This is becoming a rather pleasant tradition of mine. On Fridays I got to books a million prowl the shelves and find things I want to read and then enjoy them. Lots of things I am curious about but not really curious enough to buy.
So without any further ado.
Red Hulk/Green Hulk books 1&2- Loeb is a superstar writer, or so I am told. I read the Ultimatum book by him though. Utter shit. Utter utter shit, and what the fuck is with all the cannibalism? Jesus christ it is just gets distasteful after awhile. Anyway who cares. This is about the hulk books. The Hulk is a charecter that has always interested me. I really like the idea of it, a brilliant scientist turned into a hulking green moron whenever he gets angry. It deals with all sorts of ideas like interalization, repression, anger, and there is a beautiful sort of exerstential horror to it all. The hulk is less of a hero, or a villian but more of a charecter, a living force of nature who can potentially destroy the planet just as easily as he can save it. Its an amazing concept. Even more interesting is that there is a whole family of gamma irridated people who run around, some of them look out for each other other times they fight. Together though they are all cursed with this debilitating thing that keeps everyone on the run or ostracized. Unfortunatly it is bungled by just about every writer. Loeb being no exception. There is hardly any interplay between Banner and the hulk, and when there is it is always hightly overwrought. Like handwringing cyclopse shit. Ugh. The rest of the marvel universe also gets treated exceptionally poorly throughout the book. Thor for example. No one can pick up Thor's hammer. So Red Hulk instead just sort of jumps with it into space so he can throw it there, since you know there is no gravity. See that is just stupid. Thor is a god, son of both Odin and Gaia. He doesn't need to bend to rules like that. Like the way he flies, it doesn't really make sense. So all the sudden making his hammer vulnerable to gravity is, well it is hulk fan service.
Oh well. Despite all the bitching I just did I read both books cover to cover and enjoyed myself. They are mindless and involve a lot of people hitting each other and blah blah blah. Also the identity of the red hulk actually forms a decenently compelling mystery, along with the question of Doc Samson's true motives. The fight scenes are fun and I dunno I enjoyed it. Its just that it could be so much better. It could have real depth and horror to it. Instead it is exactly the opposite. Oh well.
In other news...The Deadpool/Thunderbolts crossover? What the fuck! Andy Diggle should be perfect for the thunderbolts, but he isn't. It is crap. I don't understand why so many people love Deadpool so much. I guess it is the whole "we are 12" sort of thing. I don't know I read the whole thing but it was PAINFUL.
I didn't get a chance to read The Secret Warriors though which made me upset because it looks exciting. Oh well next time then.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Sorry Local Buissness
I'm not a good person but I do random little things that help me pretend that I am. One of those things is today I tried to support my local used books stores. There are two of them near me, one right on the way to the other and so I was excited at the prospect of being able to pick up some books I wanted to read cheaply and quickly. Instead I was bitterly let down.
BITTERLY!
I wanted a copy of The Road. I loved what I read of Blood Meridian and sasha loved The Road so I figgue I should pick it up, and I should do it for cheaper than 15 bucks, which is the price of a new book now and days. What the fuck is all that about? Both of the books stores, were, well they were just a plain old disapointment. They were both really small, and amazingly they both had an almost identical selection of books. It was creepy. I noticed something else about the both of them, they were both closed on mondays, and they both closed up at 5.
I've talked about it before and I will do it again. Small businesses can survive. They can survive things like walmart and amazon. However, they have to want it. Wanting it doesn't mean closing at 5. II mean come on I am their target customer, a crap job working ninja badass who doesn't shoplift but still hates paying 15 bucks for a book. They need to be open later if they are going to be able to cater to people like me. Subterranian books had the right idea but its gone now.
Oh well. So it looks like I am back to ordering used books off of amazon. I mean these used books come from small buisnesses so I don't feel that bad about it. And I mean nothing stops these local folks from listing on Amazon and Half.com.
See the thing is I do like sifting through stacks of books, and I do like hanging around stores and stuff. Sadly though, these stores just aren't cutting it. My eccentric needs aside, they just don't have what I need/want/desire and the interent does at the same price. I hope they wisen up enough to offload some of their stock on the interwebs. One store who is run by a little old lady will not. The other store who is run by some guy just might. I hope so. Best of luck to you kids.
In a strange side note today I was reminded of vacationing in the outerbanks with my Dad and step mom. The outer banks is an area that is almost compleatly tourist driven, and that place had more used book stores per capita than anywhere else in the world. Okay that may not be true but it certainly seemed like it. They were everywhere and they all had this dizzying collection of stuff. To be fair though there wasn't much to do on that island other than read, swim, and minature golf. I don't think most of the houses had tv and if they did there was no cable. So there were books everywhere. Out there is where I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amtiville Horror, and the Excorcist. The first two books actually changed my life they were absolutly fantastic reads. The Exorcist was kind of lame actually.
Anyway, we would spend hours scouring these stores looking for things to read and I would find all sorts of stuff that interested me, but I never picked up. Like this crazy series about one man's adventure in a post apocalyptic wasteland. It was pure 70s grindhouse pulp, it was a series that went on forever, there must of been over 20 books, and they all looked terrible. I wanted them so much but I was afraid my parents would say no. They aren't around now though so I'm thinking it is time to go looking for them.
BITTERLY!
I wanted a copy of The Road. I loved what I read of Blood Meridian and sasha loved The Road so I figgue I should pick it up, and I should do it for cheaper than 15 bucks, which is the price of a new book now and days. What the fuck is all that about? Both of the books stores, were, well they were just a plain old disapointment. They were both really small, and amazingly they both had an almost identical selection of books. It was creepy. I noticed something else about the both of them, they were both closed on mondays, and they both closed up at 5.
I've talked about it before and I will do it again. Small businesses can survive. They can survive things like walmart and amazon. However, they have to want it. Wanting it doesn't mean closing at 5. II mean come on I am their target customer, a crap job working ninja badass who doesn't shoplift but still hates paying 15 bucks for a book. They need to be open later if they are going to be able to cater to people like me. Subterranian books had the right idea but its gone now.
Oh well. So it looks like I am back to ordering used books off of amazon. I mean these used books come from small buisnesses so I don't feel that bad about it. And I mean nothing stops these local folks from listing on Amazon and Half.com.
See the thing is I do like sifting through stacks of books, and I do like hanging around stores and stuff. Sadly though, these stores just aren't cutting it. My eccentric needs aside, they just don't have what I need/want/desire and the interent does at the same price. I hope they wisen up enough to offload some of their stock on the interwebs. One store who is run by a little old lady will not. The other store who is run by some guy just might. I hope so. Best of luck to you kids.
In a strange side note today I was reminded of vacationing in the outerbanks with my Dad and step mom. The outer banks is an area that is almost compleatly tourist driven, and that place had more used book stores per capita than anywhere else in the world. Okay that may not be true but it certainly seemed like it. They were everywhere and they all had this dizzying collection of stuff. To be fair though there wasn't much to do on that island other than read, swim, and minature golf. I don't think most of the houses had tv and if they did there was no cable. So there were books everywhere. Out there is where I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amtiville Horror, and the Excorcist. The first two books actually changed my life they were absolutly fantastic reads. The Exorcist was kind of lame actually.
Anyway, we would spend hours scouring these stores looking for things to read and I would find all sorts of stuff that interested me, but I never picked up. Like this crazy series about one man's adventure in a post apocalyptic wasteland. It was pure 70s grindhouse pulp, it was a series that went on forever, there must of been over 20 books, and they all looked terrible. I wanted them so much but I was afraid my parents would say no. They aren't around now though so I'm thinking it is time to go looking for them.
Wanted
Wanted. Terrible movie. However, it is based off of a graphic novel by Mark Millar. I like Millar, he has a keen eye for widescreen, easy to follow, exciting combat. When he took over the Authority he made that comic sing. He also has a severely nasty side, a part of him which is just plain old flat out mean. It makes for a fun read. It also makes Wanted what it is.
What is it? Well that's complicated. See I am excited by little life improvement sorts of things. Movies like The Shipping News, American Beauty, The Ref, really strike a chord with me. Funny Kevin Spacey seems to really dominate that genra. Anyway, the idea that someone, usually a man, wakes up one day hates his life, and changes it. In American Beauty he decides to change it for himself. In The Shipping News he gets a tremendous amount of help from his Aunt...oh hey Fight Club fits in there. Then this person sets out to become something diffrent. Something that doesn't conform to societal norms, or just people rebelling against the rut that life has set them in. I like stories like this.
Wanted is kind of like that. Except it has that crappy 00 rock turned up to 11 the whole time, everything is about murder and sex, and money. The story is about an over privalaged 23 year old boy with confrontation issues. In essance he is a looser. The thing is that he never stops being a loser, he is more of a loser who can kill anyone though. I never once like him, and I am immeaditly more interested by the people around him. At one point he wonders why exactly he just decided to kill an entire police station, and someone has to tell him that it is okay to just sit around all day and watch tv sometimes. Everything doesn't have to be eXtreme. It doesn't really seem to stick though.
No matter. I set the stage well enough. The point is that the book makes no bones about the fact that the main charecter is a fucktart. It just so happens that he is a fucktart who comes into his own. Most of the stuff in this genra gets all preachy about how the stuff we own owns us, we need to live life to the fullest, or some sort of thing like that. Wanted doesn't do that. The charecter is immeadiatly given everything he could ever need want or desire and with nothing out of reach he chooses to be an asshole, and the book is okay with that. To be fair he was a looser first.
There is something about Wanted that should bother me. Like how Juvenile it is, or how fascinated with itself it can be, or something along those lines. Yet it has a sort of critical honesty with itself. Something you just don't see very often. While the message isn't very uplifting, happy, or soulful, it realizes that it is a book about a prick being a bigger prick and it is perfectly okay with that. Somehow I manage to respect that. Its strange just about every instinct inside of me screams out that I should detest this book. I should be ashamed I own it and I should mistrust anyone who likes it, and yet at the end up the day I like it myself far to much to be able to condem anyone else for reading it. Weird.
What is it? Well that's complicated. See I am excited by little life improvement sorts of things. Movies like The Shipping News, American Beauty, The Ref, really strike a chord with me. Funny Kevin Spacey seems to really dominate that genra. Anyway, the idea that someone, usually a man, wakes up one day hates his life, and changes it. In American Beauty he decides to change it for himself. In The Shipping News he gets a tremendous amount of help from his Aunt...oh hey Fight Club fits in there. Then this person sets out to become something diffrent. Something that doesn't conform to societal norms, or just people rebelling against the rut that life has set them in. I like stories like this.
Wanted is kind of like that. Except it has that crappy 00 rock turned up to 11 the whole time, everything is about murder and sex, and money. The story is about an over privalaged 23 year old boy with confrontation issues. In essance he is a looser. The thing is that he never stops being a loser, he is more of a loser who can kill anyone though. I never once like him, and I am immeaditly more interested by the people around him. At one point he wonders why exactly he just decided to kill an entire police station, and someone has to tell him that it is okay to just sit around all day and watch tv sometimes. Everything doesn't have to be eXtreme. It doesn't really seem to stick though.
No matter. I set the stage well enough. The point is that the book makes no bones about the fact that the main charecter is a fucktart. It just so happens that he is a fucktart who comes into his own. Most of the stuff in this genra gets all preachy about how the stuff we own owns us, we need to live life to the fullest, or some sort of thing like that. Wanted doesn't do that. The charecter is immeadiatly given everything he could ever need want or desire and with nothing out of reach he chooses to be an asshole, and the book is okay with that. To be fair he was a looser first.
There is something about Wanted that should bother me. Like how Juvenile it is, or how fascinated with itself it can be, or something along those lines. Yet it has a sort of critical honesty with itself. Something you just don't see very often. While the message isn't very uplifting, happy, or soulful, it realizes that it is a book about a prick being a bigger prick and it is perfectly okay with that. Somehow I manage to respect that. Its strange just about every instinct inside of me screams out that I should detest this book. I should be ashamed I own it and I should mistrust anyone who likes it, and yet at the end up the day I like it myself far to much to be able to condem anyone else for reading it. Weird.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
It is the comic boogaloo!
Comic book roundup!
SO yeah. There are a fuck ton of comics out there. I know I see them, with my own eyes even! I love them very deeply. Well some of them. Some of them are pure crap, and some of them are good for a read or two then to be put back on the shelf and forgotten about. See the nice thing about comic books is that you can read them in about an hour, maybe 2, sometimes longer if you are reading something dense like Watchmen. They are fun though. So I decided awhile ago that despite my love for comics I can’t buy all of them, nor would I want to even if I could. With that in mind I would start reading things in the store. Something I ordinarly detest doing but hey it is amazing what you can get over when you realize you can read something cover to cover and not have to buy it, which is good cause it isn’t worth the money I would have to spend on it.
So here is what I read in the past couple of days.
Scott Pilgrim book 1- Or well most of it. This is a series of books that came to my atension through Time Magazine. Time is good for things like that, even though the beliver was better. I am so resubbing to that for my birthday or maybe after I move. I would make a nice housewarming present that is for sure. Anyway it is a book about a 23 year old guy who is in a go nowhere band, who is jobless, mooches off his room mate, and who is dating a 17 year old girl. This guy is a looser. He also has dreams of this girl who turns out to be real, real hot, fairly interested in our looser main character, and who can use door ways in reality to jump from one place to another. She also has a river of crazy ex-boyfreinds. I wanted to like the book. I really appoched it with a super open mind but the main character just turned me off so hard that I couldn’t stay interested. I didn’t want him to get the girl, either of them. I wanted him to get kicked in the nuts and to have it revealed to him just how much of a fraud he really is. He cheats on his 17 year old and it really bothered me. He seems like the sort of person who I have cleaned up after one to many times. Also when I made a similar mistake I changed my outlook on life radically. He just shouted radical and kept going. There are 5 of these books or so, and they are alright I guess if you can stomach the liquid asshole that is the main character. Oh yeah the art is also ass ugly. So have fun with that. Dunno glad I didn’t buy it.
Secret Invasion- It is a sad fact. The dc universe is more about high concepts and experimental ideas. The secret invasion ran along roughly the same time DC’s Final Crisis did. Final Crisis is about a god who has discovered the anti life equations, the mathematical proof that life is meaningless, and he unleashes it on earth prime. This sends a shockwave through the multiverse which threatens the entire universe, which is sentient by the way. By the end he is sitting in the center of a singularity and the big bad gets shot by batman who is using a bullet that fires backwards through time. Reading final crisis is like kissing an ocean it is impossible for me to fully fathom. There is an army of supermen, ground level invasions, sentient universes, the death of bat man, and just simply mind blowing stuff. By contrast Secret Invasion is about a race of shape shifting aliens who invade earth. The super heros can’t tell who is an alien and who isn’t, chaos happens. The Secret Invasion is interesting for a couple of reasons. One it brings a moral conclusion to the Civil War. When the dust settles everyone realizes that the superhero registration thing was a stupid idea. At the end of the day though it is a just a bunch of super heros pointing fingers at each other, punching each other, then punching aliens. They all get together save the day, and The Green Goblin gets put in charge of all of the earth’s security. Yep even though he is bat shit crazy. It could have been good. It could have been great in fact, but the skrulls weren’t developed enough to be interesting, and the heros spent way to much time being confused about everything,. All in all it was a really LONG really lame event. Oh well. It did usher in the Dark Reign a time with Normal in control and that, that my friends is something I find intensly interesting.
Dark Reign Fantastic 4: I picked this up because I want to like the Fantastic 4 but I don’t know where to start reading them. They are reffered to as Marvel’s first family and for very good reason. They have been around for almost as long as Marvel has and they bring a lot of history with them. Like I said I am really interested but I am unsure where to begin. This book was a good choice though. Written by Jonnathan Hickman of Nightly News fame, Mr. Hickman’s run picks up right after Norman takes power, and the first thing he tries to do is to bring the FF to heel. It is reminiscent of right after the civil war when Tony tried to bring people in line. It really delineated between the marvel have and have nots, There are pleanty of people who just simply can’t match Tony in power. Then there are people like Thor who threw Tony across a city when Tony tried to bully him. This is the same thing only Norman is a bastard.
The thing about the FF though is that they aren’t really super heros. Not in the traditional sense. They are more exploreres than anything else. If you had to take all the concepts of star trek and boil them down in to a comic starring 4 charecters it would be the FF. So while Norman Osborn is trying to threaten them with legal action they are lost in compressed space time as a result of Reed Richards building a machine that lets him see alternate realities. He blames himself for the skrull invasion. Granted it is partly his fault so some blame is warrented. So by looking into alternate realities he tries to see if he can find a sequence of decisions that would of ended peacefully. There weren’t many, and in all of the good ones he acted alone, without consulting anyone. Of course sometimes when he acted alone he came up with some terrifying results, like killing several of his friends, or taking away all super powers from everyone, or giving super powers to everyone. The point being he acted alone. While he is looking into this the rest of his family is lost in alternate compressed space time realities, I am litterally dazzled by how cool some of the alternate realities were. Everything had a cool steam punk like aethetic to it and it went from knights, to pirates, to the wild west, to ww2, and it was pretty fricking awesome. The sheer wild creativity displayed means this is a book that I definatly want to keep up and I more than certainly want the rest of the run. Oh yeah and in an amazing couple of moments Reed’s kids totally fuck with Norman Osborn it is pretty epicly cool and well worth buying/reading.
Iron Man: World’s Most Wanted- Yeah I read this too. This is another Dark Reign book. Post Civil war Iron Man was in charge of everything, right in time for his movie to come out too. Now he has fallen from grace and is literally the most wanted man in the world. You’d think it would be more interesting to read about, but it wasn’t. Basicly it was just Tony running and gunning, whining about how his technology is behind the curve, and he destroys his brain. The whole technology thing, man that really started to get tiresome after awhile. As soon as someone popped up you would hear first about hot Tony’s designs are better, how he isn’t using his snazzy designs, so he has to use crap weaponry or something like that. It happens 3 times, all one right after the other and it started to drive me a little nuts after awhile. The core idea is cool, a super genius, with the world’s most valuable database trapped in his skull, on the run from literally everyone. It could be all sorts of cool manuvers where he outsmarts people at the last second running from secret base to secret base, doing all sorts of cool things. See that happens, but instead of him oursmarting anyone he is on the ropes constantly and he is relentlessly complaining the whole time about his shitty technology. Christ. Not a good book. It is especially not good when Norman steals the stage from he title character. I found myself far more interested in his movements and actions than any of Tony’s. After awhile I was reading more to see what Norman would do, and I didn’t really care what Tony did.
This is mostly because I knew what he would do. Complain, fight for a bit, then run. Norman however? Now that man is crazy, unpredictable, and when written correctly he is downright scary. Good stuff.
Okay I am tired of doing this, but Dark Avengers is worth buying cause it is awesome. Ultimatum is all the crap that people made it out to be, read at your own risk, Hulk Red/Green is surprisingly not shitty. It isn’t great but it isn’t bad.
Okay I am done.
SO yeah. There are a fuck ton of comics out there. I know I see them, with my own eyes even! I love them very deeply. Well some of them. Some of them are pure crap, and some of them are good for a read or two then to be put back on the shelf and forgotten about. See the nice thing about comic books is that you can read them in about an hour, maybe 2, sometimes longer if you are reading something dense like Watchmen. They are fun though. So I decided awhile ago that despite my love for comics I can’t buy all of them, nor would I want to even if I could. With that in mind I would start reading things in the store. Something I ordinarly detest doing but hey it is amazing what you can get over when you realize you can read something cover to cover and not have to buy it, which is good cause it isn’t worth the money I would have to spend on it.
So here is what I read in the past couple of days.
Scott Pilgrim book 1- Or well most of it. This is a series of books that came to my atension through Time Magazine. Time is good for things like that, even though the beliver was better. I am so resubbing to that for my birthday or maybe after I move. I would make a nice housewarming present that is for sure. Anyway it is a book about a 23 year old guy who is in a go nowhere band, who is jobless, mooches off his room mate, and who is dating a 17 year old girl. This guy is a looser. He also has dreams of this girl who turns out to be real, real hot, fairly interested in our looser main character, and who can use door ways in reality to jump from one place to another. She also has a river of crazy ex-boyfreinds. I wanted to like the book. I really appoched it with a super open mind but the main character just turned me off so hard that I couldn’t stay interested. I didn’t want him to get the girl, either of them. I wanted him to get kicked in the nuts and to have it revealed to him just how much of a fraud he really is. He cheats on his 17 year old and it really bothered me. He seems like the sort of person who I have cleaned up after one to many times. Also when I made a similar mistake I changed my outlook on life radically. He just shouted radical and kept going. There are 5 of these books or so, and they are alright I guess if you can stomach the liquid asshole that is the main character. Oh yeah the art is also ass ugly. So have fun with that. Dunno glad I didn’t buy it.
Secret Invasion- It is a sad fact. The dc universe is more about high concepts and experimental ideas. The secret invasion ran along roughly the same time DC’s Final Crisis did. Final Crisis is about a god who has discovered the anti life equations, the mathematical proof that life is meaningless, and he unleashes it on earth prime. This sends a shockwave through the multiverse which threatens the entire universe, which is sentient by the way. By the end he is sitting in the center of a singularity and the big bad gets shot by batman who is using a bullet that fires backwards through time. Reading final crisis is like kissing an ocean it is impossible for me to fully fathom. There is an army of supermen, ground level invasions, sentient universes, the death of bat man, and just simply mind blowing stuff. By contrast Secret Invasion is about a race of shape shifting aliens who invade earth. The super heros can’t tell who is an alien and who isn’t, chaos happens. The Secret Invasion is interesting for a couple of reasons. One it brings a moral conclusion to the Civil War. When the dust settles everyone realizes that the superhero registration thing was a stupid idea. At the end of the day though it is a just a bunch of super heros pointing fingers at each other, punching each other, then punching aliens. They all get together save the day, and The Green Goblin gets put in charge of all of the earth’s security. Yep even though he is bat shit crazy. It could have been good. It could have been great in fact, but the skrulls weren’t developed enough to be interesting, and the heros spent way to much time being confused about everything,. All in all it was a really LONG really lame event. Oh well. It did usher in the Dark Reign a time with Normal in control and that, that my friends is something I find intensly interesting.
Dark Reign Fantastic 4: I picked this up because I want to like the Fantastic 4 but I don’t know where to start reading them. They are reffered to as Marvel’s first family and for very good reason. They have been around for almost as long as Marvel has and they bring a lot of history with them. Like I said I am really interested but I am unsure where to begin. This book was a good choice though. Written by Jonnathan Hickman of Nightly News fame, Mr. Hickman’s run picks up right after Norman takes power, and the first thing he tries to do is to bring the FF to heel. It is reminiscent of right after the civil war when Tony tried to bring people in line. It really delineated between the marvel have and have nots, There are pleanty of people who just simply can’t match Tony in power. Then there are people like Thor who threw Tony across a city when Tony tried to bully him. This is the same thing only Norman is a bastard.
The thing about the FF though is that they aren’t really super heros. Not in the traditional sense. They are more exploreres than anything else. If you had to take all the concepts of star trek and boil them down in to a comic starring 4 charecters it would be the FF. So while Norman Osborn is trying to threaten them with legal action they are lost in compressed space time as a result of Reed Richards building a machine that lets him see alternate realities. He blames himself for the skrull invasion. Granted it is partly his fault so some blame is warrented. So by looking into alternate realities he tries to see if he can find a sequence of decisions that would of ended peacefully. There weren’t many, and in all of the good ones he acted alone, without consulting anyone. Of course sometimes when he acted alone he came up with some terrifying results, like killing several of his friends, or taking away all super powers from everyone, or giving super powers to everyone. The point being he acted alone. While he is looking into this the rest of his family is lost in alternate compressed space time realities, I am litterally dazzled by how cool some of the alternate realities were. Everything had a cool steam punk like aethetic to it and it went from knights, to pirates, to the wild west, to ww2, and it was pretty fricking awesome. The sheer wild creativity displayed means this is a book that I definatly want to keep up and I more than certainly want the rest of the run. Oh yeah and in an amazing couple of moments Reed’s kids totally fuck with Norman Osborn it is pretty epicly cool and well worth buying/reading.
Iron Man: World’s Most Wanted- Yeah I read this too. This is another Dark Reign book. Post Civil war Iron Man was in charge of everything, right in time for his movie to come out too. Now he has fallen from grace and is literally the most wanted man in the world. You’d think it would be more interesting to read about, but it wasn’t. Basicly it was just Tony running and gunning, whining about how his technology is behind the curve, and he destroys his brain. The whole technology thing, man that really started to get tiresome after awhile. As soon as someone popped up you would hear first about hot Tony’s designs are better, how he isn’t using his snazzy designs, so he has to use crap weaponry or something like that. It happens 3 times, all one right after the other and it started to drive me a little nuts after awhile. The core idea is cool, a super genius, with the world’s most valuable database trapped in his skull, on the run from literally everyone. It could be all sorts of cool manuvers where he outsmarts people at the last second running from secret base to secret base, doing all sorts of cool things. See that happens, but instead of him oursmarting anyone he is on the ropes constantly and he is relentlessly complaining the whole time about his shitty technology. Christ. Not a good book. It is especially not good when Norman steals the stage from he title character. I found myself far more interested in his movements and actions than any of Tony’s. After awhile I was reading more to see what Norman would do, and I didn’t really care what Tony did.
This is mostly because I knew what he would do. Complain, fight for a bit, then run. Norman however? Now that man is crazy, unpredictable, and when written correctly he is downright scary. Good stuff.
Okay I am tired of doing this, but Dark Avengers is worth buying cause it is awesome. Ultimatum is all the crap that people made it out to be, read at your own risk, Hulk Red/Green is surprisingly not shitty. It isn’t great but it isn’t bad.
Okay I am done.
Somethings man was not meant to know
It’s a matter of perspective I guess. I don’t know. I was once talking with this one girl over the internet and she said to me, “You work really hard to be who you are”. It struck me as a funny thing to say then I realized how true it was. Then I realized how little work most people put into themselves. I bring this up because new years just happened, there was great celebration, lots of setting off of lame fire works, and other silly bullshit. Then immediately the world put its pants back on and got back to work. This is a time of renewal for some people. People look back on the past year or even decade and realize that they need to make changes and that they should start now. This is where the divide starts to happen. I do something like that every couple of months. I constantly look out for things I don’t like about myself and I change them. I try to stay “stuck in a rut” as little as possible and I do make a concerted effort to use my time as productively as possible. For example, I realized last month I was watching WAY to much TV and I wasn’t being an active watcher while I was doing it. That shit was put to an end and I was back on track. Reading more, writing more, eating more, doing more et cetera. I do have some serious road blocks, or rather things I just don’t know how to get around. Like socializing more. I don’t know how I’d do that even if I wanted to. Okay I do. Start drinking and go hang out at the Azelia. Or hell I could just grab a coke and hang out there. Bring my baby lap top and start writing there on a regular basis. Easy as pie. So never mind I do know how. I don’t want to though and that’s the point.
The point is that new years doesn’t make sense to me. I mean so what the earth is billions of years old, humanity is hundreds of years old, we pocess the technology to end world hunger but not the social maturity, we hate people who look different, we have the word hate period, there is still religious persicution, and more people care about the winning football team than the government who is trying to make everyone’s lives better. The thing is though it might fail. That’s scary. Still we all feel a need to celebrate to pat ourselves on the back and be all happy that the year has happened. It isn’t that I disagree with this, or anything like that at all. I think it is great, and a little more fellowship and comradery amongst people is a nice thing. It is just that the idea of New Years is a concept that is fundamentally alien to me. I don’t understand it. I can’t see it as anything more that a sad excuse to party, a pathetic cry for help, and a time for people to make resolutions they don’t intend on following. I mean seriously if they really wanted to do any of the crap most people resolve to do they would just do it, and not need some sort of special date to make the occation.
I realize it isn’t like that for everyone. Hell it might not be like that for anyone. But when I said that it is a view that is fundamentally alien from my own I wasn’t joking at all. It really really is. I don’t get it. I don’t think I ever will. I’ll admit though some of it is due to lack of trying. New Years seems to fit this social need for people that I’ve transcended. Okay transcended is a bad word, it makes me sound super arrogant. Moved past I guess is better. Hell this whole thing makes me sound super arrogant and I don’t mean it to. I really don’t. I look at the people who all rush out on new years and they see and feel something special, something grand, something that I just don’t see. I don’t see it at all, and that’s a little bit sad to me. Then again though my life is filled with 75 pounds of beauty. I realize I don’t write about it enough. Like the woman I saw clutching her head, or how pretty I find my street, or how I like the way certain words are structured, the art I look at, and the people I surround myself with. I laugh, and shout a lot. Even if I am by myself and to me, that is okay. This is something I am find with.
I don’t really celebrate any holidays. It has to do with my family and how I had to spread them out, and hurt my parents. I realized this awhile ago and that is the sort of thing that sticks with you for the rest of your life. It is a sad sad thing. Perhaps my inability to enjoy New Years is part of that. No matter though. I run, jump, and laugh ten times harder than just about anyone else I know, and I deal with 50% less shit as a result. Woo! It is one of those things I guess, nothing can be done about it cept just keep moving on. There is a stream of worries waiting in 2010, I’m going to start tackling them though with the same vicous force I’ve been using all along. I don’t need to wait for a mile stone to make things happen, neither does anyone else. Ah whatever. I hope everyone that actually enjoys the damn thing had a happy new year’s eve. I know I did.
Oh and zombies is last decade. This decade it is all about the sea monsters. Spread the word.
The point is that new years doesn’t make sense to me. I mean so what the earth is billions of years old, humanity is hundreds of years old, we pocess the technology to end world hunger but not the social maturity, we hate people who look different, we have the word hate period, there is still religious persicution, and more people care about the winning football team than the government who is trying to make everyone’s lives better. The thing is though it might fail. That’s scary. Still we all feel a need to celebrate to pat ourselves on the back and be all happy that the year has happened. It isn’t that I disagree with this, or anything like that at all. I think it is great, and a little more fellowship and comradery amongst people is a nice thing. It is just that the idea of New Years is a concept that is fundamentally alien to me. I don’t understand it. I can’t see it as anything more that a sad excuse to party, a pathetic cry for help, and a time for people to make resolutions they don’t intend on following. I mean seriously if they really wanted to do any of the crap most people resolve to do they would just do it, and not need some sort of special date to make the occation.
I realize it isn’t like that for everyone. Hell it might not be like that for anyone. But when I said that it is a view that is fundamentally alien from my own I wasn’t joking at all. It really really is. I don’t get it. I don’t think I ever will. I’ll admit though some of it is due to lack of trying. New Years seems to fit this social need for people that I’ve transcended. Okay transcended is a bad word, it makes me sound super arrogant. Moved past I guess is better. Hell this whole thing makes me sound super arrogant and I don’t mean it to. I really don’t. I look at the people who all rush out on new years and they see and feel something special, something grand, something that I just don’t see. I don’t see it at all, and that’s a little bit sad to me. Then again though my life is filled with 75 pounds of beauty. I realize I don’t write about it enough. Like the woman I saw clutching her head, or how pretty I find my street, or how I like the way certain words are structured, the art I look at, and the people I surround myself with. I laugh, and shout a lot. Even if I am by myself and to me, that is okay. This is something I am find with.
I don’t really celebrate any holidays. It has to do with my family and how I had to spread them out, and hurt my parents. I realized this awhile ago and that is the sort of thing that sticks with you for the rest of your life. It is a sad sad thing. Perhaps my inability to enjoy New Years is part of that. No matter though. I run, jump, and laugh ten times harder than just about anyone else I know, and I deal with 50% less shit as a result. Woo! It is one of those things I guess, nothing can be done about it cept just keep moving on. There is a stream of worries waiting in 2010, I’m going to start tackling them though with the same vicous force I’ve been using all along. I don’t need to wait for a mile stone to make things happen, neither does anyone else. Ah whatever. I hope everyone that actually enjoys the damn thing had a happy new year’s eve. I know I did.
Oh and zombies is last decade. This decade it is all about the sea monsters. Spread the word.
January Preview!
January Outlook- So this is a new thing. Not really entirely a new thing but more of a variation of an old thing. In combnination with the month in review I also want to start doing a monthly preview of sorts. Or more of come up with a list of things I want to do, start doing or need to do. Something like that. I am not sure what sort of form it is going to take but I figure if I start now I’ll be able to get a move on.
So what do I have planned for January. Well first of all my lease is up in Febuary, and I’d like to move. It isn’t so much that I don’t like where I am living now. I mean I was never supposed to live here for longer than a year, but it grew on me. I love the road I live on, it is an absolutely beautiful road. My neighbors are quiet and nice for the most part. Some of them are poor though. They aren’t poor because of lack of money but rather lack of an ability to put what little money they have to work for them. They feel they are victem of circumstance and they keep allowing themselves to be vicemized by circumstance instead of taking the horse by the reins so to speak. It is a tricky dangerous topic and it really only applies to a couple of people so lets move away from it. Long story short this place has grown on me, and the location is absolutely perfect. It is just that the individual unit I live in is just so shitty. At this point every window leaks. Every single one. The roof in the back bed room leaks, and because of the pit of dirt all around us the whole place is dirty. So it is time to go now. I’ve only done something like this once before and I am worried about it. I am not good about stuff like this and I wish I had someone around to guide me. I don’t. No one I trust that is. So I am going it alone. It’s strange I know people who can do this sort of thing effortlessly but they can bearly tie their shoes. We all have our achillies heels I suppose. From the looks of things I’ll be sticking with the trailer life. This is fine with me. Tuesday and Wensday I am going to go looking at places, Craige’s list makes this sort of shit easy as pie.
As a result writing and other projects might be a little light. I find this sort of thing stressful.
As for my writing projects I want to get at least one part of the PPP written in big boy voice. That means pictures and everything. I think I am going to start with something simple and go with the deifinitions and breaking down some of the misconceptions about pornography. I’ll be starting with softcore and working my way up. I plan on doing several compariosons with art to actual paintings. Famous ones! I want to talk about representations and the different ways we interact with representations and how they cause us to both enter into and interact with a hyper real state. It is going to be a lot of fun, it also might be an unmitigated disaster. So we’ll see.
I also want to get a couple of more SLA bpns written and put together. I also want to run at least one game session this month. Depending on how things go with moving that may or may not be possible. Hrm I need to figure out how to take apart my damn futon. I can dismantle just about anything putting back together however? Ah well. This thing sucks I might just ground score a mattress.
Comic wise? To the best of my knowledge nothing new comes out that is on my must buy now list. The new walking dead book maybe? Maybe. I dunno. I need to save my pennies because next month the new VTES expansion comes out and I plan on hugging it to death. With knives!
Gaming wise I want to get better with Rufus and to figure out what I want to do video gaming wise. Really? Right now I am at an impass. I don’t want either next gen system and getting a new computer is really not something in the cards. Right now? I think I’ll just save my moneies. I would like to play DMC4 before I give him back his 360.
I was going to say I wanted to start hitting up used book stores and getting some books but if I am going to be moving that is a retarded idea. Ah what the hell though, I have enough milk crates for everything. It shouldn’t be a problem. Specifically I want more McCarthy books. I’ve only read half of Blood Meridian before ADDing out of it. I have a hankering to start reading again and that is what I’ve settled on. I feel like a bit of a kunt because I still have stuff I grabbed from Sasha as she was moving. However, I am a man of strong desires and I feel no need to ignore them in this particular instance. Asides, I promised myself I would start reading more, and it worked swimmingly! The problem? I can’t keep up. Especially if I am going to be buying new books. So first I am going to see what I can get from used book stores. Half.com is nice but once you factor in shipping most times you only save a couple of bucks. So! Like I said off I go. Sasha called it to my atension the other day that my copy of A Clockwork Orange is missing. Which is sad I like that book a lot. Okay well that seems like everything I need to say for this month. I’m going to be really disappointed with myself if I don’t successfully move.
Oh hey yeah I want to hit the fiction writing again. I’ll figure that out latter in the month. I might want to weave that in with the SLA stuff or something. I dunno.
Okay now I am done. Lets see how things go in the monthly review.
So what do I have planned for January. Well first of all my lease is up in Febuary, and I’d like to move. It isn’t so much that I don’t like where I am living now. I mean I was never supposed to live here for longer than a year, but it grew on me. I love the road I live on, it is an absolutely beautiful road. My neighbors are quiet and nice for the most part. Some of them are poor though. They aren’t poor because of lack of money but rather lack of an ability to put what little money they have to work for them. They feel they are victem of circumstance and they keep allowing themselves to be vicemized by circumstance instead of taking the horse by the reins so to speak. It is a tricky dangerous topic and it really only applies to a couple of people so lets move away from it. Long story short this place has grown on me, and the location is absolutely perfect. It is just that the individual unit I live in is just so shitty. At this point every window leaks. Every single one. The roof in the back bed room leaks, and because of the pit of dirt all around us the whole place is dirty. So it is time to go now. I’ve only done something like this once before and I am worried about it. I am not good about stuff like this and I wish I had someone around to guide me. I don’t. No one I trust that is. So I am going it alone. It’s strange I know people who can do this sort of thing effortlessly but they can bearly tie their shoes. We all have our achillies heels I suppose. From the looks of things I’ll be sticking with the trailer life. This is fine with me. Tuesday and Wensday I am going to go looking at places, Craige’s list makes this sort of shit easy as pie.
As a result writing and other projects might be a little light. I find this sort of thing stressful.
As for my writing projects I want to get at least one part of the PPP written in big boy voice. That means pictures and everything. I think I am going to start with something simple and go with the deifinitions and breaking down some of the misconceptions about pornography. I’ll be starting with softcore and working my way up. I plan on doing several compariosons with art to actual paintings. Famous ones! I want to talk about representations and the different ways we interact with representations and how they cause us to both enter into and interact with a hyper real state. It is going to be a lot of fun, it also might be an unmitigated disaster. So we’ll see.
I also want to get a couple of more SLA bpns written and put together. I also want to run at least one game session this month. Depending on how things go with moving that may or may not be possible. Hrm I need to figure out how to take apart my damn futon. I can dismantle just about anything putting back together however? Ah well. This thing sucks I might just ground score a mattress.
Comic wise? To the best of my knowledge nothing new comes out that is on my must buy now list. The new walking dead book maybe? Maybe. I dunno. I need to save my pennies because next month the new VTES expansion comes out and I plan on hugging it to death. With knives!
Gaming wise I want to get better with Rufus and to figure out what I want to do video gaming wise. Really? Right now I am at an impass. I don’t want either next gen system and getting a new computer is really not something in the cards. Right now? I think I’ll just save my moneies. I would like to play DMC4 before I give him back his 360.
I was going to say I wanted to start hitting up used book stores and getting some books but if I am going to be moving that is a retarded idea. Ah what the hell though, I have enough milk crates for everything. It shouldn’t be a problem. Specifically I want more McCarthy books. I’ve only read half of Blood Meridian before ADDing out of it. I have a hankering to start reading again and that is what I’ve settled on. I feel like a bit of a kunt because I still have stuff I grabbed from Sasha as she was moving. However, I am a man of strong desires and I feel no need to ignore them in this particular instance. Asides, I promised myself I would start reading more, and it worked swimmingly! The problem? I can’t keep up. Especially if I am going to be buying new books. So first I am going to see what I can get from used book stores. Half.com is nice but once you factor in shipping most times you only save a couple of bucks. So! Like I said off I go. Sasha called it to my atension the other day that my copy of A Clockwork Orange is missing. Which is sad I like that book a lot. Okay well that seems like everything I need to say for this month. I’m going to be really disappointed with myself if I don’t successfully move.
Oh hey yeah I want to hit the fiction writing again. I’ll figure that out latter in the month. I might want to weave that in with the SLA stuff or something. I dunno.
Okay now I am done. Lets see how things go in the monthly review.
Friday, January 1, 2010
December in Review
So now then. December totally happened, no matter how much I want to believe it wouldn't. Lets review shall we?
Blog wise, 16 entries. Some of them were shorter than usual. Four of them were angry rants. The one about parenting was paticularly unfocused. Evan wrote his own response to it in his own blog. Ultimately I fell victim to the same thing the writer of the article did. It is also a subject that hits a little close to home to me, after all I more or less raised myself with my parents making guest appearances. It is also a sticking point for me. I see SO many people who are just unable to handle life, myself included. Maybe I am just angry at my inability to do basic things like get an apartment by myself. Who knows. At the end of the day I am still 16 and my parents suck.
The religion one was just weird for me.
I liked the your pal the president thing. It was a nice fairly solid two part blog entry. What I really need to do is to read less time and more Harpers/Atlantic/Foreign Affairs and do commentary on articles like I did with the president thing...only you know on really good articles. I dunno. We'll see, right now I am in the middle of my own thing. Speaking of which at the end of the month I start getting some nice solid brain work done on that, that's nice.
I aborted the whole let's play Dwarf Fortress thing because doing a season by season update of that game doesn't interest me. It is needlessly time consuming. Still taking time out and outlining what is going on in the fortress was a lot of fun. I want to do another one now that it is further along. I just went through my second siege and it went rather hilariously.
Unpublished, I wrote up two SLA bpns. That is quite a bit of writting actually. I plan on putting them up in the licking the subconsious blog once I run them. Or sooner if I just sort of feel like it. What I think I am going to do is publish the session and then in the comments post what actually happens. Cause you know the two things are compleatly diffrent from each other.
Okay that about takes care of the writing all in all a pretty good month. Lets move onto the life thing.
So I realized earlyer this month I was enimic, aenimic...fuckit iron deficient. I was like that all november too. Basicly I would come home from work and some nights I would just literally pass out for an hour. Then I would wake up fit as a fiddle and carry about my buisness. After a month and a half of that I decided to worry. Then thinking about the problem logically it sounded like an iron deficiency. So I picked up a multi vitamin with iron in it and started taking it every day. Wouldn't you know it? The shit cleared right up. Hasn't happened once since I've been vitamen enhanced. The solution was almost to simple. Though I suppose it is nice to have one or two things that aren't a struggle.
I also go into a nasty habit. See feeling tired and crappy after work I would come straight home instead of writting, watch Star Trek the next generation, and then go do something else. The problem is that that I started watching more and more star trek, sometimes I'd spend three hours a night on that shit. Now I am not adverse to a little tv watching but twords the end I just had it on while I was looking at pictures on the internet. That's when I pulled the plug. About that time the iron thing happened and I started getting back on track. A couple of days later I started serious construction on the post modern pornography project. Of course it might not of happened if every fucking store wasn't spamming christmas music but whatever! We are good to go now. I am banned from the tv until further notice and as a result my productivity skyrocketed. That isn't to say I can't watch movies. However, movies are diffrent. I don't know how they just are.
My mom came an visted me. I think it has been two years. Maybe more. Not everything is for publication though.
I did get to see Sasha though! I don't get to do that every month so it is a big deal. However I don't think her parents like me very much. Every time they seem to track her down and collar her I am there. I wonder what they think of that. Prolly not much.
I didn't get sick, I didn't kill anyone, and I still fucking hate Christmas with a passion. Oh well.
Oh yeah new years happened. Whatever. Actually I might give that its own blog. I am seriously in the mood to write at the moment.
Blog wise, 16 entries. Some of them were shorter than usual. Four of them were angry rants. The one about parenting was paticularly unfocused. Evan wrote his own response to it in his own blog. Ultimately I fell victim to the same thing the writer of the article did. It is also a subject that hits a little close to home to me, after all I more or less raised myself with my parents making guest appearances. It is also a sticking point for me. I see SO many people who are just unable to handle life, myself included. Maybe I am just angry at my inability to do basic things like get an apartment by myself. Who knows. At the end of the day I am still 16 and my parents suck.
The religion one was just weird for me.
I liked the your pal the president thing. It was a nice fairly solid two part blog entry. What I really need to do is to read less time and more Harpers/Atlantic/Foreign Affairs and do commentary on articles like I did with the president thing...only you know on really good articles. I dunno. We'll see, right now I am in the middle of my own thing. Speaking of which at the end of the month I start getting some nice solid brain work done on that, that's nice.
I aborted the whole let's play Dwarf Fortress thing because doing a season by season update of that game doesn't interest me. It is needlessly time consuming. Still taking time out and outlining what is going on in the fortress was a lot of fun. I want to do another one now that it is further along. I just went through my second siege and it went rather hilariously.
Unpublished, I wrote up two SLA bpns. That is quite a bit of writting actually. I plan on putting them up in the licking the subconsious blog once I run them. Or sooner if I just sort of feel like it. What I think I am going to do is publish the session and then in the comments post what actually happens. Cause you know the two things are compleatly diffrent from each other.
Okay that about takes care of the writing all in all a pretty good month. Lets move onto the life thing.
So I realized earlyer this month I was enimic, aenimic...fuckit iron deficient. I was like that all november too. Basicly I would come home from work and some nights I would just literally pass out for an hour. Then I would wake up fit as a fiddle and carry about my buisness. After a month and a half of that I decided to worry. Then thinking about the problem logically it sounded like an iron deficiency. So I picked up a multi vitamin with iron in it and started taking it every day. Wouldn't you know it? The shit cleared right up. Hasn't happened once since I've been vitamen enhanced. The solution was almost to simple. Though I suppose it is nice to have one or two things that aren't a struggle.
I also go into a nasty habit. See feeling tired and crappy after work I would come straight home instead of writting, watch Star Trek the next generation, and then go do something else. The problem is that that I started watching more and more star trek, sometimes I'd spend three hours a night on that shit. Now I am not adverse to a little tv watching but twords the end I just had it on while I was looking at pictures on the internet. That's when I pulled the plug. About that time the iron thing happened and I started getting back on track. A couple of days later I started serious construction on the post modern pornography project. Of course it might not of happened if every fucking store wasn't spamming christmas music but whatever! We are good to go now. I am banned from the tv until further notice and as a result my productivity skyrocketed. That isn't to say I can't watch movies. However, movies are diffrent. I don't know how they just are.
My mom came an visted me. I think it has been two years. Maybe more. Not everything is for publication though.
I did get to see Sasha though! I don't get to do that every month so it is a big deal. However I don't think her parents like me very much. Every time they seem to track her down and collar her I am there. I wonder what they think of that. Prolly not much.
I didn't get sick, I didn't kill anyone, and I still fucking hate Christmas with a passion. Oh well.
Oh yeah new years happened. Whatever. Actually I might give that its own blog. I am seriously in the mood to write at the moment.
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