Fate talks about the Masons, a "200-year-old code devised by Thomas Jefferson" and "a decade-old crossword puzzle that conceals secrets worth dying for."

Okay, the only part the Masons play in the book is that the crazed assassin character is obsessed with the idea that the Masons are behind everything. They aren't. The Jefferson code doesn't come into play until there's only 100 pages to go (of the 500 pages of novel) and they don't even bother fully explaining/decoding it. As for the crossword puzzle, sure it conceals secrets, but secrets worth dying for? I think that's a bit of promotional exaggeration. The crossword puzzle is a MacGuffin, like almost everything else in the book. I could summarize the actual plot in the book in about three or four sentences. Instead we endure 500 pages of rising and falling action, points where it feels like they're about to ascend to the climax but then you realize there's still 300 pages to go.

Despite that, I found the book passable. The dialogue is snappy and Meltzer does a good job of conveying action, and he really did his research. What really killed it for me though, was the main character. Wes Holloway, presidential aide, was injured and scarred during a failed assassination attempt on the president, and eight years later, all he does is whine whine whine about how no one will hire him and no one will love him and everyone just stares at his horribly scarred face. Look, anyone who watched a colleague bleed out on the pavement and then had their face torn up by a stray bullet is entitled to their share of PTSD. It's understandable to have nightmares and be paranoid for years after something like that. But the "oh woes me" attitude is pretty ridiculous, because he pretty much blames the incident for everything that's gone wrong in his life... things that I'm not sure would go wrong. He's a former presidential aide and he can't get a new job? Really. Girls are repulsed by the sight of his horrible facial deformity? Sigh. People won't stop staring? Well duh, that's what they're biologically programmed to do, it doesn't make them bad people. By the end of the book things start to turn around for him, which I guess shows it was all in his head, but you have to wonder if he deserved the White House job in the first place, since it feels like he wasn't made of stern stuff to begin with.

Overall, Brad Meltzer is a hack. He can spin a yarn that you'll be able to read and get through with a minimum of effort, but you might wonder why you bothered. I've seen people go off on Identity Crisis and I never agreed with them because I did enjoy that story, but reading more of his writing in Book of Fate makes me take a second look at IC and realize that it's also pretty shlocky and cheesy at times too, and if you're exposed to enough of it you'll grow to hate it. I'm not quite there yet, but I did start reading some of his Justice League of America, and well, he stuck a "Wes Holloway" reference in there.

Hack!

"I will go to the animal shelter and get you a kitty cat. I will let you fall in love with that kitty cat. And then, on some dark cold night, I will steal away into your home and PUNCH YOU IN THE FACE."

I only seem to write when there are conventions. This weekend was the Big Apple Comic-Con, but you see, that wasn't the point of the weekend, because it kind of sucked.

Now, we only went on Friday, so maybe we aren't being entirely fair. So here's fair:

Few people showed up on Friday and the dealers were hurting. I hear the same was true of Sunday. Saturday was actually pretty busy from what I hear, so good for them. However, I felt no need to go because I did all my shopping Friday night and there was no interesting programming on Saturday or Sunday. Friday was a Warehouse 13 panel that I might have wanted to check out, but they never put the schedule online and I wasn't going to ditch work early for an unknown quantity.

A lesson to all NYC convention organizers: make sure people have a damn good reason to skip work, otherwise they're not doing it. And don't complain if no one shows up on a weekday to your event; nerds have jobs and school to worry about.

So I bought that Supergirl issue I was missing only to realize I still need one more, also got every issue of Air except for #2 and issues #9-15 of the Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror annuals, except for #14. So in a way I left needing more than when I entered. Horrors.

The actual weekend was spent hiding from the weather. Looking back I feel like I didn't get much done. That sucks, but it's okay, I'll make it up later if I have to. We did watch Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and that was decent, and last night's Venture Bros. was confusing in between the funny bits.

Is anyone going to check out King Con Brooklyn next month? I'm actually kind of interested. Also? They have panels.

1) Every planet has a North.
2) That's not ironic, that's coincidental.

(Look, I'm sure there's more but I just thought of this this morning. Any additions?)

Re-read DC One Million on Sunday. heehaw_tng bought the trade at NYAF, and when I flipped through it I really wanted to just read it, so I did. It's just as good as I remember; harking back to a time when Grant Morrison could write big, expansive stories that still made a lick of sense. This crossover reminded me just why Morrison is given so much latitude at DC: he can come up with big ideas that are actually suited to the grand, archetypal characters that live there. A story like "Civil War" is suited to the Marvel Universe because it's so messy and political and down-to-earth like most of the heroes there; throw them into something like "Final Crisis" and it's just not quite right, "Infinity War" not withstanding (though it was cool when Captain America faced down Thanos, he's still just Cap, not Superman). The DC Universe is better suited for cosmic stories because a lot of the heroes are from space anyway, or a non-gritty future. And when your leader is a guy who flies through space and hurls mountains, well, you're going to need to step things up a bit.

DC One Million stands as one of my favorite comic-book stories of all time, because it hits so many bases with me. First off, the incredible amount of world-building. The universe of the 853rd Century is just so well thought out, with all these crazy ideas that make sense for a far-future and and incredible amount of consistency. Because every single DC title the month it was published did a million issue, that means Morrison had to write out all these crazy ideas in a bible of some sort so the other writers would be able to write a story in the same future. There were throwaway lines in the main miniseries (like the Headnet and rogue icons) that were picked up and fleshed out in other titles.

Second off, the attention to legacy. The DC Universe is very strong on legacy heroes. And though this story wasn't about prior iterations of heroes (like the original JSA) it felt like it was, in a way. Because we were put in the position of viewing our heroes in past tense. Much as in how we look back on Barry Allen (recent resurrection notwithstanding) and Jay Garrick, we're being asked to look at Wally West in the same way, because that's how the heroes of the future see him. (I know, not the best example because the Flash in the 853rd Century is John Fox, but you get my point.) This all ties into the world-building aspect of the title: Morrison created legacies that don't exist yet, and may never exist.

Most of all, it was just a good story. We saw villains from the past (Vandal Savage) and villains of the future (Solaris). We saw the heroes of the DC Universe dealing with the crisis in their own ways... and we saw what they could become.

As for the actual trade, it's okay. To their credit they included not only One Million #1–4, but also Starman and Resurrection Man, which were both important to the plot. They also included Superman: The Man of Tomorrow for whatever reason, though I feel like it raised more questions than it explained. What they didn't include was Chronos, which on a re-reading I realized was *very* important, at least in terms of what happened with Vandal Savage.

Not much to say about the weekend. This past weekend was the New York Anime Festival, which is a nice idea with weak execution. Though the dealer's room was full and it was insanely packed on Saturday, it was missing a lot of product categories. There weren't a lot of DVD sellers, and almost no one selling toys. I guess a good chunk of the dealers sold costuming materials, some manga, and music. Of course, I don't cosplay, and I can get my manga and music cheaper elsewhere. And many people did—Midtown Comics was doing a 40% off manga sale, and their shelves were getting cleaned out.

We skipped Friday of the con due to work obligations; went out drinking instead and that was fun until the end. Saturday we headed out a bit late but not too late, it's just that rushing there would have been an utter waste of effort since there were no panels were were interested in. We walked around the dealer's room, got annoyed at the crowds, watched a bunch of idiots form a long-ass conga line, and bought lots of trade paperback comic collections. American comics. They were 50% off and the box was loaded with good stuff.

We headed out and went to meet reverend_dave for dinner, only to discover that the BBQ place we wanted to eat at was closed. We ended up at an Italian place with okay food but lousy, lousy service. Then we went home and watched Dollhouse (okay) and FlashForward (pretty good).

Sunday I went back to the con and actually went to two panels. I got there in time to see half of the Leviathan panel, and then a few hours later I was at Anime Parliament, where I ended up helping out Adam.

Last night we watched Heroes and the FOX Sunday Night lineup... while there was some pretty amazing stuff on both American Dad and Family Guy, The Cleveland Show was a bit lacking. The Simpsons was awesome, though. Go Seth Rogen!

The Devil You Know
By Mike Carey

Picked this one up at the Hachette booth at this year's New York Comic-Con. They were giving this and Book of Fate by Brad Meltzer out for free, and the choice of those particular two books by those particular two writers shows a surprising amount of insight by the marketing department at Hachette (both Carey and Meltzer write comics).

The fact that I've actually managed to get around to reading this in the same year I received the book shows a certain amount of fastidiousness (ha!) on my part in reducing my to-read stack. I still have a few more to go, then I can start reading books from the library again. I've already started making a list; book 2 of this series (Felix Castor) is on it.

Yep, that means I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed it enough that I made plans to get my hands on the sequel before I even finished reading this one. Of course, then I find out there are already five(!) books in the series. Looking through Amazon I think only three of them are actually published in the United States, though nothing really stops me from importing the other two.

I've seen the series compared to the Dresden Files but I've never actually read those books but now I might; I really enjoyed the mixture of occult and detective story. I've enjoyed mystery and detective novels in the past but never developed a yen for reading them. But science fiction and fantasy have always been easy for me to pick up, so maybe what I needed was to combine the two.

The main character was the typical "someone you find yourself liking even though you'd probably hate him in real life." He has a past that's briefly touched upon and acquaintances that make brief appearances in the book; it's definitely a "my life is a dark pit of darkness and here I am now, but this one case will start to turn everything around" scenario, which is very typical of a first novel. Like, you want a character with a past, but you need him to be at a place where the readers and jump in and feel like they're at the start of something. So the book followed a predictable path there. Heck, nothing was particularly surprising about the book, it's obvious from the start of the case that a simple exorcism isn't going to be so simple, and Felix was going to find out how the person died, but knowing that didn't make it less fun to read. It's deliciously trashy in all the right ways, but well-written. Which is funny, because I've never read Carey's Lucifer and I don't like his X-Men run at all. (I actually stopped reading X-Men.)

The last chapter makes it obvious that we're going to get more; it very much feels like the pilot of a TV show. "Hey, the gang's all there, now let's go find some mystery!" But less like Scooby-Doo mysteries and more like mid-to-early 90's Vertigo Comics, which I miss and am very glad to go back to given the chance.

In the past week I have twice used the word "fastidious" as a compliment to people. This morning I was thinking about life stuff and I used the word "gregarious" in reference to myself, which was followed up by, "Geez, I've been rather loquacious lately."

Maybe my vocabulary just needed a good workout.

So, weird question that came into my head about Stargate SG-1...

Have we ever seen Teal'c read? We know he can read Goa'uld because he used to help Daniel translate stuff all the time, but what about since then? And did he ever learn how to read any Earth languages? I guess the closest we've ever seen of that was when Teal'c and O'Neill were trapped in the time loop, and they had to help Daniel translate text (since they would be the only ones who would remember any progress they made) but I don't know how much literacy that actually imparts on the character.

Why am thinking about these things? I don't know, I just DO.

EDIT: heehaw_tng mentioned that Teal'c was seen reading a script in "200." So there's one instance! ...in season 10.

Things you will find at the Brooklyn Book Festival:

• Independent booksellers
  
• Books about New York City or Brooklyn
  
• "Literary" magazines and anthologies (aka hipster lit)
  
• Hipsters
  
• African-American literature
  

• Pretty much everything else