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-->September 11, 2004
Eric Burns-White: This is a small test.
Hi all. This is a small test of the "scheduled posting" system. We'll see if it works. If it does... um... go me!
More snarks later.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)
-->Eric Burns-White: Gerbils and dinosaurs, and I'm very tired.
(From Narbonic. Click on the thumbnail for full sized revelations (subscription required)!)
I really was tired. And still am. I woke up bright and early but then fell back asleep, then woke back up, over and over and over again. It wasn't very fun -- I almost wonder if I was fevered, because I had some weird weird dreams during it all. But I'm not going to take my temperature. It's more fun to wonder.
I may go back to sleep, but before I do, I want to actually snark about Narbonic for a bit. I came late to Narbonic -- Hell, go through the backlog and you can see when I finally discovered it and started running through the logs. It was fun. Very fun. This strip is demented, but never loses the thread of Story (or should we call that the thread of sanity). Plus, there are gerbils, and said gerbils are amazingly cute.
Now we have the revelation that Zeta is part gerbil, which we knew from her light sensitive eyes anyhow. Or suspected. But when she takes her glasses off, she doesn't look unlike Dave, and her name of course is Zeta, which makes it sound like yet another Narbon clone.
I suspect that Zeta's got some Dave genes and some Helen genes and some Gerbil genes, either from Doctor Narbon using bits of DNA she got when Dave visited her in the past, or from Helen, who spliced various DNA into one of the gerbils she loves working with, then fired the result into the past to gestate and grow because she didn't want to wait. We know Zeta and Helen have History, and that it isn't pleasant. Or at least Helen doesn't want to talk about it. Or see Zeta.
Alternately, Zeta might have merged with Dana, somehow.
No, I'm not making this particularly easy for you to understand. What part of "I'm tired" don't you get? Coherence is beyond me right now.
Plus, I've been backtracking through the archives of Daily Dinosaur Comics, on the advice of a friend. They also linked to me, though the friend recommended them before the link. There is an amazing zenlike quality to backtracking through those strips... and the oddest sense of Deja Vu. As well as some element that reminds me, for some painfully obvious reason, of David Lynch's The Angriest Dog in the World. Only, you know, Daily Dinosaur Comics is funny.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:30 PM | Comments (0)
-->September 10, 2004
Eric Burns-White: Dear God I'm tired. Oh, here's an update on a snark I did yesterday.
(From Greystone Inn. Click on the thumbnail for full sized told ya so.)
I'm tired. Very, very tired. I should be asleep, but as of now I am not. Next week, our students return (we start late, because we're 6 day a week -- it's a boarding school. We want to maximize the time the kids spend with their families.) The playtest is going very well. The comments are good and spirits are hi. I got some playtest comments from one of the people behind White Lightning Productions, which is one of the better run adult comics/webcomics sites (adult being the point, unlike, say, Sexy Losers, where the Funny is the point and the adult bits are the premise) out there. I don't think the playtester knew that the Websnark guy was the person he was commenting about, but WLP was one of the first sites to actually link Websnark even though I hadn't snarked them (and honestly don't plan to, as I'm not generally into adult webcomics without more of a hook -- Story or Funny or the like), so I was aware of him. And one of his artists is a friend of mine -- and a damn good artist, I would add. It's a small world sometimes.
I'm very tired, and the "scheduled updates" system promised in Movable Type 3.1 hasn't worked right, so I need to place a service e-mail in (the joys of paying their price) and see if I can get the damn thing troubleshot. The Cron job is running, but it's not doing the updating. So my master plan of doing late night snarks to run in the morning and give you all regularly updating content despite my irregular hours has been scuttled. Damn my eyes.
I'm very tired, but I wanted to update you on a snark from yesterday (which is where the strip above came from). Guigar did in fact follow up with the traditional denouement graphic designers face -- he got the blame for all the crap he was forced to do, but on the bits he did without interference, the editor gets the credit. It's the story of the Desktop Publisher's life. Guigar clearly has worked in this field, or knows someone who has. He groks it.
I've very tired. But I'm wired. So more later. Maybe I'll finally successfully snark Irregular Webcomic. We'll see.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:45 PM | Comments (4)
-->Eric Burns-White: Two immediate thoughts -- it's impressive they have a comic up anyway, and no one gives a rat's ass about today's comic. Just, y'know, for the record.
Today, Penny Arcade has a comic strip out, as they do every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It's about line dancing or something. Honestly, who cares. That's not important, today. Normally it is. People love that crazy Penny Arcade. Today? Who cares.
No, Penny Arcade is all about the News Post today.
Penny Arcade is famous (infamous) for its News Posts. Scott Kurtz -- one of the few webcartoonists in Penny Arcade's league when it comes to readership and success -- has mocked Penny Arcade's habit of setting a newspost on a seperate page from the comic, necessitating two page visits for each visitor, two chances to look at the advertising, et cetera et cetera et cetera. He's also mocked the sometimes esoteric nature of the comic strips, making the news post required reading. Penny Arcade has fired back that yeah, that's all true. And by the way, they own his ass in page visits. All good fun, until someone loses an eye, when it will be even more fun.
Today's news post details the birth of Mike Krahulik's son. With pictures.
Mike named his son "Gabriel." Which is somehow one step dorkier than naming him "Mike Junior." And yet it is somehow incredibly endearing. Though when his child is old enough to go to gaming cons, he'll be confused. "Dad, why is everyone calling you by my name?" "SILENCE, child! Can you not see I am down two kills? I need total concentration!" And then someone calls Child Protective Services and we all have a good laugh at the end of the episode.
This is amazingly cool. It honestly is. In part because we the Penny Arcade readers have been involved with this marriage from the get-go, dating back to 1999, when Gabe proposed to Kara in a strip. Now, five years later (Jesus Christ -- five years later) they've had a child.
Of course... you realize... we own him now. Totally own him. Before, he just had a wife and a crippling addiction to Pocky. You can break those. But a child? That's forever, and you have to feed it regularly. If not, see the reference to Child Protective Services above. He's officially chained to his job, and we're his job. Now, we just need to get Tycho bred and we'll lock Penny Arcade in for the long haul.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:32 AM | Comments (0)
-->Eric Burns-White: In other news, my Skull plushie is en route...
(From PvP. Click on the strip for full sized manly facial hair.)
It's been too long since we've looked in on our friends at PvP. It's time we rectify that, because things have been interesting. For one, Kurtz continues to nail opportunity square in the forehead with a high powered rifle. In a good way. He's doing a bundle of City of Heroes, which is frankly brilliant. He's already produced the definitive City of Heroes webcomic sequence -- and I say that as a dedicated and obsessed CoH player myself. So he's proven he can handle the material in a way that CoH players enjoy. And he brings in a broader audience for City of Heroes in general.
But on the other side of it, he pushes PvP out to many, many more people. And he gets paid to do it. Scott Kurtz gets merchandizing and advertising. He honestly does. He's not the only success story out there, but he may be the smartest.
As for the above strip itself? Well. It's actually one of his more clumsy executions. And yet, I had instant identification. Not with my mustache (yes, of course I have a mustache. And a beard. It's required for my brand of geek), but with my hair. And that brings up my Big Friend Frank.
Frank and I were apartment mates back in Ithaca, New York, when we lived under a bridge in an apartment we called Trollhome, within easy staggering distance to the seminal Chapterhouse Brewpub. (And just slightly further down the road was the ABC Cafe, which had bad tea, good coffee, and live jazz. Live jazz. On the street where I lived. After growing up in Northern Maine, this was like winning the lottery.) Frank was, and is, for that matter, the manliest man I have ever known. He is huge, with bulging muscles. I've never been small, but he used to casually lift me over his head as a demonstration. He looked like a pro wrestler, with his thick beard. And wearing a Greek fisherman's cap he loved, he looked like Tolstoy after undergoing the Super Soldier Formula. Think about how that would have changed comic books.
One could easily have felt inadequate next to Frank. Once, when he was walking through an alleyway leading off the Ithaca Commons into a parking garage, a guy with a board attacked him to mug him. Frank sidestepped the attack and one-punched the guy, then calmly headed to the Police to tell them what had happened. While both of us had relationships, he was the one who got it right, marrying his perfect woman and raising a family of cool people. He is artistic as Hell, producing graphic work that blows me away.
But I've never felt inadequate... because I have hair.
Male pattern baldness is a sign of testosterone, and like I said, Frank is the manliest man I have ever known. The baldness came on slowly, and he grew his remaining, thinning hair long until he got sick of it and shaved his head. Now, of course, he looks more like a pro wrestler than ever with his gleaming pate. And it looks damn good on him.
And then, there's me. With my thick, luxuriant, full head of hair. It's beginning to go grey on the temples in that 'distinguished' way that pisses the less fortunate off. It's thick and rich and has a healthy shine. It is hair, glorious and full, and is the reason why (some) men who don't have it buy products with Rogaine in them.
Looking at today's strip, I can easily see Cole's easily grown mustache -- and his jab at Brent -- as an echo of my (excellent) hair, and Frank's gleaming skull. Brent may have the unbelievably hot girlfriend, the pony tail, the artistic talent, the Macintosh, the sunglasses and the considerably trimmer build... but Cole has a mustache he can grow at will.
So there.
(Update! Today's comic came out extra special early... because... um... Kurtz is away, I guess... and yes indeed. The overcompensation of Brent's scalp hair versus Cole's lip hair has begun. I now identify with both of them. Which makes sense, because I'm a pretentious Mac user by day, and by night I'm a total geek.)
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:27 AM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: And now, a word about my sponsor(ed link™)
If you've been watching the (cough) Ads by Gooooooogle block on the side, you'll notice it's learning about us more and more. The pet food seems to be mostly gone, and more and more comic strip stuff is appearing. This is cool.
However, it's not actually capable of reading. Otherwise, it would have noticed that I have little to nothing good to say about current Dilbert. Once, I liked Dilbert. Dilbert however won't get a "you had me and you lost me" essay, because I try to be detailed and insightful in those essays and there's no good way to pad "it stopped being funny around 1997" to 250 words. And I have a degree in English Literature, so I know from padding.
That's not what gets me, though. If you click the Dilbert merchandise link, you discover it takes you... to a Cafepress site.
Does Dilbert, arguably the most popular modern first run comic strip in the free world, really need to use a Print on Demand shop for its tee shirts and mugs?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:00 AM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: This is a commentary site, not a fucking confessional...
...but it's mine, so I'm going to break the rules just once. I'm not going to go into details on my life, because honestly, no one here cares. You're not here for that. I will say, however, that since March 3 of this year (when I had doctors with various frightening implements do things to me while I was unconscious), I have lost 108 lbs. Or, the combined weight of both of my nieces.
And tonight I joined a gym.
HAH! In your face, Death-Before-40! You want me? Hit me with a fucking bus!
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:51 AM | Comments (2)
-->September 9, 2004
Eric Burns-White: Can you get next day shipping?
(From Lore Brand Comics. Click on the thumbnail for full sized online convenience!)
Cut and paste comics live and die in their humor. For most humor strips, the execution consists of phrasing, of art choices, of panel sizes. When your figures barely move and generally only talk, however, language becomes all, tone becomes crucial, and your job gets a lot harder.
Of course, Lore Sjöberg is humor on a plate. He doesn't bring the Funny. He's taught the Funny to heel, retrieve the newspaper and not urinate on the rug. One of the architects of the late, lamented Brunching Shuttlecocks website and still the purveyor of the hysterical Book of Ratings, among other sundry projects, Lore is a Comedy God. Or at least a Comedy Demigod.
Lore Brand Comics is Webcomics's equivalent of Steven Wright. The delivery is deadpan, and sometimes it takes a second or two, and then brilliance washes over you. Dissecting the humor is like synopsizing a Three Stooges cartoon -- it's technically possible, but why would you ever do it? You just kick back, enjoy, let it wash over you, and accept that yes, this is funny.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
-->Eric Burns-White: Casey and Andy: brought low by MAD SCIENCE HOSTING
Casey and Andy is currently down, which makes that link worthless, doesn't it? WORTHLESS! By checking their forums, I found out that their hosting company is switching servers and DNS and other such things are currently -- this is the technical term -- screwed.
As it works out, the latest comic is at a Livejournal Mirror. And is pretty funny. So if you're grooving on the Casey and Andy fun, check it out. If not... this post meant nothing to you.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
-->Eric Burns-White: That's it, Gleek! Take his Exorian punk-ass to the curb!
(From Liberty Meadows. Click on the thumbnail for full sized Ack. Subscription required. There's nothing I can do about that.)
I don't really have a snark here -- I mean, these are all reruns anyway. I just want to say this has to be the funniest Cathy related joke of all time.
And for those who are bummed out because you can't see the full sized without paying, here's a different thing from Cho's site. Click it for full sized. He's going to burn in Hell for a very long time, so be sure to thank him for making you laugh while you can.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:25 PM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: And Brad Guigar goes for the Snark... he's up on the vault -- NAILED it! That's impressive Snark, Bob.
(From Greystone Inn. Click on the thumbnail for full sized snarky goodness.)
I worked in Desktop Publishing for years. Years and years and years and years. I had this conversation more times than I can count. It's always the same things. Someone comes in with a project (often a totally crap project, but I digress). They detail what they want. And by detail, I mean "they make vague comments about how they want it 'Strong' or 'Sensitive' or to have 'Impact.' You ask for clarification and they repeat the exact same thing, over and over again, as though you're a foreigner and, like all foreigners understand English perfectly if it's spoken slowly and with an accent.
Oh, you show them fonts and graphics and samples, and talk about design elements. You try desperately hard to get hard guidance on the vision in their heads, but they have no vision. They have a glimpse through soft focus of a piece of paper with maybe a bit of color and a title, but that blurry hint of something is the absolute Holy Grail they seek. They don't know what it is, but they know that if you, the designer, just give it to them they'll recognize it instantly -- and if you don't give it to them it's because you're stupid and lazy and just don't want to be helpful.
Guigar nailed that sentiment in this strip. He nailed the frustration. And he nailed the driving, yearning need to drive a spike through the eye of the client.
I have to wonder if tomorrow's strip will end the way all of those projects end. With the irate client (editor, in this case) coming back and saying "that's not what I meant at all," demanding a free redo and money off besides, and then filling out a comment card on your substandard work. Dollars to doughnuts it is.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:05 PM | Comments (0)
-->September 8, 2004
Eric Burns-White: I've had workdays like this. I have a nasty slice, though.
(From Overboard. Click on the thumbnail for full sized treasure!)
This is kind of the archetypical Overboard strip. Equal parts traditional pirate and modern day life, bringing the Funny without braining you over the head with it. Also note that Charley, the short pirate, isn't exactly kind to his boss. This is a strip where it's considered standard procedure to feed your boss to a sea monster to get out of doing laundry.
The playtest is going well, as are preparations at the school for the arrival of those punk kids (we're a six day a week school, so we start late and end early). It's really, really busy -- which is why you barely heard from me today. For that, we are very sorry. And yet, you were warned, so.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)
-->Eric Burns-White: Excuse me? I thought when you made this you'd use milk -- not crap
XPlay has always had a kind of "cable access charm." It's total lack of production values and snarky sense of humor (there's that word again) made it fun. Great fun. The kind of fun that... well, every G4 show has failed to have.
Now, their San Francisco studio has been closed, their staff has been fired, and Adam and Morgan are down at G4TechTV's Los Angeles studios. Yesterday's show showed promise -- declaring that their studios hadn't been built yet, they filmed it out of Adam's apartment with all the 'graphics' being sharpie-on-cardboard. It was fun, in an Xplayish kind of way.
Today... they're doing riffs on movies. Filmed. With clear money being spent. Costuming, effects, writing. Production values. A significant bump in everything they do.
Dear God this show sucks now. I mean, sucks. All the charm has been bled out, leaving bad jokes and stale references. Even the reviews seem overproduced now, though they remain the strongest points of the show.
Tell you what. Give Judgment Day the budget. That show already sucked, so some influx of new ideas might do it some good. Let XPlay be XPlay. Right down to video tape, bad wigs and stupid jokes.
Alternately, do bikini shots of Morgan. I mean, if you're going to pander, pander.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:15 AM | Comments (4)
-->September 7, 2004
Eric Burns-White: Wherein the author gets pulled into paid copy
Hi gang!
One of my paid RPG writing projects just went into playtest. As I'm contractually bound to those folks, a lot of my ancillary writing time will have to be devoted to that for the next couple of weeks. I should have at least some snarking every day, but understand that when someone slips me filthy lucre, they buy my loyalty, so.
I can't say what project or for whom, yet. If I did, they'd haul me up the thirteen steps and throw me off the pyramid, and no one wants that, do we?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:57 PM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: That was the phone I learned to play the 1812 Overture on... good times.
(From Achewood. Click on the thumbnail for full sized jilapidation!)
I've likened Achewood to jazz music before, and it comes out here. In the phone interference from Ray's old cordless, Waterbury's secret mission crosses lines with the relationship between Ray and Roast beef. Ray's the melody line, but two different soloists doing improvs around it slide around his phone. The art connects and cross connects, and makes something different than a strip on either one would be.
I understand about the phone. When I went off to College in 1986, I bought a cheap Radio Shack phone -- not a cordless. Back then, those were pricy -- but it had like twelve autodial buttons on it. My roommate of the time told me it'd never last. It was just cheap junk. My parents still had their rotary phone with real bells inside -- the few times electronic phones had entered our lives, they'd proven to be shoddy and untrustworthy.
I finally retired that Radio Shack phone in 1998, after a year in my first apartment right here in town. It was falling apart, the number pad driven into the unit at a weird angle, but it was still hard to give it up. That phone had seen me through College, through Boston, through Ithaca (twice), through Seattle, through returning to Maine and finally into New Hampshire. I had history with that phone. I still own it, piled up in the back room along with a bunch of other useless junk.
But you probably don't care about that, do you?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:04 PM | Comments (3)
-->Eric Burns-White: Is explaining a comic strip another way to make something even duller than school?
(From Superosity. Click on the thumbnail for full sized fraternal ennui!)
It's somewhat difficult to point to any one Superosity strip and say "There! Hah? Haaaaaah?" Superosity is a little bit like pointillism -- each strip is a dot unto itself, and the whole forms something remarkably different. Reading a pack of Superosity strips is a way to get myself in a good mood, enjoying the tone and Crosby's utterly warped sense of humor. It also allows me to enjoy the sheer consistency he brings to his craft. Crosby has never, to my knowledge, missed an update. Certainly he hasn't in all the time I've been reading Superosity, though that was after he made the strip -- and Keenspot, which surrounds it -- his profession.
This strip is neither particularly good nor particularly bad at evoking the overall sense of Superosity. A bit clumsier than usual in execution (Bobby's tacked on "idiot" when talking to his brother is perfectly in character, but feels clunky) yet setting up a plotline that frankly tickles me something fierce (why shouldn't there be a plot on "the true meaning of Labor Day" or "the first Labor Day." Just because a national holiday isn't Christmas, Thanksgiving or Easter doesn't mean it doesn't deserve an animated special, you know!), there is a lot of promise for Crosbyesque weirdness offing.
One note, however. As clumsy as I think today's dialogue between Chris and Bobby is, I note it also nails the casual disregard most people in Superosity have for even their most beloved friends. Chris is matter of fact about how boring Boardy is, and would be the same to Boardy's face. Bobby's disdain is genuine. One gets the sense that some obligation to his own sense of the universe motivates Bobby to follow along with Chris -- certainly, it's not affection.
So I don't know if there's a core reason to point to this strip as representative of Superosity. However, it's the strip we've got, today, and it looks like something's about to start. So, there you go.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 1:48 PM | Comments (0)
-->Eric Burns-White: Random reader question randomly answered
"Why do you care so much about webcomics, anyway?"
Because art matters.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:54 AM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: Mornings are too damn early. Also, Dumbrella still seems to be down....
Maybe it's just me, but I can't hit the Dumbrella sites at all this morning. So, no Diesel Sweeties. No Goats. No Scary-Go-Round. And other such things.
Though Wigu? Wigu came right up. And looked good in black and white, no less.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the only one who can't reach the other Dumbrella sites. Maybe Old Man Stevens is on his porch with a shotgun full of rock salt, keeping a weather eye out for me, ready to blast a few barrels at me. "G't off my damn property!" he shouts, in a virtual sense, eye narrowing as he sees my pickup approach. "Go down th' damn road! Peddle your sass to Krazy Larry, see if he puts up with it!"
Later that night, I'll climb over the fence into the cornfield he shares with Old Man Rosenberg. I'll climb into their gazebo and drink beer with a couple of my buddies, and we'll try to keep our voices down but we'll be laughing too hard, and Old Man Stevens will come out of his house in his nightshirt, lantern in one hand, Ol' Bessie in the other, shrieking like a banshee. Years from now, when we get together at the 20 year high school reunion, we'll trot the story out and snicker about it, our children embarrassed as Hell. The cornfield will have been paved over for a strip mall by then, of course -- bought out by the Allison twins when the bachelor farmers couldn't make their mortgage payments. Young Sassy Rosenberg will be a teacher at the school then, and she'll be at the other end of the room, quietly seething for her uncle's violated pride. Mr. Rowland, the principal now and still the principal then will put a hand on her shoulder. They'll share that moment together, as my friends and I laugh. And Mr. Rowland will remember with cold pleasure that he still has our permanent records under lock and key, and one day, when the time is right, those records will see the light of day....
It occurs to me that all evidence suggests I'm significantly older than all of the named cartoonists above. It also occurs to me that I'm barely awake because it's too damn early in the morning. These are not necessarily related facts.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:12 AM | Comments (1)
-->September 6, 2004
Eric Burns-White: Jesus Christ. If you love Something Positive and Queen of Wands so much, why don't you marry them?
I promise to drop M. Milholland and Mlle. Aeire for a while. I really do. And I won't even put thumbnails up or anything.
I just wanted to note... in today's S*P, Davan expresses a decision that is materially opposite to the opinion Kestrel makes in today's QoW.
There's plenty of good reasons for it, of course. Kestrel is leaving her friends to take a good job and forge a new life, where Davan is deciding to not follow his girlfriend to Vancouver and try to make a life for himself. They're both choosing to live for themselves, not for those closest to them. But still, Kestrel is leaving Angela, Shannon and Felix behind, while Davan is staying with Peejee and Aubrey.
I'm hoping that Kestrel becomes a S*P character when she moves. There's been speculation that she and Davan will end up involved. Me, I'm pulling for her to wake up, nude and hung over next to T-Bob. Or Jesus Mickey. Or both.
I mean, if she's going to enter Something*Positive, she has to be ready for trauma and lots of it, right?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:53 PM | Comments (2)
-->Eric Burns-White: On what to snark, and why to snark.
I get a lot of mail these days, which honestly is very nice. I hear from people who like what I'm doing and I hear from people who don't like what I'm doing. I hear from wonderful people and I hear from Assholes. Some of the mail I get has me staring and saying [Name withheld to prevent lame namedropping] wrote to me? He/she/they/it/other read something I wrote?" Other of the mail has me staring and saying "how does someone with no command of the English language manage to fill out a request for a Yahoo mail account in the first place?" Some mail is insightful, some is sophomoric, and I love all of it.
A nontrivial amount of mail I get are requests to look at comic strips -- either by the creators or by fans of the strip. I really like that. Honestly. I can't swear I'll check these recommendations out quickly or snark on what I find if I do, but the world of webcomics is so tremendously large and involved, and the best way to find fresh goodness is to be led to it.
And then there are the other recommendations. The ones that, more or less, say "hey! You should snark about [name of webcomic withheld to protect the innocent]! It sucks! I love when you tear into crap!"
That, I don't need so much.
See, pretty much any webcomic that I stick with long enough to be able to snark reasonably about it is one I like. If I don't like it, I honestly don't care enough to put in the time and energy to develop an informed opinion. And, if it's not an informed opinion, I don't really want to slap it up here.
Yeah, I know -- it's "websnark." That makes it sound like I'm always going to say nasty things. Except I don't think a snarky sense of humor precludes writing about stuff you like. This isn't a site that reviews webcomics and gives out stars. (The closest thing I do is give out biscuits -- tasty, tasty biscuits -- but I don't give those for whole webcomics. I give those for individual strips that impress me. And they're not that serious as all that.) This is a critical site, but the criticism tradition I'm working in isn't reviews, it's art and literary criticism. I'm making points, and the stuff I comment on either illustrates that point or illustrates the absence of that point. Hopefully in an entertaining fashion.
Sure, I make a lot of references to strips I'm not as enamored about any more. I'm not as happy with User Friendly or It's Walky or Megatokyo as I once was, and I'm unashamed to say why... but I did like all three, terribly much. I invested some of myself into them because they pulled me in. Even if they had me and they lost me, there was a point where they had me, and that's why I care.
A good number of folks are following the stuff I snark to strips they haven't tried before. And that's fantastic. If you follow a link to a strip and enjoy it, I've done a good thing. Even if it's a strip I've lost my smile over. If I have to be a reviewer, I'd rather be a reviewer in the style of that Simpsons episode when Homer became a food critic. He loved food, he loved restaurants, he burbled happily about every place he went into, and all of Springfield prospered -- restaurants did a boom business and all of Springfield happily gained weight. It was only when the other critics pressured him to write only bad things that everything went south.
I respect reviewers. I respect bad reviews, but that's not my thing. If you want to read entertaining snarks about really bad popular culture, read Television Without Pity. It's hysterical and sarcastic and mean as Hell to shows they can't stand. And they pay their contributors, which is I expect why those contributors are willing to continue to watch television they loathe.
Me? I don't get paid for Websnark. In fact, I've spent a nontrivial amount of money to produce it, and I expect to spend more. I never expect to make more money than it costs, and I'm okay with that.
But I'm not okay with spending a large amount of time reading stuff I just don't enjoy. I won't swear I'll never do it -- if it illustrates a point I want to make, I'll use it -- but for the most part, I'd rather celebrate the stuff I enjoy.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:12 PM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: Oh get over the "kidnapping" thing already, King Luca. Everyone else has.
(From Nukees! Click on the thumbnail for full sized Jenga!)
Bleuel has a real gift for dialogue. He honestly does. Oh, I could sit here and nitpick King Luca's use of Elizabethan dialect until the cows come home (for example, "sometimes thou kidnappeth people and strappeth them to cots?" It doesn't work. It should be "Sometimes thou dost kidnap people, who then be made strapped to cots." Just because it's archaic doesn't mean there aren't grammatical rules to follow, skippy. But I digress.) but that doesn't change the skill Bleuel brings to the table. Cecilia's shift from vulnerable to scared to determined to enthusiastic is frenetic, but also handled deftly. And King Luca's responses are perfect. It's odd to have such an insane ruler over the Berkeley Nuclear Engineering department as the straight man, but sanity is relative and Luca does it well.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:41 AM | Comments (1)
-->Eric Burns-White: You might notice a slight flush around your face. That's your self-esteem trying desperately to reassert itself.
(From For Better or For Worse. Click on the thumbnail for full sized snarkiness.)
Lynn Johnston makes her points with a kind of sarcastic humor that comes out of left field. People take the tremendous amount of Story she brings to the party and use it to forget she has a wicked sense of humor. Well, for the last week or so the Junior High April has been complaining because she wants to wear a whore dress to school, and her mother makes her wear it with tee shirt and tights. Once there, we see a number of the other girls dolled up for streetwalking.
I've seen schools that are draconian with dress codes. (I don't even count the school I work at that way, by the way. It's a private school. You go to private school and you should expect to wear a tie. It's as simple as that. They should be glad we don't make them wear catholic school outfits.) My own high school, my senior year, outlawed sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts. I guess because they wanted to ensure we didn't adopt hedonistic hawaiian values. But at the same time, I'm on the other side of the desk now, and being a full on adult I think a certain amount of decorum -- and a certain amount of "you're thirteen years old, stop trying to pretend your nineteen and a dancer in a hip hop video" is appropriate.
I love the execution of today's strip. It kind of sums up the whole -- there is a practical side to clothing, and if it takes keeping the Gym at 62 degrees to remind kids of it, that's a good thing.
By the way -- the whole "whore clothing" thing? I only feel that way in August and September. Come April and May, those first few warm days when (admittedly a hair more post-pubescent than this) girls crack out of their woolen cocoons and emerge, near naked and stretching their still-winter-pale limbs to the sun, I am simply and humbly pleased to be alive.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)
-->Eric Burns-White: No snarkiness on this -- this is just pretty!
(Taken from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. Click on the thumbnail for full sized galactic splendor!)
I know I tend to be a wiseass with the APOD pictures. Well, occasionally I need to just stop, stare slack jawed at one of them, and say "this is the universe we live in. We can see this, from our world." This is M51, a galaxy some 30 million light years away, that's over sixty thousand light years across. Which means this is the light M51 generated 30 million years ago. And yet, staring at it, it coalesces into a whole that looks immediate and eternal.
Someday, we're going to reach M51. We're going to see what's there. We're going to spread out throughout it. Someday, M51 will be ours, and we will look back at the Milky Way from it with a sense of wonder and awe not unlike what I feel looking at M51.
Sadly, this means one day WalMart will open stores through M51, driving local businesses out of business. Which reminds me, I need to go get a picture frame sometime today.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
-->September 5, 2004
Eric Burns-White: Dear God, HERO was a good movie. Now, webcomics
(From Something Positive. Click on the thumbnail for full sized parental love and respect.)
It's hard to write a snark, having just come in from seeing HERO. This was a movie that shows that someone on Earth understands how to make a movie that has a moral stance at its core, epic in scope, that does not talk down to its audience. This movie blew what little mind I had, and will stay with me for a long, long time. If you haven't seen it, go see it. If you don't want to go see it, go see it. If you know you're going to hate it, go see it. If you won't go see it, you're stupid. Got it? Good.
Oh, yeah. Something Positive.
The thing I liked about this strip was how far we've come with the evolution of Monette. Yeah, Monette's still dumb as a bag of hammers, but she's now truly, officially a Macintyre -- right down to being browbeaten by her adopted father. Personally, I have no problem with peanuts in Coke, and I'm not a lobster fan -- not because of the truly hideous way we cook it, but because I think it tastes like rubber dipped in butter, which is why I can't actually live in the State of Maine. They'll let me be from Maine but won't let me actually live there. Not if I won't eat the sea-bugs.
For the record, I also don't like Moxie. But that's considered "sane."
But the trappings of the strip are just that: trappings. Monette's over the trauma in her life and has found where she's happy -- where she belongs, with people who care about her. And the remaining reticence on Mr. Macintyre's part is essentially gone now. She is in the family: ergo, he can bitchslap her verbally with impunity. He'll absolutely kill anyone who hurts her, but that doesn't make him a nice guy.
Anyway -- I liked it.
Now go see HERO.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:15 PM | Comments (4)
