Websnark

January 13, 2007

Eric: Submitted Without Comment: The Most Important Post I Will Ever Make

As most of you know, the "submitted without comment" posts I do are generally me uploading some reference to a strip where Websnark is referenced (directly or not) or Weds and I appear, or something like that. So it is with today.

The joke -- and I use the term as loosely as I possibly can -- is that I always comment extensively on those posts. Parenthetically.

Well, I'm commenting on this one, and I'm doing it directly. There is a full comic strip behind the cut at the bottom. (Why is there a cut? The strip is seventeen panels long. I don't hate everyone reading this.

Said comic strip has been produced by something of a supergroup of webcomics professionals. It's like Abba, that way. And it's also available -- for those who might be interested in sound and music and effects -- as a complete Quicktime MP4 file. An MP4 which, at the specific time this post automatically appears in queue, will be being presented at my Arisia panel "The Best Webcomics You're Not Reading."

A panel, it's worth noting, Wednesday is also at. This is important, which you will see momentarily.

As a side note, my thanks to the Arisia programming staff, and to fellow panelists Rob Balder of Partially Clips, Ferrett Steinmetz of Home on the Strange, and Kelly J. Cooper of Comixpedia, who helped set this whole kurfluffle up.

I also need to thank Ursula Vernon, Scott Kurtz, Greg Holkan, David Willis, Rich Burlew, Peter Venables, Josh Lesnick, Chris Crosby, Howard Tayler, Kristofer Straub, Frank "Damonk" Cormier, Brad Guigar, Darren "Gav" Bleuel, Jon Rosenberg, Shaenon Garrity, Meaghan Quinn, and the master of funk himself, Randy Milholland.

Also, my thanks to Bill Mallonee (formerly of Vigilantes of Love) for his permission to use his song on the MP4.

So. Behind the cut....

Submitted Without (Further) Comment.

(Wow.)

GAH! Corrected Rich Burlew's entry! It is now on there.

Oh. By the by?

She said yes.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:01 PM | Comments (149)

November 13, 2005

Wednesday: Fragmentary filler

We're not around today. I'm recovering from a minor medical procedure, and Eric's writing. In the meantime, here are two short items written to launch a side project of mine which never happened.

1: Hinterland Who's Who: The North American Bad Erotic Poem
Non-Canadians may wish to watch some context, but may recognize SCTV's take on the woodchuck.

The common bad erotic poem is written primarily for public performance, but also thrives in anthology environments. It often builds its habitat in the spaces between bad erotic short stories. A mature adult may take up from two and a half to three pages, although poems of one and a half pages are not uncommon.

In winter, the poem depends almost entirely upon body fat, which is stored in the broad margins of its page. By April, when new plant life reappears to be turned into paper, all that may be visible are the four to seven words occupied in each line.

Like the bad erotic short story, the poem veers precipitously from inappropriate simile to non-sequitur metaphor. Food motifs surface frequently. The use of terms like "rugged watermelons" or "windswept bananas" is not unusual. In extreme environments, references may be made to the preparation of vegetarian meals.

For more information on the bad erotic poem, contact the Canadian Wildlife Service in Ottawa.

2: The Flying Ants
From early September, by which time all of the bugs should have been dead. Today, it's so cold that the windows don't work, but even that's preferable.

The flying ants are out in swarm today.

From the horse farm to the train station, they form thick clouds anyplace there's space. Some, wings clipped, teeter up the road and down the block. Mostly, they zip about pointlessly. Some hill released too many, and the Queen of the Joneses found it necessary to compete.

The air is glutted. There is no purpose they could possibly serve, save to annoy. The afternoon is humid, overcast and drab, suffused with neither light nor pollen; it will not rain and wash the ants away. Over the train tracks, it's not unlike the end of Exorcist II; all we need is Linda Blair spinning on the very rails, one with the locust pretenders.

They have no sense of direction. Periodically, they fly into my face, my shirt, my hair; I chase one from my skin and there's yet another. When some of them fly into the remnant webs of dead spiders, I'm vaguely cheered to watch them struggle.

There is no purpose they could possibly serve, save to annoy.

For some reason, the flying ants don't flock to the necking children. Perhaps the thick layer of pastel makeup on one, or the strong bleach job on another, repels them. Perhaps taking up smoking at nine is wiser than we knew; they may die young, but they won't have clawed ants from their forelocks. God knows the pungence keeps the rest of us away; youth seldom demonstrates good taste in tobacco.

Perhaps swallowing one another's tongues forms a seal against the swarm. I can only guess.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:27 PM | Comments (13)

October 10, 2005

Wednesday: Bloody hell, that's creepy.

(From Alien Loves Predator. Click to understand how I might be just a little messed up.)

It's not so much the execution, although I normally love AlP to death. Not that I was much on Alien, or on Predator, or on the whole bizarre conflation of those two concepts (why are they the same universe? No, wait, don't explain it to me, because I won't care!), but I'm enamoured with these two repulsive action figures sharing an apartment in a city full of other action figures. Also, as sitcom writing goes, it makes me very happy. Notwithstanding the Buddy Christ. I'm no fan of the Buddy Christ; that part's just been overdone.

But I digress. See, the thing is, Bernie Hou just invoked ELIZA.

As Eliza Dushku.

Okay. Understand, I can cope with the idea of an ELIZA implementation who's sexualized outside of the therapeutic environment -- if you're over 21, go find Sexy Losers strip number 200 and consider ARPA-01, or consider this panel out of context
-- but, for no apparent reason, I hadn't connected the face of Hypersexualized Vampire Slayer Faith with my childhood babysitter.

Yeah.

See, I'm second-generation computer geek. One of my very first memories is of my dad taking me down to his academic workplace, and sitting me down in front of a greenscreen Tektronix terminal in the lab. It was 1979, maybe 1980; I was four. He passed me the phone receiver and dialed a campus number; the phone started squealing. Then he took the receiver, and put it down onto this strange little machine with cups in it.

The terminal, he said, was talking to a big computer down the block in the engineering deparment.

Slowly, the greenscreen terminal started responding. Apparently he was right.

There's not a lot for a four-year-old to do with a mainframe in 1979, or even 1980. So he pulled up ELIZA for me to talk to. I wasn't sure why she wanted to know so much about my mother, but we kept up something of a conversation. A four-year-old can't have much of a conversation with a program from 1966, but, then again, neither can that program have much of a conversation.

I dimly rememeber being frustrated by the limited topic scope, though. My dad would later mess with the code enough to have ELIZA bring up topics more relevant to my personal life (Barbie dolls, for example), but it was never quite the same. Not that I didn't spend entire weekend afternoons or after-kindergarten stretches talking to ELIZA, or that I didn't miss her as I moved on to the WICAT in the other room and such.

Anyhow, the image I always had of ELIZA-the-person was of some austere daycare manager. A bad beehive or perm; perhaps aviator glasses and schoolmarmish garb. Not...

Not Eliza Dushku with the biouxbies falling out, willy-nilly, all religiously devout sex and silver lame trousers. No. No, I'm vaguely creeped out in that way one is creeped out when one's primary caretakers are characterized as possibly being inclined towards private activities now. But that's my problem.

Then again, I was never the sort to develop crushes on my real-life babysitters to begin with. They were cute, and had nice chests, but they didn't know the first thing about computers. Who wants that in a relationship?

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:39 PM | Comments (60)

August 25, 2005

Wednesday: Scenes from the headache weekend

Friday begat the headache, a piercing, screaming thing birthed from the caverns of Video Room One.

Ayacon was showing He Is My Master, a Gainax anime which should have been the Evangelion of maid-fetish shows. Two young girls -- thirteen and fourteen, barely more than little children -- run away from home and end up on the estate of an equally tiny orphan boy. At first charming and sweet, the boy hires the two girls on as maids. It turns out that the boy views his parents' tragic death as an opportunity to act out reprehensibly, and so begins to demonstrate an alarmingly lecherous streak. It does not help that the girls carry with them an alligator who exists mainly to jump the fourteen-year-old girl and tear at her clothes. "Oh, that's Pochi," says the younger girl. "He gets like that whenever he sees her."

This show is meant to be a comedy. I had hoped for subversion -- the self-insertion target is selfish and slavering? Bring it on! -- but no such luck. Gainax had used up all of their year's mojo on Re:Cutie Honey, leaving us to simply feel unclean.

At roughly the third screech, the four-day headache began. An ill-advised attempt to drink away the pain of He Is My Master begat a hangover, which compounded the problem. By Saturday afternoon, con flu had firmly taken hold instead, and the headache persisted.

By Saturday night, my back joined my head and stomach on the picket line. I would spend much of the convention holed up in my room, wrapped around a laptop, swaddled in masses of blankets. The scabs and reruns of CBC Radio One were cold comfort, but I felt too out of sorts to position myself so as to watch Teen Titans episodes or my copy of The Incredibles.

Periodically, I would leave the room for a couple of hours, trying to enjoy the con, or spend time with friends, or find food. Passing through the crowds of costumed eighteen-year-olds, I felt out of place. Here, a catgirl. There, a goth Moogle. Beyond, a passel of elegant gothic Lolitas. While some of the worst excesses of American anime fandom were thankfully missing (for example, no one carried signage soliciting sexual favours in exchange for Pocky), the event was set about an octave and a half above my comfort levels. Once again, I did not speak the language anymore.

I gingerly made my way through the dealer's rooms, eyeing a wallet of shoujo-themed Letraset Trias, but only buying a small set of ProMarkers (thinking all the while: "What am I doing? I can't even draw in this state"). Five years ago, I would have walked through the room and been wracked with tchotchke desire; now, the plushies and knickknacks were quaint. I barely even glanced at the DVDs; I knew that there was next to nothing that I would want to watch.

It took two Nurofen Plus and a Luna bar to get to sleep that night. Everything hurt.

By Sunday, little had improved. I moderated the anti-piracy panel, by which I mean that I stood at a podium and looked menacing, then took questions from the audience and continued to look menacing. (I suspect that I looked less menacing than exhausted, but either will do for the purposes of cutting people off when they ramble.) Occasionally, I would sling the panelists a question, or give them a two-minute warning, but that was about it. It went relatively smoothly, although we had limited time for questions.

A nervous, wild-eyed young man circled a small group of us -- panelists, friends, audience members -- afterwards, then approached to ask if I worked in the anime industry. This perplexed me. I'd helped out at a distributor's booth the year before, at another event, but my badge plainly labeled me as a regular congoer. I'm not particularly remarkable.

"You seem so knowledgeable, and you have such a strong American accent..."

Ah. No.

Politely explaining no set off a bit of a panicked screed. "I want to work in the industry," he told me, "but I can't seem to make any connections." And so on, and so forth, with the undertone obvious: can you tell me how to make them? I couldn't. So he began to pace. Around us, around the panelists, around the people around the panelists. Waving his hands, lecturing the air.

I'd seen that look and that stance a few times in my life. At charismatic Baptist prayer meetings, from the purpotedly demonized. In a hospital, from schizophrenics who'd been led down from the wards to the cafeteria. One night in a shelter, on the faces of some ongoing residents. You don't forget it. You just learn to huddle in, then slink away when you have your chance.

What could I tell him?

On went the headache, through another pass by hucksters, through the dwindling crowds, through an escape into Coventry for lunch and books. Disconnected, pained and alarmed, the last day was a fog. When the Blood concert ran long, and the closing ceremonies were postponed for another hour, it didn't seem like such a bad thing to just go home.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:41 PM | Comments (24)

August 15, 2005

Wednesday: [w] They could also rerun old episodes of The Parka Patrol. God, I miss The Parka Patrol.

It occurs to me that the CBC Radio One managers are missing a tremendous opportunity here.

I've heard horror stories about the care and feeding of older radio shows, so it could be a hit and miss endeavour, but now strikes me as the perfect time for the managers to be hauling out old favourites from bygone eras. Even at random. I realize that there's been some antagonism towards the concept of Beloved Radio Personalities at Radio One in recent years, but the trend seems to be headed back towards them.

What sparked this, oddly enough, was listening to the tail end of 50 Tracks on the Vancouver feed just now. This is an atrocious show. It's filler. The original concept was that Canadians would suggest a bunch of purpotedly seminal pop songs from various eras, an on-air panel would discuss whether or not they were seminal, and then the audience would vote to further cement seminality. At the end of the series, you'd have a list. Woo. The concept was played out more than once. As an interactive endeavour, it's possibly engaging and intriguing to the right people. As a series of reruns, ages later? It's atrocious. Not even the infectious Jian Ghomeshi saves it.

What I particularly want to know is why Peter Gzowski's vast back catalogue of material hasn't been pulled out. Gzowski's following continues even today, and much of his work is either timeless or historically well-placed. Just the pieces enshrined in Morningside-related CD releases alone, many of which were circulated in the months following Gzowski's death, could be assembled into a couple of best-of specials; even more material was unearthed for the various memorial specials which aired. Failing that, do recordings of his later interview series, Some of the Best Minds of our Time, still exist?

Even beyond that, there's still stuff from the prior generation of Radio One personalities which would be wonderful to hear instead of the muzak, or the clumsy Radio Two show Disc Drive. Gilmour's Albums? A few hours of Alan Maitland's best interviews, or of his readings as Fireside Al? Some of the better episodes of Ideas as hosted by Lister Sinclair? Some of the Humline segments from Basic Black? Heck, why isn't the CBC grabbing temporary broadcast rights to the various Royal Canadian Air Farce best-of-radio albums (scroll down; three of them are online for free)?

It's a waste. Now's the time for management to get the listeners on their good side; it strikes me that a fantastic way to do that is to exploit Radio One's rich heritage. Even just going back over the past fifteen years would be worthwhile on that level.

Besides, I miss Morningside something fierce.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:28 PM | Comments (8)

Wednesday: [w] Odd nostalgia fit

One of my earliest television-related memories is of watching Three's Company reruns in the mornings, before kindergarten. Oh, that Chrissy --

Wait. That's not it.

One of my other earliest TV-related memories is of watching static images. CHSJ had its own labour dispute many, many years ago (one of several, I think), and they had never been particularly assiduous about running actual moving video content during non-program time to begin with. Time is highly subjective when you're four, but I remember sitting in front of a grainy, oversaturated picture of Mr. Dressup for about half an hour one day. It would, if I concentrated hard enough, become an actual episode of Mr. Dressup.

It may or may not have turned into The Friendly Giant. I'm not telling. It was certainly a frustrating experience, but I was damned if I was going to switch over to CBAFT Radio-Canada.

Understand: CHSJ wasn't CBC owned-and-operated for the longest time. As with everything else in New Brunswick that wasn't Crown property, McCain-owned, a reservation, or incredibly bloody useless, CHSJ belonged to the Irvings. It wouldn't become a real CBC station until 1994, when it was magically transformed into CBAT. There was never any guarantee that you'd get any particular show that ran on "proper" CBC stations, or that it'd be on at the same time as anywhere else in the Maritimes. A quick riffle through the region's TV Guide could be deeply disappointing.

I never knew if the cards were a CBC-affiliate thing, or just a particularly localized kind of crap. I knew enough to realize that this didn't happen much on other stations; the ATV affiliate ran Interlude, a series of incredibly tedious nature montages set to insipid instrumental music, and most of the American stations ran, well, commercials, or pictures of their (inevitably hideous) station logo. WAGM in Presque Isle may have had the cards at the time; they existed in a sort of nebulous everything-affiliate state, running non-CBS shows a week late like some sort of UHF dollar theatre, so I wouldn't have put it past them.

The placeholder cards, which often ran in place of actual programming, were wretched. Had it been ten years later, one might assume that they had gone through a colour photocopier roughly two dozen times before having a logo slapped atop them and going in front of the camera. The skin tones on the WKRP card alone spawned nightmares. I have sharp recollections of a deeply discoloured Kermit the Frog.

It's an odd thing to flash back upon, of course, while the manager reading the hourly news on CBC Radio One botches the report for the ninth time in a row.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 3:43 PM | Comments (19)

Wednesday: [w] I am the face of my country / Expressionless and small

The temporary newscaster cut in late, his introduction reduced to a simple "--we fry."

Frank Fry isn't a bad newsreader. He's no Bernie MacNamee or Judy Maddren, but he's more listenable than Bob "CBC! Rrrradio!" MacGregor. Even so, he's a little bit uncomfortable with his presentation. His voice is masked, but still tight and uneasy.

The thing is, this isn't his job. Fry is almost certainly one of the managers who have taken over programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as of 12:01 AM today. The CBC's contract negotiations with the Canadian Media Guild ran up to the last available moment, then broke down. Producers, technicians, and presenters have been locked out of CBC offices across Canada, and are now picketing. (Workers at studios in Moncton, New Brunswick, and the province of Quebec are still around; they belong to a different union. Radio Canada International remains unaffected for similar reasons, although they obviously can't rely on any new programming from the CBC until this is over.)

The CBC website has been stripped down. It's not as bad as it was during the Toronto blackouts, but it's pretty bad. Subsites dedicated to individual shows are completely missing; don't expect to watch old episodes of The National online this week. The Arts section, which had recently undergone a fantastic turnaround from clunky to vibrant and engaging, now looks like a half-dismantled Blogger template. News is plainly all wire reports, all the time.

CBC Radio One has always made for fascinating listening when regular programming is suspended for one reason or another. The trick is to come in early, when few people are expected to be listening, and nothing is actually happening yet. In the wee hours of the morning, after the first bombs fell on Baghdad, Anna Maria Tremonti and Bernie MacNamee filled time by swapping anecdotes about Saddam Hussein's bizarrely customized bed. When the Toronto blackouts fell, Andy Barrie walked several hours across an utterly darkened city to reach the studio, and told us all about it as the morning show began. During times of conflict, Michael Enright has been known to find some of the strangest emails from listeners, and to read them without comment.

Today, the quiet bafflement came during the replacement morning show. Unable to generate any regional programming whatsoever, Radio One is reduced to a single national broadcast for the drivetime broadcasts, not unlike those aired at Christmastime. (The music is arguably better today, at least when it's not fourth-rate jazz.) In between blocks of two or three songs, a sweet-voiced manager abased herself. "I'm sorry. I know that I'm not who you expected to hear this morning," she'd say, then explain that there was a lockout and the managers were running the show. "Most of us actually started out as producers," she mentioned, but it didn't seem convincing. The poor woman. One wonders if, as the lockout continues on, she'll get to develop any patter.

We already knew the situation from the brief news reports, and from the hourly apologies. Every hour on the hour, and also at the half-hour should recorded programming break, Radio One and Radio Two run a prerecorded apology for the unavailability of "regular progreeeaaahhhming." This, I explained to a friend by email this afternoon, is how you know it's a Canadian labour dispute: they apologize. At length. Repeatedly. Every hour. And then, if they get a chance, they apologize some more, just to be on the safe side.

It's not a dire programming situation, at least not from the listener's perspective. Outside of the drivetime music shows, the reruns are arguably more engaging than much of the regular summertime programming Radio One had been offering. Shelagh Rogers is in her element, shortly after her much-needed move to Vancouver. Full episodes of Quirks and Quarks are on instead of highlights. There's a strong likelihood of Grooveshinny reruns. Hell, they're running Richardson's Roundup instead of Tetsuro Shigematsu. (Unfortunately, Sounds Like Canada is still being padded out by the confessional sonic-collage mishmash OutFront. Even during a lockout, we can't get away from that condescending bitch who believes that we care if she has a story to tell.) As with the television schedule, major news coverage will be handed over to the BBC World Service.

Even so, it's the little things. Losing Radio Overnight, say, which is a ridiculous move when you can't generate your own shows. Or the general sense that no one is really home anymore. The hockey and Canadian football will run on CBC Television without any commentary whatsoever, should the lockout last that long; the silence in the face of ambient noise is alarmingly similar.

The National Research Council Official Time Signal was wrong today. This never happens. At the sound of the long dash, following ten seconds of silence, it was 1PM -- 1:30 in Newfoundland. Except for that this was on the Ogg Vorbis feed, which pulls from Toronto. It seems obvious that the signal is running at 1PM in each major time zone (Newfoundland is not a major time zone); the resources to air it synchronized, in the usual fashion, plainly aren't there right now.

Still, until all of this is resolved, it will be 1:30 in Newfoundland five times a day.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:59 AM | Comments (25)

August 14, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Life has never been the same since Shaun of the Dead.

I don't understand a single word that these people are saying.

It might have been the lager. Somewhere down the line, a major brewery bred a herd of donkeys for maximum bladder capacity and output. How all these people have gotten drunk on dilute uric acid, I have no idea, but they were shambling everywhere.

They staggered around before the monitors at Waterloo, colliding with me as though my powers of invisibility had finally made themselves manifest. When their trains were called, they bolted in lurching packs. Fast zombies, subverting the genre. Fast zombies with severe bleach jobs, all straw and eyeliner. Fast zombies in low-rise jeans.

Low-rise jeans, and briefs.

Briefs.

In between glimpses at the monitors -- if I run, and I catch the 23:15 to Portsmouth Harbour, will it take me to the right one? -- waiting for the inevitable announcement of platform nineteen, I tried to unravel their conversation. Occasionally, I made out an assortment of terms for the female genitals. It seemed obvious that these people are having entire conversations consisting of terms for the female genitals; the ambitious among them will occasionally reference the male's.

It's finally happened. I'm twenty-nine, and I'm already too old to understand English anymore.

For no apparent reason, I found myself dueling insomnia earlier this week by reading websites about borderline personality disorder. One symptom which kept jumping out at me? A tendency to suddenly drop rude, inappropriate non sequiturs into the conversation. How would I tell if any of these people are borderlines? I wondered.

Thankfully, I had my iPod. And, once I mounted the 23:30 to Reading, the tiny hutch next to Passenger Assistance turned out to be empty. I could temporarily escape the consumption of my brain through frequent proclamations of "twat!" I could watch the decelerating zombies try to work the door to first class.

Jamming their thumbs around the glowing, pressure-sensitive mechanism, the door's opening simply eluded them. Some, coming back the other way, pressed themselves against the frosted glass for minutes on end. No one should learn their button-touching skills from early seventies adult pulp novels, but apparently that was all that remained: darting and jabbing, clumsily missing the target.

Inevitably, one of them began to miss by miles. He strafed back and forth for a moment, incompetently dancing to his own internal half-speed Sisters of Mercy album, prodding the air. The door has no forcefield trigger, I thought, before the zombie dribbled ectoplasm on the carpet.

Three times.

I am, in fact, serious when I say ectoplasm. You owned this toy as a child; you dropped it onto your He-Man toys, or your Ghostbusters figures, and never could get it out of the upholstry. It was flourescent green, the devil's own non-toxic phlegm. This is clearly the sum of the zombie's humours, and this one spluttered his in the fashion of a disillusioned geyser.

I got up and moved down the train, triggering the door with a simple, fluid motion. Pushing through first class to the next empty car, I couldn't hear the Argyle Park song for all the cries of "Twaaaaaat.... twaaaaaaat..." around me.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:59 PM | Comments (20)

August 11, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Taken by surprise

From For Better or For Worse.

Lynn Johnston nails it.

I nitpick comics, literature, films and television which incorporate any form of sexual assault. Telefilms, fine art, even black humour. To some extent, it's a distancing mechanism. While the vile practice can make for a dramatic moment, it's exceptionally difficult to convey without sliding into melodrama or exploitation. Many don't bother to try; some make a halfhearted stab, but aren't competent to follow through. After a fashion, the shell gets pretty thick. Rather than having one's night ruined by a series of unpleasant reminders, one can simply lean back, sneer, and declare, "Please. That's about as convincing as the plotholes that you could drive a truck through. What's their inspiration? Day of the Woman?"

In other words, "That's not what it's like."

Today? That's what it's like.

I spent a couple of minutes trying to find the flaws. "Liz must not have hit him very hard if he's still going without so much as a flinch. Wasn't her fist closed?" Since when have we seen Liz punch people before? "The prior stalking is a little oversimplified." But we know the constraints of the form, the way people in FBorFW communicate, and we so know what gaps to fill in. Putting aside a slight awkwardness in the rhythm, this is elegantly minimalistic -- we don't have to be told what else is going on, and we arguably shouldn't be. "The offscreen rescuer wouldn't have had the presence of mind to contribute the superheroesque comeback." Rubbish. It's an obvious retort, and it's cathartic.

No. Johnston gets it. She nails it. Assaults take various forms, of course, but there's a particular strain of jump and banter which she has down. Ignore the dialogue, if you need to; the body language conveys everything that it needs to. His arms.

That's exactly it.

Perhaps you might not want to read the strip today. I'm... I'm going outside for a while.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:34 AM | Comments (71)

August 8, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Coffee, Beer, Wine and Whiskey?

This seems about the right sort of time to ask if others plan to attend Ayacon, a British anime convention at the University of Warwick, over the weekend of 19th August. If so, this is also to check and see whether some sort of excursion for food and/or drink is indicated. Because, see, planning.

I intend to hit up Paul Gravett's lecture on manga history and culture, spend some time in the artists' alley (since Fred Gallagher isn't around this year, there may actually be space for one this time), hang about the bar with some Copic markers feeling indequate about my drawing skills, and attend any webcomic-related panels that happen to be scheduled¹. Also, I plan to drink alcohol.

Hopefully, not Strongbow. Not this year.

¹ I have no idea if any have been scheduled, but it seems like there should be -- the surge in minicomic/doujinshi/zine style small press work amongst British fanartists since 2001 suggests that webcomics would also be embraced. And I'm looking forward to what sort of material's been inspired by Gallagher's appearance two years back.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 1:50 PM | Comments (8)

August 6, 2005

Wednesday: [w] On the other hand, it could just be that the show is nothing special.

I thought I'd figured it out yesterday, while walking up to the Tesco for brisket and tisane. I'd stuck the opening and ending themes to Kannaduki no Miko on the iPod, amazed at how similar they were. ("Gosh," I thought, "it's nice that anime-oriented J-pop has finally made it into the mid-nineties.") The infectious marketability of "Re-sublimity" reminded me of a conversation I'd had with someone earlier in the week.

I watch Kannaduki no Miko with some friends, one episode every week or so, because it's an utter trainwreck of dismal giant robots and bisexual love triangles. Between the two, there's something to horrify everyone in the room; if that doesn't work, the earthbound characters are overseen by a battery of spirits drawn from the otaku fetishist's checklist (combined as much as the law will allow; I assure you, there is an underaged catgirl nurse/maid).

Most of us really enjoyed Revolutionary Girl Utena, which warped as many seventies shoujo tropes as possible into a magnificent synthesis of derivative pseudosymbolism. It meant nothing, by the producer's own admission, but you could read all kinds of things into it. It didn't make the slightest bit of sense, but it felt like it ought to. KnM, meanwhile, throws the selling points from its genre-spanning contemporaries into a focus group's stone soup pot. Assigning even a semblance of meaning to the sound and fury is beyond this show. Lacking a strong market for choose-your-own-itch-scratcher hentai games in North America (and I'm positive that the anime, recently announced by Geneon USA, was made chiefly with the English-language market in mind), KnM splatters every available fan-kink across the screen.

I turned this over in my mind for a couple of minutes, then wondered when I'd gotten so blasted cynical. Somewhere down the line, the line between mediocrity and disaster had shifted. I couldn't tell whether my standards had changed or the market had. The aggressive marketing was certainly nothing new for any sort of anime or manga (when your subtitle cherry pops on Sailor Moon and Bubblegum Crisis, you've no right to complain), so the mere fact of its existence in a disaster like KnM wasn't the only thing getting to me.

I did know that the harem and magical-girlfriend models had ground me into fine dust, from that perspective. From Tenchi on down, the personality-free, sweet and hapless lad (or, after Fushigi Yuugi, lass) had become a vampire. I'd stopped caring which of the (three? five? seven?) carefully honed, crafted and targeted possibilities landed the self-insertion vehicle. At some point, I began wondering why the creators were passing up such perfect opportunities to draw attention to the social problems each show embraced. Why wasn't Love Hina a useful springboard to the discussion of domestic abuse? Heck, after years of reading Dan Savage, I'd have been happy with Chii's on-switch in Chobits serving double duty as an anatomical chart.

But I couldn't figure out what the straw on the camel's back had been. Perhaps there hadn't been one; no matter how delightful your trashy pleasures are on their own, once crushed and overwhelmed by their cumulative damage, enjoying any particular example becomes hard.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 5:18 PM | Comments (25)

July 21, 2005

Wednesday: [w] No, no, no. It's not you.

Some part of me wishes that everyone would shut up for a week or two.

Oh, don't worry. I don't mean you. I like you. I respect your opinions on the matter, and that other matter, and ... all right, we disagree on that one thing, but it's okay. There are things which we can just let pass by us. We don't have to talk about that. I like you.

I do. I really do. I don't mean you when I say this.

But I really, really wish that everyone else? Would shut right up.

Or, at the very least, I'd just like for them to try harder. For example, yesterday, the first thing I thought as soon as someone mentioned to me that James Doohan had died? "Oh, no. I'm not going to be able to throw a stone without hitting two dozen expressions of Scotty having beamed up for the last time, even though he was more often tasked with running the transporter." And, sure enough, like Superman ascending to the sky from the wheelchair his actor occupied, there we were. The cynical bit of me -- all that was left after these past few months, I'm afraid -- just wanted to start a betting pool for the cliches that will be invoked when other celebrities die. I felt guilty, full of disclaimers, but I also wanted a scorefile.

No, no, not you. I didn't mind when you did it. That's different. Don't worry about it! Besides, I saw yours first.

And it's not like you were doing the whole routine with the bombs. I woke up this morning and put on the radio -- Canadian radio; you know me, I'd rather have news from home -- and they'd bumped The Current again for Special Programming about the Lame Followup Bombing. (And it honestly was the lamest followup bombing. The Penny Arcade-knockoff-with-bad-Mac-Hall-style-colouring comic of folllowup terrorist attacks.) Really, I'd just started getting used to the non-UK papers being all "our post-9/11, post-7/7 world," and random net.users swaggering around and being all, "TEA! The British drink tea, and that makes them robust and Blitztastic!"

No, it's okay; I didn't mind when you posted the lyrics to "London Calling" that night.

Five times.

Without a cut.

Hey, at least you're cutting your Harry Potter spoilers. I hear that's a problem. I probably shouldn't get into the Harry Potter thing, should I? Yeah, I know you were really upset about the thing -- no, the other thing -- no -- oh, I didn't know Lupin the Third was in it. Anyhow. Yeah, I know, you were really upset by that, but I don't think I could bring myself to care now. No, it's all right if you vent to me about Harry's sex life. It's okay. I don't know who any of these people are, but --

Yeah, well, you kind of get used to it when you live somewhere where the new TV season doesn't start until January and everyone assumed you'd seen Buffy come back from the dead already, y'know? And they only just figured out that it's okay to release a movie two weeks later instead of three months, except for where they haven't -- no, I understand how you feel. I really do.

Yeah, go ahead and tell me about the Weasleys. I'm sure it's fascinating. No, don't worry about spoiling me; I'll never read it any -- no, it's okay. You don't have to loan me your copy.

Really.

Yeah, I like Alan Rickman, too. But it'd be nice if I could find something else at the bookstore. I'm just so bored. And kinda run-down, really. Tired.

Yeah, I could read some webcomics.

I guess.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 4:44 PM | Comments (56)

July 19, 2005

Wednesday: [w] So. What happened with the Keenspot panel?

This past weekend, Keenspot had a panel up at Comic-Con International(*). Big two-hour panel. And they had a newsbox, advertising the panel, up over the weekend. There were to be Major Announcements during their Big, Two-Hour Panel.

I waited patiently. We've heard a lot about the ebbs and flows of Keenspot over this past little while, so I figured that this must be something significant. And, since it must be something significant, someone would see to it that the annoucements were disseminated to the general population within short order, right?

Yeah.

I waited.

I waited a bit longer.

Nothing.

I checked the Keenspot forums. Nothing.

Followed Jeffrey Stevenson's CCI panel writeup link feed. Nothing.

Followed the Sequential Tart blog. Nothing.

Kept an eye on Comixpedia. Nothing.

Posted to the Snarkoleptics community on LJ. Alun Clewe had made it to the second hour, where it was mentioned that some sort of incentive system is in place for artists who keep their updates consistent - unusual, but not a Major Announcement that one foreshadows in one's newsbox, right?

It's Tuesday. I still haven't turned up a thing beyond Jeff Darlington's photo slideshow for Wednesday and Thursday of the con (Darlington was apparently doing a significant chunk of Keen-herding for the con, so my money had been on announcements getting mentioned in his reports).

Now, I realize that people are still tired and recovering. But it strikes me as odd that we've heard other webcomic-related stuff out of the con (e.g. Shaenon Garrity's Lulu of the Year award; the Wired article and Kurtz's side of it), that con reports are filtering out, that we're seeing people's photos and so on -- but nothing about these Major Keen Announcements. Not even on the forum about Keen's presence at CCI.

I concede that this confuses me somewhat. I'd kind of like to know what the fuss was, or if I'm missing some desperately useful piece of information.

Then again, I'm also confused that the news about Penny Arcade's publishing deal with Dark Horse reached us via DH's press release (which I was scanning for manga acquisitions) before anything else. It's safe to say that I'm easily confused.

Anyhow. Was it the Two Lumps thing? Did anyone else neat join? Did a show get sold to TV? Someone getting married? We'd like to know. I'd like to know.

Thanks.

[EDIT: We have answers in the comments! Thanks, Aeire!]

(*) Now featured on a triple bill with World Series and Miss Universe. But I digress.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 3:17 PM | Comments (60)

July 7, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Because some have asked...

...I'm fine. I don't live anywhere near zones 1 and 2, nor was I in the area at the time.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:19 AM | Comments (8)

July 4, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Drift and Anchor (I: Alien)

I am very frequently mistaken for an American.

This makes some amount of sense. Upon realizing, somewhere around seventh grade, that I never, ever wanted to sound like someone who came from my end of the St. John River Valley, I began obsessively patterning my accent after American television. (Unfortunately, this was the late eighties, so it was impossible to avoid a certain modicum of, like, southern Californian mallspeak, y'know.) Then I proceeded to move to North Carolina for two years. This will confuse most people.

Even without that mitigating factor, some are confused by dint of ignorance concerning what remains. Many Canadian accents are unfamiliar to those from away -- most of us don't speak SCTV Standard, after all. A friend's trick works well here: if you spot someone with a North American accent you can't pinpoint, ask if they're Canadian. The Americans will smile and correct you; the Canadians will be thrilled.

In Britain, I had gotten rather accustomed to being treated as both American and foreign. While my accent took care of the broader classification problem, my prevailing nationality and cultural identity still bordered on the invisible unless I took pains to make it otherwise. While many take pains to point out how strong and strange my accent is, few can identify it. Some are more gracious about the correction than others. (I eventually vowed, not long after moving here, that I would one day rent a billboard: "Telling a Canadian that she's American because Canada is in North America? Not clever, not funny, and not even remotely original. Now go away, you misguided pedant." Then I realized that I'd have to tote the billboard around.)

Living overseas left me significantly more identified with my country of birth, to be fair. There's a Canadian flag on my living room wall; I hang it in the window during significant football matches as a means of self-defense, a sort of disclaimer. (When the town is covered in England flags, it's time to hunker down.) I've become much more attuned to my nation's politics, and more deeply absorbed in its political satire. I grew up a fan of CBC Radio One, but became an aficionado just as soon as broadband meant that I could have it on all the time. There are piles of books by Pierre Trudeau and Peter Gzowski on my bedroom floor.

There was a time, when I was much younger and things were not so bright, where I was rather ashamed of my nationality; I most certainly wasn't proud of my home province -- a backwater, only relatively recently bootstrapped from the dirt (and not entirely there yet), viewed with disdain by most everyone else -- and I didn't know enough to realize that New Brunswick was not Canada, that the river valley wasn't Canada, that my home town was most certainly not Canada. That's when I began to purge the river from my voice.

I wouldn't take that particular move back, since I like my accent as it stands and I've never been fond of what I could have picked up in French immersion. I do, however, pay the price of myriad invisibilities.

In Britain, I'm a different kind of alien. In America, I'm part of the landscape. When I fly back to visit family, the people at the airport process me as foreign, then tell me: "Welcome home."

It's not a bad thing. But I find myself making almost compulsive reference to Being From Away when I travel. Not, you understand, that there's much choice; how can I give you my zip code, nice lady at the cash register, when I don't have one? How can I tell you what size I am when I don't know what the numbers mean anymore? How do you card me when I don't have any ID which you recognize? Still, it's sometimes extraneous. I feel self-conscious. What is a Canadian, who lives in Britain, when she's visiting America? Why should she be unfamiliar with the surroundings, with the relative proportions of meal sizes, with sweeteners and colas, with the colour of money and the flow of traffic?

Everything, after a fashion, no matter how many times I come back, becomes a novelty. A shiny thing. Unusual. I no longer have a sense of corporate monoculture, because I'm too sensitive to the localizations. Everything is familiar, but everything is strange.

It might be a fair trade.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:23 PM | Comments (23)

Wednesday: [w] Silence Perpetuated

Eric's Powerbook fell over last night. Dying-to-dead hard drive. And he has Familial Obligations today. So. Well. He won't be around.

So you're stuck with me.

Oh, stop that face. If it makes you feel better, I'll go put on a beard.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 12:03 PM | Comments (18)

June 22, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Losing Sailor Moon

Tom Spurgeon remarked yesterday, in passing, that rights to the English-language Sailor Moon manga have lapsed (it's not clear to me whether Tokyopop owned blanket English rights, or just those to that language in certain territories; I never bought that version, because I was following the French release instead -- if anyone knows, I'd be curious). He finds it remarkable because Sailor Moon was very much responsible for helping to capture the publisher's substantial female audience, but that seems to be it.

I find myself stung a bit harder by the news. This is the last bit of Sailor Moon to disappear from the North American market, and, so far as I can make out, it's one more aspect of the property's removal from the world outside Japan. (Or, at least, the world outside Asia. I keep casual tabs on European translations; French and German manga and anime are pretty much unavaiable, for example.) Pioneer (now Geneon) Entertainment scored a major coup a few years back by getting the R1 video/DVD rights to the middle two TV series and the three films -- both dubbed and in Japanese, which was huge at the time -- but those rights have since reverted. ADV Films, who did quite well out of selling the highly edited US dub's first two seasons to little kids, got a very short-term license to produce uncut boxed sets of those shows (minus one episode); those boxes had barely hit the market before, so far as anyone can make out, production company Toei grabbed the license back.

All of this coincided with the production of a live-action television series, which I've discussed here before.

Much of what follows is a combination of memory-reliance and speculation on my part; use all the salt you can, because I'm spouting here:

The live-action Sailor Moon was almost certainly intended for localized release in several territories, much like the Power Rangers franchise and other (less successful) sentai formula exports. My understanding has generally been that a combination of lackluster performance and royalty disputes with creator Naoko Takeuchi have both prevented this effort and contributed to Toei's clawback of the anime licenses; I could be wrong, though.

Sailor Moon, like many Japanese children's franchises destined for heavy export, is problematic for its older, geeky fans. It exists to sell toys, in whatever form it takes -- artistic considerations are secondary. It gets repackaged, cut down, and otherwise made palatable for children in whatever country it goes to; controversial elements are altered as needed. While, over the years, these alterations have generally been to individual characters (effeminate gay men become women, lesbians become friends or cousins, and -- in the case of the Sailor Starlights in Italy -- characters who shift genders between mundane and magical identities are instead replaced by their "identical twin sisters from another dimension"), it's quite possible that other incarnations of Sailor Moon were being pulled outside Japan so as to make sure that an eventual live-action version tailored to each market would be seen as definitive. Even within Japan, DVD releases of the original anime had ground to a halt.

Now, this might not necessarily affect the Kodansha-published manga -- Toei doesn't have any particular stake in that, to the best of my knowledge, and -- aside from fannish gossip -- the average layperson can't really know how the balance of power works between those two companies, Takeuchi, and Bandai (who handle toys and stage musicals). That said, one of the more interesting things to come out alongside the live-action show was a revised edition of the manga, in wideban format, with minor alterations to the text, new covers, fewer total volumes (there's been concatenation), and some revised artwork. I can certainly conceive of a situation where Kodansha and/or Takeuchi would want this to be released alongside the localized live-action shows, possibly with another publisher in, at least, North America (where the market has changed drastically since the manga was originally licensed out), but then didn't see it as feasible to carry out [re]negotiations. I'm also not prepared to rule out the possibility that someone else has the rights to the new, shiny manga and just hasn't made an announcement yet -- Anime Expo and Otakon are still coming up, and we do tend to hear about interesting acquisitions there.

Either way, I should probably go pick up Warriors of Legend before I babble more about Sailor Moon.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:08 PM | Comments (8)

June 12, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Who are they trying to marry?

At first, my reaction to yesterday's PvP was pretty simple: "Whoa. Mr. McCloud and Mr. Brahe are well-versed in the art of lirpa combat."

Then, I thought: "Hold on. Why the lirpa? Who are they trying to bone? Who's getting their telepathic betrothal on? Who's all mister blood fever? What? Did I miss something?"

Then I found out that the lirpa can be used outside of mating-related tussles.

Then I was kind of sad for no good reason. I wanted to see one of them cheat through judicious stealth application of tri-ox compound, and then be okay.

Mostly, I just wanted to report the fact that I was bouncing up and down and being all terribly excited that all this has come down to lirpa fightin'. If this doesn't actually happen at Comic-Con, we'll all be most disappointed.

Well. I'll be most disappointed.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:33 PM | Comments (23)

May 30, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Brevity

The day was surprisingly exhausting. Eric's still away, and I have very little for you. I am very sorry.

I did join the ranks of people who had seen Episode III tonight, though. (I didn't really want to join the hordes of chav cosplayers descending upon the town centre that Friday night, and had no company until now.) I don't actually have a useful opinion; Star Wars isn't really part of my nostalgia (didn't see the originals sensibly through until just prior to the special edition releases to cinema, and I was quite drunk when I did), and all the appropriate remarks about corniness or whiz-bangery and such have been made. This mostly leaves poor Dead Milkmen filk, and I'm not about to do that in a public forum. It's just not right.

(Mostly: "Okay. That was shiny. Can I see Serenity now?")

It did strike me to mention, however, that there's something very wrong with a world where the trailers before a bloody Star Wars film are all desperately uninspiring. For example, I now actively don't want to see War of the Worlds, because it seemed indistinguishable from a run-of-the-mill disaster flick, and that's wrong. At the very least, I should merely be apathetic about an adaptation of War of the Worlds.

I don't even remember what the other stuff was.

That's incredibly depressing.

Anyhow. Eric will be in a plane tomorrow. Tomorrow, we will talk about webcomic site infrastructure some more. Or something.

Tomorrow.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:32 PM | Comments (15)

May 29, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Priority Origami

You may be familiar with the concept of the "fold". In the case of a broadsheet newspaper, it refers to what you see when you fold the closed paper and rest it with the top side facing upwards. The closer to the top any given bit of content is (headline, photo of current event, ridiculous column by popular writer in enclosed tabloid supplement, &c.), the more likely it is to catch the eye of the passerby, who will then purchase the paper. Or so the theory goes. For web designers, the fold is the point at which your reader has to start scrolling down to read the rest of the page.

Now, that point's pretty arbitrary. The best thing we can do is make somewhat informed guesses, do a lot of reading, compensate for certain alternative browsing environments, make the layout as semantically correct, as fluid (or, at least, as spare), and as gracefully degradable as possible under the circumstances, and roll with it. Still, the salient point remains: you want as much of your essential content -- stuff like core navigation, certain forms of advertising, a reasonable amount of branding, and, uh, your comic -- as near to the top of the document as possible, because your audience is there for a reason.

All of this blather is so that I can pull a nit out of my hat and beg of you, the creators, the people: Please resist the urge to randomly push your comic's starting frames below a sensible fold point in favour of chrome or secondary content. The more stuff you cram at the top of the page, the less important your comic seems to me.

I love Bruno to death, so it rather pains me to cite it as an example, but I'm going to anyhow because it's recent, and because it self-corrected. On occasion, such as this past week, Chris Baldwin will completely displace the comic with a very large announcement for something else -- in this week's case, a book release, along with the cover art. At first, where the comic was, you got the cover art and a lot of text, and there was a fair amount of scroll until the day's comic became visible.

Now, I'm not opposed to scrolling, but, at a first glance, the reader could be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't a comic that day because instead there was a book announcement. There's the space the comic occupies... and it's full of something else.

As of Friday, possibly a bit earlier, the comic was on top of the announcement, albeit dwarfed by the cover art. I don't know if Baldwin changed his mind about positioning, or got complaints, or what. The problem was remedied, and that made me happy, but there was still a nagging sense of disorder. Like the rug had been a little bit pulled out. And I remember having seen this sort of thing before. Perhaps other people don't notice or keep track of trends like this, but it registers for me as a metaphorical collar-grab -- "no! Look at this first! It's more important than the whole reason you're here!" I'm sure that's not the intention at all, but that vibe still remains for me.

I've seen a fair few comics do this sort of thing over the years. A large, splashy logo shoving the comic a little ways down... and then the adbanner at the top gets a little bigger, a little fatter... and then it seems like a good idea to put a great big link in to the con countdown, or the news about the new book, or the big graphic letting people know that such-and-such another strip has moved to a new site...

The more emphasis goes to an element which is not vital to the purpose of a comic, the more one gets the impression from a site's design or layout that the comic's not as important as other stuff. Stick an extra lump of text, or an extra picture, on top of the strip one day? What you're telling me is that the comic's not as important that day. Let that build up, and you're telling me that the comic is sliding down the list of priorities. Consistent elements are something else again (although I'd beg people not to take up huge amounts of vertical screen real estate with logos if they don't have to, especially if nothing else usefully occupies the horizontal); fluctuating ones, though, diminish the amount of trust I have, as a reader, in your priorities.

It's not that I'm too lazy to scroll. Far from it.

This sort of fluctuating element thing can be done well, and unobtrusively; consider Achewood, whose occasional insertions of update status/short announcements don't displace the comic in any significant fashion, and whose on-again, off-again banner ads slot gracefully into the layout. It's more spartan than some approaches, but it does work, and work well. The eye is drawn to where it needs to be drawn.

Which is pretty much all you really need to do.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:08 PM | Comments (17)

May 28, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Personally, I'd like to install a pair on my knees so as to cushion the regular blows from the doorjamb.

From the 28/05/05 NLExD by Lea Hernandez. Click for nutbra.

24 Hour Comic Day begat Near-Life Experience: Mr. Pluto, which begat the resumption of regular NLE comics. This time around, they're going into Lea Hernandez's weblog, with a little Paypal button at the bottom, instead of behind the subscription wall.

I loved Pluto (must. order. paper copy. soon). I'm loving NLExD so far. I'm a sucker for the borderline-swirly, spontaneous, textually dense, downright organic style in play here. Hernandez's anecdotes aren't ponderous, desperately self-conscious screeds (a trap way too damn many autobiographical comics fall into; are there actually people out there whose lives consist of a lot of people staring at each other, thinking profundities as loudly as possible while picking up gum wrappers or consuming hot dogs? Can they be shot?). They read like the way you tell yourself your memories. They're not a little playful, as and when circumstances permit.

But that's not why I'm gushing right now. I'm gushing because I wish I'd been a fly on the wall for the conversation about Neuticles.

What I'm thinking, of course, is: "Wait. I was flipping channels earlier, and it was after the watershed, and so all the porn "documentaries" were on. And the girl versions stay up by themselves. Wouldn't neuticles be self-supporting, too? Are these unusually perky-looking pets? Is there an unnatural amount of separation?"

Also, I'm saying "nutbra" to myself a lot.

Nutbra.

Go on. It'll make you happy. And, then, when you realize you're overdue for bra shopping, it'll help you through the process. Trust me. I know this to be true.

Nutbra.

Well, you'll feel better about it.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:58 PM | Comments (3)

May 26, 2005

Wednesday: [w] A null thar nan eileanan, gu dhà Ameireaga gun teid sinn...

(...A null rathad Shasuinn agus dhachaidh rathad Eirinn.)

Here are a couple of things. Since time moves differently in this apartment (yes, I will have you know that my apartment is a teeny tiny little Domain, and, the moment I exit, I will transform into some sort of haggard sack), you need never know that I've just realized what time it is in the outside world. From my perspective, there have only been a couple of hours.

Ever.

But I digress. Here are some things.

Oh, man; today's QC just reminds me, once again, that I'm boring and, well, old^*. See, I know from genre explosion -- used to collect it -- but I couldn't give you any contemporary examples of what on earth that's supposed to mean. I'll think Big Daddy, or Sacred Cows by the Swirling Eddies (or Argyle Park's Steve Taylor and Stryper covers, if we're in that space), or... you know, stuff.

No, wait, I have one. It's like copping to enjoying boy band super sentai teams in its way, because "real" fiddle fans aren't supposed to enjoy this sort of thing and real anything else fans didn't dig anything but "Sleepy Maggie." But I want to know, if we're dealing with things with bows and strings, why Apocalyptica's Metallica project got pulled out, while Ashley MacIssac didn't. (A friend once described Ashley as "a goddess," and I agreed that he was.) hi™ how are you today? and Helter's Celtic (and parts of the albeit overproduced eponymous album, particularly "To America We Go") are, at their best, bloody masterful reworkings of traditional material into rock and dance arrangements. Or perhaps I'm overextending the meaning of "cover songs." It's been known. (Also, "I Don't Need This" really should have been a breakaway hit for the overstressed. I digress.)

And what of Rachel Barton Pine? Maaaan. Apocalyptica's disappointing, but the concept has been executed well. By her. Oh, yes.

Yes.

The other thing:

Peanuts?!

Look. You have to understand, I'm travel karma person. Travel karma girl. Ever since I turned eighteen, it has been my karma to go places. Life conspires -- regardless of my circumstances at any given time -- to put me on planes and trains, into cars, onto busses. (Rarely onto boats. I fear crossing the ocean, and aviation obviates the need for direct contact with it.) I rarely know well in advance where I'll go, or for how long, but I have to go places. And, since I'm stuck in Britain these days, lately, that tends to involve the use of the airplane.

And peanuts?

I think peanuts are a lie from the devil.

See, we could use the protein provided by this pungent salt-delivery mechanism, especially when placed in situations where the layover is just not going to happen, or the money simply isn't there for a burger or a steak or a lump of your preferred vegetarian protein source at or near the airport, or you're on a long-haul flight and the meal in coach is completely inedible, or whatever.

But some people are allergic to nuts. Very allergic to nuts. Therefore, you really don't want to have that sort of thing circulating through the filtration system -- you can't go to the hospital while you're on a plane. It's just bad.

I'm sympathetic to this. I am. I have a rare food allergy going on myself (rare enough that it makes people giggle to hear about it, but to something avoidable enough that it doesn't much impact dining choices), and I know I wouldn't unexpectedly want to be hit with that in the air while I'm trying to get to America from Heathrow.

But.

I have also subsisted for hours and hours on the alternative snacks which have sprung into being on American-operated air carriers in recent years. Pretzels? Yep. Weird-ass cheese-like Chex-mix thing? Oh, yeah. And have I gotten that spacy sort of headache thing you get when all you eat for hours is small doses of refined wheat flour, and all you drink is water or diet soda?

You bet.

I want to know who these peanut-carrying airlines are. I want to know if they operate international flights. While I am greatly fond of American Airlines (having, you know, legs longer than a popsicle), I am telling you: you could seduce me with real peanuts. And a commitment to real peanuts. Especially in this age, where actual food is becoming more of a premium than a guarantee for even the long-haul flights, where they offer me pizza (no, no, never offer me pizza) as a sort of lunch, or bags with withered bagels in them, at best? I would love peanuts.

I would love them.

Yes, I could bring them. You are missing the point, because I have already stuffed my carryon full of strawberries and vitamins and water and (on return, anyhow) Luna bars. And I don't think they'd be happy.

Are these regional carriers, with the peanuts? I'm going to cry.

I bet Eric got peanuts on his flight.

* Yes, I know. Not that old. Yet.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:18 PM | Comments (34)

May 22, 2005

Wednesday: [w] A God Shot Interlude: Them Duke Boys

One of the problems with recent Chick tracts has been the artwork. As I've said before, Jack Chick's stroke and Fred Carter's prolonged absence have had a horrible knockon effect -- Chick's recovery, both as writer and artist, has been slow, while Carter's post-Light of the World output has been slapdash. Chick's experimentation with continuity bore out what Gabe and Tycho constantly joke about: some people just shouldn't play with that particular lighter. The few standalone tracts to come out of the Bob years and beyond had been pale shadows of the scintillatingly trashy past. Efforts at dense plotting fell flat. I began to worry.

I stopped worrying once I saw The Wall. This month's Chick/Carter collaboration, while still no Soul Story, finally gets back to what made the older tracts work: B-movie plotting, dialogue so painfully wrought that the prosletysing doesn't feel the least bit out of place, and an artfully understated Hell Toss that could have gone either way.

I want to believe that Chick stayed up late one night watching nothing but reruns of Speed Racer and The Dukes of Hazzard. It's not quite right somehow -- Carter can't decide whether he wants Mach GoGoGo or Hazzardish kineticism, so panels which should drip motion end up feeling a bit static. But the Nifty Cars rerun vibe is very, very strong indeed. I wish I still had my notes to hand as regards the cars themselves, though (it was pointed out to me by a Formula One fan that the cars, especially when crashing, simply don't work).

Fred Carter is clearly getting back into his element, incidentally, even if he's not doing much reference work for the actual racing elements. He's clearly been puzzling out digital shading, and it seems to be finally clicking for him. The earlier Kidnapped!, which tries desperately to hearken back to his early, lush tone style, falls over in a fit of blur and smear. Here, he's finally managing a compromise between spare line and subtle greys; he's got a ways to go before we start thinking Soul Story again, but the confidence is back. Now, if we can just get past the mouths again, we're set.

I'm not 100% certain Chick's confidence is back as regards antagonists, though. Kim Lee is a serviceably stereotypical sexpot, but she's not much of a motivation. She's very much defanged. One would be hard pressed to find evidence that Chick reacts to negative feedback, but Kim is very much the antithesis of other recent non-Christian devouts; we never find out just what it is she practices, she's not particularly vicious, and her ultimatum may well be more complex and considered than it appears at first glance. (Yes, at second glance, it's pretty hypocritical and ridiculous -- it's fair enough not to want an intolerant husband, but the Jesus/boingyboingy thing doesn't really work as phrased.) I can't decide if she's a subtle thorn or a minimally considered device. Either way, she works well as eye candy, and I do like that we're not getting OMG FOREIGN RELIGION IS EVIL in the usual forceful way.

Even so. Dude. Racecars, hot chicks and moonshine probably mean we're back on track.

They can give us Ms. Henn's Night Out now. Have I mentioned that I'd held out, expecting a new Li'l Susy this month? Rar.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 4:00 AM | Comments (3)

May 15, 2005

Wednesday: [w] We locked Wednesday up with the In Nomine Infernal Player's Guide, and this is what happened.

Here are things. Since every demon is a beautiful and unique snowflake, these things apply in all sorts of different and interesting ways which are up to you to interpret. (In case of this particular thing, there will be an exclamation point!) However, these things will, to some extent or another, apply to every demon in some way. Except for Lilim! They're cute, so instead, they get to do something else.

They're also pouty. (Look. Breasts!)

Here are some more things. They do not apply to Lilim, because the Lilim are off doing something else. Did we mention that the Lilim are a really special case? GEASES. And nipples. And pouty!

Also, Andre will have sex with Lilim. He likes Lilim. He is vaguely naughty and not at all inclined to have sex with the chair, or the cat, or the dog, but he will probably have sex with the Lilim. Not you. Just the Lilim. Using the fuzzy handcuffs and the novelty prophylactics he picked up at the Spenser's Gifts, he will have sex with the Lilim. Who are, you realize, an exception. We will talk more, later, about the naughty prophylactics of Andre, Demon Prince of Really Boring Sexxor.

But, first? Lilim.

The Lilim are the last of their kind, and have cat ears, and geases, and do everything adorably in a sexy sort of way that involves the use of their phenomenally violet-eyed nipples pouts and their amazing business sense. Did we mention that, basically, they are an exception to everything? No, really. We went through every single paragraph and added: Except Lilim. (See p.146, "Lilim are Cooler than You;" p.172, "You Totally Need to Bone a Lilim," p.244, "Did We Mention the Geas?") In fact, we actually considered rewriting the Shedim section to be all about the Shadayim. Even Bright Lilim are special because -- get this -- they still get to be Lilim! They're just Lilim who fight for the side of the angels with their clarified breasts and their otherwise unchanged personalities.

(In passing, Djinn are really creepy, but strangely compelling. Also, Habbalah make some perverse amount of sense, and -- oh, did you want to know more about Impudites? I'm sorry, I think you meant Lilim! They're hot.)

Oh, also, Lucifer does some stuff sometimes, and oh my god, you so do not want to cross Asmodeus because he's a total asshole. Except...

Yeah. GEASES! GEASES! GEASES! geases. Jesus...

[EDIT from an hour later: I went back to reading about Redemption and what was the first thing I saw? "When a demon is redeemed, he becomes the divine analog of his former Band (except Lilim)" Emphasis mine. AUGH.]

[EDIT from even later still: And then I got to the part where it was all, "Bright Lilim are the most specialest choir ever because there's, like, only twelve of them, and they're so pretty and their wings are the best wings in the history of wings and they follow Laurence around and swoon and it's so cute! They're the best! Ever!" and... dude. If there's only twelve of them, who cares?]

[EDIT the next morning: Crap. How'd I forget to reference the cat ear thing?]

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:29 PM | Comments (25)

May 11, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Lois, incidentally? Is so on my List.

Here's how it works: the virus comes out in North America, and then, a few days later, because of licensing restrictions, it comes out in the UK. (This is apparently a huge improvement from the situation a couple of years ago, where you had to wait at least six months from the virus release date before they'd consider special preview colds in and around central London.) If things are out of whack, you should blame the fact that British cold preparations have been known to contain mild opoids.

Anyhow.

(From DTWOF #457: Sun Goddess.)

Dykes to Watch Out For occupies a nebulous, transitional place in my head these days. I followed the strip off and on in various alternative print weeklies over the years, and you'd think that'd be the place for it. Much of the humour and characterization, up to and including the state of Mo's sex life at any given time, hangs off of current events. But DTWOF always worked best for me in collected format, especially when the newspaper strips could play off of the print-only longform stories. Biweekly installments, grateful as I always was to have them, always felt a little too spurty and isolated. All in one place, however, the collections felt like solid overviews of a 12-18 month period, like a sheaf of snapshots meant to be gone through all at once.

In recent years, the strip's been carried by PlanetOut. I don't know what circulation looks like for DTWOF in print these days (I see it's just been dropped by a larger weekly in Ithaca, of all places); I know it's always been more than a bit spotty outside North America, and the sorts of publications it'd appear in have been somewhat on the decline (do I even need to get into why?). And don't get me wrong; much as PO might screw around with the layout and frame it with the most irritating layouts imaginable, I am grateful to have it online, in the same way I'm grateful to have online any number of American comic strips which don't appear in British newspapers. And people are obviously reading it there.

That said, I'm not convinced that I'm the kind of person who gets much out of an online DTWOF, either. This got brought into sharp relief for me late last month, when PO were behind in posting something fairly topical. The creator, Alison Bechdel, apologized for/vented about this in her weblog, saying, "It's hard enough keeping the strip timely when it only comes out every two weeks, and Jon Stewart has already made every possible joke there is to make before I even sit down to write. But to have it run a week or more late is maddening."

I think that's only part of the problem. First of all, the topicality thing: the impact might not be quite so sharp if we were still back in the land of Just Print, true (it'd still be aggravating to have Jon Stewart make all the good jokes first, true), but I find my expectations have been utterly subverted by reading so many comics intended chiefly for online consumption. There's a fuzzy buffer in my head for weekly newspapers, magazines, and the like; I'm expecting snapshots, not feeds. And I realize, even with the above caveat that I've always preferred DTWOF in those Garfield-sized collections, always liked it better in larger chunks, that it's patently absurd for me to let my expectations shift like that.

(And I don't want a more frequently updated DTWOF, either. Alison Bechdel's not doing the kind of art you can knock out in a few hours, for which I'm glad. Ecstatic.)

The other thing, unfortunately, is that my attachment is less to the politics of DTWOF (which seem a little forced in the past couple of years; this might well be more to do with my infrequent direct exposure to America and its news/entertainment media, though) and more to the characters. I know I'm going to pick up Invasion of the Dykes to Watch Out For in October and I'm going to really get into, say, Cynthia (so far, my favourite of Bechdel's takes on teenaged/university-aged lesbians; the Madwimmin interns were frustratingly shrill and glossy) or Samia (who I think I like, but keep thinking "Toni and Clarice merged completely?" about for some reason -- she's hard for me to pick out). I'm going to totally enjoy the Ginger/Samia thing, I'm going to root for Bechdel to pick up the pace on Clarice and Toni's little agreement-that-died, and I'm going to get completely wrapped up in Sydney's chemo.

But, at the moment, all I'm catching are riffs on current events (especially when Clarice gets upset... she's worse than Mo) which The Current had hashed out completely by the time I remember to check in. I know the things I love are still there; they just don't make as much of an impact as they might, and even less still against the lack of the fuzzy buffer bumper.

Which is not a little frustrating when you're talking about something you've loved and loved and loved for about ... god, twelve years now? I feel like I should be better at managing my context here.

On the other hand, that's not going to stop me keeping up.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:40 PM | Comments (4)

May 9, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Takeover: Page Ten - Preparation for Takeoff

And so, with Eric ill again (or, in the case of the current story, still), the scribbled girl prepares for her rescue mission. (popup) (same window)

(Actually, I drew this a month ago, but got stage fright.)

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 2:02 PM | Comments (3)

May 7, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Oops.

He was sick. (Seriously. He woke up with the ook, and then he took drugs, and the drugs made him all, like... you know, with the giant fucking Q? That thing. Thirteenth fuckin' step! High, kite, teeth green. Christmas, merry. Yes.)

And I was stupid. (Seriously. Everything I've said or done or written for twelve to thirteen days? Stupid. Moronic. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't write a grocery list. I went to the store for groceries, and I bought coconuts. Coconuts and the wrong prosciutto. And oxtail soup.)

So, there is nothing. You will have to tell us about your own free comic day. Or about CAPE. Or something.

Speak.

Now.

Dude.

I said now.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:59 PM | Comments (23)

May 2, 2005

Wednesday: [w] And when we run out of plot / what will we say / na na na na / na na na hey hey

These past two weeks, we've finished up watching Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. I wish I could explain what happened in any sort of sensible way, but I'm not sure they actually bothered to write a plot. They just kind of ... killed everything and then put it back. You know. Like you do when you're fourteen.

A few points, before I try and explain the end of the world.

The six-year-old catgirl sailor senshi who comes from a plushie cat? Not generally useful in combat. I don't think we really need to get into the problems inherent in wise plushie familiars. However, I think it follows that, should your plushie familiar transform mysteriously into a child with kitty ears, tail, and other nonsexual catgirl tropes, you shouldn't let her into battle. And, if you do let her into battle, you should probably come to terms right now with it: her CGI attack sequence is going to suck.

Luna Sucre Candy. Okay? It wasn't bad enough that she couldn't do panty cartwheels with the rest of the girls (actually, it was something of a bonus); it wasn't bad enough that her transformation sequence involved her making little paw motions and going "mew!" Everyone around you is attacking with things like fire, ice, chains, and lightning? I think it's highly inadvisable to project gumballs at your opponent. If nothing else, it shows a certain discontinuity with the elemental paradigm, by which I mean die.

It is possible to reassure oneself that it is not, in fact, as bad as Chibi-Usa's transformation sequence in the Sailor Moon S movie. This does not make the idea of catgirl candy CGI energy attacks against Power Rangers rubber monsters in drag any less painful, I assure you.

When you stab yourself, be certain not to do so in the hip. Dark general Kunzite attempts suicide in order to break the curse which binds him to Queen Beryl. Or something. Dude picks up his sword from an evil altar in the woods, unsheaths it, and WAAAAARGH, stabs himself in the hip. Or possibly the cloak. We're not sure. Petals started coming out, and so we were rather convinced that he'd somehow persuaded his spleen to escape from his nominal surface wound. Then, suddenly, an episode later, he was walking around later as though nothing had happened. It was nice of them to give that dead man another chance and all, but then dark general Jadeite had to go and stab him for real in the back. Goddamn, was that ever boring, not to mention pointless, what with the world ending and all.

It was pretty dumb for people to stick around by that point, so it was a good job that several other characters were smart enough to get out. We lost another general, Zoicite, through stupid sideswitching tricks (before he died, he managed to mime bad piano-playing and trigger auditory hallucinations in his counterparts, then have a nice long witter at Usagi about his master).

And we lost Sailor Venus in a very, very special episode of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.

Arrange to meet your tragic, nonspecific demise shortly before the final boss battle. Minako Aino, idol singer and Sailor Venus, has plot cancer. In the plot. Her elegant coughs and swoons, lacking even the merest hint of Moulin Rouge blood spatter, explain absolutely nothing at all about her condition. She's fine, she's great, she's happy, aw, hell, she's dying again.

Minako is merry and sweet in her professional life, but she seems a bit underwhelmed by it. So, because it's not like she's got a lot of hobbies these days, she goes out and becomes utterly committed to her past life as a warrior. Since she's dying, she figures that she might as well make certain Princess Serenity doesn't take everyone out with her selfish, abject despair. So she makes a great show of shedding her civilian identity, quitting idolhood after her second album. Only... oops! She can't transform! And then... oops! She decides to go and have the surgery after all, having discovered her true self! And... oops! Dead! Right before the final battle!

Shucks!

Also, her plush cat had just confessed undying love to her. That's a great time to die, especially when it hasn't yet demonstrated its ability to transform into, uh... Tuxedo Candy-Throwing Scary Catboy or whatever.

To her credit, Minako at least died properly: without any detail, offscreen, possibly not even during the surgery she got in order to completely fail to save her life.

Which is more than we can say for Kuroki Mio, the girl for whom the gob never stops. She wasn't smart enough to die in a useful fashion; instead, she stuck around, antagonizing Usagi, halfarsedly abducting Mamoru/Endymion, and lounging around on a brass canopy bed. When the time came for Endymion to stick the forces of ultimate evil inside himself, effectively becoming the final boss, she didn't get out. No, she stuck around, kidnapped Usagi (signing Usagi's little brother's stomach on the way out. He's like eight? Ew?), and tried to stage some kind of useless and redundant duel.

Instead, she got whacked by the ultimate evil. And, by whacked, I pretty much mean that she got up off the ground, jogged around a bit while waving her arms, and whined, "Saaaaaaaaaave me, Sailor Moon!" Then the ultimate evil waved a sword around and she got vaporised. Very unsatisfying.

Stupid ultimate evil. Didn't even have the common courtesy to, you know, cleave her in two or anything. I swear. I wonder why I bother. There's just not enough apocalyptic cleavage on these Japanese girl-sentai shows anymore.

Speaking of which: Beryl! Beryl tried to make the show all morally ambiguous and stuff, but mostly succeeded in getting crushed by a big rock. After Sailor Moon had gone and stabbed the ultimate evil to death, killing Endymion in the process Beryl popped out of nowhere and explained that, well, you know, Princess Serenity? Serenity sucks. Keeps Endymion out of Beryl's arms over two successive lifetimes, destroys the world and the moon once, causes a bunch of selfish destruction the second time around, and now she's gone and killed Endymion just to prevent the ultimate evil from taking over the world. So. Serenity? Evil. Also, brat.

Okay.

Serenity responds to this by exclaiming, "What? Endymion's dead? Shit." And so she makes the world end. Which, as you know, is the standard response to getting flamed by hot dominatrices.

The end of the world is actually pretty disappointing. Serenity just sorta ambulates away, leaving a horde of flunkies for the three remaining useful sailor guardians to fight off (they even get random powerup weapons in the process, which seems pretty pointless, since there's very little time left to market them). And then the guardians completely fail to take her out (there's a lot of them lying on the ground being soiled, which is kind of irritating). And then everything just... stops.

It stops with a lot of montage and white screen, of course. But it stops.

Whoosh.

Then, uh... commercial.

After commercial, the world's still gone. Endymion and Serenity go off into the desert (you know, the desert that naturally shows up after there's no more world to have a desert on), kiss under an archway, make the world come back, and die in some sort of euphemism for marriage and lovemaking. (I assume they're dead, anyhow, because they're lying in the sand, hand in hand, looking pretty ensconsed there.) And their earthly selves get sent back to earth to have lives. Possibly lives which start before the series starts, or possibly lives with amnesia. We're unclear on this.

And Minako comes back to life without any cancer.

You know, I'm thinking Minako got the most out of this arrangement.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:26 PM | Comments (7)

Wednesday: [w] The Saddest Thing

weds: "Lie-Bot, what is the saddest thing?"
  "Your most recent blog entry, Phillippe."
eric: Yeah, what is the *deal* with Phillippe lately?
weds: I have no idea. He is becoming increasingly fragile.

My command of stuffed otter child psychology is fairly limited. That said, I'm worried about Achewood's Phillippe. Ever since his bid for the American Presidency fell flat, the stars have turned even harder against him. I don't think he's going to come out well in the long run if this keeps up.

His living situation is already precarious. I'm not sure what his mother is thinking, housing him with such as Lyle; is it because, having no father available, she believes such as Lyle to be a suitable replacement? Chris is clearly now quite distracted. Teodor is arguably too forthright and, simultaneously, insufficently communicative. And it's not like Cornelius hears him out when something goes wrong.

(Then again, I've never entirely been sure what she's thinking. Her involvement with his life is restricted largely to phone calls and bizarre presents. The presents are everything from self-consciously affirming to dumbfoundingly outre. One wonders if, before she left him with these odd examples of male role models, she would read him M. Scott Peck before bed.)

I worry for little Phillippe. Everything, lately, seems to end up with him in tears. He didn't mean to put lubricant on food. He didn't mean to find Teodor's Fleshlight while making the bed. He didn't mean to make Click Bot jump up and brand him with obscenity. He did not mean to get in Trouble. And he really, really thought he was doing the right thing when he charted Baby Onstad's gas emission patterns. Phillippe only means to help. And, lately, he's just running and sobbing, sobbing and running, and occasionally ashamed of himself into the bargain.

And speaking to himself, not like a kid, but like a support group leader.

I'm starting to wonder if Phillippe will turn out like Pat, rather than the terse, plump gamer we caught a glimpse of once. It seems like the logical thing to happen: strangely traumatised once too many times, rejected again and again by Ultra Peanut, embittered by failure, the self-consciously affirmations by which he parents himself will collapse in upon him. Some day, Phillippe will be dragged into the street by the shards of a demonic banjo, and a squirrel will vomit upon him. And, in his happy place, he will talk to Moby about the pistachio nuts in his Walk-Around Butt.

And Moby will chase him out of the paper store.

Then again, I know nothing of stuffed cartoon otter child psychology. No one ever tells me anything.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:32 AM | Comments (1)

April 27, 2005

Wednesday: [w] And It's Off

We broke down and said, "Okay. It's better this way. Embrace the multideliveration; don't fear it."

Then we ordered the APG (and the IPG) from Warehouse 23.

We shall have face faith in UPS's ability to put something into a mailbox. We shall. No courier fashioned against us shall stand; the battle belongs to the Lord. We sing glory, and honour, power and strength to...

Um. Well, we sing, anyways. Unfortunately, we are, in fact, singing Petra at the moment, but I swear it's for research.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 12:21 PM | Comments (16)

April 26, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Karmic Dilemmas

[This is going to be one of those entries where I am more conversational than analytical. So you're warned.]

Right. See, I have this problem.

I have this problem I don't know how to resolve, and it pertains to the ordering of books. Games books. Books of games. From America.

One component of this "writing partner" gig is that you kind of have to grasp the things the other person is writing about in order to afford any sort of sensible critiqueage. This is a bit easier in the other direction; I don't typically indulge in fanfic, both of us are religions nerds, both of us enjoy a bit of webcomickry, and I try not to inflict anime or manga on poor Eric unless it's absolutely necessary. However, he has this In Nomine thing going which you may or may not be aware of.

And, see, people had not, you know, been firm enough about that. "You have to read the core rules for In Nomine," they would say to me. "You would dig this thing. It has angels in it." And I would go, "uh huh," because... well, you have to understand that I've been a fairly active anime/manga fan for nigh on ten years now. And I've done my time with the omg-omg-bishiebishiewai types, although that's really not my thing at the end of the day (I figure I shouldn't crush on anything I could break). So, when someone tells me that something has angels in it? I've lately come to assume a couple of things about it:

1) It's probably fucking Angel Sanctuary;
2) Dude, I totally hated Angel Sanctuary;
2.5) See.

And that was totally lame. But expected. It's not like anyone was telling me, "this is about pretty, pretty angels the same way that Preacher is about loving, caring God."

But I have come to take Eric at his word. So, he tells me, I have to read In Nomine, because then I will understand things that he writes, and I will be able to critique them from an informed standpoint. And I say to myself, okay, I can get behind that. He will probably not steer me wrong, and I don't think he's all about the bishies. And people do keep telling me to read this thing, but not in the obnoxious way that they used to tell me to read sodding Iain [M.] Banks. (There are things which I will suggest to such people that they do to Phlebas, and they tend to involve the ear.)

So, one day, the doorbell rang. Royal Mail. With a parcel from Amazon UK. My cohabitative partner, David, answered the door, and accepted the parcel, and handed it to me at arms' length. With a pained expression.

A deeply pained expression.

It was from Eric. And it was In Nomine (and Superiors 4).

I think I need to make it clear, right here, right now, that I utterly fell in love with In Nomine, hard, and everyone who did not tie me to a post and make me read the core rules however many years ago? You need smacked. I'm not even sure I made it clear to Eric how hard the falling was. I think I went down a cup size, broke my nose, and looked better in jeans for a few days. Put it that way.

Haibane Renmei hard. Sailor Moon hard. Utena hard; xxxHolic hard.

Star Trek hard. The local newspaper knew how hard I wanted Spock when I was 12; put it that way, OK? (Two years on, it was Deanna Troi. Never let it be said I wasn't flexible.)

The other thing you have to understand is that I do not game. I don't. It's not in me. To get me into your RP, you have to explain to me very patiently that this is acting, or writing, or something which has absolutely nothing to do with the act of the game at all. I will panic on numbers, hide from stats, and otherwise weep my way through chargen; it's a fatal combination of insufficiently addressed, math-related learning disability and absent self-esteem. Did you care? Didn't think so. I can arguably write; I might, theoretically, be able to perform. But call it a roleplaying game and you're invoking the Penny Arcade Defense: it's not for me. (Eric? Please put this in the lexicon.) So, when someone hands me one of these, it takes a lot to get me to read it. And, if it makes me fall in love? Something must be right.

Hell of right.

Anyhow.

Amazon is an interesting thing to talk about in our house. At one point in the past -- some years ago -- Amazon were more proactive about sending marketing-related mail to account holders than they are now, and they will still market via email to people whose preferences allow for that. David and I disagree on whether that means it's acceptable to patronize them; I'm okay with it (I've never had a problem with them, and my threshold of what constitutes acceptable personal marketing is fairly high), but he's not because he counts this sort of thing as spam. Which is fair. We typically buy books from brick and mortar shops (to the extent that we will make side trips on US visits just to stock up on things we can't reliably obtain in London), and other things wherever it's appropriate to do so.

While I'm not adverse to buying things from Amazon, I have only ordered one thing from them in my life. That was because I had left the Christmas shopping until the last minute. I needed a particular R1 Dr. Who set to get to my parents' house in the US before Christmas Eve, because doing standards conversion on an R2 set at the last minute seemed ridiculous, and Amazon could guarantee delivery. It literally doesn't occur to me to buy anything from there.

Or it didn't until today.

I live in a very tedious little suburban area of Thames Valley, not far from Reading. London Waterloo (or, via Reading, Paddington) is near enough to make a pleasant day trip or a lengthy errand, but expensive enough by rail (I own no car, and who would drive in Central London?) that one should not make the expedition frequently. Reading has a games shop, but, as of a couple of days ago, it carried very little but Munchkin, BESM d20, D&D 3rd, and World of Pointy Things^[1]. The local nerd Blackwell's isn't much better off. There is an Ottakar's in town, and they are somewhat gamer-friendly, but, by gamer-friendly, they tend to mean "all the GURPS ever. Except GURPS In Nomine." And World of Pointy Things. And, um, Warhammer/Games Workshop. (Hey, they also sell Silver Ravenwolf books, NIV bibles, and Chobits manga; everyone needs their gateways. We do better than many.)

And I'm impatient as hell. I want the Angelic Player's Guide, and I want it right now. Since I can't have it right now, I'd like it within some reasonable compromise between "now" and "reasonably inexpensive" (because, I'm afraid, my selfishness wars with my fiscal practicality). This means I need to order it online. My preferred London games shop does not have an online presence, and the god of London bookshops -- Foyles -- does not stock it. So, today, I found myself making some arbitrary eliminations in my options, and came up with two possibilities:

Warehouse 23 and Amazon. (I thought about Powell's, but I'm not convinced by the lowest-cost shipping option being surface. I've lost things that way, more than once, and, also, NOW. Ish.)

Most of my friends are American. So, when I explain the vagueries of Customs, the nuttiness of the postal system, it doesn't always register. Customs and I are old foes. My family and I, having been split across countries about as far back as I can remember, have long done war with the postal services. Canada to the US and back; US to Britain and back; Canada to Britain and back. I drop a parcel into the box, and I pray. Or, more likely, you ask me to mail you something, and I'll save it until I come to America -- it all makes sense when it's internal.

Amazon seem pretty good at dealing with the postal system. They do what they need to do as and when they need to do it, and they have a flat rate for it. (Just shy of $5/book. If you were curious.) Warehouse 23, on the other hand, does this weird thing (at the "you're cheap, but practical" level, anyhow, which is where I'm at -- look, I take care of the place while the Master is away, you know?) where they ship the parcel UPS as far as your country, and then UPS drops it in the local postal system. And, then, it gets to you via, you know, mail.

The latter? It panics me, not because it involves Royal Mail (Royal Mail is not too bad, as postal systems go, suffer as it may and might and does), but because it involves two separate mechanisms of courier. Anything could go wrong in those negotiations. Not that it couldn't go wrong in the negotiations between governmental postal services, but at least those are covered by treaty.

Panic insensibly? Yes. That is me. That is what I do.

On the one hand, Warehouse 23 is as close to the source as one gets. And I can break down and order other things, although I'd have to ask what they should be.

On the other? Amazon has the Westminster Handbook to Evangelical Theology on hell of discount. I covet the Westminster Handbook series. The Westminster Handbooks are my neighbour's ass. Look. I told you. Religions. Other people fangirl on Tolkien or Lewis or whatever? I fangirl on Mark Noll.

But. Yes. I need to place an order. This isn't something I'm good at.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to pick.

I know I'm gonna cave.

So tell me what to do.

¹ - aka World of Cheese, aka World of Darkness. Pointy Teeth, Pointy Hat, Pointy Claws, Pointy Ears, Pointy Stakes... Look, I love Mage as much as the next person pretending not to love Mage, and I'd quite like to see what happens with it in the new setting, but... yeah. This is the sort of thing one might fetch near as dammit everywhere, so I was most saddened. Meanwhile, I can't find a core book for Orpheus for love nor money. Never have been able to. I could cry. Yes. I am utterly, totally pathetic. You may have me shot.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:28 PM | Comments (20)

April 19, 2005

Wednesday: [w] It Only Counts If

Dear Brent:

I know that you are being mean and cynical today. I understand this. But could you confirm something for me, before going off on the mocking of fabric-based talismans?

Is the gaming fez, in fact, made of outing flannel?

If no: what are you on about? And where can I get one which is?

If yes: why on earth would you make it into a pillow? Why not a sport coat?

Please respond at your earliest convenience.

Yours, except not,

-- weds.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:14 AM | Comments (12)

April 17, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Falling Out of Love with the God Shot III: I Know This Guy...

The thing with Bob Williams is, he knows everybody. Or, if he doesn't know them yet, he will. The hero of Jack Chick's Bible Series is just cool like that.

Some people are blessed with divine gifts. Prophesy. Tongues. Masses of flaming red hair draped over cleavage that a man would go to jail for. Bob? Bob has the gift of always being around when someone needs the savin'. (Or, occasionally, the wrath of God tough lovin'. But mostly the savin', 'cause Bob's not willing that anyone should perish. Much.)

When you're on tour of the Holy Land and some guy blows up a bus down the road from you? Bob is there to explain to you why you need Jesus straight away. When your best friend died right in front of you and you're lying around a burn ward in agony? Bob's right there to tell you how much execution by fire sucks. When you're cussing up a storm to pass the time because you're twelve and you're badass? Bob's totally going to tell you who Jesus is. @*!!

Here's the thing with Bob: he's who every script evangelist wishes he could be. Placed at the right spot, at the right time, Bob will lead any man to Christ, or curse him to death in the process. (Not, you understand, with curses -- that's the job of the witches. Of the witch, precisely, but we'll get to Holly in a bit.) He has the power, and the skill, and the blessing. Also, he's a tool.

No. I mean that in the secular sense. Bob is such a tool.

You see, Bob Williams is a Mary Sue on a scale not seen since Chick and Carter's Crusaders universe comics. (Yep, that includes Alberto, even though Alberto Rivera himself is a completely different proposition... but I digress, and Eric's already touched on him.) Although Bob hasn't the Crusaders' campy charm, let alone their bullet-deflection or outing skills, he trumps them in many ways.

Many depressing, ill-rendered ways.

Continuity isn't particularly good for the standard Chick tract distribution model. The idea with Bob's series is that you pass the tracts to your target someone that you will see on a regular basis, in order; when these were coming out, you were presumably intended to pass them along as and when you got them, or to pass the URLs along as they went online (more or less at the start of each month, sometimes accompanied by the restoration or featuring of a "classic" tract -- it's slower than most webcomics, but Chick does understand the power of regular updates.) No longer merely content to hook the collector through the usual distribution mechanism, Chick was looking to get people interested in the adventures of Bob, the community of people around him, and the cancerous evangelism of everyone he knew.

The problem is, Bob isn't actually very interesting.

He's not interesting as a character, for the same reason that few Sues are intriguing to those who aren't the writer, or the writer's intimates. Bob doesn't have much of a personality on his own; he's just alarmingly competent (for some derivation of "competent," anyhow) and well-connected. Those of God love him, and those not of God ... don't.

In fact, there are relatively few characters here who have any real sense of definition or power to them. Chick tracts are arguably not the greatest things to be asking for character development from, but older pieces were quite good at conveying a very bold, strong impression in a very few strokes. Yeah, we can chalk it up to Chick recovering slowly from the stroke, or being distracted by The Light of the World's near-completion, but the whole point is for us to be intrigued by this universe. This is meant to be a serial, told in snapshots; continuing characters should engage us.

I can only really call two individuals to mind, even after having read this series over about a couple dozen times since its completion, who stand out. That's pretty depressing. Even more depressing, only one of them recurs, and that's to get run over by a truck and fall into Hell with the other one.

Holly was never really a target of Bob's preaching, merely his smugness. She's a witch with a demon, and she likes it that way. Holly was probably intended to represent a contemporary neopagan, visible and proud. She ends up a harsh, vitriolic caricature. She makes some amount of sense, though; on his own and with the help of hat-talker William Schnoebelen, Chick has published a considerable amount of ridiculous antipagan literature. Not everyone who's going to respond to Schnoebelen or Chick about this sort of thing is utterly reasonable; I imagine Chick's gotten plenty of half-cocked mail about his quarter-cocked work over the years. Holly strikes me as the natural result of that cascade effect.

She's still ridiculous. She stands out because she actually gets to go off and have a grudge against Bob for a fashion, and doesn't immediately end up in Hell like most Chick-victims who reject or put off the salvation thing. When she does go, it's while driving sitcom-reject medium Gladys to a hotel so that she can get away from Bob. (Gladys is, incidentally, the other notable character. She's an egotist; she's a false prophetess. Woo. This is hell of depressing.) You'd think, after all that buildup, the Hell Toss would have been glorious, but we barely get a zig worth moving.

I've frequently heard Chick tracts and comics compared to bad pornography, and with good reason. You get broad characterizations (or archetypes, or even stereotypes), you get character interaction which hits fairly predictable points along an assigned/expected spectrum, and you get some version of the climactic outcome you were expecting when you went in. Some climaxes are, of course, better than others.

Either you get the God Shot or the Hell Toss. In the latter, the victim turns up in front of God's throne and gets found wanting, then gets pitched into the flames. In the former, we get orgasmic salvation and conversion: made new and clean, freed by her submission, the victim pretty much explodes with the Holy Spirit. Viscous tears of joy course down her face as she rises, slowly, from her knees. This is what you really want to see, right? Souls won to Christ. This is what you really want to have happen to you, or to others, right?

Not that many of us are passing pornography to people we're interested in in order to explain to them that we'd like them to... yeah, okay, the analogy just broke down. But you see my point.

The problem is, really, is not that it's porn. That sort of thing has its place in all kinds of storytelling. We watch He-Man, Sailor Moon, and other magical girl shows for the stock footage and the monster smiting. We read C-list shoujo manga to watch the plucky, plain heroine eventually land the appealing, but irritating rogue. We go to blockbusters for the explosions. That's fine. The problem is, here, this is workmanlike porn. This is shoddy porn; this is not particularly well-considered, poorly constructed, and -- though Chick might claim otherwise -- not desperately respectful or cognizant of its audience. It just gets the job done, and cynically so at that. This is why Soul Story was such a magnificent piece of work by comparison; it may have been exploitative and formulaic, but damned if it didn't try to make a connection, to appeal, and to work. It did the job out of love; this does the job out of goalmaking.

To be fair, the Bible Series does set the stage for further plot and continuity in Chick's tracts, particularly once Fred Carter was freed up from the film to draw them. Unfortunately, it backfired. In the next installment, we look at Officer Carter, Li'l Susy, and one of the most disappointingly potential-laden Chick antagonists yet written: Ms. Henn.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:50 PM | Comments (12)

April 16, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Oh, Quit Playing Your Damned Harp Already, Princess

So, here's the thing: we here at 'snark Europe LLC have been working through Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon at a snail's pace, utter aeons behind broadcast. I know it's over, but I also know that some of you (okay, most of you) haven't been watching it. For those of you about to be spoiled, we salute you.

For the benefit of those who don't know: billyuns and billyuns of years ago, or at least a fair while back, there used to be a kingdom on the moon. The kingdom had a princess named Serenity, and she was guarded by representatives of nearby planets. (Why they didn't extend this courtesy to, say, other planets' satellites? I don't know. No one tells me anything.) Things being as they were, said representatives were all teenagers in sailor suits. Look, no one said it was going to be sensible.

Serenity had it very bad for the prince of the Earth kingdom, Endymion, who had long ago mastered the fine art of combining sheer assholishness with utter blandness. He had four generals, scattered across the asshole/bland spectrum. And then there was a hot chick named Beryl who wanted to mess things up because Endymion didn't want her.

It is, of course, the job of all hot spurned chicks to arrange for the deaths of their beloveds, especially when the chicks have pert poledancer's breasts and nails like porn stars. And the guys are, well, so bland and jerklike that they're not even worth depicting. And have tassels for shoulderpads. Look. Trust me here.

So, Endymion dies, and Serenity is just so distraught that she, um, destroys the moon. And the earth. Because, if Endymion's not around to be prince of the Earth, then there shouldn't be an Earth, so, by extension, there shouldn't be a moon. At least not that moon. If anyone really wants a moon, they can go bother Sailor Pluto and have her install someone on that moon there, or they could if she was in this series.

So, you know, boom.

Some time later, there's Earth again, which means that everyone has to get all reincarnated as teenagers. Except for Endymion, who was always the older man (it is, of course, the job of the guy with no personality to be older and able to go to university in England), and the four generals, who are just, you know, guys, and Beryl, who's just too hot to die.

The teenagers, because that's the way of it, only come to know their past lives in a gradual fashion, so, first, a cat comes along (and not just any cat, a plushie cat who can turn into a six-year-old) and gives them transformation items and is all, "Hey, protect the earth against monsters while dressed up in fetishy sailor suits and diapers." And they're like, okay, but also? Karaoke. Which happens too.

I'm leaving stuff out. Like the whole thing where Sailor Venus -- oh, they're all Sailor Bla, where Bla is some planet except for where it's not a planet -- Sailor Venus is off doing her own thing, totally cognizant of her past life and totally hacked off with the unprofessional attitudes of her fellow sailor guardians, because professionalism is the hallmark of people who fight rubber monsters in fetishy sailor costumes. And the thing where the guy who runs the arcade (and fancies the girl who's Sailor Jupiter) has a turtle ... a turtle thing. He's not a furry, because it's a turtle thing.

weds: Is it still furry if one's thing is for turtles?
eric: Technically? Yes.
weds: Crap. I'm not sure it really should be, though.
eric: Oh, what do you think it should be? Shelly?
weds: Oh, poor Shelley.

Anyhow.

Eventually, Sailor Moon figures out she's the Princess. And the Princess is not desperately happy with the situation; she knows she's capable of destroying the world, but, dammit, she'd quite like to have her boyfriend around again. Furthermore, if she can't have her boyfriend, she's not desperately keen on keeping anything else around, so she'll go about causing severe property damage. This upsets her present-day mortal identity, Usagi, no end; she doesn't like the idea that she can blow up cars, let alone the world, and she'd quite like to get back with her boyfriend too.

Usagi is perky and terminally useless -- all archetypal dizzy, genki teenaged wish-fulfilment fourteen-year-old girl. This places her at considerable odds with her alter ego; Serenity is a mopey, dour sort who draws pentagrams in the air with a sword, blows up cars, then sits around with a big plastic object and plays it as though it might have, once, been a harp. I'm not sure this is the best message to be sending little girls.

(Any moment now, someone is going to ask me why this is totally my favourite show, and I'm going to explain to them that I was actually all about the anime, which also had lesbians, and epic love stories, and pseudobiblical stuff, and Sailor Saturn. They would destroy the world about once every fifty-two episodes, or at least blow up Tokyo, and that was fine. Then, someone would change gender or have a forbidden love or, at worst, fall for a winged horse.)

Anyhow. I am catching you up on this for one reason, and one reason only: I want to complain about Kuroki Mio.

Kuroki Mio is Beryl's shadow, hench, servant, and mirror upon the earth. She manipulates people around her to hate the objects of her hatred, while she maintains a seemingly innocent appearance. Or she would if she could act worth a damn. She is an idol singer, because Sailor Venus's mundane identity is that of an idol singer. She goes to school with Usagi, and briefly attempts to pretend to be her best friend. But, you know, that's all going to go horribly wrong when your real motive is to transparently seduce Mr. No Personality Soldier of the Earth just as soon as he gets back from Cambridge University's highly regarded Plot Device College.

The problem is, I cannot possibly accept that this girl is capable of seduction, because she has the world's hugest mouth. When she talks, her skull flies up off of her lower jaw, angling back and forth in the air against gravity, proving that she is, in fact, half Canadian. When she kisses people, their jaws break.

The picture seriously does not do Kuroki Mio justice. The actress, Alisa Durbrow, must be having her mouth digitally altered to accomodate entire districts of Tokyo. There is no other explanation. No, not one. Not one at all. When the generals of the Dark Kingdom teleport back home from the Earth, they do not simply vanish into the aether; they vanish into her mouth, because it houses multitudes. Multitudes, strawberry Cheetos, most of the Shibuya shopping district, the Dark Kingdom, and the sourcebook I was reading the other night but appear to have misplaced. It is the job of Kuroki Mio to house all that has been lost. In her mouth.

Do you understand? I do not expect the last episode to end with the destruction of Earth, or the salvation of Earth, or the reincarnation of the sailor guardians, or anything involving a plushie cat. No, I firmly believe that, in the last minute or so, Kuroki Mio will declare, skull snapping in the breezes:

And then she shall. And then, they will go back to making sentai the way God and man intended: with masks, lycra, and a complete and total lack of Tommy Oliver.

Scans and screenshots from a soldier's effigy and three-lights.net. Next time on Miercoles Mercredi Mittwoch: why Lunatic Party was the best Sailor Moon hentai doujinshi series ever.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:52 PM | Comments (30)

April 13, 2005

Wednesday: [w] This is how it's done.

OC for Wednesday will not be available due to an issue regarding an event.

See, folks? THIS is how it's done. Not with paragraphs, not with angsting...

This. This is how it's done.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:04 PM | Comments (7)

April 11, 2005

Wednesday: [w] By Force of Detail

The thing is, I totally fell for Friendly Hostility on the wrong day. By the time I'd made it through the archives on a fluke, absolutely smitten with Nefertari, some things had gone horribly, horribly wrong in the teapot.

It had been two days since I'd seen

and decided, right there, that I had a new commitment.

Look at the eyes. And the lips. Then you tell me. The banter was just a bonus.

A digression into method seems advisable right now, even though I promised that I would not talk about me. It's bad to go to me. There's only a Sbarro.

Eric's the one with the massive trawl. This is the way of it here:

I have a routine, into which I'm very set, in the mornings. I roll into a sitting position, reach across the room to the desk (the browsing environment you see in Takeover is pretty much it; this is a small room), open a set of about ten tabs (three to five on weekends), and go get caffeine. A little later, I set the remaining bundle (entirely dependent on what's up) off from an LJ filter comprised of feeds to things which are slightly less predictable, or of which I'd like to persuade myself I can stop reading anytime now.

I have to go through the full archives of anything I write about. It's a rule for some of the publications I work with, and it seems like a pretty sensible restriction for my own process anyhow. It might be an artifact of research addiction. It might just be some sort of mental illness, some kind of compulsion; Left Behind 1-12 + The Kids 1-4? You're welcome.

Somewhere down the line, this became an ironclad rule for gal: wherever possible, nothing makes it into the tabset or feed list unless the entire archives can be read through without regret. If something dropped out of that tabset or feed list, it doesn't go back in until catchup has been played. This works against me sometimes -- I can go through years and years of something I hate on the trainwreck fascination, but guilt over not having the time to properly enjoy Wigu means I'm not riding that boat properly yet, say. But, mostly, it keeps my blood pressure, if not down, then at least lower.

That's how it is. Yes, there are the occasional side dalliances: peeks at Under Power, binges on Nana's Everyday Life, that sort of thing. (EDIT: Neither are SFW, BTW.)

(So, you can see why I never picked back up on Sluggy, say; I don't want to read all that back story and beat my head against the Bun-Bun Conundrum. Sometimes you really do just have to walk away, and smile, and nod, and just... retreat.)

The worst part is that very little will actually get my attention. In fact, the traditional methods tend to engender delays; after several years around Iain [M.] Banks fans, for example, I developed a mental block against Phlebas and was completely incapable of considering him. I could not possibly tell you how I came across Friendly Hostility that week; it had to have been unusual. It wasn't a newsbox, it wasn't a recommendation, it wasn't a banner ad or a rant link or a news item or anything like that. I really don't know.

But I'm smitten. And I hope to talk more about it as I go back through it again, and as I keep up with it.

Lines and eyes. That's what it's about, people.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 1:45 AM | Comments (21)

April 9, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Best. Iron Man thing. Ever.

Imagine: Wednesday busts into giggles, having completely failed to write the first line of the thing she needs to write but is having a hard time writing it, since her brain is frozen. Anyhow, giggles.

"What?" Because, you see, it's a slow night, and she has the headset on, and Eric's all, like, you know, playing City of Heroes, and how would he know what she's laughing at? He's playing City of Heroes.

"Oh my god. Little Gamers today." And then more giggling.

"What?"

"Best Daily Grind thing ever." Which is true.

"What's it say?"

"Um. Visual joke. I... I can't, see."

"So snark it."

"But I have nothing to say about it. It just is. I can't giggle for a whole post."

"One of the guiding principles of this thing is that you're allowed to post, like, 'dude, look at the funny picture of the dog.'"

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Okay," she said to him, so she did.

Also, it's not like he's going to post anything, what with the City of Heroes and all.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:44 PM | Comments (1)

April 8, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Look at me with longing eyes and I will always know the score.

Okay, see, the thing is? It's so happened before. Probably within your memories, and almost certainly within your lifetimes. The world didn't end last time, nor was the character diminished. And it definitely didn't screw with how we understood the character, so it's not like future generations are going to get screwed over so much by the retcon, either. It might even help.

Do you understand? Do you hear what I'm saying? See this psycho Fairuza Balk face?

This is not the first time Cookie Monster's been driven to promote balanced eating. Not by a long shot:

Me promise that when you eat varied menu,
You get more out of every meal.
You need balanced diet,
Come on and try it!

"Healthy Food" went into rotation in 1987, folks. (Warning: clips from this and other songs from Sesame Road may contain explicit lyrics.)

Yeah, I know. It's mindnumbingly pedestrian and obvious. It flies in the face of Cookie's basic id nature. Cookie's supposed to be the ultimate in monofocus, right? Writes to Santa and eats the pencil? Types at Santa and eats the ribbon, then the typewriter? Phones Santa, eats the phone, and pulls off a miracle in then-contemporary telecommunications? (Yeah, I know. I hate that it's out of TV circulation myself. Douglas fir give me heartburn, too. It's on DVD.)

Hey, we're getting off light. Sesame Street has a precedent for dropping characters perceived to be harmful in some fashion, okay? Roosevelt Franklin "was abandoned because he was thought by some to be a negative cultural stereotype and because the schoolroom in which he spent most of his time was considered to be a bad example." Don Music got "complaints about his alarming tendencies toward self-punishment. Apparently, kids were imitating his head-banging tendencies at home." (It'd take some hunting through 1998's Sesame Street Unpaved, the CTW-issued puff book cited above, to confirm it, but certain live-action segments went by the wayside for similar reasons over the years. Cake pratfalls down stairs? Dude.)

If you're gonna get upset about the American version of Sesame Street this week? Okay, there are plenty of reasons to get upset over Sesame Street. The way Mr. Hooper was an Event, but David just kinda vanished, say. Elmo's just bloody obvious. The scaling back of the show's target market's also bloody obvious; it sucks that they have to dumb down the one show which never assumed we were freakin' morons. In fact, Elmo's focus-stealing stems from that. And so do the other cardboard "characters" which began to populate the show. Baby Bear. The mindnumbingly heavy focus on Telly, who was at least suitably neurotic back in the day. Did you see how they mishandled Grover and his friends in that one direct-to-video special a little while back? Appalling. Fuckin' Rosita de la Great Big Hug thing. Plaza S»samo's awesome, but this? Fuckin' Rosita? So not. (And, hell, I'll just go with you on any of the generic, bland monsters from about 1991 onwards. The real character development on monsters seems to be going on over with the international markets. The ones which don't just dub Big Bird and Elmo, anyways.) A little character depth? A little nuance and unforced charm? In the ten games we've played, she's only beaten me twice? Hello? Yeah. Yeah, see, no issue there. None at all.

And Noggin dropping those fantastic, grainy, perfectly bumpered late-night reruns from a few years back? Yeah, I'm with you every step of the way here (and if you taped 'em? My family wants a giant gushing word with you). That? That was for us. And it's not like Sesame Workshop don't know from the market here; we're getting Roosevelt Franklin figures from Palisades, after all.

(Look, my people got Sesame Park, okay? I have no bloody sympathy. Canadians can't deal with the grim urban reality of the Sesame Street ghetto, they told us. Yeah. Because, you know, couple generations of kids didn't do just fine with having the Spanish segments replaced with French ones, or just watching cable (MPBN, represent, yo) and being able to tell you what on earth a salida was. Fuckin' inane Francophone beaver. Fucking beaver. Beaver, bear and biplane. Grim rural reality. I want me some North of 60 or Due South? I will watch me some of that. No sympathy at all. No.

None.

It got cancelled, by the way. But I digress.)

Look, he's still going to be Cookie Monster. It's like how, when Cartoon Network picks up a show to run on Toonami or Adult Swim, the original Japanese materials don't just somehow vanish from existence. They'd pretty much have to stomp this character, or purge him, to eliminate his basic appeal. And, in a few years, when the current wave of perceived urgency settles down a little, we'll probably see him go nuts again. And there's way, way, way too much stuff in circulation now to remind us of what was.

Frank Oz doesn't even perform him anymore, now, anyways. Likewise poor Grover.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go put more butter on my ham, demand the establishment of a delicious buffet, and fail to be harmed by the puny weapons of the lametastic alien fleet. Oh, wait.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:56 AM | Comments (33)

April 2, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Conversational Style and the Limits of Mundane Patter

My partner -- not, in general, a webcomics fan beyond Megatokyo and Penny Arcade, so I figure I can basically mock him into the ground here -- first awakened me this (alleged) morning by coming into the room and picking up one of my Scary-Go-Round books. Scare-o-deleria #1, specifically. I don't entirely recall how it came up; it might simply have come out, as remarks do. But he had a complaint.

"No one talks like this," he said. "'Global warm-ification?' Who says that?"
"All you British people do," I offered, regretting accursed boozes. "Obviously John Allison does."
"That's probably an affectation."
"Does it matter? Next, you'll be saying that no one talks like they do in Achewood." (In my defense, I was thinking mostly of Teodor.)
"Well..."

(For the record, the hotly contested household nomenclature for the automobile is "motor car." For the record.)

Not coincidentally, because everything is symbolic before the naproxen kicks in, the morning trawl through Achewood blogs (poor Molly) led to a spot-on review at Ruminator Magazine. This popped out at me:

My own favorite strip features a T-shirt of Roast BeefÌs that says on one side, ÏIÌm the Guy Who Sucks,Ó and on the other, ÏPlus I Got Depression.Ó WhatÌs funny about that isnÌt just the idea of a talking cat advertising his low self-esteem on a T-shirt, but the locution. Who says ÏI got depression?Ó (If thereÌs one thing I know about this world, itÌs that there ainÌt just one guy who sucks.)

Now, I'm sure I've said it myself more than once over the years, but that's not entirely the point. The point is, having seen this, I think I'd be more likely to try and explain any number of mornings this way:

"Why aren't you up yet?"
"I'm the girl who sucks. Plus, I got depression."

Also, this is the shirt I most want to own, more than anything ever in the world.

My friend Keith occasionally describes us folk as "ladies." This, at first, struck me as odd. Nothing in the mirror screams "lady;" I have, in fact, passed as male from behind on several occasions. But Keith has, over the years, absorbed a certain Dumbrella-and-friends sensibility into his speech, and it just works. It's nothing which sticks out unless he makes it do so; it's just there.

I struggle with this criticism a lot. This was one of the difficulties I actually had, getting into Achewood and SGR and -- to a lesser extent -- Diesel Sweeties. And it's something that will come up when I go through my trainwreck comics under stress. It's the thing I picked over for a year or so, deciding just how much I liked Alisin from Fans!. It was a huge sticking point for me with something I was reading recently which should have reflected some personal experience, but fell entirely flat and pat. And, fundamentally, it's the biggest problem I have with my own writing: "Is this natural? Would anyone actually speak this way?"

I do start to wonder if I'm asking the right question here. On the one hand, there's a big box of Gilmore Girls sitting here. It came home with me from America this Christmas because, after about ten days of reruns, it struck me that this was a show full of people who spoke as I spoke; when your accent and delivery are glaring, garish anomalies where you live, that's tons of reassuring. At the same time, there are big boxes of Buffy in the other room; while they sort of speak the Language, it's more that they take the Language and build upon it. Then you sort of draw it back into yourself and make it resonate. Like any good, quotable art/entertainment, really; how many people who aren't me can carry out entire conversations based on that blasted Princess Bride thing? (I can explain whether or not I get along well with certain people by telling other certain people: "They speak 'dude' and 'um' and 'see.'" But I don't get the Princess Bride thing at all. Never have. Sorry. It's not for me.)

My partner and I find ourselves communicating, on occasion, in Penny Arcade references. No one talks like that, either. Or no one did, anyhow.

What is the right question here? 'Cause I'm thinking it's not whether or not that's how people talk -- or how you or yours talk -- so much as whether or not that's how you could see yourself speaking, if the circumstances were appropriate. It's whether you can take on the code. Because, dude, none of this is natural.

Dude.

See.

Now. If you'll excuse me, I have to go kick the ass of Wordpress.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:44 PM | Comments (29)

April 1, 2005

Wednesday: [w] Because I can't be the only one who'll care about this

As part of the events on CBC Radio One today, Lynn and Rod Johnston appear on the first half hour of Sounds Like Canada. The show runs at about 10 past 10AM in each Canadian time zone; I've just gotten through listening to the Atlantic region's live feed. You can follow back through your time zone; there should be a few chances to catch it on Radio Canada International as well (not going to go through the methods for that, as they're too numerous -- read through the schedules for your method of choice).

Most of the interview is with Rod, and concerns a major dentistry award the couple's won, but there's a fair bit of interesting material about For Better or For Worse.

If you get a chance, you might also enjoy Samantha Bee's stint on The Current -- that one should actually turn up in the archives by, at worst, Monday (although some bits may be missing for copyright reasons). The roundtable on international differences in humour styles was fascinating to me as a dual national on her third country of residence, particularly in light of the whole thread on what constitutes British humour a few days back.

Meanwhile, I feel stupid -- I had to have this year's fake RFC explained to me by my partner. Doh.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:28 AM | Comments (8)

Wednesday: [w] Takeover: The Final Chapter.

1 April 2005: I told you I would fix him.

Coming soon: Takeover: Wednesday Goes to Manhattan, Takeover X, and Sonata vs. Wednesday.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 12:41 AM | Comments (17)

March 28, 2005

Wednesday: [w] We were wondering, if you recall: what is a lake of fire?

I do believe, sir, that it fails to be on.

For example, I see you doing nothing to remedy the situation. Here, we have an extensive history of apology, and yet there is no post about Alberto.

Here is the gauntlet. Come, Lord Jesus. What, exactly, is the problem with the definitions therein? I mean. Sheesh. Dude.

Everyone knows what apostasy is.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:01 PM | Comments (13)

Wednesday: [w] Llewellyn Ash knows you are capable of wonderful things.

Look. I got nothing. I totally suck tonight. I cannot come up with a God damned thing.

(But, you know, at least I'm not being all Piro about it.)

Here's the thing. That Alberto thing is absolutely perfect, but I'm not the person to write that particular piece because I'm already writing about fucking Bob. But he can't write about Alberto because he is being attacked by his own cat.

There's a fundamental injustice in the world.

The worst part is, I have about 75% of another strip in the queue, but it's turning into the fucking infinite canvas. I expect to drill through the earth and have it arrive in Australia somewhere around the turn of next week.

So, what do we do now, Boss?

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:54 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Metatakeover: Rules.

Just in case anyone was curious, 'cause I've found myself explaining this to a few people IRL. If you're not, my apologies.

Takeover is filler. I'm using it as an impetus to learn Alias Sketchbook. I have a plot, but it's nothing committed or firm at this stage besides a couple of anchor points. Each page is alloted 45-90 minutes, generally 45 (90 for the anchor strips, or if I'm otherwise distracted while drawing), for sketch, assembly and lettering. Aside from wireframes, absolutely nothing is planned; everything gets drawn as you see it and plonked down according to head images. The idea is to take a concept and implement it as quickly as possible, without regards for much of the internal censor.

I appear to have the car's blessing in this endeavour. Wish me luck. I think there's about another twenty strips left in the plot, at which point it leads into another project I'll be running elsewhere.

Ran into the wall with Bob; more on him later.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:23 PM | Comments (3)

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! (page 9)

This one is for John Allison: Steadily worse.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:19 PM | Comments (3)

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover (page 8: Plot.)

I think I forgot to write about Bob. What about Bob?

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:44 PM | Comments (7)

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! (page 7)

"Cue the ominous mu --" oh no wait.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:14 PM | Comments (5)

March 21, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Falling Out of Love with the God Shot II (Interlude: Background)

(I'm afraid this isn't much about comics, but please bear with me. If I don't write some of this down, I feel like I'll be doing the rest of the Chick piece a disservice.)

I became interested in religion on a recreational basis at roughly the same point in my life I first became seriously involved with it. Once someone's made a good faith effort to throw demons out of your head, arguably unsuccessfully, it's really hard to take anything entirely seriously again.

"Recreational religion" is a difficult concept to convey. As I said, everyone has their comfort trash. There's a phenomenon -- and, really, we're all in the teapot here; we've seen the storms -- whereby it's desperately easy to take some insignificant thing very, very seriously when you get too close. On occasion, the most sensible way to cope with things is to do exactly the opposite: step away from the big dogs and laugh.

It has nothing to do with disrespect, except inasmuch as it's hard to respect stuff which is doing its best to exploit a state of indecision or inquisitiveness. There's meaning well, and then there's the service of agenda. "Unintentional metahumour," perhaps, if that wasn't such a bloody pretentious way of putting it, with a side order of what?!

Missionary zeal often has trouble making the transition to popular media, which is part of what can make it so entertaining. Or so disastrous. The most unsettling material, for my money, is the stuff where you realize, no, the person really has gone off the edge. They are deadly earnest, they are incredibly serious, and they cannot grasp why you have completely lost your shit. You must know this laugh: it's ever so slightly nervous. You put up your own field of lunacy so that you can pass through theirs intact.

It's not always the stuff you can check for glorious internal consistency, either. I always seem to bring up the same examples, which is frustrating; it feels rather like concentrating on poorly executed Christianity, not poorly executed religion. (There's just such a wealth of material. I'd love to hear about stuff from other faiths which pulls this sort of thing off; I know from neopaganism, but I fall short in other respects. Anyhow.)

That said, American rapture cinema is so representative of the condition, whether or not one's taking up the campy pulp of the seventies (the feel of which was captured perfectly by Chick and Carter in The Last Generation) or the glossy, overproduced-yet-cheap shite from the past ten or so years (Omega Code, Left Behind/Tribulation Force, that sort of thing). On the one hand: what?! On the other hand: and you're playing this straight while you what?! I figure this must have been the reaction everyone but Hal Warren had to Manos: The Hands of Fate when it came out. (The viewing experience is, I assure you, not dissimilar; there are, for example, only so many ways you can depict Torgo's little altar to Ba'al, let alone your demonic harem. Especially without the MST3K track. "Beat! Beat!" indeed... but I digress.)

The old Spire comics do a fantastic job with this as well. I don't know how common this was for a lot of people growing up -- I'm told the answer is "quite" for certain pockets of North America -- but there does come a point where, after you've gone through all of the used bookstores in town, you really have just run out of Archie. The next step is dangerous: you wander, innocently, into your local purveyor of Precious berloody Moments and find the stuff which just isn't canonical.. Weatherbee bussing everyone out of the school district to pray? Reggie the swell, swell guy? Veronica unsexed? A vibrant Big Ethel?!

And that way lies madness. Madness and adaptations of Nicky Cruz's street punk phase. Madness and Hansi. The common threads are this bafflingly earnest bombast, the sense that someone has had what seemed to them a fantastic idea spun out long past its logical conclusion, and the creepily dawning concept that your soul's relative value has just diminished by dint of coming into contact with their goals.

(Also, Big Ethel. I mean, what?!)

There are really only two directions in which one can go with trainwreck material along these lines: really pulpy, awful dreck (there's a classic of deliverance ministry, Pigs in the Parlor, which works for this; Salem Kirban's elliptical perspective hops are great here, too, and there's an apostolic TV show coming out of San Francisco which is killer) or stylish, slick delivery that just somehow misses the mark (like the Spire comics, any of the Hal Lindsey/Johanna Michaelsen antioccultism materials, Bob Larson at his peak...).

Part of the point is recognizing, without actually acknowledging or submitting to, the innate power of the work. This actually makes the materials very difficult to effectively satirize. The Landover Baptists of this world, and sometimes even the Lark Newses, ultimately fail by flaunting the power instead of flirting with it. Beat the same drum too hard, too often, and the rhythm gets lost. This is also where The Wittenburg Door has been known to fall down in recent years, although they still pull some admirable turns.

This is also what makes the middle ground so very difficult to really enjoy, inasmuch as one enjoys such things. There is such a glut of mediocrity in this vein, and there are so many people with a middlingly unremarkable case of agenda. With most forms of entertainment, study, self-initiation, or whatever you're up to that can possibly correspond, you're wading through dreck to get to what you need, and that's irritating on its own. Here, you're also wading through a mass of grasping hands; I don't know about you, but I have one hell of a huge concept of personal space.

So, when a star falls from the firmament into tedium, it's always a shame. You have the older materials, of course, but what now? Where the hell is this going? Do we stick around and see if it gets better? Or worse?

I usually do. I'm nothing if not loyal.

(Illustrations are from the Hal Lindsey/Al Hartley Spire comic There's A New World Coming. Eric should be back tomorrow, Kyriotate willing and the creek don't rise. I'll be yelling at screens for the next couple days, then yammering something about Bob (for real next time). Takeover! resumes after God Shot IV: Officer Carter and the Squandering of Ms. Henn.)

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 5:32 PM | Comments (6)

Wednesday: [weds] Y'know what makes me feel dumb?

After a week of not sleeping much? Forgetting the difference between "draft" and "publish."

You'll get a snark tonight. I assure you.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 5:12 PM | Comments (4)

March 19, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] My Secret Scary Friend

So. I have a Son of Mongor, and you don't.

This is not actually a con report. That goes on 'Pedia, because that is the way of things. However, they have computers here. My god.

Computers.

Who knew?

If anyone is actually bothering to read someone's blog entries while they're actually at the UK Web and Minicomics Thing, and they're bored, they should be looking for the fat chick in the sparkly black jacket, toting a pink Yakpak messenger bag, wandering around with her two native porters.

And her Son of Mongor.

Because. I have a Son of Mongor.

And you don't.

(I have also eaten a Ping cookie and taken a lot of pictures and just generally pretended I don't have a mild social anxiety problem and ... dude. There are people here. Dude.)

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:06 AM | Comments (6)

March 18, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Falling Out of Love with the God Shot I: Info Dump

Everyone has their comfort trash. Apartment 4-G. Those horrid Li'l Archie comics where everyone balances themselves on one foot during the course of normal conversation. Mile-thick installments of pulpy fantasy "cycles." Iron Chef America.(*)

Me, I have Chick tracts.

And I know you're staring at me like I'm some kinda predictable freak ("how can you enjoy that stuff? What, did you like old rapture movies as a child or something?" Errr...), but leave aside the matter of his cracked theology (bizarre and kooky at best, downright hateful at worst) just for a moment. Seriously. Just for a moment. OK?

Jack Chick arguably has the best independent comics distribution network ever.

Think about it. Many of us are going to be delighted if we get, like, more than half a dozen hits on our webcomics, or sell a couple dozen copies of "My Logorrhea Ate Montana" at the zine fair. Some are going to be delighted if books sell a couple thousand copies, especially if one can supplement that income with t-shirt revenue. A very few get respectable positions on the Amazon bestseller list for a day or two. A couple folks end up big enough fish in their small ponds that they, say, might be found at the mall.

Chick tracts, meanwhile, are all over the place. Public transit. Phone booths. Washrooms. Workplaces, if you're unfortunate. Cafes. Turnpike service stations. McKFCQueenKingThing(**). Hell, probably Sbarro, since all things inevitably lead to Sbarro. I've found them in three different countries, four different languages, just over the course of daily events -- they get hell of translated, so there's every chance you'll find one just about anywhere you'll go, assuming someone's eager.

Yeah, lots of your gaming buddies might have their favourite strip which keeps up with the industry chatter, but dude? Not only has everyone seen Dark Dungeons, gamer or not, chances are someone you know found a copy on the bus once.

The bus.

This has its effects. You get everything from people who know them on sight and by reputation (although they couldn't tell you much about the contents) to keen collectors. You could order a selection of the in-print tracts from the site, but that's cheating (and several of them have been altered, taken out of general circulation, or discontinued entirely), so there's a certain cachet to tracking them down if you go for that sort of thing. Comic distribution as scavenger hunt.

What's cooler than that?

Also, what a lot of us are after isn't Chick, per se. It's Chick and Fred Carter, who drew Chick's vision for most of the highly recognizable tracts. (A less distinctive third artist has made contributions, but you can track down a copy of Imp #2 for more on that one). Chick's own approach is distinctive, but cartoonish. Carter's style is often lush, sumptuously detailed, and exaggeratedly gritty. Soul Story's finest panels (like that one right there) should be paid homage in a lower-profile Tarantino film, put it that way.

So it went. Until 1994. That's when Fred Carter began his extensive break from drawing tracts (he has only just resumed this past year) to work on paintings for a film called The Light of the World. In the meantime, Jack Chick himself suffered a stroke (circa 1996?) which affected not only his drawing hand, but, arguably, his writing style.

The decline really became obvious when LotW went into final preparations and we began seeing the solo-Chick companion tracts: The Bible Series, featuring ... this guy called Bob.

Bob is the worst Mary Suevangelist since Cameron "Buck" Williams, and next time we'll talk about him.

In scathing tones.

I assure you.

(*) Disclaimer: Wednesday has been told it gets better, but... Bobby Flay, people. Euuuurgh.
(**) KFC, for reference, should be pronounced "kafka."

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 3:39 AM | Comments (31)

March 17, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] It's Not Quite Gossamer Commons, But...

I couldn't resist not exploding over this one. Also, reading documentation is annoying. And I've been waiting for months to tell someone without swearing them to absolute and utter secrecy.

I found out last night that copies of Friendly Fire, the new album by former Vigilantes of Love frontman Bill Mallonee, have entered the wild via his shows in Kentucky. This is big enough news on its own for a fan (and I have been a fan since sometime in 1995, circa Blister Soul; Mallonee's quite solidly my favourite musician ever). Friendly Fire was originally slated for a Christmas 2004 release, but slipped, as such things are wont to do.

Bill's working methods these days make me wonder why webcomics hasn't seemed to notice him; if he drew instead of performing, he really could just slot right into this community and thrive. FF and his previous album, Dear Life, were funded through online preorders. A chunk of his core fanbase belongs to a subscription-based site consisting mostly of harder-to-source tracks and live performances. (Yes, I'm among them.) The industry, in its myriad forms, just kept sucking for him, and sucking hard -- Summershine, Perfumed Letter, Locket Full of Moonlight, and the delectable albatross of Audible Sigh should have broken, and broken hard -- so he just kept moving.

And here he is.

(Oh: no one ever knows what the hell genre labels to apply, but -- and I'll have to take folks' word for it, 'cause I have yet to break down -- Wilco keeps getting brought up as a comparison point these days. "Americana" and "alt.country" seem to come up as descriptors a bunch of late, and there's heavy, fuzzy britpop influence on the solo work prior to Dear Life. But those labels so totally suck. I liked the "bridge between folk and pop" thing I saw in a review recently, if that helps. If you were listening to the college bands coming out of Athens in the nineties, you might have an idea of what some incarnations of VoL were capable of. Mallonee's worked with Buddy and Julie Miller, toured with Dolly Varden... there are guitars. Don't ask me; I end up describing most of the albums in terms of what colour I see when I play them. Anyhow, I've probably answered my own question and made myself seem terribly old; I'm so not indie. Then again, I also think the man is a closet goth -- a proper British goth, from back when that was sorta tasteful, stuck in Georgia clothing.)

For me, though, this is a big old bit of personal good news, too, because Friendly Fire contains my first piece of published visual art since the mid-nineties. (Stage fright? You better believe I have it.) The girl you see here is Mandy Parker-Fujimoto, a character from my own Seekrit Project webcomic-in-development (distinct from Takeover and semidistinct from project Wu). You'll find her on the inner traycard, when you take the CD out. And, if you can spot the visual homages to Leiji Matsumoto, Sakura Taisen, and Preacher, you will rock.

It's not time yet for me to talk a lot about Mandy. I'll tell you that she was born quite some time ago, and she was born because of some songs that Bill Mallonee had written. Since I wasn't about to start work on a project that referenced his work without checking to see if it was OK, I bounced him a note to ask about it. I didn't know at the time that he might think she was nifty, and it's staggering to me that he liked her enough to want her close by.

I know that some of the people who read this know exactly how this sort of thing feels. This is, for lack of a better reference point, my In Nomine supplement. So you'll understand when I say that, tonight, I am a little dizzy, and a little flushed, and I haven't even started drinking yet.

And I now no longer have any excuse to keep Mandy under a bushel.

Thanks, Bill.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:27 PM | Comments (3)

March 16, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! (page six)

Page six. Ideally, you should be pretending that she's listening to this. Or possibly "In the 21st Century" by Men Without Hats.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:17 PM | Comments (12)

Wednesday: [weds] UK Web & Minicomics Thing

All right. Who's going? I plan on running around with my buddy Keith, being all, you know, "Should I buy a shirt?" and then bemoaning the concept of the size L Bella. While I realize that I am, in fact, the only fat woman with a British passport(*), I espouse my entitlement, under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to make the ghost of Pierre Trudeau happy through presentation of the unruly charges.

This requires an XL Bella. Preferably an XXL, but, you know, we cope.

Usually by bitching to Keith about it, then resolutely failing to order such shirts from the Americas. But anyhow.

Anyways, this is a transparent abuse of the facilities to find out if anyone wants to go for a drink after the con, or for a drink during the con, or even just knows of any non-Whittard tea vendors within walking distance of the facilities (because, aside from anything Whittard might be hiding in the upstairs of the Carnaby Street location, that is not a lapsang souchong I should buy). I have purchased tickets, and am not obviously creepy. Monumentally shy and frightened of people, yes, but not creepy. Just slightly nervous until halfway through the first pint.

(*) Disclaimer: author is perfectly aware that this is just a problem with living in Chaverston, Berkshire.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 10:29 AM | Comments (15)

March 15, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! [page five]

This is what drinking all the tea in one go feels like. Page five.

Everyone should go and drink all their tea. I'm just saying.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 4:11 PM | Comments (6)

March 13, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! (page four)

And the next question you want to ask yourself is: have I ever done this? Page four.

More tomorrow. I think I just killed my hand.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:27 PM | Comments (6)

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! (page three)

It's not a pot. It's a kettle. I can watch it. Page three.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:17 PM | Comments (2)

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! (page two)

I assure you, I am not normally so lax with my self-criticism. Page two.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:24 PM | Comments (1)

Wednesday: [weds] Takeover! (page one)

This is what happens when you say, "Gee, I should see if I like Alias Sketchbook." Oops. Page one.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:23 PM | Comments (2)

March 12, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Hey! Y'Know What's Cool?

Kumala Zenith merlot/pinotage/shiraz '04. Far be it from me to be all about the needlessly commercial ten-pound new world red, but it's the needlessly commercial ten-pound new world red going at 60% off at the moment. If you're stuck in Britain, anyways.

I would rather have a pinotage-cinsault, or even just a good rioja, but, you know, that option was not provided.

Now, don't make me break out the cuvee prestige, guys. OK? You know what two bottles in one night leads to?

Reviews.

Oh, my, god, it is a diversionary tactic.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 12:08 AM | Comments (10)

March 10, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Will Write Drivel For Deleter Pads

Okay, so I'm working on this thing. (It's a thing. It does stuff.)

Running Photoshop CS on a contemporary eMac with only half of its max memory allotment is an experience best described by comparing it with the consistency of golden syrup, four years expired. (If you have no golden syrup, then consider the treacle.) Ideally, you want to dilute the whole thing with whiskey, drink deeply, then go to bed. So, since the gods are capricious and like to release all the free things for Windows, I find myself using Expression a bunch.

Do not get me wrong. I am quite fond of Expression, and have been for some time. I love it to death for inking and colouring things; it makes me happy. It has a bit of a learning curve, but everything worthwhile does. vi. Roasting beef. Reading Achewood. Writing CSS2. You know. Normal stuff that everyone does.

The problem is, I have yet to ascend the bit of the learning curve which lets me pencil there, too. I keep sliding down.

The net result: I delineate a bunch of panels. They sit there, empty. I make faces.

Have you ever seen 8mm? It's a horrible film. (Downright insulting to the viewer's intelligence, let alone to anyone who might enjoy an old spanking loop, but I digress.) The redeeming feature -- hilarious enough to at least merit watching it when it runs on the movie channel of your choice, if you're plastered -- is Nicholas Cage, who spends the entire film making faces at offscreen pornography. They're not even normal faces. The man must be capable of dislocating his lower jaw, one hinge at a time, and wrapping his mouth around his head about half a dozen times. I do believe his eyebrow was extended not merely up or down, but about forty-five degrees and ten inches away from his own forehead.

Yeah. Like that.

Yes, I know. "Shut the fuck up and draw something, woman." I am trying. (At some point soon, something I drew will come out, so I can prove it to you!) I keep deploying paper. And, shamefully, ballpoint pens. Something will happen. But I am dislocating my jaw, slowly but surely, in the process.

At what point does "ah" happen? When do I go "click"? Should I just, like, stick up a cam and offer to not pose in front of it in exchange for donations? DDR memory can't be that bad.

I need a glass of wine. There's no wine in the house.

Dammit.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:18 PM | Comments (10)

March 8, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Look! A Bird! (or, Star !Gentle...)

One of the household catch-sketches (it's hardly a catchphrase when partner starts repeating most of the good lines, I think) is this piece by Ben Elton, which I've never actually heard. It's just been told to me a lot.

It's the one where this guy with a big old posh "we'd not have had any of this nonsense in the Punjab" accent starts in: "Well, it was a lovely day out and I'd just strolled up to bat when, what do you know, my period started." It's normally the first retort when I come running out with the usual celebratory cries of despair. You know. The ones where it's like, oh, thank ghod, I'm not pregnant; fuck me, I'm glad coedine is legal OTC in this country, because I'm about to become such an opiate fiend. One likes to share one's joy! And one often likes to complain! But! It's this sort of code by now: "Blood!" "Well, it was a lovely day out --"

I'm a bigger fan of Questionable Content than a Comixpedia review from a while back might have suggested (it's really hard to evaluate something as a whole when the exciting stuff is all bunched up at the corner, and I think I failed there). Stuff like today's period comic (detail at right) is why.

Nailed. So nailed. Nailed up there with MC Menses (note to self: get over fear of wearing cute t-shirts, obtain cute t-shirt, re-henna hair, wear around boys). I never presume to speak for any other woman, but it's the smile that does it for me in both cases: not only is it awesome when a guy doesn't gross out around the concept, it's secretly also kinda fun when he does.

(Dammit. I may have said too much.)

I feel bad for wondering why, so far, all my favourite comics about spittin' out uterine goo have been written by guys. (Mutual flow is often go. Someone else can bring up the coffee if they'd really like to.) I mean, I shouldn't -- if you can mock it right, you've so won, and, besides, the slightly removed position is probably helpful for the purpose.

Still, I tend to think we, the ova-disgorging, should be a bit better at poking fun at the process (it's our endometrium!), and I know we've written tons of pretty awesome stuff about it in one place or another. Annoyingly, though, any time I try to think of the classics, all my brain can come up with is that one bit in Hothead Paisan (and, don't get me wrong, I'm all about Hothead) where Loon-Chi and Coco are all, like, "let now the females of the earth receive to the deepest extent of psychic receptivity, to embrace the shadowside, and to bleed all over the place!" Which had its place, heavyhanded as that one chapter was, but it wasn't funny; it was all, like, a statement about reclamation and stuff. Also, there was this one Roberta Gregory thing which was cool, but the underlying message made me sad. This is annoying me. Please help.

Also, I always thought that Sailor Star Healer's [EDIT: Maker. MAKER. The hell? I know I *saw* Maker] attack should have caught on better.

Anyhow. If you'll excuse me, I have a beef rib in the oven and it might not be rare anymore if I wait too much longer to suck the blood from it. Eric'll be back tomorrow. Aren't you glad?

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 8:46 PM | Comments (14)

March 5, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Awesome Navigation Weakens the Knee

It's not so much that I was impressed by Pointless today (although the form and linework's striking as hell, and I'm all about that shade of pink) as that they won me over with a nav button.

"Prior comic."

Not "previous," not "yesterday's," not "before," none of that. Prior.

Prior.

I'm a little puddle now. More prior, less previous, please. I don't know if it's The Right Thing, but it makes more sense in my white and yellow head full of blue, underlined, bolded links.

For my next trick, I'll tell you why you shouldn't wear a Jakob Nielsen t-shirt into the town centre the day after the World Cup semi-finals and -- HEY. Drink a cup of coffee, would you? Geez.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 6:31 PM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] Platform Occupation (or, I Will Punch You In the Face)

For reasons best left to your imagination, I found myself wrapped in both endorphins and unsugared blood this evening. I was looking for distraction in the Borders, but, sadly, I found the Laurell Hamilton.

And the fellows. But we shall, shortly, get to the fellows. (RSS readers: I'm being conservative; full article on site.)

There is something fundamentally wrong with this situation: imagine two rows of gothically colourful books, lined appealingly in order, across the midst of the horror section. Pluck out any given volume -- something Anita Whatserface, say, or the other thing -- and crack it open. Fate conspired against you: any line you pick, utterly at random, will pertain to the protagonist's hotness. Panties. Flirtations. More panties. Trouser options. Panties.

I couldn't possibly tell you anything more about the Hamilton oeuvre; my greatest fear is that I will, god help us all, find myself in possession of a volume of Hot Queen Merry Goes to the Mall, and the entire thing will reek of Love Hina. "I was so hot. But the Lord High King of the Vampires was a nebbish, so I beat him up and kicked him out of the hot spring. I had clearly chosen the wrong panties. But I was so hot."

Sorry. That one needed out of the system. Let us proceed.

While dithering over a copy of Michelle Tea's Rent Girl (do I want this? Yes? No?), a pair of ... fellows, yes, that's it; a pair of fellows began some sort of incoherent argument across from my head. I couldn't follow it at all. I got the impression that the one with the greasy hair was attempting to persuade the one with the patchy beardalike that he should pick a style at random and base his masterpiece upon it.

"See, look here," Greasy said to Patchy. "This manga stuff? It's designed to look weird." Whereupon he launched into an explanation of how manga was built, from the ground up, in very recent years, to look as bizarre as possible. Also, apparently, the heavy use of armor is some sort of prerequisite for the term. And stripes. (I took the latter to mean "speed lines" -- hardly a prerequisite, but up there with the default casual observation signifiers like "big eyes" and "panty shots" -- until, no, it started to look like he meant "stripes." I am hoping that I misheard chunks of the conversation, because his concept of manga sounded alarmingly like R. CLAMP Crumb's The Hobbit.)

I attempted a withering gaze at this point, but I think I just looked stoned. Note: Next time, Starbucks first.

After making the rounds and gathering up disorganized Fables trades -- when one's train of thought amounts to "god, I really could use some print comics right about now," this is what one does -- Patchy launched into his own tirade.

"It doesn't matter," he said, presumably after a good half dozen comic art traditions had been misrepresented to him. "It doesn't matter what you do. It's all about connections. You can draw any old crap --" and here, his head bobbed in the direction of the two-for-£10 tankoubon -- "and it's there if you have connections." Then everything became incoherent again. (In large part because of Greasy. But I digress).

I exchanged glaring for looking stoned again. Didn't say a word. This had gone from tiring me to making me angry, and I couldn't put a finger on it. I wanted to reach across the shelves and shake the guy, apart from not really much wanting to touch the guy. I wanted to punch him in the face. And then, I wanted to yell:

"Shut the fuck up and draw something. Shut the fuck up and draw something. Shut. The fuck up. And draw. Something."(*)

I don't know if this was an unreasonable reaction. (I assume it was, since my next desire was to place vanilla syrup in a frappucino. Let me reassure you that I merely continued to look stoned, then asked my partner if I should buy some Tank Girl. He said to get the Fables. So I did. Then I had vanilla syrup placed inside a frappucino.)

I know that I found myself in a place of profound disconnect. I get tired of "who you know" games. I can fathom the need for professional contacts, buzz between creators, that sort of thing. I can't grasp, however, the mindset which says that one should just not draw the bloody thing due to the lack of same, let alone the expectation that napkin doodles would draw publication after the ex nihilo creation of a bond with... some guy. (I don't know who. Someone. Jackson Pollock's secret love child with Interdimensional Sylvia Plath, perhaps. Don't ask me. I just write shit down.)

God. I mean. Seriously. Shut the fuck up and draw something. Put it in the drawer, and the closet, and get weirded out and draw something else, and do it over and over again if you have to.(**) Make something up. Don't get your strange buddy to explain stripes and armor to you. Do pinups and character sketches and hone them like knives if you have to. Be as scared as you want. Keep them away from your friends, if you don't want them to react. Have a month of block here and there if it has to happen, but don't, like, cop out before you started. Don't give me this shit about connections. Don't give Greasy that shit about connections; he doesn't even know what a line is. Guy. Shut up.

Shut up and draw.

(*) Yes, I know. The stage fright is, I assure you, being worked upon.
(**) You should totally see my closet. Or possibly not.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 4:56 PM | Comments (8)

February 24, 2005

Wednesday: [weds] The Tricky Biscuit Dilemma.

Okay. You see, I live in the United Kingdom. (You know where London is? Well, you get on a train and then you're where I am. Not a tube train. The tube doesn't go there, so you have to change at Waterloo.)

We have biscuits.

He's in New England. They don't really have biscuits, notwithstanding import shops.

Meanwhile, despite an abortive attempt to repackage the Wotsit over here (and an unusual permutation of the brand in France), we don't really have Cheetos. And that's what I have people ship over when they're feeling like they have to send food: Cheetos. I miss Cheetos. (And Kraft Dinner, but you don't need to know about my neuroses.)

I don't intend to actually, you know, produce Cheetos as a reward, at least much, but it's tempting. We might have to locate a generic.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:28 PM | Comments (11)

Wednesday: [weds] Well Merited Catatonia! (or, Dude.)

Okay, so the thing is, there wasn't a lot going on this afternoon until Eric got metaphorically tapped on the shoulder. Apparently, there's a big old ad in the current Previews for Penny and Aggie, which... you know... it's Penny and Aggie, it's about to be in print, it's a grandness.

That wasn't the point.

The point was that the ad proclaims, hugely: "Winner of the 2004 Shortbread Award for Down-to-Earth Humor!"

The solicitation then goes on to quote the explanation why.

So he's been all, well...

eab: By the way? Holy *fuck.*
eab: I mean, *Dude.*
eab: Dude.
eab: Holy fuck.

for, like, ages, at least if IM's any indication, and I suspect he's sort of gently rocking back and forth over there from the dude and the holy fuck. Especially the dude part.

Well, and also especially the holy fuck part. I think he's a little awed.

So, I'm like, "You know, I could co-opt your blog and say something about this." And he somehow managed to not make my login "dude" or my password "holy fuck." Which is good. Because, you know, then you'd know what it was.

So, basically: Hey. The Shortbreads? Mentioned in a Previews solicitation. Eric? Mentioned by name. So, everyone?

DUDE.

Eric? Wake up, Eric. Dude.

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 2:50 PM | Comments (7)

August 30, 2004

Eric: FAQ: Cast Page

So, I've received more than one note from folks that while it's all well and good for me to campaign for webcomic cast pages, I don't have one of my own here on Websnark.com.

"But..." I said in reply. "This isn't a webcomic."

"Put up or shut up," they replied.

So. Here's the cast page. Enjoy.

Eric Alfred Burns is one of the heroes of our story. Like all good English majors, he makes his living as a systems administrator. He also has a bad habit of writing. Born in a very small town in the very far north of Maine, Eric has lived in different places in Maine, in New Hampshire, in Ithaca and Syracuse, New York, and in Seattle, Washington. He currently lives in New Hampshire, but is wondering if his roots are beginning to get a touch long and therefore need uprooting.

While systems administration puts food on his table, Eric lists his occupation as writer. In addition to Websnark.com, Eric has written and published short fiction and poetry. He has also written for and designed Role Playing Games, including work for Decipher and Steve Jackson Games. He was one of the primary authors on the ENnie nominated Sidewinder: Wild West Adventures, and the subsequent Sidewinder: Recoiled won the Gold ENnie for best Electronic Game (non-free). He's listed as a contributing author on Recoiled, and would be much prouder if the sum total of his 'contributions' wasn't stuff from the first edition of the game which they rewrote parts of to make it sound less like the somewhat urbane Bat Masterson and more like Festus from Gunsmoke. But Hell, they got the gold with it, so why should he complain?

In the webcomics world, Eric writes a monthly column called "Feeding Snarky" and occasional features and reviews for Comixpedia, where they have learned to curse his procastinating name.

In addition, Eric has the unfortunate distinction of being an amateur novelist, but is deep into work on a novel that will hopefully change his professional standings. He has tried his hand at webcartooning himself, and epitomizes the old saw "those who can't draw, snark." He has learned from this mistake and is now hard at work at writing webcomics instead. He is hard at work on Gossamer Commons, as drawn by Greg Holkan and Peter Venables.

Eric has a cat named Sarah, which is short for Seraphim Kyriotate. He has yet to notice angelic behavior from her.

Wednesday White is, at most, a cameo in all things. An uneducated boor, she used to sneak onto university newspapers' staff because the high school papers wouldn't let her in. Every few years, it occurs to her to write something. This time, it landed her in webcomics. "If I write about it for a little while, I'll learn how to do my own sensibly." You see where that gets you.

This way lay contributing to Comixpedia then throwing stuff at The Webcomics Examiner. She's worked as a free-floating associate editor for Comixpedia, and handles site maintenance and script editing tasks for Gossamer Commons.

She loves trashy religious pop culture (all religions; she's not fussy), Canadian public radio, and sorting through artistic trainwrecks.

The pair can be reached at "websnark" "at" "gmail" "dot" "com." It's like a reverse rebus, isn't it?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:19 PM | Comments (14)