Author: Michael Rawdon

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 14 February 2007.

Okay, having tried it for a few weeks, I think I like my original format better:

  • 52 #41 of 52 (DC)
  • Justice Society of America #3 (DC)
  • Sandman Mystery Theatre: Sleep of Reason #3 of 5 (DC/Vertigo)
  • The Incredible Hulk #96-103 (Marvel)

That said, it was an undistinguished week. 52 and JSA both had pretty pedestrian issues. Sandman has its points of interest, but Eric Nguyen’s skechy artwork turns me off: Backgrounds are rare, peoples’ faces usually look strained or pained, characters are difficult to tell apart… I think the story would do much better with a more realistic art style.

I bought the rest of the “Planet Hulk” storyline to date (apparently it will run through #105). It occurred to me while reading these eight issues that the story is focusing mainly on the Hulk, and Bruce Banner hardly appears at all. It mainly concerns the influence that Hulk has on those around him, how they learn from his demeanor and aggressiveness, and how that doesn’t always apply in different situations. The Hulk is unique because he’s learned to care about no one but himself, and he has the power to back it up; those who are more caring, or weaker, can’t get away with the same attitude. But Hulk also realizes that he’s his own worst enemy, though he’s come to accept this somewhat.

In a way, this story takes the gray Hulk from early in Peter David’s run and makes him more aloof and dispassionate: He’s not stupid, and he understands many of the subtleties of what’s going on around him, but mostly he doesn’t care. In the high-pressure arena that he’s landed on, that makes for an entertaining ride. (Aaron Lopresti’s artwork is darned nice, too.)

Why FP Doesn’t Have a Full-Text Web Feed

J.D. Roth commented in a recent post that he’d like Fascination Place to have a full-text web feed. In principle, I’d like this too, but I have several problems with full feeds, and while none of them is compelling by itself, they add up to my decision to go with a partial feed. Here’s an edited version of the reasons which I sent to J.D. in e-mail:

  1. Loss of content. Some information doesn’t come through in a feed. For instance, an entry with a YouTube embedded video won’t show the video in the feed. This seems contrary to the promise of a “full feed”. At the least, the feed should include a placeholder for items it can’t render so that people can actually tell that there’s something missing.
  2. Loss of formatting. Feeds often don’t reflect the formatting, e.g. of embedded images or other typical CSS tricks, of the content they’re displaying. For instance, floating images of books I review end up showing up in odd places in a full feed, rather than floating to the right like they’re supposed to. I find this annoying as both a content provider and a content consumer; formatting does matter.
  3. Hit tracking. This is admittedly a completely selfish reason: I like to see who’s coming in and reading which entries, which is difficult to do if people are reading only the feed. (I know J.D. use Feedburner for this, but my experience as a consumer is that Feedburner goes down a lot, and/or has serious performance issues sometimes, so I see it as a mediocre solution at best. I’m also reluctant to use a third party for feeds.)

  4. LiveJournal syndication. LJ syndication is nifty in that it’s fairly well automated, but annoying in that there’s no way (that I know of) to subscribe to the comments on a syndication account. With full feeds, people can (and probably will) comment on my entries and I’ll probably never see them. Using summary feeds essentially sidesteps the issue.

    (Plus, of course, if I switch to a full feed, then the LJ syndication account for FP will get spammed with new copies of all the recent entries available in the feed. Although, that would be a one-time – if ugly – thing.)

Basically, I think that feeds are still a young technology, with issues yet to be worked out. They’re still tremendously useful, but still require some compromises to be made. So I’ve chosen the compromise that works best for me. (I could probably address some of these issues through coding of my own, but time rarely permits such efforts these days.)

If people know of simple solutions to some or all of these solutions, I would consider them.

(BTW, if you have no idea what I’m talking about here, you can read the Wikipedia entry on web feeds. Two good ways to subscribe to feeds on the Mac are to use Safari RSS on Tiger – which is what I use – or to download NetNewsWire Lite.)

My Past Life

It’s somewhat amusing that my career at a previous company (or a close analogue) made The Daily WTF: A Case of the MUMPS. (The comments are also interesting.)

For four and a half years I programmed in MUMPS and in Visual Basic. It was an odd combination. It paid well, though. The work was actually fairly interesting, but a lot of that was because I was both aggressive about being one of the guys to use new technologies when the opportunity presented itself, and because the industry the company served was itself interesting to learn about. (Of course, one might call that a backhanded compliment: at Apple there’s so much to learn and new things to try that if I were aggressively picking up everything that came down the pipe, I’d never have time to do any real work.)

But MUMPS also feels a lot like a shell scripting language: Objects are created on the fly, creating anonymous data structures (arrays of dictionaries and so forth) is so easy that it’s commonly done, the syntax is quirky but not so bad once you figure out a paradigm you’re comfortable with, etc. Perl, Python, and even Ruby (my favorite of the three) all have touches of these characteristics to some degree. (I’m not a big fan of Python, and when I first read about it, its line-indenting restrictions reminded me a lot of MUMPS’ peculiar code-block notation.)

Reading the WTF article, I do have to wonder whether I view those days through rose-colored glasses. If I were to go back to programming in MUMPS (or M as it’s often called these days), would I be able to put up with the low-tech editor, the limited file sizes, the syntactic restrictions, the lack of any object-oriented programming at all?

Well, probably not. Especially since I’ve drunk the Objective-C kool-aid.

(Sent to me by Mark.)

Presidential Candidates

It’s a little sad that the 2008 Presidential campaign is already kicking into gear – with the first primaries still a year away.

But, NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday had a surprisingly entertaining interview with former Senators Bob Kerrey (D-NE) and Alan Simpson (R-WY) about the race. In this interview, they voice opinions that perhaps the most likely candidates to win their parties’ nominations are:

This seems like a plausible list to me, although of course a lot can change in a year.

The interesting thing here is how many candidates are sitting or former Senators, especially among the Democrats. But in my lifetime, being a sitting Senator has been the kiss of death for a Presidential candidate. Look how far back we have to go to find a sitting Senator who was elected to the Presidency:

In that span, many Senators and former Senators have won their party’s nomination and then gone down to defeat:

So does this mean we can look forward to a President Giuliani or President Romney? Well…

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 7 February 2007.

  • 52 #40 of 52 (DC)

    The long-running Luthor/Steel/Infinity Inc. storyline apparently comes to a conclusion here. Oddly, it seems entirely disconnected from the rest of the series’ storylines, so either there’s something else going on, or not everything is connected. The latter would be kind of lame, I think.

  • Justice Society vol. 2 TPB (DC)

    The completion of the reprint of All-Star Comics from the 1970s. This was and still is one of my all-time favorite superhero series (starring the Justice Society of America). Although in some ways too blunt and not very sophisticated, this was the seminal series exploring relationships between multiple generations of heroes, and was one of the first series to consider that heroes will eventually retire. A lot of series in the decades since owe a lot to the ground this series covered. If it has a downside, it’s that Joe Staton’s pencils in this volume (following the Wally Wood-dominated first half) seems a little too cartoony and simplistic. It’s still a fun read, though.

  • Astro City: The Dark Age Book Two #2 of 4 (DC/Wildstorm)

    The halfway point in this lengthy series (which will consist of three 4-issue series), it’s running a little late. I’m starting to wonder where Kurt Busiek is going with this particular story; although it focuses on the pair of brothers – one a crook, one a cop – and their lives in the 1970s, there’s a lot more that I hope gets resolved here. I think it will end up being either very ambitious, or rather scattered. But based on the series’ track record in the past, I’ll hope for the former.

  • Fantastic Four: The End #5 of 6 (Marvel)
  • The Incredible Hulk #92-95 (Marvel)

    I’ve heard good things about the “Planet Hulk” storyline which begins with these issues, so I decided to pick them up. (They’re about a year old now, so I have some catching up to do.) The Hulk is exiled by other heroes to a peaceful but uninhabited world, but something goes wrong and he lands on a barbaric world with a variety of creatures, and is captured and turned into a gladiator. But clearly as he regains the strength he lost from his journey, he’s going to become a player.

    It’s not a terribly subtle story, but writer Greg Pak keeps his eyes on the prize: The Hulk is entirely self-absorbed, doesn’t trust anyone, but isn’t (any longer) a fool, either. Which makes him a very dangerous contestant who’s not willing to play by anyones rules. (This also explains why the Hulk isn’t taking part in the Civil War “event”.)

    So this seems like a promising beginning to what they say will be a 14-issue story. I suspect it will have the usual disappointment in that eventually the Hulk will have to return to Earth and leave behind anything he’s gained on this other world. But that’s the downside to ongoing series.

  • Ms. Marvel #12 (Marvel)

    The first year of this series has been extremely haphazard, in large part because the Civil War disrupted it a great deal. Writer Brian Reed says in the letter column here that the second year will take the series in a different direction, as our heroine comes to grips with the less-than-ideal conclusions of some of her battles. I’d be happy if it just becomes a more cohesive series with more direction.

  • newuniversal #3 (Marvel)
  • Dr. Blink: Superhero Shrink: Id. Ego. Superego! vol. 1 TPB (Dork Storm)

    This is a collection of the very funny superhero satire by John Kovalic (Dork Tower) and Christopher Jones. Kovalic leaves no turn unstoned among the mainstream heroes, with both obvious and subtle humor worked in. Jones’ artwork straddles the line between dynamic and cartoony, and although it’s not stellar, it has some fine moments. (It’s reminiscent of Michael Avon Oeming’s work on Powers, actually.) The book is dedicated by Bob Newhart and Kurt Busiek, and it certainly feels like a twisted reflection of Busiek’s Astro City.

    The collection features a mix of 2-pagers (or thereabouts) and a few long-form stories; the latter are by far the more successful, as the short gags get a little repetitive after a while. But it’s still a fun little package, and it’s in color, yet! I’ll certainly be on board for the second collection.

Kirk, You Ignorant…

Today I had coffee with Subrata, Cliff and Whump and as we usually do we were geeking out about various things. The conversation turned to the Mirror Universe two-parter toward the end of Enterprise, “In A Mirror, Darkly”, which Cliff hadn’t seen. So I described the premise, and eventually got to mentioning my favorite part:

“And we get to see Scott Bakula in Kirk’s slut uniform!”

A great thing about my friends is that they all know exactly which outfit I mean when I say that.

Creepy Celebrities

Some celebrities creep me out. I reflect on some of them here.

The San Jose Mercury News has an interesting article on the celebrity status of the late Anna Nicole Smith. Even I was surprised by it, and I’m not really a celebrity-watcher. But some celebrities are hard to escape from, unless you never follow pop culture at all, and Smith was one of those, especially once her “reality” show become popular.

I’ve seen bits of her show while channel-surfing, and I immediately classified Smith as a “creepy” celebrity: Her shrill voice, her odd sense of decor and color, it was all just really weird. And of course her public exploits tended to seem equally weird. And, of course, she was one of those people who’s mostly famous for being famous, not because she was particularly talented or accomplished. This sort of fame is also very creepy to me.

I know it’s gauche to speak ill of the recently deceased, but Smith’s whole cachet seemed to be wrapped up in being peculiar, if not outright creepy. That ship sailed before I got anywhere near the pier.

My list of the five creepiest celebrities:

  1. Paris Hilton
  2. Mary-Kate Olsen (who jumped onto this list after I saw this photo)
  3. Britney Spears
  4. Anna Nicole Smith
  5. Pamela Anderson (especially after reading about her flirtation with on-line poker)

I can’t honestly think of any male celebrities I find creepy enough to put on this list.

One celebrity whom some might find creepy is Jessica Simpson, but honestly I find her to be your basic pop singer trying to forge an acting career. While anyone willing to do a “reality” show has to be considered at least somewhat peculiar, I just don’t find her strange enough to be creepy.

Which celebrities creep you out?

Well Today’s GOT to be Better

Yesterday was a pretty crappy day. The day after frisbee always starts out slightly crappy, since I’m stiff and slow-moving after running around for 2-3 hours.

But work was just a bear. It was just one thing after another, and never being able to make much progress on what I’m actually supposed to be working on. To be fair, I recently took on a project which turns out to have both a bunch of code that doesn’t work as I’d expected, and which uses technology which is new to me, so it’s been a bunch of thrashing around trying to both get oriented, and figure out how to get the code to do what I want. But then it’s everything getting in the way of that which was just hugely frustrating.

And on top of it, I had my least-favorite-weekly-meeting in the middle of the day.

So I was stressed out and very grumpy when it came time to go.

At night I went to Subrata‘s for gaming. It was not a good session. I made a boneheaded error and ended up way behind in the game we were playing, had a couple more setbacks, and ended up leaving at 10:30 because I clearly wasn’t going to win (or even come close), and the game was going to go on for a while yet. Not at all what I was hoping for out of gaming.

On the bright side, I did buy comic books. On the dark side, I only got to read two of them before going to bed. But one of them was the new Astro City, which made me happy.

Today’s gotta be a better day. I mean, it could be worse, but geez, I hope not.