Wednesday, August 14, 2002

I just watched HBO's special on the '68 Detroit Tigers and it made me think one thing: I want my damn Red Sox to win the World Series already. I want to party. That's it. Not anything important, just my jealous selfish desire to see my team win.
9:11:22 PM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

war in Iraq. Samuel Day Fassbinder said: According to Debka, the ground war against Iraq is already on, & has been raging at low intensity since March... http://www.debka.com/ DK responds: Debka is Israeli source that often scoops Mideast stories; I'm not sure exactly whose behind it, its politics, etc, but it is becoming respected. Anyone have any comments on this? [BlogLeft: Critical Interventions] This Debka thing is becoming a weird blog meme - I picked it up at kuro5hin, reacted, and later read the comments at k5 - the site's pretty much exaggerating small facts into big stories. I've gotta find a good response to it, or pull together the bits I've already seen - I'll get back to this later this evening.

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I just started hacking macros - wrote an easy one to make my Muppet of The Day bit easy. Now I need to think of what else I can hack here. =) What I *want* is to hack the bleeping weather - it's 99 or so outside. Heat index of over 100. I can't LIVE like this...if I wanted this kind of weather, I'd move to some place hot - I live in Massachusetts for a reason. I can't STAND the heat. Now, we're well air-conditioned in my building here at work - especially in the nook my cubicle is in. It used to be Dr. Wang of Wang Computers' private office/penthouse apartment. When the building got renovated and leased out piecemeal, that area got turned into standard cubicles, but it still has a seperate climate control system. It's quite nice actually. And my car has good air-conditioning - it can overheat, but as long as I'm driving over like 20mph, I'm ok. The problem is that my apartment is very very poorly air-conditioned, at enormous expense. There's a crappy window-unit stuck through the living-room wall. It requires turning it up an absurd amount and then rigging a box fan at a weird angle to get any of that cool air into my room...augh, it's just unlivable. Now I could work late - but I'm pretty much done for the day, and I want my comics - esp. that Transmet issue I mention below...so I guess I'm going to go swelter. <shrug> On a brighter note - I just called and verified that I won't have to live in a horribly air-conditioned apartment much longer - I got the one bedroom I applied for. And it includes central air...woohoo!

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Hey - this My Pictures thing really rocks. =)
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Today, the second to last issue of Transmetropolitan comes out. If you're unfamiliar, check the link. Transmet is quite possibly the best comic to come out of a mainstream company over the last 5 years - and it's about to end. No, it's not getting cancelled - it's ending. The story's ending. It's always been planned this way, and now we're about to see it happen. Though I can't wait to see how it goes down (the plot is more or less resolved in this issue, with the final, #60, serving as an epilogue) it's kind of sad - this comic has played a major role in my life for nearly five years, and now it's about to go away. It's more than just the comic, mind you. The comic itself is brilliant - imagine Hunter S. Thompson fused with Blade Runner. Now you're getting close. Warren Ellis, the writer, has used this platform to show how he thinks journalism should be, how politics should be, and more - there's some issues that deal with situations that don't exist in our world and yet still feel personal and relevant. Darick Robertson's art has been consistently brilliant, improving over the years, using every technique in the book. It's a great comic book. Period. You need to read it. But I said it's more than just the comic - and it is. I started reading Transmet when I picked up issues #4 and 5 at the Newbury Comics in Burlington, MA, while home on Christmas Break '97. I read them, got my hands on the first three issues, and never stopped. I managed to scam some promotional swag from the comic department of the bookstore back at college - a poster, a postcard, a window stickie of the Transmet logo, a three eyed smiley face, a mock newspaper with columns by the main character, Spider Jerusalem (whom you must see to believe)... I was in heaven. I began to hunt down other comics Warren had written - much of it not that great, but some of it, most notably his run on the previously-crappy WildStorm superhero book Stormwatch, was brilliant. Next thing I know, I'm one of the first ten or fifteen people at his Delphi forum. And wow, did that forum ever go nuts. He's closing it down in October - originally it was going to close the day Transmet #60 came out, but the schedules got shifted, etc... It's not as busy now as it was - a lot of its traffic has moved into the satellite forums, other forums inspired by discussions at Warren's. At its peak, it was, without question, the single most active online comic discussion area in the English language. Thousands of people browsed through it, and in one week, something like 1500 different people posted to it. Communities were formed, creators got their breaks (among the creators I started reading through the forum were Lea Hernandez and Brian Wood in the first few months, many, many more since), companies were founded (Larry Young's AiT/PlanetLar was definitely inspired by Warren's writings on how to run a comic company), and even the obligatory marriages were made. This was a huge community - I barely paid attention after early '99...it was just too busy. I did meet one of my best friends on the forum - ironically, he lived literally down the hall from me at the time. Warren has sent out periodic emails for a couple years now - first on his From The Desk Of... list, and now his Bad World list. On FTDO, and his column at comicbookresources.com (which ran for one year and now I can't remember the name...argh.) he ranted on comics as an artform and as a business. He formed a movement. We wanted comics for adults, dammit. Screw spandex, screw characters valued for their movie rights over their creative potential- we want good comics. It hasn't changed the world, not yet, but your average comic is far more intelligent now than it was five years ago. Warren's got to be given some credit for that. I met Warren a couple years ago at a Q&A in Columbus, Ohio. He graciously signed my copy of Transmet #17, the last issue to have a letters column before Vertigo replaced that page with another ad - I happen to have a letter in that issue. =) During the Q&A, he held forth on any number of subjects - a friend of mine actually taped the whole thing, though I haven't seen it since. I remember him responding to my question about Howard Chaykin's American Flagg and its influence on Transmet (noticable), but not much else. He's a strange man - he's half-jokingly referred to as Stalin on his forum, he's got a thing about having a coterie of young woman as his aides de camp, a lot like Spider Jerusalem's Filthy Assistants in Transmet, he can be very rude and insulting to people who don't share his opinion - but he's made me think more. I've read weird books and comics because of his reccomendation or that of others on the forum...more than I count, really. And now it's going away - he's not, of course. He's still writing, shorter self-contained, 3 or 4 issue stories mainly. But Transmet's going away, and the forum's going away. I wasn't active in it very much for the last 3+ years, but I was one of the early adopters, and I've always felt a certain pride in how it's turned out. I guess it's understandable that I feel a little sad that it's going away. Anyway - read Transmet. Buy Transmet. If you have any interest in comic books at all, you need this. Also, go to Warren's comic critique site, Artbomb, and find more interesting things to buy. We can make comics good if we just buy the damned good stuff.

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your muppet of the day: The Seven Foot Tall Talking Carrot OK - I have no memory of this thing at all. But c'mon - it's a giant talking carrot with a mustache and a tuxedo. as always, image taken from www.kermitage.com
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Israel and Its Disastrous Settlement Policy. Many issues regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict are well established and clear to most impartial outside observers: The Jewish people's connection to the region is unquestionable, Israel has a right to exist and the Palestinians' current embrace of terror is truly reprehensible. What is not well established in the minds of many, or maybe just easily forgotten, is that Israel's settlements in the occupied territory have a coherent and strategic purpose and one should not ignore the resulting effects this has on the current situation. [kuro5hin.org] Very well-written article on why Israel is occupying the West Bank and Gaza. I have one nit to pick with it, though. A big deal is made in the article about 'Modern Zionism' requiring that all of historical Israel be controlled and populated by Jews. In actuality, that's just one school of thought in Zionism. Admittedly, it's the dominant one, but Zionist figures in the early part of this century were willing to accept non-Israel solutions for a Jewish homeland, such as Uganda and Madagascar. Zionism is about the need for a Jewish homeland, and ideologues have hijacked it and made it look to be about Eretz Israel when it's not. Sorry - pet peeve. I'm a fervent Zionist in the original sense - I wholeheartedly support the need for a Jewish homeland, and I support the right of Israel to exist. However, I just as fervently oppose the occuption and settlements, and support the right of the Palestinians to have their own homeland. To me, a Zionist is a hypocrite if he/she doesn't also support a a Palestinian free state.

6:35:27 AM p e r m a l i n k trackback [] say something []

get your war on: also check at my new fighting technique is unstoppable and more kooky fun. Greatest use of clip art ever.
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