THE DARK KNIGHT

Maybe the reason the Joker always loses is that no matter all his talk of chaos, he wants to win by perverting idealism. Even he's an idealist. He openly abhors the way we citizens accept some lossses and not others. To be as unspoiler-y as possible to make my point--what the Prisoner did on the ferry made sense from a narrative point of view and was cool. It made sense. What the jackass bridge-and-tunnel guy did made sense from a narrative point of view, but was hardly redemptive. The world is being wrecked by just this sort of guy and my first thought about his actions was "I bet he suddenly wished there'd been tort reform after all". His actions ultimately just weren't believable.

I wanted Batman's answer to be "So what if people can be bad? Don't tell me you're surprised, Joker. Don't tell me you think it wasn't obvious to anyone." That's really a very tiny flaw in a major motion picture, that it doesn't use my dialogue. But seriously--a superhero movie this good means a change is ahead. Either the themes grow or we beat it flat into the sand like the Western. Please please please don't let the next theme be the price of fame. Another movie with famous people in it playing famous people who are tired of the attention makes me want to make the pencil disappear...

The movie was fantastic; but it was so well done that it underlined the fact that the whole vigilante justice issue is getting less relevant in an age of increasing acceptance of real horrors. It might well signal the coming downward arc of superhero movies. The SPIRIT trailer made me want to go hide under something. Is this to be the ONE FROM THE HEART of superhero movies?

For me, the scary bit is using emotional distance to commit horrors. Them's the psychopaths.

Me and My eeePC

I count Pam Bliss among my great pals and listen closely when she is won over by technology of any sort. If you know Pam, you know what I mean; she's wary about stuff like that. So when she raved recently about her new eeePC from Asus, I took notice.

When convention time rolled around this year I found myself wincing at the thought of carting around my laptop and the possibility of an extended search that would include powering the monster up and even the possibility of TSA wanting to keep it for further study. All just so's I can blog from MoCCA? There had to be a better way. Indeed there was.

The eeePC's size surprises you the way tiny dogs amaze you by being that little. It looks for all the world like a Fisher-Price Laptop might.

Well, maybe not. This gadget is actually larger than an eeePC (true). And like the laptop above, when you turn on the eeePC it works. It already has eveything you need to be out and about in a wireless world. I got the 4G Surf and installed GIMP on it, but that's about all the tinkering I've done.

Since it's got a solid state hard drive, when it's off it can take some thumps and bumps with no trouble. The TSA screeners barely looked at it, and I got a few stares from the line behind me when (as per TSA policy) I put the little eeePC in its own bin for the x-ray. The tiny keyboard requires some carful typing; I cannot master hitting the spacebar on it just yet, as I am more of a spacebar stroker than a spacebar hitter. Oh, and you can double your hard-drive size with a flash drive.

When I caught up with Pam at Wizard World Chicago, I told her of the effect her blog posts on the eeePC had on me. When she started quizzing me on my model and mods I knew she'd really been hooked on her eeePC. When Pam goes for something, she finds out everything there is to know about it.

Even my 72 year old mother, who is interested in learning about the internet and email and such said "That thing looks like a toy! I bet I could learn on that!" There's your slogan--"eeePC; we don't intimidate the elderly" unlike some manufacturers we could name (Alienware, I'm looking at you). She may even get one of her own; goodness knows getting mine away from me can be a trick.

Asus is starting to put out bigger and badder eeePCs, and that seems to me to be missing the point. A relatively inexpensive laptop with a small form-factor doesn't need to be a monster. Nobody's going to get one to play GTA 4. Nobody in their right mind would want to do Photoshop-level graphics on one. I have a feeling this will be a small window, and that the 2 and 4 gig models will disappear entirely in favor of the 80 gig monsters. I'm very happy with my tiny on the go 4G Surf, thanks.

And don't get the one with Windows XP on it. That's like peeing in the sink.

Hanna's Very Smart

Just thought I'd mention it. Here's an abstract from a paper she co-authored (Warning: Math). If you're on a University account, you might can read the whole paper. I may start saying cool stuff is "totally geodesic!"

Also, I just saw that the first part of the YouTube adventure through the 2008 Wizard World Chicago Artists Alley (starring Hanna's back) has been viewed 83 times. It drops off quite a bit for other parts, mostly on account of my own brand of Handicam work; I should have at least focused on the claw-rent noggin of Lady Liberty for all the queasy POV I generated. Yes, I own a tripod. Yes, it'll get better.

Now that I've sorted out the video uploading, I'll dig up a Candle Light Press Public Access TV show from a few years ago and put it up. Ian was behind the board for that one (including special effects!), so the video part is plenty competent. Watch this space!

More Wizard World Chicago--The Artists Alley Tour!

After Hanna came in on the train, she joined us and we wandered Artist's Alley (most of it anyways) in one long run. It's actually pretty instructive on what draws the eye and what doesn't. There are a lot of empty spots at noon on Saturday, even if they are just gimmes for guests. Two new innovations that work: one is labelling tables by taping the names of the creators on the floor in front of the table. This helps a lot with table poachers and also get names in front of the faces of people who look down a lot when they walk; second is a large board near the area showing where everyone is. Well done!

As with Will yesterday, much of this video involves Hanna's back. But it works as an average walk-through point-of-view piece.

Blogger Video Upload is not so good now. Here's some Youtube!

It could've been worse

I was just getting back from my weekly comic book run when my car started to act funny. It all started with a fwipping noise coming from the right hand side of the car. "This can't be good!" I thought. Then my power steering and coolant went out. All while I was cruising down interstate.

After navigating my auto to a tire/oil change venue I was informed that my Serpentine belt had snapped. Sure enough, there it was, snapped in half and wound around my engine. "Crud!" I thought. But I was glad (and this may change later) to find out that I would still be able to get around under my own power and will get it into a proper garage Monday.

Now, here is the silver lining: I was just in Chicago, 5 hours from home, attending the Wizard World convention. Sunday was looking pretty bad, as we were lost like CRAZY somewhere in the Outer Rim that is the Chicago suburbs. Signage: Non-existent. Someone from that area might be missing one of these:













Now, in hindsight, I'm so glad that this was the biggest of my worries. I can't even imagine having that belt give out whilst JT and I were desperately trying to Escape From Chicago and rendezvous with Will at the elusive O'Hare Oasis.

P.S.: Here are some photos from the trip. Stayed at a place called the W City Center. Very swank (see the razor they sent to my room). The bartender was smoking hot and I want her to be my wife. Seriously. Anyway, thanks for looking out for me. You know who you are.

Ah, The Scholarly Life

Just got the proofs for a book review I did for a Comparative Lit journal called INTERTEXTS. They were sent Tom Sito's excellent history of animation unions and weren't sure who they knew who would review it. An old friend of mine is an Associate Editor there and he dropped me a line asking if I wanted to do it.

It's been a while since I was in academia; those two Masters Degrees seem like a million years ago now. But once you've laid down your opinions with footnotes, you never really lose the urge. You'll have to troop to your local university library to read it if you're interested. I wrote it during the Writer's Guild strike (if you think movies have a long lead time, try journals) and it's already a snapshot because of that.

As soon as you stop writing, your work sits still while you float on ahead; I've known a lot of writers who feel uncomfortable with this fact. Some folks will keep tinkering and tinkering and never quite finish. I suppose I've been like that myself, but that's the great part of writing graphic novels--it's done when it's drawn. Well, you can change bits in lettering, sure, but there's no going back on the big choices. It's for the best.

I'll employ fair use and give you the last paragraph:

"History repeats itself with painful regularity in the case of animation unions; the lessons are forgotten as a new generation of animators, grateful to be working in the dream factories, make costly sacrifices that work against them later. Drawing The Line is a cautionary tale for the artists and writers who want to join in telling the established epics of our time. The warning isn’t that you should prepare for a beating; it’s that you should prepare for a fight."