Wil Wheaton’s blog is a source of many kinds of delight, but this post about role playing gets an amen.
Warren Ellis is a lot of things, and this post sums many of them up well. He shines here as a futurist able to put himself into a historical context while writing poetically. “This is the path people walked when they first thought about how to talk to time,” indeed.
Yeah, yeah, I know they don’t have a blimp.
I was at SMO this evening trying to get a couple night landings in, though the clouds had other ideas. Even though I didn’t get much flying in, I did get to see the Goodyear blimp doing low maneuvers over the airport. They aren’t quite touch and goes, but that’s what they look like from afar. Anyway, only one shot really came out. That’s Santa Monica’s tower in the blurry background.
One of the hardest things about reading the BBC piece on the RHPS remake is that the goddamn thing is full of names from the credits of the RHPS. This means as a read them they’re translated into red on white bloody letters and the appropriate catcall comes into my head. The old scars run deep.
Some bozos seem to have decided to make another movie called The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Several people are up in arms about this, including Wil Wheaton and Richard O’Brien.  I share their recognition that this is wrong and blasphemous: I think it’s wrong to view the RHPS anywhere but a theater at midnight; there isn’t a scale that captures the odiousness of remaking the movie. Still, I’m not expecting this attempt to amount to anything. The RHPS survived Shock Treatment, which was made by people who understood the RHPS. These nimrods don’t scare me.
There are those actively resisting the attempt, and you may want to help, but honestly, I trust the universe on this one.
My capsule review of Nancy Isenberg’s Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr is posted on Bell, Book, and Candle.
Here’s an amazing bit of americana. Via BoingBoing. The kid’s diagnosis is correct.
Street Use has followed up on its ominous segways sighting by finding a monster segway. Video included.
I’ve been living in California for a while now, and the place still manages to amaze me. Not just the people, who are really sort of wackily charming, but the state itself. This week the LA Times tells me that there’s a hunk of land near Fillmore that just heated up to 800 degrees F. Apparently it just does that. Man, what a weird place.
I updated the X.509 certificates on lunabase today. If you have a jabber account, you may see a new one, replacing the one that expired 2 years ago(!). The local certificate authority is now reasonably well organized (thanks Phil), so future changes should be less painful.
Will Eisner’s The Spirit #19, Aragones, Evanier, Armstrong, Amancio, Austin, Rivoche. I should probably drop this. Three short stories with different artists in which I didn’t like any of the visuals and found some of the writing both uninspired and unbelievable.
Captain America #40, Brubaker, Epting, D’Armata. Not much really happens this issue for the amount that goes on. It’s a fast-paced issue with two sets of foils going at one another concurrently. It’s nice to see Brubaker making jump cuts between the two conflicts using dialog overlaps and other bits of writing. Overall this would be a hard place to jump on, but a fun issue for those of us who’ve been playing along.
Glamourpuss #2, Dave Sim. After Cerebus ended, I didn’t think I’d be reading anything else Sim wrote; as I’ve mentioned before, he can be kind of crazy. But man alive can he draw and write about comics. A student of the medium could learn a fair bit just paging through and looking at the layouts. There are some ramblings on various other topics that are of varying quality, but Glamourpuss is worth it for the art and the discussions of art styles of middle 1900’s comic strips alone. And to be fair, the non-comics stuff has its solid moments as well. The book is remarkably original and remarkably good.
Black Summer #7, Ellis & Ryp. This ended up well enough. The series was an exploration of the envelope of vigilanteism with exercises. Unfortunately, the exercises – that is to say the mayhem – and the ideas didn’t mesh as well as they could have. I think this may be because Ryp’s faces and postures aren’t well suited for conveying subtle nuances of character. His layouts are extremely dynamic and convey the adrenalin rush of combat, but don’t convey soul-searching with any conviction. That’s a shame, because the series should have its share of both. Consequently Ellis’s writing carries the weight of the ideas in this issue. There are a lot of words, and one can see spots where I’d rather have been shown a point than told about it. Overall, the words are worth reading and considering, but the visuals aren’t holding up their end.
Madame Xanadu #2, Wagner and Hadley. These two are in synch. I don’t know if Wagner’s experience drawing is helping with the collaboration or if Hadley’s just remarkably good at doing a lot with her art. Here each page is laid out with a unified theme, usually bled to make use of every millimeter of the paper. Each page draws out both what’s mechanically happening and what it means to the characters (and the world), and is part of the unified whole of the issue and arc. I’m slighting Wagner’s excellent writing here, but his pacing, plot, and characterization are all right where they need to be to bring out his themes. This is remarkably strong work.