It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Japan has threatened to launch a preemptive strike on North Korea. This is pretty much right on the edge of violating the World War II surrender terms. Possibly those are obsolete and should be reconsidered anyhow, but I’d like to see that done under less frantic circumstances.
Man, I’m glad I don’t live in Northeast Asia right now.
Edit: Thanks to my anonymous commentor for correcting my geography.
Well, I’m of three or four minds about this. OK, so Mike Meyers has struck a deal to do what he’s calling “film sampling.” I.e., he’s gonna insert himself or other actors into old movies. Remixes. See also Kung Pow.
I want to see what Meyers does with this concept, cause I think he’s comedic gold, even after the last two Austin Powers flicks. But I hate the way the Variety story calls films “properties.” But I think that this sort of remixing will demonstrate the value of having more creative works in the public domain, since it’ll show what people can do given the right to edit. Except that Meyers isn’t gonna be working with public domain movies. And how the hell does this jibe with the whole ClearPlay issue? Are they really saying “It’s OK to screw with the director’s original vision as long as you own the rights to the movie.”?
Well, of course they are. Still, this move blows the hell out of comments like “There are those who would revise a film for what they claim to be benign reasons. But there are others who would alter for pornographic and obscene reasons. To allow one, it would seem you must allow the other.” That’s Jack Valenti talking, there.
You know, I think next Valentine’s Day I’m going to Paris. That’s just cool.
Nothing funner than slamming in a Movable Type upgrade first thing in the morning before I take off to sunny California. Looks immensely cool, though. Let me know if you see any problems. It’s worth installing, though, for a myriad of reasons readers won’t notice.
The above was egregious, but also tested the text formatting. As usual, let me know if anything breaks.
Edit: woo! Text formatting improvements — just work!
So here’s what happened.
About a month ago, I picked up the four phonebooks of Essential X-Men on a whim. For those unfamiliar, phonebooks are cheap black and white reprints of old comic books. It’s one of the few ways we see long runs of classic comics kept in print. These were the first umpteen issues of Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men, including the Phoenix Saga, and they are darned good. I’d never read ‘em before. The energy of the writing is very engaging, and the plotting is solid and fairly complex. This is the X-Men before they got weighed down with too much continuity. Fun.
After finishing ‘em, I had that completist impulse to go read all the X-Men. I quickly did what I always do when I get that urge; I read the rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks FAQ and remind myself of the hash they made of Jean Grey until the impulse goes away.
This time, I was reminded that Warren Ellis’ run on Excalibur represents one of the few significant big chunks of Ellis’ work I’ve never read. After a little more struggle, I convinced myself that it would be OK to read just the Ellis issues, and dropped over to EBay in hopes of finding ‘em. You never know.
That’s where it got bad. I searched on Excalibur, and found an absolutely complete run of every Excalibur-related comic in the world. I mean, everything — the Alan Moore Captain Britain Jasper’s Warp graphic novel, the Wisdom and Pryde mini, the whole damned thing. With no bids on it. And less than an hour to go in the auction, so I didn’t have time to sleep on it and think better of the idea in the morning.
There are now two boxes of Excalibur on my floor, and I’ve been reminded as I reread the FAQ while writing this entry that somewhere in the middle of it all there are gross Phoenix retcons. The Warren Ellis issues start around #85. Fortunately, most of the intervening stuff is Claremont and/or Alan Davis, but there’s a bunch of Scott Lobdell in there too.
If I don’t make it out alive, don’t send in a search party. The risk is too great.
I was looking for a way to permit random people to submit entries to Movable Type, and there’s not really any way to do it out of the box, so I wrote this CGI. It is not entirely polished; in particular, it ought to use a config file and of course the HTML is gonna need to be changed. It also ought to display a success page. However, I realized last night that I was going to wind up modifying it substantially to meet my specific needs and that it wouldn’t be so generally useful post-modification, so here you go.
Note that unless you add NoPublishMeansDraft 1 to your mt.cfg file, submissions will be not be posted as drafts. More details on that here.
Edit: Mmm. Yeah. Sorry about that; I stuck the CGI off in the extended entry bit.
So the Onion went and asked a bunch of celebs who they could take in a fight. I gotta say, if you respond to that question with “I believe in non-violent solutions” or words to that effect, you’re kind of wimping out. This is the Onion. Have a sense of humor. Maintain your principled stance on non-violence by saying “Nobody, because I have a principled stance on non-violence and I’d just curl up into a little ball even if it was Nancy Reagan coming after me.”
Best line in the piece was from Frank Miller:
Well, she [Little Lulu] doesn’t exist. She’s just lines on paper. If you want to go along those lines, I’ll just say I could take Galactus. Paper rips.
Yeah, baby. Paper rips.
Also, I am tremendously jealous of my once housemate Tasha Robinson who gets to go out and interview people and ask them questions like that. There’s someone who knew what she wanted to do and now does it.
After getting Sorcerer (which I will talk more about at some point) and reading Gibson’s new novel Pattern Recognition (ditto), I got all fired up to write up a little discussion of using the former to run a game set in the environment of the latter. Then Rob MacDougall beat me to it, so I just posted my thoughts in the thread he started. Man, I’m getting some good gaming out here.
In honor of Jon Carroll’s 2/11 column, and inspired by my friend R. Francis Smith, I present the Candidate X Store. Candidate X: he doesn’t like killing people. It is, in my mind, a perfectly chosen phrase.
Everything there is priced at cost; I don’t make any money off ‘em. The slogan is thanks to R. Francis.
