Born Too Late
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends View]
Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
[ << Previous 25 ]
| Saturday, November 7th, 2009 |
kadymae
|
5:01p |
Jesus wept, I met an *ignorant* MOFO
So I womaned the CBLDF table today at the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival. With 5 minutes to go, the MOFO arrived. 1) Asked me *my* position on the Danish cartoon controversy. I said there was a right to publish those cartoons. So he asked me where was the CBLDF when these cartoonists needed help! Why didn't we step up to defend them? I explained that the CBLDF is a United States First Amendment organization and that the First Amendment doesn't exist in other countries. 2) Asked me why the CBLDF didn't step up to defend two English Holocaust Deniers who did a webcomic about how the Holocaust was a fake and sought Asylum in the US and were extradited back to England where they are now serving sentences. ETA: Because how can we think it's okay to publish comics that make fun of Mohammad, the Pope, and Jesus, but not okay to defend Holocaust Deniers? One is more popular than the other and clearly the CBLDF doesn't defend the unpopular free speech. So I explained that (a) I don't even know if the CBLDF was asked to help (b) the CBLDF deals in US First Amendment cases, not extradition/immigration/Asylum cases (c) and that unless there was an obscenity case brought in the US, there wasn't much for them to do. 3) MOFO goes on a screed about the International Jewish conspiracy and how the CBLDF is a fake free speech organization in league with the JDL and Ba'ni Barith (sp?) B'nai B'rith and .... I finally said as calmly as I could, "Look, I'm a volunteer. I am not on the CBLDF board. You can go to the website and see what they've done. You can also contact them about the case of those two guys, but the festival is over now, so I need to pack up." I really should have explained from step one that I was just a volunteer and he *might* have left sooner. ~sigh~ --- "Networking Dave" Siegel who is one of the gentlest, sweetest men I know, overheard most of the exchange and after the MOFO Loony stormed off, told me that he was "getting ready to punch that asshole." |
foenix
|
8:10p |
Oy V.
Just watched the premiere...and oh mom. Midway through the episode, "Wait...the V's aren't good??" That would make for thrilling tv, huh? ;) Not to mention I know she's seen the old minis and tv series... "So, that was the first episode?" "No, it was the 12th. I thought I'd start us in the middle and bounce all around." Then she got pissed at me being a smartass. Well, if you ask a dumb question... J |
budgie_uk
|
7:02p |
My son, the story editor...
"You know the Doctor Who episode, "Utopia"? It would have been so much better with Professor Yaffle instead of Professor Yana..." |
ronkaperplexous
|
11:29a |
Sometimes you just feel inundated by life. |
foenix
|
7:48a |
Comics Next Week
Action Comics #883 Angel Vol 3 #27 Regular Cover B Booster Gold Vol 2 #26 - FREE Orange Lantern Corps Ring with purchase - while supplies last (Blackest Night Tie-In) Cable Vol 2 #20 Dark X-Men #1 (Cable Long Way Home Part 2) Fables #90 Farscape Dargos Trial #4 Cvr B Green Lantern Corps Vol 2 #42 Regular Patrick Gleason Cover (Blackest Night Tie-In) Realm Of Kings Imperial Guard #1 REBELS #10 - FREE Indigo Lantern Corps Ring with purchase - while supplies last (Blackest Night Tie-In) S.W.O.R.D. #1 Toyfare #149 Hasbro Iron Man 2 Figure Cvr Witchblade #132 Cover A Stjepan Sejic X-Force Vol 3 #21 Regular Clayton Crain Cover (Necrosha Tie-In) X-Men Forever Vol 2 #11 J |
foenix
|
6:03a |
Black River: Day Seven
Still no dead bodies. Brain hit a plot stall as I tried to figure out how to get where I wanted to go, and filled words with dialogue until I could get things back on track. Good stuff, but wheel spinning. Fingers crossed to finish chapter three tomorrow. |
| Friday, November 6th, 2009 |
budgie_uk
|
10:26p |
Girl Number 9
I'm a little bit in shock. I just watched the final part (part 6, all parts five minutes or so...) of Girl Number 9, the web-only thriller written by James Moran, and starring Gareth David-Lloyd, Joe Absalom and Tracy Ann Oberman. It's dark. And I don't know how to tell you anything about it that won't give the plot away, so I'm going to go with the official site's lines of: Vincent Boylan (Joe Absolom) has just been arrested, suspected of being the man behind the brutal murder of seven girls, but the team only have a limited time to get a confession out of him. If they can't make him talk, he could slip through their fingers.
Detective Matheson (Gareth David-Lloyd), who led the investigation, is sent in to try and get some answers. But things soon take a horrifying turn for the worse, as Matheson and his boss Lyndon (Tracy-Ann Oberman) are about to find out that all is not as it seems. Here's the trailer: Episode One was good enough to make me want to watch Episode Two. With Episode Two, I was hooked. Warning though. The show comes with its own warning saying it's not suitable for anyone younger than 15. To be honest, I'm surprised that left it that low... Girl Number 9 - all is not as it seems... |
jkcarrier
|
2:38p |
|
foenix
|
5:02a |
Black River: Day Six
It amuses me that no one noticed I'd screwed up on counting days. ;) Yes, I'm quite a bit ahead of where I need to be, even by my own 2000 words a day goal. I've been writing a bit extra of a few hundred words the last few days because I had some really good momentum, although I was keeping it back from my word counts, for personal bookkeeping reasons, mostly for better keeping track of things in my head. Today I got far enough ahead that I figured I might as well keep everything in synch. Yes, I know how weird it is to actually hold back on my word count and essentially 'cheat' myself out of words. My brain works oddly, but we knew that. I am really liking how chapter three is turning out so far. J |
foenix
|
3:29a |
Grah.
I half read/half skimmed an article on giving your characters different voices, and how to not have them all sound the same. And so I'm sitting here writing away, and I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. It's good advice, but gah, I don't want to get into the details of such things as planning and language when I just want to put one word in front of the other! ;) J |
|
polite_dissent
|
5:53a |
Fringe — Episode 6 (Season 2): “Earthling”
http://www.politedissent.com/archives/3946 http://www.politedissent.com/?p=3946 Could have been a contender, but was KO’d by bad science and too many clichés
The Plot: A married man in Boston mysteriously turns to ash while waiting to spring an anniversary surprise on his wife. The Fringe team is called in to investigate. Broyles tells Dunham that he’s seen this before — there were five similar deaths several years ago at a hospital in Washington DC. He tells her he was contacted by an “Eastern European” man who provided a strange formula to him and indicated it was the solution to the deaths. Unfortunately, none of the FBI’s scientists could decipher the formula several more deaths occurred before they suddenly stopped — until now.
Dunham digs a little deeper and finds that the victim had recently been visiting his sick mother at a hospital. The Fringe team stakes out the hospital, trying to find a link between this hospital and the one four years ago in DC. They find a critical care nurse named Tomas Koslov who has worked at both institutions. Meanwhile, another ash-death has occurred on the in the hospital. A review of the hospital’s surveillance tapes show a strange being made entirely of shadow moving down the hall right before the death was discovered.
The team locates and searches Koslov’s apartment but discover he has abandoned it. They are able to find a fingerprint. When they run the fingerprint they find that their suspect is man by the name of Timur Vasaleiv who is wanted by both the CIA and the Russians because he stole something important from Russia. Broyles is told that the CIA will be taking over the case, but he decides to keep his team on it anyway. A contact at the Senate sends him Timur’s file. It turns out that his brother Aleks was a cosmonaut who returned comatose from a space mission, and it is his brother that Timur has stolen from a special Russian quarantine facility. He has been keeping him in various American hospitals while posing as an ICU nurse.
Walter has been working on the formula and realizes that it represents an organism that seems to feed on radiation. The hospital patients died because they all had been undergoing radiation treatment, and the husband died because he had been on a recent cross country flight (where he had been exposed to higher than normal levels of background radiation).
Timur returns to the hospital and takes his comatose brother out of the ICU and to a hotel. The shadow tries to emerge, but using a series of car batteries, Timur shocks his brother enough that the shadow retreats. He also knocks his brother into asystole (flatline), but after a few moments, a normal heartbeat returns.
Confident that Walter can crack the formula, Agent Broyles reaches out to Timur and offers his help. Timur is trying to decide whether to take Broyles assistance when he slowly turns to ash — the shadow is loose. The FBI arrives to find the comatose cosmonaut and the dead Timur. Peter thinks Walter can shock Aleks to make the shadow return, but Walter cannot read the equipment as it is all in Russian. When they hear a young girl scream from another motel room, Broyles takes unhesitating action and shoots Aleks in the head, killing him. The girl tells her mother that there was a shadow man in the room, but he disappeared. Later, when the CIA approaches Broyles to warn him off their case, they tell him that despite being shot in the head, Aleks returned to life, and they apparently sent him back into space.
1. Glow In the Dark
There is a major misunderstanding of radiation here. While the victims had all been recently exposed to radiation, but they were not radioactive themselves. There was no “high levels” of radiation for the shadow to detect, let alone feed off of.
2. Feed Me, Seymour
What had the shadow been feeding off of for the past four years, after DC but before the husband died?
3. I See You
There is no way a patient is going to sit for four years in a hospital ICU like Aleks apparently did.
 ICU beds are incredibly expensive. The hospital billing department would have been on the phone to his insurance company as soon as he was admitted. No insurance? While they wouldn’t have kicked him out (unless he was medically stable and had a place to go), they would have been looking at the records very closely.
If someone is in a permanent coma, they would be transferred to a rehabilitation hospital or a nursing home as soon as they were medically stable. They wouldn’t keep them in a regular hospital ICU indefinitely.
How did he get him admitted to each new ICU? ICU transfers are very irregular unless one is going from a less-equipped hospital to a better-equipped one, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
4. Eleven Herbs and Spices
In my brief look at the formula, there seemed to be a number of carbon atoms with more than 4 bonds. I admit that Ionly had two years of Organic Chemistry, but that seems quite unlikely to me.
5. Blackjack
Your Osama Tezuka link for the day: the little girl was watching Kimba, the White Lion.
The plot line had potential, but was dragged down by too much bad science, reliance of clichés, and deep piles of nonsense they didn’t even try to explain away. The clock moves closer to midnight.
 This week’s Fringe cipher was: DEJAVU.
A list of all previous Fringe reviews is available here.
UPDATE: And I should mention that I’m already dreading next week’s show, just based on the preview, where they mention the completely debunked “most people only use 10% of their brain” myth as if it were fact.
|
jkcarrier
|
1:18a |
|
| Thursday, November 5th, 2009 |
kadymae
|
10:00p |
|
budgie_uk
|
11:25p |
Comics questions...
1. If The Green Lantern ring is supposed to be the most powerful weapon in the DC Universe, why the hell didn't Lex Luthor attempt to reverse engineer a weapon from a captured one? You seriously telling me that Luthor wouldn't have tried? Why haven't we seen that story? 2. If Wolverine has a constant, always-on healing factor, why does he look older now than when his powers kicked in? 3. And I ask this one every couple of years, and it's always fun seeing friends argue... so... you stick Sue Richards (aka The Invisible Woman) in a windowless room with black walls, floor and ceiling. The room is lit by a single 60 watt bulb. That's the only light source. She turns the entire bulb invisible. What happens? Does the room go dark or not? Does your answer change if instead of the room being all black, the walls of the room are mirrored? Opinions on any or all of the above, please. |
foenix
|
5:08a |
Black River: Day Five
This isn't where I originally planned as chapter two, but is more akin to the first half of what I had planned. However, it seemed like a natural point to stop it at, and makes what comes next more of its own piece, which makes sense in the long run. And any crazy person actually checking the wordcount of these two chapters, no they do not equal the word count above. I'm a chunk into chapter three as well. ( Black River - Chapter Two ) Current Music: The Offspring - Bad Habit |
sdelmonte
|
5:01a |
To the Yankee Fans...
Congrats. I might be a Mets fan, but I cannot be helped but be impressed by their World Series win. Special kudos to Andy Pettitte for turning back the clock and Hideki Matsui for putting on a Reggie-level show. Enjoy your victory. As for me, all I can say is "wait till next year." When odds are your team will be great and mine will struggle again. Oh well. |
|
polite_dissent
|
6:12a |
Heart Surgery and Luke Cage (aka “Medical Review of The New Avengers #58, part 2″)
http://www.politedissent.com/archives/3925 http://www.politedissent.com/?p=3925 
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this scene, so I’m just going to engage is some speculation and throw out some ideas. There’s not quite enough information provided to know for sure what is going on. This may be due to cleverness on the writer’s part, or laziness. Regardless, Bendis’s glacial pacing is making this scenario last months.
We know that Luke Cage has had a “cardiac episode” — probably a heart attack — so he needs someone to restore the circulation to the arteries that supply his heart. Non-surgically, this can be done with thrombolytics (“clot-busting” drugs), or by angioplasty. Since he’s undergoing surgery, it seems he’s receiving a CABG (coronary artery bypass graft), the surgical method of restoring the heart’s circulation.
But then the surgeon mentions the pulmonary artery and also mentions a pump in the next panel (not shown here). Why is the surgeon messing with the pulmonary artery? It’s not part of coronary bypass surgery.
 Is Cage’s heart so badly damaged that he requires a ventricular assist device to keep him alive (basically, a pump that helps the heart pump)? The doctor is focusing on the pulmonary artery which would mean Cage is getting a right ventricular assist device (VAD) instead of the much more common, and useful, left VAD. Frankly, neither VAD really fit Cage’s situation all that well.
Maybe he meant an intra-aortic balloon pump — which fits the circumstances better — and he just messed up the anatomy.
Or is Osborn up to something nefarious and implanting something nasty (which is my suspicion)? Time will tell, though at this rate my great-great-grandchildren will be reading the conclusion long after I’m gone.
Other thoughts:
♥ If you’re using a scalpel and the skin is “tearing”, then you’re doing something wrong. Surgical scalpels cut through skin like a hot knife through butter — if anything, it’s easy to cut too much.
♥ No mention of “cracking the chest” — opening the rib cage (because it’s hard to reach the heart, otherwise) — though the previous panel does show some rib spreaders at the ready.
|
| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 |
kadymae
|
7:48p |
|
budgie_uk
|
11:46p |
Taking A Constitutional
The older I get, the more I come to the conclusion that the Colonies have it right: a written constitution is a good idea. There's a myth that the UK doesn't have a written constitution. We do have one. We just have it in umpteen (a technical term, you understand) different laws, statutes, statutory instruments, etc. What we don't have is a single codified document entitled "The Constitution". And not only do I think we should have such a single codified document, I think that we could do a lot worse than look at our American cousins' one as a general guide. Now, sure, I can't stand the second amendment, or at least the interpretation that's been put on it since the US created a standing army, which never existed at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified. And I still prefer a parliamentary system rather than the entire separation of the executive and legislature... And yes, I know that for a couple of hundred years, people have been arguing about the precise meanings of not only the second amendment but the entire document. After all, that's what the Supreme Court spends almost all of its time doing. Well, that and paperwork. And ok, they sometimes have to give the Chief Justice a few days off to supervise the occasional Presidential impeachment. But I do like a lot of it, particularly the first amendment. You remember that? It's the one that goes: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Of course, as fans of Alistair Cooke will recall, he never tired of reminding people of the qualifier "peaceably". However, I am long past tired of people, ignorant, stupid people, who - whenever a message board censors something they've written, or (as happened today) Twitter removing what they considered to be an offensive hashtag trend - complain that their first amendment rights have been infringed. I'd ask if they were so ignorant of their own bloody Constitution that they don't know that the first amendment does not apply to any private organisation, only Congress, but the answer is obviously, sadly, yes. |
evandorkin
|
4:33p |
They're Publishing More Comics I Want
Apparently the first volume in the IDW King Aroo reprint project has been solicited in this months Previews eyesore -- this is a series I'm really looking forward to as I find Jack Kent's strip delightful (there's a word I rarely type) and an example of great pure cartooning chops. And my daughter might enjoy it, as well. Maybe. I'm basing this on the character designs, all the cute creatures running around in the strip, and the gentle nature and humor of the strip. And the puns, she's getting into corny old gags in the way most of us did when we were little. I never know what comics she's going to respond to, to be honest. For a long while she wouldn't read anything with people in it, Dennis the Menace was out for that reason. Now she has taken the Toon Treasury away from me and has gone through it multiple times, without missing funny animals, kids, gag pages, even the Briefer Frankenstein pages, which I thought might turn her off. Then again, she read print-outs of the first issue of Beasts of Burden #1 in black and white, while we weren't around, and startled us at the dinner table one night by quoting the "eat 'em up frog" (as she put it) demon (she also calls it the "eat everything frog"). She quoted the frog in a funny kid monster voice, and it was very funny, but Sarah gave me the "I thought we agreed not to leave those pages lying around" look. And we did agree not to let her see the pages because some of them are kind of nasty, and as it turned out, Emily was bothered by some of the events in the first issue, and told me I wrote it "wrong", because the deaths of two animals in it upset her. We have since never admitted the existence of Beasts #2, for reasons some of you might understand after reading that issue. She knows #3 exists because she's seen pages on the computer, it's the "Orphan goes looking for his girlfriend" story (as she puts it), and while there are some gory bits, it's an adventure and not a downbeat, depressing bit of work. There's no way she's seeing #4, because there's some horror stuff in there that I don't think she'd like. She's also been "stealing" my copy of the first Cul De Sac collection lately, and she seems to like it, although she doesn't get a lot of the strips. But she keeps reading it. Kills me to watch her reading comics. You see, there's this kid in my house, right, and she's little and cute and she's ours and she's reading some of them there funnybooks. Who'd have thunk it? Not me. Anyway, off tangent, what else is new. Didn't expect to be posting, but I'm taking a break in-between working on some strip layouts and so there you go and here I go and who knows where it goes. But speaking of the Dick Briefer Frankenstein comics, I read that Fantagraphics has announced a new slate of books, including a reprinting of this material. To which I say sweet, because along with oddballness like Herbie Popnecker and a few other projects, this is a cult series that many folks have wanted to see back in print. Hopefully enough folks out there are interested in order to make it viable for the long haul. Who knows. And it gets better, or worse, if you consider your wallet and shelf space, because FBI's also doing collections of lesser-known 50's horror comics, an Alex Toth collection of his Standard Comics work, a pre-Plastic Man Jack Cole collection, a book on EC cartoonists' work at other companies, and a Basil Wolverton book. So, you folks who are into these sorts of things better start taking a few bills outta your mom's bag or your dad's wallet each and every week because this is gonna be an assault on the cents-less. So many good books, and I'm not half-wise to everything IDW is announcing (I did read about a Polly and Her Pals oversize Sundays collection, apparently a $75 "Champagne Edition" -- hell, I like bells and whistles and all, but give me a decent Budweiser Edition, fer chrissakes!), or Dark Horse, or whoever else is helping grow the pile. Hell, Captain Easy still hasn't debuted, supposedly Walt and Skeezix is getting back on track, the John Stanley library is up and running, more Harvey stuff, more DHC Little Lulu, I mean, holy goodnight! You can't sell a comic book outside of Marvel and DC that isn't Buffy or whatever-related (I oughta know, after seeing the numbers on beasts #1), and they're not even selling a ton of the aforementioned, but somehow scores of classic comic collections are making their way into the world. Not that I'm complaining. It's just so unprecedented and unforeseen; going back a few years, that it's hard to imagine it isn't a geekanerd fever dream. Anyway, I just hope 2010 isn't the dam bursting on the reprint trend and we're not hitting the motherlode overload anytime soon, because at some point this has to start choking shelves and bringing consumers to their financial knees, but while the gettin's good, this is a goddamned Golden Age of great comic gatherings, guys and gals. This is history in the re-packaging, and bears attention. Or maybe it's a sinister alliance with Ikea to sell even more Billy bookcases. So, anybody looking forward to any of this stuff? Anything you've heard about that is of interest? How about them Yankees? No, no Yankees, I don't really care, in fact I really don't care, anti-care, could care less. No Yankees, no NYC mayoral race, no creepy rich people sports of any kind. Just funnybooks, today. Glorious, ridiculous funnybooks. Them I understand. |
kadymae
|
1:33p |
|
kadymae
|
11:11a |
|
kadymae
|
7:05a |
|
sdelmonte
|
9:13a |
|
foenix
|
5:13a |
Black River: Day Four
Made some good progress today. Stumbled across a plot point I wasn't expecting, and I'm about to explain, at least in part, why the story is named what it is. I always hate these parts of stories. I feel like they're terribly boring, nothing is happening, and pray that my characters and dialogue are interesting enough while I spend too much time establishing geography and people. ;) J Current Music: Dangerous Toys - Demon Bell (The Ballad Of Horace Pinker) |
[ << Previous 25 ]
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
schung1968's Friends Page
