This is a little bit of gallows humor that I whipped up and sent to Scott Kurtz and my friends at Penny Arcade when we all knew that Aeofel was dead, but couldn't tell anyone else in the world.
It seems pretty stupid and clunky now, but at the time, it was as hilarious as it was cathartic to me.
I think most folks here know that I don’t drink alcohol and never have. However, I have friends who do, and one of them, my pal Deven Desai, is out here visiting my family for Thanksgiving. He’s partial to a good Scotch whisky, so when he arrived, I presented him with one that I had heard some very good things about: the Master of Malt Single Cask 19 Year Old Tomatin (Cask Strength). Words like “astonishing,” “magnificent” and “astounding” were in the various recommendations I’d seen, which seemed encouraging, so I was willing to take a chance on it and give it to Deven to try out.
I’m happy to say he was extremely pleased with the whisky, and his recommendation of it is couched in terms that science fiction fans will especially appreciate: “This approximates what Romulan ale ought to be,” he said. And, well. There you have it.
This observation was followed by the following, slightly fictionalized conversation:
Deven: Mind you, it’s not blue, like Romulan Ale is supposed to be.
Me: We could fix that if you’d like.
Deven: No. We couldn’t.
Me: Sure we could. We’ve got blue food coloring.
Deven: Don’t make me stab you.
So: Master of Malt Single Cask 19 Year Old Tomatin (Cask Strength). Not blue. But very very good.
Small supplementary anecdote: Athena was watching Deven and Krissy enjoy the whisky and wanted to know if I was interested in trying even just a little of it. I told her that even if I did, it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same reaction. When you don’t drink alcohol at all, you can’t taste the difference between the good stuff and the bad stuff. It all pretty much comes across as iodine to me. It would literally be a waste of excellent Scotch whisky to give any of it to me.
a survey:
http://scottmccloud.com/2009/11/24/rese
- The first item on my to-do list today is, literally, "Make a to-do list." Well, we put it more formally, along the lines of "design an experiment matrix," but cutting to the chase...
- If you know me personally you know that I am not that much of a girly-girl, usually, but if having sparkly purple fingernails is wrong, I don't want to be right.
- I keep forgetting exactly how strong the black tea from Ten Ren is (a local Chinese tea shop, though their teas are made---or imported---by the company of the same name in San Francisco), and caught unawares with the amount of sugar I add every time I brew it anew.
- Earlier this year I bought a pair of brown knee-high boots. Now I'm considering a pair of blacks. OK, maybe I am becoming a girly-girl in my old age with a limited amount of disposable income.
Work now.
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DHVRG2X3BCPTTAAAEYU7
BWR3EZAYT2YD7AAAEYU8
WNYEF7C98RWJFAAAEYU9
8322P9MQRCZDKAAAEYVA
96NV9NVGHAQ7NAAAEYVB
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Please comment if you're taking one; I'd like to strike through the ones used (You can say smething like "I took the second one"). Or, if you try one and discover that it's been taken already, and notice that whoever took it has neglected to mention it, comment for them. |"D
I can’t add much to MGK’s definitive explanations of why Betty Cooper is insane, but I just wanted to make note of one thing I found recently. When I called MGK’s attention to the first page of this story, I hadn’t actually seen the rest of the story. And I assumed that if I ever saw the original context, it would make Betty’s behaviour look less — what’s the word — terrifying and homicidal. I mean, Archie comics have done a lot of WTF stories over the years, but they wouldn’t actually build a six-page comedy story around their readership’s favourite character trying to murder the hero, would they?
But I recently happened to see that story (”Woman Scorned” from Archie # 156, July 1965), and, in fact, that first page was exactly what it looked like: the introduction to a six-page story where Betty goes bonkers and attempts to rub Archie out (not in the good way) in retaliation for a broken date. Moreover, the story establishes that Betty doesn’t care whether innocent bystanders get hurt, that Jughead is the only person who is fully aware of her violent insanity (and therefore has sense enough to be scared to death of her), that the only remorse Betty feels is over her failure to finish Archie off, that when she’s happy, she’s even more dangerous, and that Archie is an idiot. Okay, that last one may have been established elsewhere.
Here’s a link to the complete story (click on the thumbnails to read the pages).
So basically, Harry Lucey and Frank Doyle (I don’t know for sure that he wrote it, but he’s the likeliest guess for any Archie story that’s actually funny) confirmed every theory their future readers would ever have about Betty’s mental state. I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about this; it’s like finding a Silver Age Superman story where they actually tell you that Superman is a dick.
One separate thing I wanted to note here, because it can’t really sustain a full post, is that a way to tell the well-written Archie stories from the poorly-written ones is that the well-written ones usually have a joke on the first page, if not the first panel. Frank Doyle in particular would almost always try to have something funny on the first page, even if it was just a throwaway line of dialogue. Bad comedy stories in comics — not just from Archie, obviously, but from any company — tend to use the first page and even the second for nothing but exposition. Which, when you’ve only got six pages, means that a hefty chunk of the story has nothing funny in it. Not the best way to write comedy.
Where do you go in a book series when you’ve wiped out five billion people in the first book? Jeff Carlson knows, because Plague Zone is the third book in his acclaimed “Plague Year” series — and yet, as Carlson explains in this week’s Big Idea, all the thought-out plans of the author can (and perhaps should) take a backseat when inspiration comes, even from a most unexpected source.
JEFF CARLSON:
As a writer, you face two big challenges with a series. First, each book needs to work as a stand-alone for anyone who’s new to your work. At the same time, it’s important to jump ahead with each installment, always racheting up the stakes.
I try not to mess around. The first book in the trilogy, Plague Year, opens with five billion dead as the remnants of humankind cling to mountaintops around the world because the runaway nanotech self-destructs at low air densities. So. That’s all good scary fun — but what do you do for an encore? It was tough enough to outdo myself with the second book, Plague War. How about a little romance? Politics. Bug swarms as big as small cities! Bwah HA ha ha ha!!!
But now what? In the course of the first two books, people on all sides of the war develop weaponized nanotech based on the original machine plague. This played naturally from the story. The surviving nations are desperate for food and land. They’re driven to use any advantage they can find, so it seemed obvious to continue in that direction.
Nanotech is impressive stuff. By the time the curtain opens in third book, it wouldn’t have been too incredible for my warring nations to be using next generation technologies to create supersoldiers with bulletproof skin and Wolverine bones. Heck, maybe they could turn invisible by bending the light with a zillion microscopic mirrors embedded in their uniforms. Levitation! The ability to go without food or water!
No, no, no, no, no.
One of my Big Ideas, ironically, was to keep Plague Zone “smaller” as far as the technology goes. I didn’t want to get that far ahead of myself. The first two books are plausible — if outlandish — and more disturbing because of it. Zone needed to fit well with the others and yet push the envelope, too, so I had to find a different way to up my game.
I came up with my best bad guy yet. I love smart bad guys. More to the point, this let me expand the scope of the story by another order of magnitude. Year is a fairly personal story. Most of its focus is on two survivors of the machine plague and their quest to defeat it. In War, the camera pulls back a little more. The global conflict that was in the background of Year explodes onto the stage in War as the U.S. is invaded by two foreign armies.
With Zone, I was finally able to personalize the enemy. The lion’s share of the narrative continues to be with Cam and Ruth and other favorites, but we also spend a good deal of time with a Chinese Elite Forces colonel with secrets and surprises of his own. Awesome!!! No matter where you live, you could probably hear me cackling like a demented witch stirring up a lovely pot of evil.
The second Big Idea came from a fan. This was the surprise ingredient. It fell into my lap more than two years ago at one of my very first book signings. I can only take credit for keeping my eyes and ears open, which, after all, is one of the main functions of being a writer.
My mother-in-law had given Plague Year to a friend of hers. Neither of these sensible family women, both German emigrants in their late sixties, are anyone you’d peg as readers of sci fi end-of-the-world novels, but mom-in-law was very proud of me and her friend thought it was interesting to know an author, so they both took a chance.
It turns out the friend is in a book club. Her name is Ingrid Wood. Ingrid’s spent a lifetime debating the intrinsic values of character in Michener and Irving and Auel, so I was pleased when she got my address from mom-in-law and wrote to say she’d really enjoyed her first-ever science fiction novel.
Ingrid came to my book signing armed with discussion points, which was hilarious. I was very nervous. This was a hometown event. Everyone brought friends. Picture me standing in front of a crowd of forty people just trying to keep my nerves down to a low rattle. I’d already worked up a spiel about real-life nanotechnology and breaking into publishing… and Ingrid kept interrupting with questions about the motivations of Character A or what Character B really meant in Chapter 7 when he recalled some long-lost tidbit from his childhood.
Man, I’m not writing The Joy Luck Club. I like to think my books are full of honest human drama and well-written, evocative moods and imagery — but they’re also big, fun, rock-and-roll thrillers loaded with gunfights and exploding helicopters. Yet she made my head explode with one perfect question.
At the time I was writing the sequel, War, and I thought I knew where I was headed with the third book to cap the trilogy. None of those plans went out the window. It was more like Ingrid crashed my party like a gang of bikers, bringing a whole new level of mayhem to my intentions.
It wouldn’t be right for me to give away too much about Plague Zone, so I have to play coy and give you a fake name.
What she said was: “What does Moe do after this book?”
Moe? Who’s Moe, you’re asking. Man? Woman? Is that a Zoe joke? I can’t tell you. Ingrid was right that I’d left a small thread hanging loose in Plague Year, but there are several characters who are left behind or lost or run away in one action sequence or another. Catastrophes are rarely neat. In my mind, that had been the end of Moe.
Now I stood there staring at Ingrid. What I was thinking was: “Holy jumbolee! What does Moe do after this book?”
Ingrid was disruptive and outspoken and nearly derailed my little event, but she had a killer instinct for storytelling. Those few words were exactly the fresh wrinkle I needed to make the story pop…
…so Moe is back, people. That’s the Big Twist Inside The Big Idea.
I hope you like it as much as I did.
—-
Plague Zone: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s
Read a sample chapter from the novel. See samples from the other books in the series, plus short stories. Read his blog.
adjective
1. careful; cautious; prudent
2. astute; shrewd; knowing; sagacious
3. skilled; expert
4. frugal; thrifty
http://dictionary.reference.com/bro
My cat eyed me cannily as I reached into the cupboard--my feeding time meant hers as well, after all.
My new book is just chock-full of good words I'd never read! I love Diana Wynne Jones.
| Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham |
www.phdcomics.com
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title:
"Thanksgiving" - originally published
11/23/2009
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You'll still be able to place orders online of course, but there will be a little delay in shipping. Our US CS team will also be taking a four day weekend, so if you contact customer service please be extra patient - we'll get back to you as soon as possible. (In fact, our UK CS reps will be helping out while the US takes a break.)
Orders placed on the UK site, for Europe and the rest of the world will be unaffected.
When a trailer misrepresents the movie it advertises. When you view the actual movie, you see the trailer has nothing to do with the narrative, characters or plot. You are a victim of trailer fraud.
#1 : "Boy that film sucked !"
#2 " Yeah, wtf did we just watch ?"
#1 : "Dunno, the trailer looked good."
Both : "Trailer Fraud !"
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 24, 2009 is:
macédoine • \mass-uh-DWAHN\ • noun
*1 : a confused mixture : medley 2 : a mixture of fruits or vegetables served as a salad or cocktail or in a jellied dessert or used in a sauce or as a garnish
Example sentence:
The focal point of the painting is a mesmerizing macédoine of warm colors.
Did you know?
"Macédoine" is the French name for Macedonia, a region on the Balkan Peninsula that is now part of Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Historically, this area has been home to a richly varied population encompassing many ethnic groups. Etymologists believe that the cultural heterogeneity of the region may have inspired people to use its name as a generic term for any kind of wildly jumbled mixture. English speakers borrowed "macédoine" early in the 19th century. The word took on its more specific "salad" sense later in the century.
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
You know, the “hey, A Christmas Carol is total crap because Scrooge is actually the hero” argument is quite possibly the bottom of the barrel as far as libertarian thought goes: taking Dickens’ classic story about the essential emptiness of living only for profit and greed and completely missing the goddamned point isn’t something that should surprise me when it shows up on Mises.org (unofficial motto: “Sure, The State Paid For All the Stuff That Made This Website Possible, But That Doesn’t Mean We Wouldn’t Have Created A Massive International Information Network By Ourselves If We’d Been Given The Chance”) written by a bell curver, and yet it does.
Consider this part.
More notorious even than his miserly ways are Scrooge’s cynical words. “Are there no prisons,” he jibes when solicited for charity, “and the Union workhouses?”
Terrible, right? Lacking in compassion?
Not necessarily. As Scrooge observes, he supports those institutions with his taxes. Already forced to help those who can’t or won’t help themselves, it is not unreasonable for him to balk at volunteering additional funds for their extra comfort.
What Levin does here is conveniently forget to include the response to Scrooge’s question:
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
What this serves as is an indictment of Levin’s entire philosophy. The role of social welfare is traditionally condemned in libertarian circles: better that social welfare be provided by private agencies, say they, as it is in the best interests of all concerned to prevent desperation and abject poverty as much as possible. Well, Scrooge is given a chance to contribute towards the social welfare and he says “go screw.” Apparently, in Scrooge’s eyes, the welfare policies enacted by Victorian-era England (which is, I dunno, a socialist utopian paradise all of a sudden) deny the need for private charity even when clearly insufficient, and give the lie to the theory of private social welfare systems so beloved by the right.
It goes downhill from there. Really. It’s kind of sad.
So, my guide as to how to start reading comics has gotten a lot of feedback, and by “feedback” I mostly mean “why did you not mention this YOU ARE A BAD PERSON” or similar. (Okay, they never actually say that I am bad, but I think it’s totally implied and they should all feel very bad about themselves as people.)
There’s a lot of reasons why lots of comics didn’t make the list. Some of them aren’t on it because I wanted to cap it at twenty lest it become unmanageable (Astro City: Life In The Big City was one of my final cuts, as was the first Atomic Robo trade), and personal preference took over. Some of them aren’t on it because I could never figure out for myself where the best starting point is (Hellboy and Uncle Scrooge are the big ones in this regard). Some of them aren’t on it because I think they shoudn’t be on it. (I don’t like Daniel Clowes at all and it’s my list. Tough noogies.) Love and Rockets isn’t on it because I can never make up my mind between Heartbreak Soup and Locas.
Specific points worth addressing:
Anything by Chris Ware. Ware is a master draftsman who has yet to tell a story I find really compelling (Jimmy Corrigan gets way more hype than it deserves), and I think “holy shit look at this art” almost always gets trumped by story when you’re dealing with a new reader – appreciating really amazing art is something that I think comes at “stage two” of becoming a comics reader. (Sure, Jack Kirby is amazing, but he’s also really, really accessible and direct.) This is the same reason I disqualified Fantagraphics’ gorgeous Little Nemo In Slumberland collection. Out of my twenty, I count only one book that’s really art-driven (Big Guy and Rusty), and it has giant monsters and awesome battle scenes.
Fun Home. Got cut when I was dropping down to the twenty-five or so mark. A couple of people pointed out that there’s a dearth of female talent on my list, and… yeah, pretty much. But I didn’t feel comfortable including Fun Home. I love the book, but it has personally struck out for me four times when trying to hook new people for comics, and I am not going to protest that track record just on the basis of inclusivity. Persopolis lingered for the same reason, but got cut late because I already had a top-notch bio-comic (Blankets) and journo-comic (Pyongyang) on the list, and also because I really think the movie actually works better than the comic in telling Marjane’s story, and I don’t want to include works which can be easily dismissed by an inexperienced reader as inferior versions of the same work in a different medium.
The lack of manga. I read a reasonable amount of manga, but the problem with most of it is that it’s almost always a large multi-volume journey, usually in the 8-16 volume range, and thus most of it got DQed by my “no first volume” metric (since first volumes of a manga series are almost never standalone), so goodbye went Maison Ikkoku, Ranma 1/2, Monster, Death Note, Barefoot Gen, Phoenix, Buddha and Naruto. Oishinbo stayed on close to the end, but as much as I like it I know it tends to get repetitive and it’s a bit precious. I still haven’t read Ode to Kirihito, which probably could have otherwise qualified.
Understanding Comics. Works best after someone’s first half-dozen or so reads, not as an initial read. It’s great to see them suddenly think “ohhhhh…” and start going back to the first books they read and looking over them again to see if they “missed” anything.
The Groo Treasury. This only came out last month and I didn’t know about it and now I must own it because it is what I have always wanted: a big-ass Groo book that provides value for money. Had I known this existed, I would have gone to twenty-five items.
“A lot of the good superhero stuff from the ’80s onward – and I’d include Doom Patrol and All-Star Superman in this statement – is predicated on at least a passing familiarity with the genre. How to start reading comics without a single thing from the first four decades of superheroes? Not a very good start.” I’d respond by saying it’s not my fault that DC and Marvel have concsiously and affirmatively made themselves gradually more inaccessible to new readers. That having been said, Batman: Year One, Ultimate Spider-Man, Superman: Birthright, Superman: Secret Identity, Dr. Strange: The Oath and JLA: Earth 2 were all in consideration at various points. Runaways isn’t self-contained enough unless you can find the out-of-print hardcover first volume, Blue Beetle really just isn’t a good introductory comic at all (although Jaime is a great character), and Incredible Hercules relies a lot on Marvel continuity.
Any day where you find a stick that makes for a really decent pretend sword cannot be all bad.
Page Summary
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wilwheaton : CSI: D&D [+0] - scalzifeed : A Recommendation You Probably Wouldn’t Expect From Me [+0]
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amonitrate : hey comics fans [+0] - silmaril : Bitties [+0]
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dreamwidth :: hopelessosaka : Seven Dreamwidth codes up for grabs [+0] - mighty_god_king : Canonical Proof of Betty Cooper’s Insanity [+0]
- scalzifeed : The Big Idea: Jeff Carlson [+0]
- 1word1day :: rainbow_yarn : Don't go without sleep and food at the same time because that's just stupid Tuesday [+0]
- phdcomic : 11/23/09 PHD comic: 'Thanksgiving' [+1]
- moocards : Please note: US office closed for Thanksgiving! [+0]
- dictionary_wotd : martinet: Dictionary.com Word of the Day [+0]
- dictionary_wotd : Presented By: [+0]
- urbanwordofday : Trailer Fraud [+0]
- webster_wotd : macédoine [+0]
- cdsfeed : Tuesday, November 24, 2009 [+0]
- mighty_god_king : Libertarians: Making Sure That Self-Parody Is Handled By The Private Sector [+0]
- mighty_god_king : “Where was THIS on your list?” [+0]
- mighty_god_king : Random thought [+0]
- elisem : Magpie Telegraph Alert winner! [+0]
- apod : Crescent Earth from the Departing Rosetta Spacecraft [+2]