Archive for June, 2007

Gosh, I honestly couldn’t tell you where I got this idea about Sartre’s philosophy. I also couldn’t tell you one way or the other whether it’s an accurate characterization of anything he ever said. I’m sure I didn’t make this idea up–it hinges on an awfully specific idea that I doubt I would have conjured up on my own. I’m guess it came through, half-remembered from high school. But I don’t even know when I would have gotten this idea in high school. Debate maybe? We did talk about some philosophy then. We also talked about existentialism in both history and english classes. Iunno.

I’m sure that I didn’t know even when I made this comic. This is kind of a bad habit I have, to pop out facts that come from long ago. Sometimes it’s ok, but sometimes things come out horribly mangled. And sometimes it’s a problem because the memories, while accurate, are so old that the “facts” involved come from a time when I was not quite as able to distinguish jokes from reality. It’s probably a good thing that I was never exposed to Look Around You as a kid.

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So, as I mentioned on Monday (in a post written last Friday, confusingly enough) I was in Idaho for the past week in order to take the LSAT. As for how that went, well, ask me on July 2nd when I get my score. The trip involved a lot of long drives, and so it was the perfect chance for me to check out a podcast I had been meaning to for a while, Escape Pod. This is a weekly podcast of SF short stories. They pay the writers and accept previously published stuff, so the fiction is quite good. And over the month of April, they did a bunch of this year’s Hugo nominees. In fact, they did four of the five stories nominated in the short fiction category. I had actually read the fifth one, Neil Gaiman’s “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” in an issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction earlier this year, so I’ve now read or heard all of them. So I thought I’d share my thoughts. You definitely shouldn’t take my word for it on any of these, though. Download the podcasts yourself at Escape Pod, or in the case of the Gaiman story, you can read it or listen to it from his web site here.

Here’s the list, with my thoughts on each:

• “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman

I was pretty surprised to hear that this was one of the nominees. Not that I necessarily should have been–Gaiman’s American Gods won the Hugo in 2002. But I was found this story pretty forgettable, frankly. Not bad, certainly, but far from the greatest the genre has to offer. I remember the characterization being very solid and believable, but I just didn’t care about the story that much. I guess I’m generally not as into Gaiman as a lot of people. By the time I got into comics, Sandman was, while still good, nowhere near as singular as it had been when it came out. Once you’ve read Berlin and From Hell and Phoenix and Y the Last Man and Fables and all the rest, it’s hard to see Sandman as all that special. I feel the same way about Gaiman’s prose work that I’ve read, only more so. Good but not great.

• “Kin” by Bruce McAllister

In a futuristic world where aliens visit regularly and the continent is vastly overpopulated, a poor kid scrapes together 200 bucks to hire an alien assassin to kill a man who threatens his sister’s life. There’s more to both the boy and the hired killer than would appear at first glance. Like the Gaiman story, this one stands out more because of its interesting characters than because of the story. But where Gaiman’s story excels in its characterization of normal, recognizable people, this one works because of the uniqueness of the characters. But also like the Gaiman story, this one didn’t give me enough that I could really apply any superlatives to it. Another “good, not great.”

• “The House Beyond Your Sky” by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Here we see some of the vast imaginative scope that SF is capable of, where “universe” is only a small unit of measure. Large parts of the action take place in what are explicitly metaphors for highly advanced algorithms and such. This worked well for me, a kind of beautiful merging of concrete and abstract. There is a definite lyrical sense to this piece. It’s not surprising that it was published in Strange Horizons, a professional SF webzine that does a lot of more lyrical SF and fantasy stories. Sometimes they even go a little too far in the direction of poetry for me and I have trouble sussing out the story underneath, but this one definitely worked for me–the story is clear. But the appeal of this one is the vastness of imaginespace it takes up.

• “Eight Episodes” by Robert Reed

I could possibly have guessed without knowing where the previous story came from (although I could also have seen it being published in Fantasy and Science Fiction). But this one surprised me. It was published in Analog’s Science Fiction Magazine, known generally for having stories where strong characters are emphasized. This story, perhaps the most formally inventive of this years nominees, doesn’t really have characters at all. At least not in the traditional sense. The story is a description of the short-lived science fiction television series “Invasion,” aired by a doomed fledgling network sometime in the mid-2010s. Slow-moving and running contrary to most television conventions, it is canceled after only 8 episodes. But the series holds some secrets that guarantee it a place as one of the greatest cult classics in history. Anyone who can make what is essentially an encyclopedia entry from the future this compelling deserves a serious pat on the back. I highly recommend this one.

• “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt

Man, if you have even a little sliver of movie love, this one is for you. Actually, if you’re a geek at all–or even an appreciator of any art, I think you’ll recognize something here. Ok, I basically recommend this one to everyone. Pete is a serious film buff–it’s basically his reason for getting out of bed. So when he finds a video store a few blocks from his house that he’d never seen before, he knew right away that something was off. He stepped in and began browsing. Then he saw it: “The Magnificient Ambersons: The Directors Cut….”

Seriously. Go read it or listen to it. It’s just delightful. That it coincidentally shares a name with one of my favorite Iron Maiden songs just makes it perfect

That image in the last panel is the almost unedited version of the piece of art I distorted to make the Angriest Rice Cooker image.

I’ve never really studied film extensively, but as part of a project on literary criticism I read a few books on it. The idea referenced in this comic is a pretty common one in what I’ve read of film studies, but the main place I got it was the works of early Russian film genius Sergei Eisenstein. He wasn’t the first to have this idea, but he was one of the first to put it into glorious practice. Battleship Potemkin uses this idea of montage to great effect. The book I read by him is The Film Sense, a very articulate and accessable read. He saw film as an American medium, and wrote in very clear English to speak to an American audience. He also discusses “montage” as a relationship between visual elements and musical score–something he pioneered in Alexander Nevsky working along side soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev. There’s plenty bad you can say about the Soviet art system–but they did a pretty good job of matching up geniuses. Of course, then they turned around, made a deal with the Germans, and suppressed Nevsky for a while until the whole Nazi thing blew up in their faces. I made another comic about that.

The title of this comic comes from the David Mamet book of the same name. I read that in high school before discovering that other people had said basically the same thing like fifty years before. Still a good read though. Also, those interested in making comics really ought to check out all this stuff–this particular theory of film is extremely applicable to comics.

Below the cut is both the comic, as always, and a poster for Alexander Nevsky because it’s super awesome.

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Sometimes, other people’s readings of things I write add totally new and wonderful dimensions. This comic is a great case of this. The comic itself is just a poke at the politics of Starship Troopers. It’s a pretty easy target, but I still think that this comic is fairly funny even on that level. But I liked the comment my friend and writing group compatriot Will had when he saw this comic in the early days. He said that he liked the idea that the rice cooker is just so naive that he thinks of Heinlein as someone to take with the same kind of seriousness as people like Socrates and Marx. I think that idea, that the rice cooker, while highly intelligent, doesn’t think like us or have the same preconceptions as us and so would have very different perceptions than us, was hugely important as I wrote more of the comics. I think the absolute best Angriest Rice Cookers are the ones that played with this idea.

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The premise for this one was basically just lifted from this Daily Dinosaur Comic, only applied to a joke bumper sticker. Daily Dinosaur is really about as good at anti-humor as anyone I’ve ever read. The punchline is a abridged version of a dictionary definition. The addition of sex was purely thanks to the wonders of English morphology, I barely did anything at all.

It helps that the original “joke” (which I originally saw in bumper sticker form) is unusually dumb. What are we supposed to think “Con”gress means? To move backwards? To not move at all? I think it would work better with a different summary for “progress.” It seems to me that the key to the joke is that congress is bad and progress is good, but the summary “to move forwards” does not (to my ear) convey the positive connotations of the word “progress.”

In conclusion, words are funny and I like anti-humor

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Nietzsche was a sickly man who quite possibly had syphilis. In the original draft of this comic, that was a central component of the set-up. But I just couldn’t get it to fit in without totally torpedoing the rhythm of the strip. I thought of having the punchline be “Or an unusual take on his syphilis”, but so far as I know, there’s no real definitive evidence that he actually did have syphilis, so I couldn’t just take it for granted that the audience would know that he did and make sense of it. Besides, though it was the idea that he had syphilis that made the connection for me between this quote and that more literal love/madness connection, it isn’t really necessary for the joke. Although I think the knowledge that he may have had the disease does color this one nicely.

Also, we’re getting into the period when the spelling errors become a lot more common in these comics, so this one got a little touch-up.

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Unless you’re me (hi, me!) you’re probably reading this sometime aorund June 11th. I won’t be sitting at my computer writing blog posts at that point. Chances are, at the time you’re reading this, I’m in Caldwell, Idaho taking the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). I will be in Idaho until the 15th when I graduate. This should not affect the daily Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cuts. I actually usually do those the weekend before anyway. But it does mean that I may not respond to emails or comments for a few days. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I haven’t read them yet. I hope you enjoy, and I’ll catch you all on the other side.

Heh. This one’s kind of funny to me now in retrospect. It’s just kind of a goofy one that doesn’t actually make a terrible lot of sense, but the reason it makes me laugh at myself now is that I just yanked out the word “sociolinguistics” as a very scholarly, import-sounding kind of word. I had some idea of what it meant, but not a very detailed one. Since that time I’ve actually studied sociolinguistics, albiet on an introductory level. I also know enough about lingusts to say tha they would have no qualms about doing an in-depth study of the phrase “your motherfucking ass” if there was anything particularly interesting about it–although I doubt such a study would be sociolinguistic in nature.

I’m not really sure where the basic idea of this one comes from. It may be from a book I was reading onto a tape for my part-time job. I read a book about research design once, and it had a section on qualitative research, which may have been what got me thinking about online ethnographic research.

That book-to-tape reading job was pretty awesome, actually, although I don’t think I would want to do it at a college that, unlike the college I go to, mostly assigns readings from actual textbooks. But because the stuff teachers assign here tends to be super interesting it was an odd fun mishmash of things. I remember reading a book on visionary mystics in medieval Europe, a book of essays on art and culture, a collection of Native North American oratory, a book on Native North American art, a book that laid out a theoretical model of how social movements work and a bunch of other random fascinating stuff.

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For a three line comic, this one is really packed with fairly obscure references. The most obvious, and the only part you need to get the joke, is the first two lines. These are from the spoken bridge of The Doors’ song Peace Frog. Now, I don’t want to give off the impression that I don’t like The Doors. I actually quite enjoy their music, and Peace Frog is one of my favorite songs. But there’s no getting around the fact that their lyrics are extraordinarily pretentious, and this spoken interlude is one of the most pretentious examples. I can’t help but laugh at those “Jim Morrison–Poet” t-shirts. If someone tries to convince me that Jim Morrison is a great poet, I’m going to take that as prima facie evidence that they have never actually read a poem.

The second reference is the title of the comic, “On the poet in exile.” This is a reference to the book The Poet in Exile, a “novel” by Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors and accomplished music producer. I have the utmost respect for him as a musician, but his foray into novel writing just comes off as pathetic. I’ll let the book’s jacket flap speak for itself:

Years after the Poet’s apparent death, his long-time musical collaborator and friend Roy recieves the first of several mysterious postcards bearing cryptic verse, signed only “J.” Trusting his instinct that this is not a hoax, Roy traces the cards to their apparent source–a remote island in the Indian Ocean. There, to his amazement, he is reunited with the man once known as “the snake man,” and hears the remarkable story of his faked death–and the re-birth it made possible.

“Roy?” “The Snake Man?” C’mon, Ray Manzarek, you can come up with better Mary Sue names than that. The whole thing makes me feel bad for the guy–but it absolutely typifies the “Jim Morrison is amazing” mindset that I’m mocking with this comic.

The third and perhaps most obscure reference is to a old Foxtrot comic that was in a Foxtrot book I got when I was in 6th grade. Jason shoots a suction cup gun and says “I shoot an arrow in the air. It falls to earth–and I know where.” The last panel is him running away from Paige, who has a suction cup stuck to her face as he says “Poetry for physicists.” I just about memorized that book when I was a kid, so it wouldn’t suprise me if this isn’t the only punchline I more or less cribbed from decades-old Foxtrot comics. Other books I devoured as a kid include Calvin and Hobbes (of course) and early Doonesbury. I basically learned the history of the quarter-century before my birth from Doonesbury. Sometimes I forget how into newspaper strips I was as a kid. I didn’t get into webcomics or comic books/graphic novels until I was in high school, but I think I was destined to be on Team Comics

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I’m going to present this one without any extra commentary, just because it would be too gosh darn ironic to blather on about it. Suffice to say I was reading a lot of blogs at the time. Although not really as many as I am now. Oh, 2005.

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