Month: March 2007

Newspaper comic strips. I do like the good ones, and here in NZ we tend to only get the good ones; or at least the not-awful ones. The pages and pages of laugh-free strips I remember seeing in newspapers in the U.S. are unknown here; instead our newspapers invest their strip budget in a small number of reliably good strips. And also the Wizard of Id.
The Dom Post has been running classic Peanuts, and this year it has hit a bunch of strips I’ve never seen before, back when Snoopy was still 90% dog and several long-running gags were only just being set up. Really neat to see. Sparky was a delightful cartoonist.
And, while mentioning Schulz, I always appreciated that he thought highly of legendary local strip Footrot Flats. That’s also in reruns, and is currently approaching the end, when Murray Ball finally gave some of his characters closure – so there’s Wal getting married to Cheeky, and Cooch finally admitting his feelings for Kathy. Its an amazing strip, and worthy of high-quality collection one of these days.
But what’s been catching my attention this week is Doonesbury. Trudeau’s long-running political strip has hit a whole new level in the era of the second Gulf War. This week’s storyline has injured veteran B.D. (who had a leg blown off in Iraq a few years ago) encounter a fellow veteran – a woman who suffered sexual assault from her fellow soldiers while in Iraq.
This is pretty incendiary stuff. Sexual abuse of U.S. servicewomen serving in Iraq has been slowly coming into the mainstream discourse over the last few weeks, with the New York Times running a lengthy story on the subject on March 18. The article centred on Suzanne Swift, who suffered sexual abuse during her first tour in Iraq and went AWOL rather than return to more of the same. I’m not sure what the lead times are on Trudeau’s strip but I wouldn’t be surprised if the current storyline is a direct response to this article. In any case, keep an eye on developments in your local paper if it carries Doonesbury, or online at Slate if it doesn’t.
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It feels like all I’m doing at the moment in this blog is linking to stuff. (But that’s okay, because it’s cool stuff!) Tom’s first post at ProjectX about his Wellurban blog reminded me that I’m overdue for a bit of taking stock at what this blog is doing for me, and what I want to be doing for it. I’ll get to it. In the meantime, this counts as more linking to cool stuff – if you’re a blogger, check out that post at ProjectX for some food for thought about what you’re doing.
In other silly link news, check out the other Buffy season 8, and from the movie mash-up genre, A Hard Day’s Night Of The Living Dead…
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And be ready, for on Monday this year’s installment of the Birthday Wisdom quotathon will be upon you…

Since putting Ron to bed have been all over the place. Dabbling is the word I would use; dabbling in various things. Nothing is getting much traction right now. That’s okay, to a point. I’m working on stuff, at least, just not the same stuff from moment to moment.
Need to start chasing up some more freelancey writery work too. In all seriousness, anyone out there needing things written – give me a shout. I do a word thing hell good yessum.
Over at Creating Passionate Users, a blog about usability that was drawn to my attention a couple years ago by Teresa, there’s some nasty stuff going down that just reminds me of the way internet anonymity and a framing of free expression can foster truly horrific behaviour. Don’t really know what to say about that really.
Comics geeks among you should be paying close attention to Grizzled Blog, where each week the Grizzled Andrew explores the descent of mainstream supers comics into gory violence.
And while I’m discussing both the experience of women online and unwelcome trends in comics, its an easy segue into Girls Read Comics (and they’re pissed) which has finally become a regular read for me. Karen Healey writes well about sexist trends in mainstream comics; I recently discovered she’s a Kiwi, which is obviously a point in favour.
Meanwhile, the CSI: Miami stuff a few days back has been linked to all over the place. It isn’t too late to add your own cricket-related sunglasses line.

Cal and I borrowed River Queen from the library over the weekend. I was quite keen to see Vincent Ward’s big film with Kiefer Sutherland and Samantha Morton gallivanting through the Maori wars. It had received mostly-bad reviews, but there were enough good ones that I was still curious, and it was a big NZ production to boot. Besides, how bad could it be?
Answer: really quite bad. Made it through fifteen minutes or so then we gave up. I don’t often give up on films, but this one just kept hitting us over the head with reasons to turn it off. It was very pretty, but it made not the least bit of sense, as if a bunch of semi-random scenes were stitched together in the editing room with a voiceover trying to turn them into a story. That’s actually what happened, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
Avoid. The good reviews were people lying to themselves to avoid the horrible truth – Vincent Ward, NZ cinema’s maverick genius auteur, screwed this ‘un up real bad. Rent African Queen instead.
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Also picked up issue one of Buffy Season Eight, which is the new comic series continuation of the Buffy TV show, written and show-run by Buffy creator Joss Whedon himself. Here’s how I discussed it on RPG.net:

I enjoyed The Long Way Home pt. 1 (especially appreciate how it is titled “Season Eight” on the cover) a great deal. It really felt like coming home. And the reason was, almost entirely, in the banter. No-one writes Joss-banter except Joss, hence the term, Joss-banter-esque.
Best examples:
“But your nerd points are accumulating impressively.”
“This is all bad math.”
“So you think it’s a frown.”
It was also really nice to get some insight into thought processes, particularly the two-page spread of Buffy introspection. That is a new element for Joss-written Buffy, and it came off really well – completely consistent with the characters and yet surprisingly new.
And the art! Way better than I expected. Great costume detail, excellent representations of the characters we’ve seen before (Dawn in particular), with a lot of clarity and energy. A couple jarring transitions (e.g. Buffy with the crucifix from standing to, er, flying) but otherwise nice flow.
But it wasn’t all sweetness and light.
The foreign accents bugged the hell out of me. Sure, we get it, they’re international. Can we get past the crappy accented dialogue? ‘Dat vent vell?’ Gah.
The visual design didn’t seem consistent with Buffy-on-TV. Particularly the technology, which didn’t feel of a piece with high-tech as we’ve seen previously – it was all a bit ray-gun except the comm centre. Also the monsters – we’ve seen lots of demons on TV Buffy and they don’t look like gigantic beasts. Sure, comics = unlimited budget etc, but the aesthetics of Buffy vs. giant monsters were quite unfamiliar and thus jarring. YMMV.
Joss’ writing was structurally pretty nice, running from setup to setup. The two-pager where Dawn and Buffy chat was nice in that it broke the TV-on-the-page thing I was expecting from him; it only works as comics. Sadly, it doesn’t quite work at conveying that Buffy’s in there talking to Dawn for a long time – the dialogue doesn’t sell the time transitions and missing time very well.
But the biggest disappointment was the finale. I’d seen someone bitching about the issue not being accessible to people new to Buffy, and you know, that is dead on. The big reveal on the last page, “her name is …”, only works if you are at least medium-level aware of Buffy lore. At *least* medium level. If you aren’t, it falls completely flat as a cliffhanger. And this is a big failure, by Joss, because the *actual* cliffhanger break point is thrown away at the top of the previous page. The final page should have dropped both who it is *and* what her first words were. That way, even a completely new reader would get a final page hit; the Buffy fan would get it doubleplus.
You know, all the writing stuff I have a problem with should probably have been picked up in editing.
Anyway. It’s a great first issue, unreservedly recommended to Buffy lovers, and tentatively recommended to those who aren’t.

No-one got the Whedonesque joke. Which I suppose means it isn’t funny. Well, I laugh, so ha.

Since the start of this academic year I’ve noticed a surprising trend. Schoolgirls, specifically high school girls, seem to frequently wear their backpacks on their front. This trend seems completely absent from high school boys, or indeed boys in general.
Where the heck did this come from? Is this an international thing, a Kiwi thing, a Wellington thing, what? Has it been around a while and I just missed it?
Why are they wearing their backpacks like that? They have to be less comfortable worn that way. I’m familiar with people wearing backpacks reversed to make it hard for thieves and pickpockets, but this is Wellington New Zealand, and that kind of crime is vanishingly rare here (I’ve never even heard of a single case).
Is it just a random trend that has swept through the community? Did Paris Hilton do it one time? Schoolgirl status-competition trades heavily on appearance, and surely backpack reversing can’t be a cool look, can it?
Cal suggested that perhaps girls wear their bags like that because their school uniforms don’t have pockets, so they have to keep their cellphones in their bags, so they make their bags easily accessible by wearing them reversed. I don’t find that explanation very convincing.
There are more than a few teachers of the aforementioned high school girls among my readers – can any of them enlighten me?
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I just blogged about how I have been observing high school girls. There goes my career in politics.

Woolmer death now ‘suspicious’
KINGSTON: Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer’s death at the World Cup is now being treated as “suspicious” by Jamaican police, the deputy commissioner Mark Shields told a news conference today…
There is only one person who can get to the bottom of this.

“We’re going to the third umpire…” *puts on sunglasses* “…me.”

There is now a full second draft. Longest single manuscript I’ve ever written.
Not entirely convinced by a keystone element in the last chapter/coda that answers an important question. Was much happier with the answer in draft 1, except draft 2 has changed so much draft 1’s answer no longer makes sense. This is the process of revision, you exchange big problems for smaller ones. In any case, the new answer will either grow on me, or I’ll think of a better one. All in good time.
Have probably overegged the thematic stuff like crazy. But what the hell.
(Now I need some willing victims to read it. Four very helpful people read draft 1, whose feedback was very useful indeed. There are a couple of people who put their hand up back then who I have saved for this, draft 2. Any other unsuspecting dupes out there willing to read an unpolished unproofread 160K ms and provide critical comment, and do it for the sheer love of the game? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)

Writing a first draft can take over your life.
(This is particularly so if it is done in way I wrote Ron the Body, i.e. going from page one to the end with no idea where you are going or what will happen along the way.)
Writing a first draft is a form of exploration and play, in which characters you’ve created are set loose in challenging situations and you, writing, try your damnedest to keep up with them and stay on top of them and second-guess them and occasionally prod them back in the direction of the interesting stuff. Your head gets all full of this stuff, all the time. You start dreaming elements of your story and in a sense it becomes real to you. It may be a model world inside your head, but then again you also experience and understand the real world by making a model of it inside your head. Anyway, it’s fun. I love this stage of writing. Writing the first draft of something is like actually being inside a story.
Second drafts? They be different. In a second draft, you already have the story. You’re digging through it, rearranging it, chopping bits out and putting new bits in, constantly weighing up what certain elements bring to the tale, what effect a cut or replacement or expansion would offer. How does it feel to read? How are the characters perceived? Is it communicating what it needs to communicate? It’s also fun. I love this stage of writing too, but it is very different. Writing the second draft of something is like being inside a giant and massively complex sudoku puzzle, erasing and checking and erasing again as you try and get the damn thing to have the right balance of numbers. Equal parts fascinating and frustrating, but always compelling.
(There are no third or later drafts; those are just snapshots of the second draft process with numbers written on the front.)
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Second draft is nearly done.

Here in the UK, on the other hand, the audience for protest is none other than Tony Blair. And while Tony Blair changing tack probably won’t by itself stop the prosecution of war, it might combine with other political costs to stop things before they start. An effective protest (and
I still wonder whether ‘effective protest’ is a contradiction in terms) here can really make a difference. And that’s an unfamiliar feeling.
-Me, in email, after an anti-war conference in Glasgow, Jan 20, 2003

Was it ever preventable?

It felt like the birth of a movement. It seems even more so in hindsight.
The ball, I feel, is in Tony Blair’s court – and there is every sign he is
unmoved by the display of doubt in the drive to war. This will have immense
political consequences, and soon. And this doesn’t even mention what’s
happening in Europe, in the Middle East, in the USA. The global wave of
peace demonstration will be, I hope and expect, a significant moment in
history.
– Me, in email, after the Feb 15 ‘Not In Our Name’ march, February 18, 2003

It felt like it at the time.

This weekend just gone, apart from being ridiculously busy with events (St Patrick’s Day and birthdays and weddings and EP launches and so forth) was also the weekend of the Relay For Life. This annual event is run by the Cancer Society of New Zealand. In Wellington, the waterfront Frank Kitts Park was taken over by a small tent city, around which sponsored teams ran and walked in relay from Saturday afternoon to midday Sunday.
The event fundraises for the Cancer Society and raises awareness of the costly presence of cancer. Participating cancer survivors (and their supporters) received enormous support; a key part of the event was a memorial ceremony for those who had not survived. It was all very festive, and abundant with goodwill and a moving generosity of spirit.
It was also, when considered, quite strange.
With my best outsider perspective, what we had was a large number of people literally walking in a circle without true purpose or any kind of destination, and engaging in this rather surreal activity in order to earn charitable activity on the part of other people. I exchange my pointless activity for your financial investment in a cause. That is a strange cultural equation. It is also a very familiar one, extending across a number of cultures in broadly similar form.
It doesn’t make terribly much sense on first glance. It is, in some ways, similar to a bet. In a bet, I claim that I can perform some task; you doubt me and accept the bet in order to force me to back up my claim; I attempt to perform the task to prove myself and gain the reward. However, sponsorship is the mirror image of betting. My ability to perform the task is never in doubt, so you pledge money not to force me to prove myself, but to support me in my support for a particular cause.
And that, of course, is where the logic can be found. Sponsorship operates out of personal connection. We are supporting a person, and the nature of their act and even their cause is of secondary importance. If we feel socially bound to the person, and the cause fits in the very broad category of ‘a good cause’, then we will likely sponsor that person. Additionally, this allows us to be ‘good people’ without the difficulty or challenge of actually aligning with a cause (or, less cynically, it allows us to reserve our full energies for our personal priorities while still supporting other causes with which we agree.)
When I was younger, and I first understood the concept of the then-frequent telethon televised appeal, I wondered why people had to wait for a telethon in order to be charitable. If there was money to be donated and a worthy cause, wasn’t that enough? It took a few telethons before I came to see that nothing is so simple. Human beings are not rational creatures. We do not easily look beyond ourselves. We are not capable, except in the most unusual cases, of comprehending a grand view of a large interconnected society. Furthermore, we are operating within a system that discourages such a perspective. Our concerns are almost entirely local and our judgments are emotive. This tendency, I suspect, is hardwired into us.
Sponsorship, then, is a way of tricking the human system. Our local and personal social responsibilities are leveraged.to trick us into giving financial support to a cause that is not local and not personal. And its just as well this works, because otherwise these worthy causes would not be receiving the support they so desperately need.
With Cal, I walked in circles around the tent village for an hour or so Sunday morning. It was a very pleasant experience, with people dancing and the sun coming up over the harbour. The activity’s ontological connection with cancer was tenuous; the practical connection was overt and powerful. We were performing an absurd act for the best possible reasons. If this is what it takes for us humans to choose action over inaction and support over apathy, then that is all the justification it needs.