Archive for the 'Random Geekage' Category

I’ve mentioned earlier how much I love Escape Pod, the weekly podcast of short science fiction. This week was a story that I just had to link to because it strikes so close to the core idea of The Angriest Rice Cooker in the World. The host, Steve Eley, even mentions his own fuzzy logic rice cooker and the absurdity of a rice cooker that’s smarter than the family dog when he’s talking about his own love of gadgets. The story is called Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush. The titular Toothbrush has a very different response to his lot than our Rice Cooker friend, but they’re dealing with fundamentally the same problem: wanting more for themselves than their creators gave them. Plus it made me laugh out loud, so I think you’ll like it too.

I was reading a bunch of Marvel’s rather delightful teen romance comic Spider-man Loves Mary Jane recently. I enjoyed it, which I expected both because it is an unusually common guilty pleasure among customers at the shop I work at and also because I love superhero romance. I actually started reading Ultimate Spider-Man again when I found out about the Spider-man/Kitty Pryde romance.

Anyway,  it made me think and now I have a proposal for a comic that would make me very happy. It’s just like Spider-man Loves Mary Jane except instead of being about Mary Jane it’s about the X-Men. Call it, I dunno, “Cyclops loves Jean Grey” or something. Once I thought of the idea, it seemed totally obvious. Mary Jane is, as near as I can tell, a fairly successful comic, particularly with demographics who don’t ordinarily read superhero comics. I know this is the fact at the store where I work. It’s not a bestseller by any means, but it’s been steady and growing. The X-Men, even more than Spider-man, have built in love triangles and romance. You could even take it something like the original first X-Men issue, having Jean Grey come to a new special school for mutants only to be the target of tons of adolescent male attention. You could add more and more interactions. There’s even been a very brief appearance of Iceman in Spider-man Loves Mary Jane, now that I think about it, so it would be pretty trivial to have the two comics exist in the same universe. And then you could even do the Kitty Pryde/Spider-man thing and own my heart forever.

C’mon, Marvel. It’s not like you’re not going to launch a bunch more X-Men comics anyway. Why not do something a little bit different with the X-Men. I bet it would not only help serve the same audience as Mary Jane, it would probably bring in more people to that title, since I think that a lot of X-Men fans would enjoy the Mary Jane comics as well.

I just watched Goro Miyazaki’s Tales of Earthsea/Gedo Senki again with some friends. Although this was a much better version with much better subtitles, it didn’t really change my thoughts about the film, which I discussed here. But afterwards I was doodling around a little on Ursula K. Le Guin’s web site afterward and came across a short essay entitled “What Makes A Story.” Now, I’ve read a very similarly titled essay, “What is a Short Story?” by Marion Zimmer Bradley, another writer I respect a lot. Bradley’s essay made me mad with the limiting definition it gave for the “commercial” short story. Someday I may write more about that, but suffice it to say that I was little bit hesitant when I clicked on this link on Le Guin’s page.

I was silly to worry. Not only are her meditations on what a story is beautiful and expansive enough to include all the stories I love, she wonderfully encapsulated what I think is so wrong about traditional attempts to define the story by writing:

“A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end:”  This comes from Aristotle, and it splendidly describes a great many stories from the European narrative tradition, but it doesn’t describe all stories. It’s a recipe for steak, it’s not a recipe for tamales.

I think the best antidote for restrictive definitions of stories is just to read a lot of different stories from different cultures and see for yourself how false they really are. Le Guin captures that idea marvelously.

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

There’s a lot of ways that I can enjoy a story, and a lot of different levels. But especially when I’m doing a lot of writing, I tend to look at things through that particular lens. And every once in a while I come across a story that hits me in just the right spot. And today, I think I first really became aware of what that spot is. It’s me saying “this is what I want to do”. It’s a weird beautiful bittersweet feeling. I get this feeling off Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez, Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder and The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock, and Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. And today, as I was reading The Year’s Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection, I got it off this story, which is apparently free online for a limited time. I’ve been reading a lot of SF lately, mostly to get a feel for different markets. I’ve probably read two dozen different SF, fantasy, and horror stories in the past couple of weeks. This was the first one to get me that way.

So, um, go read it. I think you’ll like it too.

“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”

–The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

When I was a kid, I was fortunate to stumble onto Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy (it’s longer now, but I actually haven’t read beyond the original trilogy). I remember The Farthest Shore, the third book in the series, was particularly mindblowing to me. I’d never read such an exploration of simple beauties, nor seen any book for children that confronted mortality so squarely. When I was in 11th grade, I returned to Le Guin, doing a year-long project on her work.

So when I heard that Studio Ghibli, the people behind films like “Princess Mononoke,” “Spirited Away,” and “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind,” were making an Earthsea film, I was very interested. I’ve been making it a point to occasionally check the evil illegal bittorent websites for a copy ever since the film came out in Japan about a year ago. Sadly, the film won’t be legally released in the US for at least a couple of more years: the license for the execrable Sci-Fi Channel miniseries of the books prevents it.

Well, now I’ve seen it. Sort of. When I finally found a copy, it was actually a French-dubbed screener. But I also found a file of subtitles in English. Well, I don’t know if you can call it English, exactly. The translation looks like it may have been performed primarily by babelfish. Without the visuals and prior knowledge of the story, I don’t think I could have divined any meaning from these sentences. Whoever translated it had particular difficulty with genders; characters are constantly being referred to as “it.”

So I just watched an adaptation of an American book made by Japanese people, dubbed into French and subtitled back into something vaguely resembling English. Quite the international project.

I was also curious about the movie because of its director. This film was directed by Goro Miyazaki. This is the son of Hayao Miyazaki, who directed all those other amazing films I mentioned above. But prior to this film, he’d never had any experience with animation. He’d avoided it, because of his complex relationship with his father.

There’s plenty I could complain about the movie. It is not up to the standard of Mononoke or Spirited away, the elder Miyazaki’s masterworks. But this is a faint criticism. I don’t think that there’s anyone on the planet who is making traditionally animated films on that level today. And even Hayao Miyazaki didn’t pull it off with his first film.

It also isn’t a faithful adaptation of the books, by a long shot. For one thing, the “sea” in “Earthsea” seems to have been lost somewhere over the Pacific. The plot of this story derives mostly from the first and third books, with borrowings from later stories as well. Both of those books involve large amounts of travel over the sea, which is one of my favorite things about them. The film takes place almost entirely on dry land, with locations that are separated by months of sailing in the books being just a few days walk from one another. Actually, the film feels less like an adaptation and more like a crazed mash-up of beautiful things. A lot of those beautiful things, though by no means all of them, derive from a series of books that also lent their name.

But all that is really beside the point. If I wanted the books, I’d read the books. They’re sitting about four feet from me right now. What I got was a beautiful experience. I got scenes of cityscapes and beautiful ruins, ominous castles and very expressive people. And marvelous dragons. In fact, if I had to sum up the film, this is what I’d say:

“I do not care what comes after; I have seen dragons on the wind of morning.”

Sometimes an apeshit mash-up of beautiful things is exactly right.

EDIT: I found what looks like much much better subtitles available here, in case anyone else wants to watch it.

My lovely girlfriend says that this is one of her favorite Angriest Rice Cookers. She says it’s because of the “human” line in the last panel–she imagines that something very similar to this could happen with us and some of our old roommates and friends.

I think she’s right. Our group of friends had several people with an odd combination of being really competitive but without necessarily much interest in “rulesy” competitions. We played regular games too–and could become competitive about them. Also old video games–our Paperboy games could be intense. But they would also get competitive about simpler games, like the old standby “throw the ball around the dorm room.” It was kind of a self-defeating exercise for those competitive souls. “Throw the ball around the dorm room” isn’t a game you can win exactly, although you certainly can lose. And so can your dorm room.

One of the greatest creations of this competitive spirit was a game we liked to call “quiet ball.” There was a ball sitting in the dorm room of two of my best friends freshman year of college. It was like one of those balls you find in a giant bin filled with balls in a supermarket–an all-purpose play ball. But this ball made kind of a strange sound when you caught it. So when my two competitive friends threw it back and forth, they quickly started to compete as to who could make the least noise when catching it. “Quiet ball” was born.

We spent a lot of time playing quiet ball, both with that particular ball and with others. One time, we even grabbed a ball out of a bin in our local Top Foods and started playing right in the aisle. That is, until my aforementioned lovely girlfriend decided to throw the ball really hard at my nose. That was not very fun.

So, anyway, I guess my girlfriend sees something of herself in this comic. Take that as you will.

EDIT: I just was re-watching an episode of Arrested Development and realized that the phrasing of the question in the first panel is a near-verbatim lift from an ethics essay topic that George Michael has in one episode. I’m not entirely sure whether that was subconscious or intentional. Either way seems more or less plausible.

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A few weeks ago, controversy erupted around the comicnetoverse when an installment of the right-leaning political comic Day by Day depicted Hillary Clinton in blackface. That’s not what I want to talk about. Shaenon Garrity responded by declaring (as she sometimes does) Day by Day to be The Worst Damn Comic in the World based not only on the offending strip by by the comic’s general quality of writing, art, and other elements. This lead to a debate with Dirk Deppey at Journalista. In the ensuing conversation Doonesbury came up several times as a counter-example, from people on both sides. This got me thinking. I think of Doonesbury as something very different than comics like Day by Day, Prickly City, Mallard Filmore, and even the left wing comics of people like Ted Rall . I think of Doonesbury as basically a story comic that occasionally makes political jokes as well, while I think of those comics as more or less just strip versions of political cartoons, with no story other than political propaganda.

But I realized that this could easily be my own bias. Political points I disagree with are perhaps marked more than those I agree with and I could easily be fooled into believing that comics I agree with are “less political” than those I disagree with. So I decided to do a little semi-scientific experiment:

I picked 90 random dates between May 22, 2006 and May 21, 2007 for Doonesbury and 90 random dates for Day by Day. I focused on the past year for both because this is how far back Doonesbury’s free online archive goes, and I didn’t want to bias the study by using a different period of time for the two comics. I then viewed the comics for these dates and recorded whether each comic made a political point or not. I then figured out, with 95% confidence intervals, the percentage of comics that are political is for both strips. I also figured out, with the same 95% confidence interval, what the difference in proportion of political strips to total strips is between the two comics.

My results: Doonesbury was “less political” by the narrow definition of what percentage of strips make a political point, at least over the past year. But not by as much as I would have thought. With 95% confidence, I can say that Doonesbury strips in the past year made political points between 44.16 and 64.73 percent of the time. Day by Day made political points between 65.43 and 83.46 percent of the time. I can also say with 95% confidence that Day by Day is between 6.32 and 33.68 percent more political than Doonesbury for the past year. But I expected virtually no non-political comics in Day by Day, and in fact found more non-political strips in my 90-day sample of Day by Day than I would have expected to find in a year. The confidence interval up there still would suggest that Day by Day has at least one non-political comic every week, on average.

I was also a little suprised by how high the proportion was for Doonesbury strips. Before doing this, I always thought it was a little bit lame that a lot of newspapers now print Doonesbury on the editorial page rather than the normal comic strip page. Now I’m not so sure. Even on the low end of the margin of error, Doonesbury was political over 40% of the time in the past year and it’s more likely than not that it was over 50% political.

Because of the relatively small sample sizes, it is hard to say how big the difference between the two strips is. And it would be interesting to see if these proportions vary if we go back further in time. If anyone would like to help expand our knowledge of the subject, a complete study of the past year or a sample going back further in time by a subscriber to the full Doonesbury archives would be very helpful.

Finally, some warnings. My statistics knowledge comes from an AP Stats class I took in high school and a hurried read through of some relevant portions of my lovely girlfriend’s college stats book. If I did anything wrong with the numbers, I hope someone will correct me (the complete data is available below the cut). Also, the judgment of which comics are “political” is somewhat subjective. Sometimes it’s easy (is it a Bush or Pelosi joke made by a talking building? it’s political). Other times it’s not (A personality joke set in Iraq? A strip about B.D.’s combat trauma support group?). Also beneath the cut I have a complete list of the comics I used and my judgements, with links, so that anyone can go through and dispute my characterizations. Finally, the question of what percentage of strips makes a political point is in some ways a poor substitute for the question of which strip is more political as opposed to story-based. Some strips make a political point while advancing the characters’ story, while others are simply jokes at a politician’s expense. This study does not measure this factor at all.

Read on beyond the cut for the full gory details.

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Ok, I know I just posted, but I was going through my referer logs and I just discovered this.

Go to Google and type in “Rotting People,” then hit “I’m feeling lucky.”

You have no idea how happy this makes me.

Although I published the first Angriest Rice Cooker comic in April of 2005, I wrote it a couple of months earlier. I designed the comic template and wrote the first comic the night after I got laid off from my job delivering Winchell’s Donuts to convenience stores. It was an awesome job, but so it goes. The idea for The Angriest Rice Cooker was a combination of a few things. Since high school, my friends and I had talked and joked about the seeming excessiveness of a fuzzy logic rice cooker. We talked about how we would always feel like it was trying to destroy us.

We were kind of geeky.

Because my donut job was only late at night, I found that I had quite a lot of free time, so I had been reading a lot more webcomics than I had before or since. So I had the idea of repeating-image and other constrained type comics in my head, although I wasn’t directly influenced by any of them. I’ve always loved PartiallyClips by Rob Balder, and that probably informed my style more than, for example, Daily Dinosaur Comics although Daily Dinosaur has perhaps more obvious similarities. It was even in imitation of PartiallyClips that I made the comics so gigantic, something I regretted as I was designing this new version of the site.

Somehow, as part of a conversation, these two ideas merged. I was still used to staying up all night, and I didn’t have anything to do, so I found an image of a rice cooker in the internet, screwed with the contrast to make it look like something that has been run through a photocopier a hundred times. The first gag came pretty directly out of the original premise for the comic. Using “the invasion of Normandy” as the ultimate in a complicated plan is cribbed from (at least one) Buffy episode. Riley Finn says that their plan to hang out was “not the invasion of Normandy,” but a plan nonetheless. I always thought that was funny. I like Riley, even if nobody else does.