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Couple of random thoughts while the caffeine from my Diet Pepsi (the drink of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) theferretts!) kicks in:
1. I'm glad I watched The Middleman show before reading the comic. The show has a much lighter tone that I appreciate. Also, call me simple if you must, but I like the "Ben bad, Tyler good" aspect of the show over the way Ben was handled in the comic. Pathos for Ben is never a good thing. "He's a doorknob." Plus, I prefer Matt Keesler's clean-shaven looks to the semi-bedraggled comic version of the Middleman.
2. Why can't Empowered get a television show? Granted it would likely be on SpikeTV rather than ABC Family, but still. I blame the anti-blond conspiracy.
3. I mentioned this over on ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) scans_daily, but it needs to be said here: Why can't Zeke Stane respond to Sasha when she's talking to him? Obviously, if he can talk without functional lungs ("Undead Zombie Owen!" Middleman cried.), then his auditory communication systems are part of his upgrades. Also, he's several levels below a Stark facility listening to her blatantly describe his location, so it's obviously a digitally encrypted signal. What's stopping him from quick-bursting a response? Cellphone triangulation works because the phone is always on, but short bursts shouldn't be any more of a problem for him than receiving her signal. It kind of bugged me.
4. Why can't more comics be like Blue Beetle? Maybe I'm just ga-ga for Khaji-Da, but I like that book. It's fun. It's got action. There's drama, inter-personal conflict, etc. Yet, it doesn't feel as macabre as even The Middleman comic. I wish more comics were like that.
Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:05:11 GMT
God, no, stack cats on dog.
Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:52:09 GMT
Haven't you ever wanted to do something wrong? Nothing bad. I don't mean like hurting someone. I just mean something wrong. Download a song from the Internet. Speed up when the light turns yellow just to see if you can make it. Build a self-replicating digital polygon to see if you could bring a virtual world to a grinding halt.
That's what being a true super-villain is about. It's not about genocide. It's not about world domination. It's not about adolescent revenge fantasies because the quarterback called you a nerd. Those kinds of losers get lumped in the same category, but I promise you, they are a different breed.
True super-villainy is exploration, discovery, and adventure that defies acceptable social norms. It's building a secret underground lair because it sounds cool, not because your parents were killed. It's about dedicating yourself to a specific field of knowledge because you personally find it fascinating, not because you want to build bombs for the army. It's the difference between being curious for the sake of knowledge and collecting all the world's information to increase shareholder wealth.
George Bernard Shaw once said, "You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'" I'm a super-villain, because I know 'why not' and I don't fear it.
I want an MP3 player that has every song ever produced on it, why doesn't it exist? Because of copyright laws, because of money, because of greedy people. I'll build one any way. I'll defy their laws and niceties and I'll have my machine, even if I'm branded an outlaw.
I want to fly to the moon, why can't I? Because the parts I need are classified as dangerous, because I need security clearance to get them, because they could otherwise be made into a weapon of mass destruction. I don't care. I'll buy my parts on the black market, modify the legals ones I can get, and I will fly to the moon, even if some social lackey is waiting there to drag me back to Earth.
Humanity has reached an evolutionary dead-end. People are content to be protected. People ensure no children get left behind by making sure none go forward. People are content with their lives, because they know no matter who invades or what disaster strikes, they will be protected.
I refuse to be protected from myself. It's my life. If I choose to expose myself to mutating radiation in the safe confines of my lab, who does it hurt? If I choose to amass a private database of ways to defeat my potential adversaries, how is that any more a crime than when the government does it? If I decide to create artificial life in a lab that turns rampant, why am I any more at fault that parents who spawn serial killers, child molesters, and politicians?
There is no such thing as dangerous knowledge, there are only dangerous people. This is what I believe.
There is no such thing as dangerous people, there are only people corrupted by dangerous knowledge. That is what you believe.
My beliefs are what took humanity to the moon, split the atom, and gave us microwave pizza. Your beliefs arrest children for writing fiction, censor graduate thesis papers, and spawned Facebook. Because of this, I'm labeled the bad guy, while you are the helpless victims. This is what you call correct, just, and right. If society is right, then I will gladly be known as a wrongdoer.
I am a super-villain.
Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:24:47 GMT
I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing, and I foolishly went and spent money at iTunes. I want to kick myself. I repurchased, at Amazon, two of the four songs I just purchased at iTunes, because, silly me, I really want to listen to them on my MP3 player.
I can't believe I did that.
GAH!
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I hate Apple.
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:52:33 GMT
I hereby declare JSONP the fevered dreams of madmen.
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:20:44 GMT
Andy: I'll tale Palindromes for two hundred.
Alex Trebek: This was the pledge made by one of the Wonder Twins, when he adorned a swastika.
Andy: What is: I, Zan, am a Nazi?
Alex Trebek: Correct.
Andy: I'll take Palindromes for four hundred.
Alex Trebek: This is how Batman explains the decline in villain abilities to Robin.
Andy: What is: Lapse of foes, pal?
Alex Trebek: Correct.
Andy: I'll take Palindromes for six hundred.
I'm still trying to come up with three more...
EDIT: Anyone know what an "opus time" is? Because I have "Emit's up on a dias said an opus time" if an opus time could speak.
Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:31:55 GMT
(Note: I'll edit this to say where I got the link from if the author of the locked post is okay with it. Either way, thanks for the link, you know who you are.)
This could actually be brilliant. Think about. McCain is old. Palin is a grandmother. If you're in that position, and you needed a way to break through the Gordian Knot that is Barack Obama, how do you do it? Pirate music, or at least make a firm stand on your campaign's fair use policies.
Can you imagine John McCain on The Daily Show turning the tables on Jon Stewart by being able to (appear to, anyway) sympathize with the people Viacom is going after in their YouTube suit by saying, "Right now, I've got Sony BMG coming after me for using a song from the 70's. Tell me, Jon, as party to the lawsuits going on against people who posted clips to YouTube, what's your motivation to persecute fans?" Or something anyway.
I'm just saying, it's a potentially interesting position for the McCain-Palin campaign to find themselves in, and I'll be curious to see how well or if they capitalize on it. Probably not, but I like to day dream.
Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:04:09 GMT
You know how you like to make fun of Grant Morrison for using that stupid law (and apparently U.S. Mail) to summon the heroes? I just figured out why it doesn't bother me as much, when I remembered I've lived through the same stupidity. Yup, thanks to Gail Simone, I'm mostly immune to Grant Morrison's idiocy.
Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:41:17 GMT
I don't read TechCrunch very often but Ted Dzubia, whose levels of assholery I can only aspire toward, linked to a funny article today about Chrome. I say "funny" but there was a line in there that tweaked me off: "Microsoft, meanwhile, is stuck with a bloated closed source browser that they don’t even tether to their search engine for fear of more antitrust woes. Ha, ha, ha. Let's make anti-trust jokes!
I never liked the idea that Microsoft had a monopoly because it put IE on the desktop. It always struck me as being a frivolous use of anti-trust laws. Yeah, sure, it's unfair that Microsoft could put on there, but, you know, it was their OS. No one was stopping Netscape from writing their own OS. Microsoft never made it impossible to install Netscape or remove IE from the desktop. People beat-off all the time about how the web is the new desktop, completely forgetting that we might have gotten their all the quicker is Microsoft has been allowed to continue down that path.
Not saying I would have wanted a Microsoft-themed web, but a lot of good software has come about because people lifted or wanted to Microsoft to some an idea. Who's to say what current trends would be if Microsoft hadn't had to step back and at least change how they targeted the desktop/web integration.
Maybe I'm a Microsoft apologist, it just rubs me the wrong way to see people cheering Google for the same thing Microsoft got slapped for doing ten years ago. Or maybe I just appreciate Microsoft not being ashamed to acknowledge their a heartless, public corporation who wants your money, as opposed to Google who looks like a cute little kitten when it knows your looking and then sells your secrets to men in black hats the moment your back's turned.
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:49:06 GMT
Next Avengers not a bad little film. It ranks up there with the Lion's Gate Iron Man movie in that it's entertaining to watch, even if it feels a bit shallow plot wise, which isn't something I think of so much as a critical flaw, more like they invented such an interesting world and characters, I want to know more than the movie has time to show. I recommend it.
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 20:21:15 GMT
It was 3:50 am when I started this. It's 5:04am now. My only excuses are (a) sleep deprivation, and (b) maybe like Iron Man the 1.0's are just too quaint to appeal to me as they do with other cripples. So, in that vein, without spell checking...
Helena Bertinelli flipped her phone open and thumbed through its menus until the display showed a slightly relayed copy of where the camera was pointing. Her battery was still half-charged, even after a day of texting her friends and Twittering various updates about her social life. It wouldn't hurt her plans to leave the camera running as she quietly crept into position.
Following her prey had not been hard. Barbara Gordon and Zinda Blake didn't exactly blend in to the student populace. Gordon in her wheelchair and Blake with her stupid pilot's hat, which looked like it had been purchased from a Military Surplus store, might as well have been baby elephants walking through the halls as easy as they were to follow, and follow them Helena was.
In fact, she had been following them since a week ago, when she caught them sneaking out of school after everyone else left. Of course Helena had an excuse for staying late: cheerleading practice. A nerd like Gordon and a gearhead like Blake, both of them social pariahs, had no excuse, at least in her eyes. She wasn't sure what they could have been doing...making out maybe, building bombs more likely...but after a week of watching them, she was ready to make her move.
They were both in the science labs, which was fine by her. The science labs were actually two separate rooms divided by a half wall with windows on top. No mater which lab they were in, it would be a cinch to get in the other lab and take a photo from the other. It was just a matter of watching and waiting for both of their backs to turn to her.
When the moment arrived, Helena slipped through the door and carefully duck-walked across the floor, keeping her head below the partition. Only when she was next to the wall did she risk raising her phone just high enough to periscope over the half-wall.
"I knew it," Helena whispered. She watched the phone and witnessed Gordon pulling off her sweatshirt. They were going to make out! Gordon and Blake were lesbians. Now she knew, and soon so would the whole school. Her finger was about to press the green button to snap a photo when a hand snapped her phone shut, pulling it out of Helena's grasp. "How dare you?" Helena snapped, whirling around as she stood up, her surveillance forgotten. "Who do yo think...Dinah!"
Dinah Lance glared at Helena as she stuffed the phone in the hip pocket of her blue jeans. "How dare I?" Dinah as, putting a hand to her chest, "How dare you?" Dinah Lance was the only student Helena feared. She was a senior. Captain of the cheer squad. Homecoming queen. As powerful as Helena knew she was, it would be nothing if Dinah turned her forces against her.
"I was going to let the principle know," Helena explained. "Those two," she whispered, "lesbians are making out on school property."
Dinah shook her head. "Come with me." It wasn't a request. Dinah grabbed Helena's arm and pulled her into the room where the other two girls were. As they entered, Barbara and Zinda looked up, their faces smiling as they saw Dinah and then falling when they saw Helena.
"What's she doing here?" Barbara asked.
"Helena wants to watch you two," Dinah paused to look at Helena. Then she turned back to Barbara and Zinda to whisper, "Lesbians," returned to her normal volume, "make out."
"Make out?" Zinda asked. She was crouched on the ground, assembling some kind of frame. She stopped long enough to look between Barbara and Helena. "You didn't say anything about that, Skipper."
Barbara's lips quirked. "I'm willing to go so far as a hug if this works, but past that..." She shot daggers at Helena. "Maybe Helena was give you a little tongue. I heard she gets lots of practice, kissing up to teachers." Barbara made a couple of smooching sounds, to which Zinda shook her head before getting back to her work on the frame.
Helena jerked her arm free of Dinah's grasp. "Laugh now, Gordon," Helena shot back, "but when I tell..."
"Tell who?" Barbara asked. "The science teachers? The principle? My dad? Please, go on. Tell them you caught Zinda and I working on our fully authorized, completely approved science fair project. Just promise I can be there to watch when you do."
Helena's jaw dropped for a moment, but she snapped it shut. She scowled for a minute, trying to think of some comeback to cow Gordon's insubordination. She could take Dinah's treatment, that was the pecking order, but there was no way she'd take it from someone who couldn't even look her eye-to-eye.
Dinah seemed to realize what Helena was thinking, and interceded. "Since you're here, you might as well lend a hand, Helena. You need anything, Babs?"
Barbara smiled. "Yeah, actually." She spun her chair around, so her back was to Helena. "My laptop needs to be plugged in...there's a socket behind the big shelf, but it's out of my reach."
"You got it," Dinah said. She lifted the bag off of the back of Barbara's chair and unzipped the bag. "Hel, go plug this in," Dinah added as she handed Helena an orange extension cable. Helena looked at the wire for a moment before reluctantly accepting it. With her free hand once again free, Dinah pulled out the transformer-power-cable combo and began to setup Barbara's laptop on a table that was clearly the handicap accessible work station.
By the time Zinda said, "I'm almost done here," Barbara was working on her laptop. Dinah and Helena were sitting on a pair of lab stools, watching.
"You following me now?" Helena asked.
Dinah didn't reply at first. Instead she watched as Zinda pulled the frame, which bore a strange resemblance to a police chalk outline, in the same way a Visible Human science model resembles a game of Operation. Once Zinda plugged a handful of wires coming from Barbara's laptop into the frame, Dinah spoke.
"Babs' dad can't always pick her up, and since he knows my dad, and my dad knows me, sometimes I drive her home," she explained. "Today just happened to be one of those days." Dinah fell silent after that, and Helena didn't ask any more. That was all she needed to know: Gordon, and by extension Blake, had a protector. They were taboo for now. Off limits.
"Okay," Barbara said, just loud enough that everyone could hear, "we're ready. You know what to do Zinda?"
"Yup," Zinda nodded, "Start the macro. Terminate power if anything goes kaflooie. Run as fast as I can if anything starts flashing red." She grinned a broad, guileless grin after the last part, and Barbara returned her smile with a sour, friendly raspberry. "I made the last part up."
"You don't say," Barbara muttered. Despite her reply, the majority of her focus was dedicated to lowering herself from her chair to the floor.
Helena watched with morbid fascination as Gordon manipulated her legs with her hands. It was the first time, to her knowledge, that she'd seen the paralyzed girl out of her chair. Helena's attention was broken when she felt something hard and plastic knock against her chest. "Here," Dinah whispered, "take a picture, it'll last longer." Helena felt herself turn red as she took the phone back, and quickly slid it back into her pocket.
Barbara continued to position herself until she was lying inside the frame. Her legs and arms within its metallic outline. She nodded to Zinda, "Let'er rip!" Zinda tapped a couple of keys on the laptop and instantly the frame jumped into he air. It was only a couple of inches, but it was enough to make Helena startle.
The frame hovered a few inches from the ground, and it seemed to follow Barbara's movement. When she lifted her arms, it followed her. When she sat up, the frame sat up with he. When she stood up...Helena almost fainted. Almost but not quite. Instead, she blurted out, "But you can't walk!"
Dinah, Barbara, and Zinda all stared at Helena. Realizing her gaffe, Helena once again felt herself turn red. "You know what I mean," she told them.
"It's our science project. Nifty, huh?" Zinda, the first to recover, said to Helena. "Me and Skipper here figured out how to use one of the old Gravity Rods, donated by the Knight Foundation, to create a walking suit."
Barbara continued as the suit slowly began to walk forward. "Zinda built the exo-frame, I wrote operating code, and we're both going to take first place next week." Barbara walked towards Dinah and Helena. Hers steps...the suit's steps...were slow and awkward, but they were still steps. Once she reached Dinah, Barbara turned around and began to walk back toward Zinda.
When Barbara was standing next to Zinda, the blond gearhead looked up from the laptop to her friend. Barbara winked at Zinda. "You know, we wouldn't want to deprive Helena of her show. How about that hug, Zinda? She can take a picture and show it to everyone."
Zinda was more than happy to oblige with a hug, even though Helena didn't feel like snapping a picture.
Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:07:57 GMT
"Yes, Bill Gates is the Anti-Christ, [but] there are a lot of other Anti-Christs out there." - Steve Rambam, Privacy is Dead - Get Over It.
Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:27:00 GMT
Grabbed from Reddit. There are twelve parts, all worth watching. Part eleven has a riotously funny bit with clips from the show. Or watch the whole thing.
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 22:16:36 GMT
 The frame size is a bit bigger than I'd like, but I can fix that in the next version. Speaking of the next the version, version 3 of ParityPics is going to have more social aspects. I'm going to put in controls so people can manually navigate through the pictures as well as a means of leaving comments. Ideally anyway! :) I may skip version 3 and just rewrite the Unpaper Doll project as an Adobe AIR widget. Throw cross-browser compatibility out the window with a single, sweet JavaScript run-time engine.
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:37:04 GMT
prodigal, what was that link to Cracked you posted in #alt? I forgot to look at it before I rushed out. Thanks in advance, man!
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 05:03:28 GMT
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:31:07 GMT
Transhumanism ain't cheap.
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:51:29 GMT
Quick thoughts:
1. Suede is growing on me.
2. I'm still rooting for Leanne, both because I'm enjoying watching her develop and I'm a fan of her model, Karalyn.
3. Blayne totally showed me how Mantis's skirt works.
4. Seat belts make a marvelous fabric. I'm going to go declare Rule 34 for a seat belt clothing fetish.
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:47:58 GMT
From here: "Playing off the success of this summer's The Dark Knight, Robinov also told the Journal, 'We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it.'" Darker than someone who abandons his pregnant lover for five years and then comes back to ruin her engagement? Good luck with that. If you're going to do a Superman movie, you don't need to go dark. You need to go into space. The problem with Superman Returns, as I gather from what bits I've picked up online, since I can't be arsed to actually kill the braincells required to watch said movie, was that it was boring. The whole thing boiled down to a dick measuring between Lex Luthor, with society as the yard stick. You want a great Superman movie, here's your pitch: Superman has to work with Lex Luthor. Aliens are invading. Huge, powerful aliens. Superman can't punch them all. Lex can't death ray them all. The only hope for man kind comes from recognizing that people as normal as Jimmy Olsen are as important as Superman when we work together. No one goes to a movie to see dark. Even Sweeny Todd was a musical. People go to the movies to be wowed. You never make Superman darker, you only make his challenges bigger.
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 01:06:36 GMT
LADY BLACKHAWK: I'M FROM 1940, NOT THROWBACK, ALABAMA.
If you jumped fifty years in the future and said, "Gets back! I has a fierce!", people would deduct thirty points from your IQ as well. Every time I see some writer using Zinda being from the 40's to make some culture shock joke, it grates of my nerves. Zinda's either still a teenager or still in her early twenties, and a world traveler to boot, jumping ahead forty years would knock her off-balance for a few months, but given that she's been in the present for a year or two, she'd be as acclimated as any expatriate working abroad would be after a year.
Yet it seems like every writer (to the joy of fans everywhere) has to make little subtle jokes about how she's from the 1940's, though I can't think of a single time when they've shown Zinda acclimating. I want to see the missing scene where Zinda discovers that she can buy an airplane off the Internet.
It just bugs me.
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:48:06 GMT
There have been times when I've questioned my bitterness toward comics. I think, "What if you really are just afraid of change, and these comics are actually good?" As someone who recognizes the value of objective observation, I acknowledge that my valuations are entirely subjective, and thus contaminated from the start by prejudices.
It's these concerns, in part, that make me love both Blue Beetle and Guardians of the Galaxy so much. Both of these books are books I sneered at when I first heard about them. I spent the first twenty or so issues of BB slamming it and swearing it off without reading a single issue. When I saw an advert for GotG, I sneered and tagged it as "for fans of the 70's" and nothing more.
Then, after time, my opinions wore down. I put BB on my list as a joke (and because it was already wearing me down). I bought the first issue of GotG solely because Star-Lord (whose name I didn't even know at the time) had a kick-ass helmet/mask combo going for him. And now, they're both books I look forward to every month. They're also small bits of peace of mind that remind me that if something really is good, funny, and gives its characters a believable, inter-personal dynamic, it'll win me over.
It's nice to be reassured that I am hating the right things. Thanks, Jaime! Thanks, Peter!
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:17:49 GMT
"Using Access400 software...it's not so much database programming as it is reverse engineering a Stargate while being fed on by a Wraith." - me, explaining why I just now realized the FULLNAME field cut off people's last names.
"It's like reading porn mags when they're sitting on a bear trap as a way to remind you not to read porn mags." - me, explaining why there's FULLNAME field in the first place.
Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:36:42 GMT
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