19 posts from September 2006

[This one wasn't written during tonight's Doctor Who, but after.]

Very good take on the zombie motif, though it was a bit like "The Empty Child" in that regard. 

Piper and Tennant did the typical heavy-handed display of acting chops by playing multiple roles. 

A lot of references to "The End of the World," but the main plot seemed a bit rushed. 

Far future stuff doesn't work as well, I think, as the historical stuff. 

Looking forward to later eps that riff on the old shows - Cybermen, Sarah Jane, K-9, etc.

I prefer Tennant to Eccleston, I think.  More manic, more random.

Not a bad ep - I liked some of the pilots better, but really the Christmas Special was the pilot for this season.

I'm working on putting all the books, DVDs and music I own into a "personal library" collection here on Vox.  (I really wish they would add other Amazon items, particularly video games, this way.)

Note:  the fact that something's in this collection doesn't mean that I've finished reading/viewing it, or that other readers have - so use spoiler warnings where necessary in the comments!

Google Reader just updated its interface.  So far, I like the new look a lot better - the fat article labels on the left side of the old interface took up too much space, so I was only able to look at a few articles at a time.

I still need to figure out how I want to do tagging - I can do it prospectively, tagging feeds by their typical content, or I can do it retrospectively, tagging posts by their content.  The ideal would be to do both, altering individual posts from their feed's tag set, but that didn't work under the old interface - if, say, the feed was tagged "feminism" but I wanted the post to just be tagged "music" (i.e., a good chunk of the posts on Pandagon), the feminism tag would be re-applied at some point.  Not sure how the new interface would handle this - I haven't even figured out if I can tag feeds yet. 

[Edit:  I can, but they call them "folders" which is confusing because I've always heard folders used to represent 1-to-many correspondence relation, where tags are many-to-many (in other words, you can have many tags for an object, but it can only be in one folder.  I guess they're distinguishing folders-for-feeds and labels-for-posts.]

What do you all think of the new Google Reader?  Alternatively, what other online RSS readers do you like?

Note to self:  if you're still bouncing off the walls three hours later, caffeine does have an effect on you.  Or at least something does.

Fallout's coming.  After Heroes, I'm less than impressed by the drama here.

Typical shelter triage plot coming up?

These aren't really cops, are they?  They're the ex-cons.

The outsider isn't doing the outsider's job of letting us share her perspective, because I just don't care about these people.

I'll probably stop watching regularly.  Heroes spoiled me.

Long explanation of radiation poisoning for the benefit of the viewing audience.

Oh, we all know cops don't have tattoos.

Why are the deputies in the trunk?  Some postapocalyptic world.

Heh.  Know-it-all.

More explanation of bombs.  (Literally explode the air?  That doesn't sound right.)

Halfway through and there's really not much going on.  Storm coming, and the convicts at the farm.

Medical planning drama is just not interesting.  Didn't they do the coming storm thing on Invasion?

Yeah, wondering when they were gonna communicate.  If the writers are gonna make the character deaf so that they can sign, they take their time about actually doing it.

Convenient salt mine.  Is that realistic for Kansas?

Another Morse code message.  Worth decoding, or are they gonna hand it to us?

Where's Mayor Simon?  Who cares?

Oh god.  She's literally going to fire the pistol we saw hung on the wall earlier.  It's a metaphor, writers!

Blowing up the cave.  Good idea, guys.

Ooh, she's gonna broadcast to the walkie-talkie.  That's what passes for suspense on this show?

That's a pretty lame boom.

Who the heck is Mr. Hawkins?

And to the rescue.  Is this the guy from the bus?

Oh, that was so unexpected.

These guys are awful shots.

Storm at the end.  Is this really going to help them?  Radioactive material will still be on the ground after the storm, right?

Ending montage.  This really feels by-the-numbers.

Roswell?

Oh, god, baby as life-goes-on metaphor.

How does he know where these bombs hit?

If you haven't already heard, we're in the middle of Banned Book Week.  There's a lot of good discussions going on about censorship, like this one over at Pandagon.  There's a neat chart (in PDF form) on the Illinois Library Association website as well, detailing the challenges over the past year.  Sadly, I haven't read many of the books on this list - just The Handmaid's Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Giver, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I've been meaning to read The Perks of Being a Wallflower but haven't gotten around to it yet.  [Edit:  another list can be found here, via UC San Diego.]

My own experience with censorship in schools is rather limited.  I had a lot of freedom to choose my reading material at all levels - which is where my love of science fiction comes from, I think.  In preparation for third grade, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and A Wrinkle In Time; by fifth grade, our advanced reading group had blown through the school's reading textbooks and class sets and got to choose our own material - we binged on H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.  In high school, we still needed approval for our choice of books to present on, but I don't think anything was turned down except maybe Sweet Valley High books.

There were only two incidents of censorship that I was aware of.  (There may have been more, but they were handled on a level that was out of my sight.)  The first was in third grade, where the class copies of a Roald Dahl anthology had one of the stories ("The Swan," I believe) cut out of them - I think the idea was that it was too violent for our little eight-year-old minds.  The second was in middle school, when we read Fahrenheit 451.  Our English teacher (who was actually a pretty good teacher, albeit one with an underdeveloped sense of irony) had instructed prior classes to go through all the class copies and redact the naughty (PG-13, tops) language, because of her opinion that no book really needs to use curse words to make their point.  (I've heard a couple local urban legends about it - that a later student whose parent worked for the ACLU sued the school, and that Ray Bradbury himself petitioned to have the censored copies removed, but a more factual account from the local paper is here.)

Kudos to the librarians for keeping the issue in the collective consciousness, and for fighting the good fight.  Not only are they the secret masters of information who control the universe, but they're very cool and make kickass action heroes, too.

Tekanji has a series of posts up (here, here and here) on Official Shrub.Com Blog about a "How to Draw" series from Wizard.  While she talks about the various forms of sexism that pervade the guide, I'm going to talk here about the aesthetics behind the suggestions.

Scans from the guides can be found at Ratcreature's posts (here, here and here).

Disclaimer:  I can't draw worth a damn.  But even if I don't know art, I know what I like, and this ain't it.  The most charitable interpretation is that these guys are trying to maintain job security by giving bad advice to newcomers.

For the guys, it's all about the muscles, each one drawn in agonizing detail.  No fat, no veins unless they're being shown exerting themselves, but every ab and pec and lat and delt is there. 

For the men, hard and cut.  I try to see as much musculature as I can.

We can trace pictures from muscle mags, and while the figures may look lifelike (if the tracing is well done), they aren't superheroic.  They are just real, normal people, even the bodybuilders.  Superheroes, especially in the fantasy of comic books, should be more than that.  So, without further blab or blather, let's look at BIG MUSCLES!

Real superpowered beings - not just the ones we read about in comic books - need big muscles to fight for right and all that good stuff.

Now I know they're not going for "realistic" in that sense - they're not average, they're heroes!  On the other hand, what does Superman use for weight training, planets?  Can you picture Hiro from Heroes all steroided out like that?  And even "fit" people don't look like that unless they are specifically into body building and developing muscles for show rather than for use.  Look at some Olympic athletes sometime - I'm partial to swimmers for that, because I used to be one and because it's a sport with a good overall balance of muscle use, but any sport would do.  Do you see *any* athletes that look like these drawings, even in a scaled down "real world" sense?  Mostly you see definition on the larger muscle groups, and maybe a hint of the smaller ones.  Minor muscle groups the size of some of the drawings there would actually potentially interfere with the superheroics these characters need to be doing.

Are there really comics readers who *like* this level of obsession with anatomy (or rather with musculature - the rest of the anatomy, not so much)?  At its best, you're going to get something like Michelangelo, but most of these artists aren't going for that kind of effect.  I think it's more about serving a gatekeeper function - not everyone who can draw a passable figure has put in the amount of study and practice to produce a believable bodybuilder figure, and as long as the "professional" artists can keep that as a norm, their jobs are more secure.

For the women, it's all about stereotypical "sex appeal" (I guess female supers don't need BIG MUSCLES! to be heroic) in ways that aren't actually all that appealing:

When drawing the female character in action, be sure to keep her feminine looking.  An easy way to do that is to straighten her feet and hands so that they each come to a point - this will give them a dangerous knife-like look while still keeping their sex appeal.  Arching the back, legs and torso will ensure your character's femininity no matter what you have her doing, be it running, jumping, or kicking through a wall.

Can you imagine Wonder Woman or Birds of Prey drawn by this guy?  Luckily for us, Terry Moore shows up and pwns the crowd:

The figure on the left is a common pose in hero art, but it is also the most criticized.  Why?  Well, putting the exotic dancer pose aside, it's obvious that the forces of nature don't apply to this body - as opposed to the figure on the right, which displays muscle mass, room for internal organs, a working spinal column and gravitational effects.

The thing is, even from a purely visual standpoint (i.e., before you know anything about the characters), Terry Moore's characters are far more attractive than the "sultry" women, whether drawn by the other artists or by Moore himself.  And I don't think I'm alone in this respect, though you'd never know it from "guides" like this.  (Which leads into a larger rant about beauty standards, genres with overwhelmingly male audiences, and the Designated Hot Girl, but not today.)

What TV show(s) will you be watching this season? Why? 
Submitted by ducnly.vox.com.

[Yes, I know this is really a Question of the Yesterday.  But I want to answer it.]

Thanks to my TV card, a heck of a lot.  My must-sees for this season:

Lost
Doctor Who
Heroes
Veronica Mars
Eureka
Jericho

And my also-records:

Supernatural (this would be a must-see, except I've got a lot to catch up on.)
The 4400 (ditto this.)
Stargate Atlantis
The Office
Corner Gas
My Name Is Earl
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends

Yay scrolltext.

Chapters?  Pretentious, but I'll take pretentious over formulaic.

Lecture in India.  Anything being described as a pinnacle of evolution is awful science.  Multiracial cast a la Lost - that's a plus.

Same with the 10% of the human brain.

So they're mutants?

The professor's dad - plot #1.  Not a bad start.

They so need to do a comic tie-in.

And the opening plot ties in to all the other heroes.  Nice.

And now it's gratuitous T&A.  I'm hoping they'll play with expectations, but it looks like they've introduced a Designated Hot Girl.

Weird voices - what's her power?

Ooh, nifty mirror effect.  Still don't know what the power is.

A smart kid that's not annoyingly saccharine.

Invulnerable suicidal cheerleader.

So far, this is really good.  Not quite the level of the Lost premiere, but it's the closest thing I've seen since.  They seem to get it - don't give us human interest stories about the character, give us the kewl powerz and let the backstory come out naturally.

Jumpy guy again.  Can he fly, or is the other guy seeing his death?  Okay, I guess it's the flying thing.

Cheerleader girl being cheerleader girl, and the Japanese guy from the previews.

Dude, this guy is seriously teh awesome.

And the first crossover.

Heh.  Comics.  Bet he'll explain the powerz.

Reflection power again.  Still no idea how that works.

Don't care much about Flyboy's subplot.  Random politician guy nobody cares about.  But he's just the backstory.

Wait, is he psychic or can he fly, or both?

And Mirror Woman has a gambling problem.

Suicidal Invulnerable Cheerleader is fireproof, too?

And of course she learns to be a hero.

And the Professor starts his search for the heroes.

Is painter guy the politician's brother, or just another psychic?  Guess he's another psychic.

And crossover #2 - the painting.

And #3 - the taxi.

Aww.  Supercidal Cheerleader has a sidekick.

Letting the music carry the montage.  Or trying to sell the soundtrack.

Trauma for Mirror Lady - will we finally get to see her power?

Oh, this is just stupid.  Why wouldn't the boss rather have money?

And we're back to the Japanese Trekkie.  I like his exposition better.

Eep.  Everyone does their scary power manifestations while blacked out, apparently.

I so need to come up with superhero names for these people.

And back to the Professor plot.  With creepiness and a conspiracy.  Yay!

Sweet.  Hiro has a blog.

Cheerleader life plot is kinda dull.  Too much like the Invasion/Surface stuff.  Yawn.

Ew.

There's a neat intersection (Cheerleader's dad).

Damn.  I wish I could teleport.

I'm having a hard time following the painter's plot.  Were the dreams from the psychic?

And a closing narration.

Epilogue - will he fly or not?  It'd be amusing if he went splat, and it was the psychic painter guy predicting his death.

Oh, they both have the power?  Confusing.

The comic thing - that's cool.

Also, squee.

Threw a bunch of old pictures I had lying around onto the blog.