Librariantics

Today I made a young girl cry at the library

2012-01-24T19:00:00.000-08:00

I should probably provide some context.

There's a young girl who comes fairly often to the library—let's call her Mary. Mary is ten years old, very talkative, very sociable, and home-schooled. She's also pretty sharp-tongued for a ten-year-old and is not afraid to tell me exactly what she's thinking. (Older, stricter adults may classify this as 'sass' or 'backtalk;' I prefer to think of it as 'conversational spice.') She visited more often last fall, sometimes once a week or more, but disappeared over the winter months; today was the first time I'd seen her in several weeks. She's also a voracious reader, currently working her way through every Nancy Drew book, in order.

Mary also has a couple of attributes that make me extremely frustrated when she comes to the library. I mentioned she's home-schooled; unfortunately, hers is the kind of education in which the answer to every question in the textbook can be summed up as 'Jesus.' Moreover, she comes to me to help her with her homework, but the kind of help she expects is, essentially, for me to write her essays for her. Lastly, she has an incredibly short attention span. I really hesitate to diagnose children with mental issues—especially after reading the first few chapters of the excellent Raised on Ritalin by Xeric-grant-winning Minnesota-based comics superstar Tyler Page—but Mary is the poster child for ADD. She'll ask me a question, get bored with my answer halfway through it, ask me a completely unrelated question, get bored with that answer, then get frustrated with me for getting off-track from her original question. Essentially, she wanted me to do her work for her, but didn't have the attention span to actually let me do it.

Like I said, today was the first time in a while she's come by, and today she had to write a page-long essay about Zeus, comparing him to the Christian God. I found her a couple books on Greek mythology appropriate for her age level, but she wanted me to just tell her what to write. I was able to give her a few sentences after much struggling and frustration ("Did you know four of the first five presidents were born in Virginia? What's the next Nancy Drew book in the series? Why aren't you helping me with my essay?"). When she left, I called her home and spoke to her mother. Now, I was extremely hesitant about taking this step, because it's crossing a line, and the last thing I wanted was for a parent to rail at me for telling them how to raise their child. Fortunately, Mary's mother was very understanding about the situation. I made sure to stress that I wasn't frustrated at Mary for being in the library, or for asking me for help, but that I simply could not be her teacher. I also suggested, as delicately as possible, that she might want to have her daughter see a child psychologist and be tested for ADD.

Half an hour later, Mary came back to the library with her father, and started crying before she could even stammer out an apology to me. I wanted nothing more than to give that sad little girl a hug, but as an adult male who chooses to spend his entire day with small children and openly admits to liking the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I'm already pretty suspect and didn't want to add fuel to that particular fire. Mary had clearly already been crying; her parents had doubtless given her a stern talking-to and made her feel terrible about making Mister Ted at the library angry for wasting his time on her. I did my best to make it clear that I wasn't angry and that I didn't want her to stop coming to the library, though I don't know how much good I did with her father at her side, apologizing for her lack of respect towards an adult and authority figure.

I feel terrible about getting Mary in trouble with her parents, but I had to make it clear to her that I couldn't provide the kind of help she was looking for, and if she wouldn't listen to me, she would have to listen to her parents. The last thing I wanted was to scare her away from the library; in a town as small as Glenwood, the library is one of the only third places available to children and teens, and I want to make sure it stays an open and inviting place for them. Calling the parent(s) or guardian is the "nuclear option," which I've only had to use once before, and in both that case and Mary's, I wish I'd thought of something else before resorting to it; doing so signals to the child(ren) that not even the library is safe from their parents' (seemingly) overly strict rules. It seemed like my only option at the time, and it might even prove to have been the right choice in Mary's case, but in the meantime, well ... I made a young girl cry at the library. In my library.

I'm not going to feel okay with myself for a while.

Self-promotion, continued

2011-12-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Within a much more reasonable timeframe this time around!

As some (most) of you readers know, I'm not just a librarian/writer/raconteur; I'm also Head Scriptwriter for the fangame My Little Pony: Fiends From Dream Valley. Well, we at Dream Valley Games (which I guess is our official "company" name?) have just released a new update video, showing what we've been doing and where we're going. Specifically, we'll be going to BroNYCon, the upcoming brony-fest in New York City, taking place on January 7. We'll be debuting a demo of the first two levels. Anyone in the NYC area should take pains to attend and help feed my already-massive ego.

I've embedded the update video itself below the cut, in case you hate going all the way to YouTube just to watch a video.

The delicate art of self-promotion

2011-12-15T10:13:00.000-08:00

I'm ashamed to realize just how much stuff I've been doing that I haven't talked about. I am absolutely terrible at promoting myself, which is ironic, considering that I'm on the Internet and self-promotion is the Internet's primary export. Furthermore, I need to practice this stuff for when I have something actually important to tell you all about.

So! In reverse chronological order:

- Today, I've posted a podcast interview with Dr. Joni Bodart, author of They Suck, They Bite, They Eat, They Kill: The Psychological Meaning of Supernatural Monsters in Young Adult Fiction on The Hub, the official blog of YALSA. Basically I spend an hour talking with this really interesting woman about zombies, werewolves, and vampires, and what they all mean. Take a listen!

- Last Tuesday I was a guest on Thunk Tank, With Bronwyn and Jay, a program on the NYC station WFMU. In it, I talk about, yes, being a 'brony.' Bronwyn and Jay were both really nice, and we ended up having a good conversation about cynicism and sincerity in children's television shows. It was, as they say, a "hoot."

- Lastly, and perhaps most awesomely (and thus most embarrassing that it took me this long to post), a comic I wrote for the webcomic group Carpe Chaos went up back in—gulp—October. It's called Reinvention, and I'm pretty dang proud of it. This comic is, in fact, probably my first paid comics work ever, so why not check it out so you can say you were there at the beginning of my long and ~~ignominious~~ illustrious career?

There may be a few more announcement-type things popping up in the next few weeks; hopefully I'll get to them sooner than I did to this batch. Keep watching the skies! I mean, my blog!

Swedish Chef is my spirit animal

2011-11-26T20:39:00.001-08:00

I saw the new muppets movie—you know, the one titled The Muppets—the day after Thanksgiving with my parents. Now, I grew up with the muppets—first Sesame Street, followed by equal amounts of The Muppet Show and The Dark Crystal—so I went into the film with high expectations and strong opinions. Did it live up to all that?

In a word: no.

In many more words: no, and here's why.

A quick summary, if you haven't yet seen it. Walter is a muppet fan, and a muppet himself, living in Smalltown, USA. He dreams of going to LA and seeing Muppet Studios, but when he finally arrives (with his brother Gary and Gary's girlfriend Mary), he discovers the place is a wreck that hasn't been used in years. Worse yet, oil tycoon Tex Richman (a brilliantly dumb name) is planning to tear the studio down and drill for oil on the property—unless the muppets can raise ten million dollars in two weeks. Walter helps get the gang back together, and with his help, they put on a telethon to raise the money.

That's a perfectly serviceable plot. It's also a perfect muppet plot, combining show-biz hoopla and small-town family values in a ludicrous stew. It's quite possibly the best possible "get the gang back together" plot there is. But the actual execution of the plot is what does it in.

It's important to note that the two screenwriters, Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segal (who also plays Gary) are muppet fans, because that explains virtually everything that's wrong about the film. The Muppets is a fan's film. It alternates between melancholy and reverent: half the time it's singing the praises of the muppets, the other half it's lamenting their disappearance. It's so busy reminding the audience that the muppets used to be funny that it doesn't bother to explain why they were funny, much less actually show them being funny.

The movie is made for those of us who grew up with these characters and who only need the slightest excuse to begin singing "Mahna Mahna". But pity the poor five-year-old child who's been dragged to the theater by his hipster parents to watch a bunch of strange, cloth-like beings walk onscreen and reminisce about the glory days. What does it mean to that child to see Gonzo being a plumbing magnate? Why should he laugh at Fozzie leading a muppets tribute band in Reno, or Miss Piggy as the editor of Paris Vogue? It's funny to fans, but it's useless to potential fans. As an introduction to the muppets, the movie flat-out fails.

Worse yet are those scenes that try to "fix" or "finish the story" of the muppets. It's nice to see Fozzie finally get some laughs with his stand-up act, or Kermit and Piggy finally admit they love each other, but those scenes do nothing for the film as a whole. Moreover, they strengthen the impression of "For Fans Only, All Others Need Not Apply".

The movie as a whole smacks of fanfic—not just fanfic, in fact, but Mary Sue fanfic. (For those of you too lazy to follow the link, a "Mary Sue" is a self-insert character, allowing the author to not only interact with their favorite characters, but often outdo them in many ways: they get to make love to Captain Kirk or outshoot Han Solo or be better at magic than Harry Potter.) Walter, the plucky little muppet who could, gets to not only re-inspire the muppets, he brings them all back together, performs amazingly onstage at the eleventh hour, and in the end even gets an approving nod from Kermit himself. It's a story written by someone who wanted to meet his heroes and bask in their reflected glow. (The only caveat that prevents the story from being an out-and-out Mary Sue is that the performer of the most Sue-ish of them all, Walter, had nothing to do with the writing of the movie. But still, Segal gets to stand right at Walter's fuzzy side and share in most of the glory.) The movie is authorial wish-fulfillment, self-gratification, or, even less politely, masturbation: it satisfies the performer, but what about the rest of us?

Was there anything good about it? Sure. Chris Cooper as Rich Texman is brilliant, and his one musical number, though too short, is hilarious. The songs are generally pretty good, particularly the opening number about how everything is wonderful in Smalltown, USA, featuring a perpetually smiling multi-racial cast. And the actual sketches of the telethon, or at least the bits we get to see, are worthy of the original Muppet Show. (A muppet barbershop quartet singing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as they lather and shave Jack Black is even more hilarious than it sounds.)

Is it a bad movie? Not really. It's not even necessarily a bad muppet movie. But it's not the muppet movie that should've been made right now, and it certainly isn't the movie that will introduce an entire new generation of fans to the muppets.

It'd be easy to say that Jim Henson was the heart and soul of the muppets, and that they should've died with him. That's not fair to the people he picked to realize his visions and who carried on after his death, and it's also a trite phrase that doesn't stand up as a criticism. But one thing that needs to be remembered about Henson is that, more than a performer, he was an innovator. He was never content to stick with just one character or show or idea; even as he perfected muppet-based comedy with The Muppet Show, he moved into fantasy with The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and The Storyteller. Technically, he was never satisfied; he was constantly experimenting with new puppet designs and methods of building and animating strange creatures. This movie may have aimed for the same blend of pop culture references, meta-humor, celebrity cameos, and bad puns that was the muppets' stock in trade, and it may even have succeeded, but it's worth pointing out that the very man who invented the muppets was always trying to do something fresh. This movie was too content to look backwards, rather than forwards.

But still, I can't deny, a little part of me thrilled when I heard that song:

It's time to play the music
It's time to light the lights...

Meditation on recent events

2011-10-29T09:26:00.000-07:00

After a week of finding books for small children, I am now wearing a My Little Pony t-shirt and preparing to play a Batman video game for the next eight hours, all while thinking about the teenage romance comedy graphic novel about werewolves I'm writing.My life is either going very poorly, or very, very well, and I'm honestly not sure which.

Self-promotion!

2011-09-27T19:45:00.000-07:00

I did another post for The Hub, official blog of YALSA, as part of the semi-ongoing "Outside Our Comfort Zone" series, where Sarah Debraski (another teen librarian) and I pick books for each other to read, then discuss them. As usual, I picked a graphic novel (Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson's excellent Beasts of Burden), while Sarah chose a fairy-tale retelling (Robin McKinley's Beauty) for me. What did we think? Well, for that, you'll have to read the post and listen to the podcast, won't you?

Men who've had sex with men can now give blood!

2011-09-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

...in the UK.

Well, it's a start. Hopefully this will encourage changes in other countries—like, say, my own?

'Doodle' - a Victoria story

2011-09-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

As most of you gentle readers probably know, I've got a lot of stories I want to write. Unfortunately, most of them I want to do in comics form, but my own drawing skills are relatively weak, forcing me to work with unreliable and lazy artists. (Hi, Aaron! Hi, Sam! Just kidding!) So I've decided on a compromise: I'm going to do a few short stories from some of my universes, and see if any of them grab people's attention. Hopefully, it grabs your attention enough to give me some money to fund the creation of the full comic.Without further ado, here is 'Doodle', a short story from what will probably be my biggest and most awesome comic, Victoria.

For the nineteenth time that night, Alex Caoimhin leaned back, rubbed his temples, and sighed. He had to deliver twenty-four comic pages to his publisher by Friday. Pages one through sixteen had been easy. Pages seventeen through twenty had kept him up late. Page twenty-one was giving him a migraine, an ulcer, and muscle spasms. At this rate, twenty-two would kick his dog and stab his mother. He started idly sketching a face while running through the pages in his head.

Nine panels, one of them an establishing shot. Too much dialogue. Character placement difficult—hard to block out the conversation. Move the third panel up, that would help the flow, but then there's less space for the establishing shot...combine panels six and seven to fix the layout, but then the dialogue would cover the art...move panel nine to the next page? No, it's a spread...

Alex got up and went to the kitchen. His apartment wasn't the best place to draw comics—in fact, he was pretty sure it was the worst possible place to draw comics—but at least the coffee maker was twenty feet from the drawing table. He walked those twenty feet, filled his mug, walked the twenty feet back, and found a girl sitting at his table leafing through his pages.

She had the slender build of an athlete, with long, slim fingers that moved like birds. Her features weren't exactly Hispanic, Scandinavian, Slavic, Asian, or any other ethnicity. Her eyes were quick, and dark, and she hardly blinked.

Alex didn't take the time to notice her appearance. Hopped up on caffeine and comic-book action, he threw the full mug at the girl from nowhere.

Without looking up from Alex's drawing table, she caught the mug and, with a flick of her wrist that was completely impossible, collected the coffee that had spilled in mid-air inside it, letting not a drop fall. “Watch it,” she said. “You could've ruined your pages.”

“Sorry,” Alex mumbled. He suddenly felt embarrassed for reasons he couldn't exactly place. “What is this? Who are you?”

The girl handed the mug back to Alex. “My name is Victoria Hill, Mr. Caoimhin, and I might be here to save your life.” She opened a manila envelope Alex hadn't noticed and handed him a Xeroxed page. “Take a look.”

The page showed an ornate illuminated manuscript page in marginally readable old English. Several tiny cherubs flew in and around the large capital letter at the top of the page. One cherub, off to the side, had comically large eyes pointing in opposite directions, an overly wide smile, and a strange curlicue of hair.

Alex stared at the page. “Is this...” he started to say.

“English. Late 14th-century copy of the Book of Hours. It's in a private collection in Germany.” The girl who called herself Victoria took another page out of the envelope and gave it to Alex. “This is from a French broadside, mid-18th century.”

Alex looked. It was an early caricature—some political figures tormented by a horde of tiny, comic devils, both sides saying long phrases in French. One of the devils had bugged eyes, a long, toothy grin, and a curly haircut.

“Here.” Victoria pulled out more pages. “English caricature, late 1890s. Early American newspaper comic, 1908. A minor surrealist painter's notebook, 1930s.” Alex leafed through them. Despite the different styles and subjects, each page had a figure somewhere with wall-eyes, a large, inhuman smile, and the same strange hair.

Alex handed back the pages. “I've got a bunch more, but you get the idea,” Victoria said, stuffing them into the envelope. “That character shows up in works by a couple dozen artists stretching back to the Dark Ages. And those are just the ones we know about—there's probably hieroglyphics with him in some lost tomb...”

“So what is this? Some kind of copyright thing?” Alex grabbed the envelope and started pulling out the sheets again, searching through them. “You think I stole the little guy I doodle in my sketchbook from a clay tablet?”

“Not quite.”

“Wait, how do you even know I've drawn him? I've never put him in any pages.”

“No, but you put him in a sketch you did last week at that convention in Denver. Remember? The kid asked for—”

“'Something random,' yeah, I remember.” Alex threw the envelope and its contents down next to the pages he'd been working on. In the margins of one page, drawn lightly in blue pencil, was a loosely-drawn figure with the same basic details as the ones in the copies. “So I drew Doodle.”

“Doodle? That's his name?”

“That's what I call him, yeah. He's not, like, a character or anything...”

“Nobody knows what the hell he is, Mr. Caoimhin, and that's the problem.” Victoria picked up the page with Doodle on it and stared intently at the sketch. “One of my colleagues thinks he's a memetic virus, that his specific features create an intense desire in certain viewers to replicate his image. There's another opinion that he's a symptom of a neural condition, or just an extremely specific form of OCD...”

“Memetic what now?”

“But my hunch is that the character himself is actually attempting to travel from the realm of ideas into the physical world, and is using artists like yourself to give him a material form.”

“Realm of ideas?”

“Just like it sounds: the world of ideas. Thoughts. Forms. Where every fictional universe is built, and every character lives, and every idea anyone's ever had is born.” She tapped her knuckles on the drawing table. “In this world there's ten million tables, but in that world there's just the idea of the table, of which all physical tables are just shadows. It's a Plato thing. Get me?”

“I...” Alex ran his fingers through his hair. “I think so. And Doodle, he's—he comes from there?”

“That's my guess. And he's trying to come here.” Victoria rubbed her thumb over the sketch thoughtfully. “The question is why? Why is he trying to come into the physical world? Does he want to spread his influence as a character? Is he trying to escape something? Are his motives sinister or benign?”

“How could we possibly know?”

“Easy. Send me in with him.”

For the third or fourth time that night, Alex was completely at a loss. “What?”

“Draw me into a comic, and then draw Doodle in, too. Where he is right now—halfway between the ideal world and the material world—I can't interact with him. But if we're together in the same medium, I can talk to him directly and find out what he's trying to do.”

“So...how do I, uh...” Alex made a drawing motion in the air with his hand.

“I'll put you in a hypnotic trance and open a portal through your drawing process.” She saw Alex's skeptical expression and grinned. “Don't worry,” she said, “I'm a professional.” She stood up from the drawing table and motioned to the chair.

Alex goggled. “What, now?” he said.

“No time like the present.”

Reluctantly, Alex sat in the chair. He took out a sheet of printer paper and a ballpoint pen—he didn't want to waste any of his good pens in case this all turned out to be some kind of insane hallucination.

Victoria put her hands on his temples and gently turned his head towards her. She took a small, shiny object—Alex couldn't quite see what it was—and started moving it in front of his face in a strange circular pattern, first slowly, then quicker, back and forth and back and forth and

the pen moved

touching the paper

drawing now

drawing her in

* * *

and then

and then he stopped

and then the universe shifted gears, everything lurched, and Victoria was standing next to him. “Did it work?” he asked, dazed.

“Far as I can tell.” Victoria rubbed her hands, massaging the joints. “His features aren't unique any more, so there's no way to spread his identity as an individual. I made him...sterile? Non-infectious?”

“Neutered?” Alex suggested.

“Close enough.”

“What about all those pictures of him? The caricatures and stuff?”

“Shouldn't be a problem. They no longer have any connection to Doodle as he is now.”

“Well...thanks, I guess,” he said, feeling stupid. “For not letting me go insane, I mean.”

“No problem.” Victoria picked up one of the pages, smiled a little, then flipped it around to show to Alex. “But you kind of...exaggerated my proportions in a few panels.”

“Yeah, sorry. Force of habit.”

Victoria handed him back the page, then turned and walked to the door. “Keep those pages safe,” she said back over her shoulder. “And don't show them to anyone else.”

“Can do.” Alex opened his mouth to speak, then shut it, then opened it again. “Look, this...this has been the weirdest night of my life. You save me from a, a parasitic character by jumping into a comic page and rearranging his face—and don't think I'm not grateful for it, but...” He paused. “I just wanna know—what are you?”

The girl looked back one last time. “Like I told you,” she said with a smile. “I'm Victoria.”

And then she was gone.

Treasures from the stacks, part one in a never-ending series

2011-08-26T18:12:00.000-07:00

So I know there hasn't been much activity on this blog in the last...let's see...month. But there's a very good reason for that: I am extremely friggin' busy. I'm planning five new programs, getting ready for storytime, furnishing my under-furnished apartment, being sick (*cough cough*), and basically doing everything that an adult human does every day.

I plan to do a nice big post on the state of the Glenwood library soon, but in the meantime I present a pictorial interlude of no real value: "Treasures of the Stacks"! All of these items were found in the stacks of the Glenwood library. Most of them I found in the process of weeding, which in library lingo means "removing the crap we don't need," so you can at least take comfort in the knowledge that few of these items can still be checked out. Now, on to the show!

This was one of my first and greatest finds. Seriously, check this kid out: he is creepy as all hell. Partly it's the teeth, partly it's the dead eyes, but mostly it's the all-pervading sense of evil coming off this kid that says he'd like nothing more than to consume your flesh.

Wow, they've already got a copy of my autobiography!

The best part of this cover is how completely stoned that mouse is.

I CAN??!?

And you can keep it.

I just love how this whole family is the portrait of dysfunction. It's all the repressed glory of the '50s plastic-fantastic universe distilled into a single image. This book is the Cold War, baby.

And lastly, some art advice:

Draw a regular animal, then kill a bunch of them.

On privilege

2011-07-19T08:16:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about privilege a lot lately, thanks partly to having discovered the site Microaggresions. It's a collection of anonymous, user-submitted stories of "power, privilege, and everyday life." (Tip of the hat for the site to sexy webcomics goddess Elena Barbarich, a.k.a. Yamino.) Much as we need to pay attention to the giant scandals, the massive hypocrisies, the enormous gaps between those who have privilege and those who don't, we also need to see the minor stories, the moments, the minute-to-minute reminders that the system is unjust and our unconscious beliefs shape our every interaction.

I think part of the reason I'm so interested in privilege is that I've got quite a lot of it. I'm a straight, white, highly educated, cis-gendered male born into a middle-class, two-parent family in middle America. On paper, I'm about as whitebread hetero-normative as you can get. So I want to broaden my horizons as much as possible, remind myself that not everyone has the same advantages and perspectives that I take for granted.

(The site is also helpful, incidentally, for reminding me of all the ways that I'm not whitebread, of all the groups I belong to that don't hold the power. I'm an atheist, for example, which puts me at odds with a huge percentage of America. I don't follow much of mainstream culture, which doesn't exactly make me underprivileged, but certainly marks me as different. And being highly educated is as much an advantage as a disadvantage in certain contexts. I did actually submit my story of the only time I ever felt repressed for being an atheist, but it hasn't shown up yet on the site.)

One of the issues that's bound to come up sooner or later in my new job as a small-town librarian is whether to include books about people who aren't represented in the community. For example, I'm willing to bet Glenwood has no Muslim population to speak of (though I'd love to be proven wrong). Should I then add a book like, say, Does My Head Look Big in This?, about an American Muslim teen? Obviously you want your collection to reflect the needs and desires of your patrons, but you also want to provide materials for them that will enlarge their world. Much as it is important to provide books that reflect the world around your readers, isn't it more important to provide books that reflect the world they don't see?

All of this is largely academic for now, because one of the problems of working in a small-town library is that we have virtually no money for new books. But believe you me, when we get that cheddar, all these musings will bear fruit.

So far, so good

2011-07-16T20:00:00.001-07:00

One week in, and I've already been hugged by an adorable five-year-old girl for finding the book she wanted.

Good start.

Slightly more busy than usual, yes

2011-07-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I took a job as a children's librarian in a small town in Iowa, which meant moving to a city where I knew literally no one within several hundred miles. Currently I'm subletting an apartment from the daughter of a friend of my mother (long story) while searching for an actual apartment, trying to crank out a 2,500-word essay on one of the longest and most-adapted manga series ever written, and simultaneously looking forward to and dreading my new job, for which I have plenty of training but very little experience.

So I've been a bit distracted, you could say. Sorry to all you loyal blog readers new and old.

It's going to take me a while to resume a normal broadcasting schedule. Let me leave you with some reading material in the meantime: remember the podcast I recorded, the speech defending My Little Pony as an excellent show that no adult male should be ashamed to watch? Well, I've posted the text of that speech on my DeviantArt page, which I hardly ever use. So if you didn't want to listen to my droning voice for more than six and a half minutes, you can now read it instead!

Some initial thoughts on "My Little Pony"

2011-07-03T19:07:00.000-07:00

I've been talking a lot about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic lately, to quite a lot of people. First the episode of Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! a few weeks ago, then a few segments on a local comics podcast I do with a few friends, The Geek Report. In particular, I recorded a separate podcast episode of the Report, only about three minutes long, in which I read a prepared, written statement on my feelings about both the show and the media coverage thereof.

Here's the thing. I didn't set out to become a spokesperson for the brony community. I don't think I'm the right person to be that spokesperson. And I certainly don't feel like being that spokesperson on a regular basis. But if my various ramblings and incoherent explanations of this weird subculture can contribute at all to its acceptance by a wider audience, then hey, I'm content to keep explaining my love of ponies and their magical friendship to anyone who'll listen.

I've said quite a bit on my various appearances, but there's two more points I haven't really been able to cover. The first is why I think there's been so much mockery of and downright hate towards the fans of MLP:FiM. Virtually every media forum in the world seems to have made fun of us at some point or another—heck, one of the first stories about bronies came from Fox News, the pinnacle of ill-informed hate. The obvious answer for why we've endured such opprobium is that it's just the latest in a long line of objects, ideas, and media that grown men should have "grown out of" long ago. Comic books, action figures, video games, animated television shows: all these are hallmarks of childhood (boyhood specifically), and thus should be left behind once we leave childhood. Anyone who admits to still enjoying anything from this list is seen as being in a state of suspended childhood, unwilling or unable to grow up and accept adult responsibilities.

But I think there's another reason for this mockery, especially that mockery which comes from other "suspended children"—that is to say, other nerdy subcultures. It's an obvious and accepted truism that we put others down to feel better about ourselves, and this only becomes more true—or perhaps more visible—the more we need to feel better about ourselves. The more we feel we are under attack, the more we look for someone else to attack, and nerds are nothing if not under attack by the "normal" world. Thus, we find someone lower on the totem pole to mock: the Star Trek fan makes fun of the Star Wars fan; the action figure collector looks down on the comic collector; the video gamer feels superior to the Dungeons & Dragons player. For a variety of reasons—the show's newness, its "girly-ness," the fact that its fans self-identify using a fairly ridiculous name—MLP:FiM fans are currently the absolute lowest on that totem pole.

Will that change? Maybe. Eventually. Hopefully. Once people realize that liking a show for young girls does not diminish adult viewers, especially adult males, and that the show itself is actually good, their opinions will change. But that'll take a major cultural shift, I think, because of how firmly certain notions of gender and adulthood are entrenched in American society. (And, probably, elsewhere, but I'm only really familiar with America, so.)

The other point I wanted to make, and which demonstrates perhaps most conclusively that us bronies are not horrible weird perverts, is that the creators of the show themselves have acknowledged us and accepted us as just another group of fans. Lauren Faust, creator of MLP:FiM, had this to say when someone commented on her DeviantArt page about bronies:

This makes me extremely happy for two reasons: first, obviously, it shows that Mrs. Faust knows we're out there and understands that we're not strange perverted freaks, but second, it confirms what I've been saying all along, that the show is enjoyed by these adult males not because it caters to them but simply because it's good. Other people who've worked on the show have responded to fans, answered questions, and otherwise made it clear that they regard bronies as just another group of fans. They acknowledge that, while the show isn't made for adult viewers—officially, lest we forget, the show's demographic is 6- to 8-year-old girls, and I think it's perfect for that audience—anyone can and should be able to derive enjoyment from it.

Frankly, I feel sorry for Faust and everyone else who's worked on the show, because their hard work and talent are being ignored in favor of talking about these supposedly messed-up fans. The story is "hey look at these weirdos who like a show for little girls," when it should be "hey look at this show based on a toy franchise that is actually really good." A great deal of time, effort, and love went into this show, and from the stories that have been published, you'd think its only viewers are unemployed 30-year-old Asperger's sufferers.

As with all my other appearances, I have no idea whether this will change anyone's mind about the show and its fans. But I'd like to try.

Because people might have been Googling for me

2011-06-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

My name is Ted Anderson, and I'm a former intern for the NPR show Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! I'm a blogger, an aspiring librarian, a comics writer, and a podcaster.

I am also a fan of the new television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, also known as a "brony." If you've been reading my blog for a while now, you'll notice that I haven't actually talked about my love of this show before; if you've just discovered this blog, I'm guessing it's because I just appeared on Wait, Wait (specifically, the June 25, 2011 episode) to talk about being a brony, and you Googled my name and a few other terms ("pony," for example) and found this post. I've discussed the show quite a bit with my friends—see here for an example—but not on this blog. Partly that's out of laziness, but it's also partly because this blog is, to some extent, my professional face on the Internet, and I'd like to seem as professional as possible, which means not talking about how I think this show for little girls is awesome.

But what the heck. I may as well capitalize on my fame, right?

Expect a post from me on my feelings about the show and its fandom in the next few days. In the meantime, I'm also a co-host of a weekly podcast in the Minneapolis area, the Geek Report, and in our most recent episode, posted June 26, 2011, we discussed the show and why it's seen as shameful for adult males to enjoy it. If you enjoyed my appearance on Wait, Wait, you should give this podcast a listen, to hear me explain more coherently and cohesively just what it is about the show that I like. Of course, you can also read through my previous posts on this blog about comics, libraries and librarians, movies, and so forth. I hope you like what you find!

Ted's thoughts on X-Men: First Class

2011-06-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

I liked it. I honestly, genuinely liked it. Which, to be fair, I was kind of expecting to, because the reviews I'd seen had been generally positive.

X-Men as a comic has always been dense with history—not just because it's been around for almost fifty years, but in the sense that many of its major characters have decades (sometimes centuries) of backstory, turning them into complex knots of motivations, desires, hatreds, beliefs, and so forth. Its two central poles, Magneto and Professor X, each have particularly rich histories, explaining how two men from very different backgrounds became the closest of friends, then the bitterest of enemies. At first, I thought the very last thing a film series that's already had four films, each packed with dozens of major characters, should do is delve even deeper into its own mythology—particularly after the last two of those films were such stinkers—but it ends up working out: they introduce essentially a whole new cast, injecting some new blood into the franchise, while explaining a bit more about those we already knew.

First Class also finally strikes just the right balance of sobriety and camp. If you've talked with me about superhero films for any length of time, I've probably given you my speech about how I hate the Spider-Man movies, mostly from the schlock factor. Sam Raimi is not an understated director; his movies are big and splashy, every emotion played out across the entire screen. I dislike that, in a comic book movie. I want the material to be fun, sure, but taking itself at least a little bit seriously. The first two X-Men films hit that perfect note for me: the plots were about stopping bad guys from doing something horrible to the world, yes, but with more pathos and emotional density than your standard action flick. They were big, and over-the-top in terms of plot, but the actual mood was more subdued, more character-driven. It's the same reason I love Terminator 2.

No movie is perfect, of course. I mentioned the "new blood" of the cast, but the focus is still on Magneto and Professor X. Their arc is great, and well-handled, but it does mean the other characters tend to be underdeveloped. Most of the young mutants get only a sentence or two to really show off their characters—not necessarily a bad thing in a splashy big-budget yet mythology-heavy movie like this, but it sure doesn't make me want to go out and see X-Men Origins: Banshee.

January Jones is godawful as an actress. I'm pretty sure the producers of Mad Men, when they were casting Betty Draper, were looking specifically for a woman who was almost totally emotionless because everything was being bottled up and tightly controlled. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that January Jones wasn't acting.

Some of the new mutant characters, both good guys and bad, are pretty odd choices. X-Men, by virtue of its subject matter, its longevity, and its premise, has an extremely large and diverse catalog of characters. So why, when you're looking for two Bad Mutants to round out Kevin Bacon's villainous crew, do you pick an extremely terrible and utterly despised character created by one of the most hated writers ever to take on the mutants, and a character so long-forgotten even I hadn't heard of him? Same goes for more than one of the First Class themselves (though I was delighted by the inclusion and Nicholas Hoult's portrayal of Hank McCoy).

At this point I'm going to start bringing in spoilers, so the rest of this scatterbrained review will be below a cut. Click through if you've seen the movie yourself, or if you just don't care.

- I joked before seeing the movie that it would be X-Men plus Mad Men, due to the '60s setting, but really it's X-Men plus James Bond. Kevin Bacon is almost the archetypal Bond villain. Overly complicated plan to rule the world? Check. Judicious use of nuclear power? Check. Love of secret rooms and other secret things? Very much check—not only does he have a secret submarine hidden in his yacht, his secret submarine has a secret room inside it. All he needed was the white cat to stroke.

- The film obviously draws bits and pieces from all throughout the franchise's nearly fifty years, but in particular it owes a lot to what Chris Claremont did in the '80s. There's the obvious ones—he created the Hellfire Club, Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, and deepened Magneto's background, particularly as it related to the Holocaust—but there's also the more subtle coloration that he gave the series, turning it from larger-than-life battles with crazy villains and trips into space towards slice-of-life stories, making more parallels between anti-mutant sentiments and racism. This isn't a bad thing, not at all: Claremont's work in the '80s is justly remembered as reinventing the franchise while keeping true to its roots. However, they did miss out on an opportunity to introduce yet another actress playing the part of Kitty Pryde.

- First Class has maybe one of my favorite montages I've ever seen, when Xavier and Magneto are training the new kids to use their powers. Not only does it have some nice visual splashiness, with multiple frames sliding around to emphasize or diminish various elements, but it's also just doing exactly what a montage should do: give us a condensed version of events we don't need to see the entirety of, in a short yet entertaining sequence.

- When Azazel attacks the CIA and kills the guards by teleporting in, grabbing them, teleporting several hundred feet up, and then dropping them, I naturally could only hear this song in my head.

- I mentioned above that some of the characters got short shrift, but here's a specific and spoilery example: Hank/Beast got to participate in that great love triangle with Mystique and Magneto, and also served to further Mystique's own theme of fitting in versus showing one's true self, but Hank's own arc got the shaft in the process. Mystique's character arc was nice and gradual and everything made sense, but Hank is sort of left hanging by the end, without any sense of closure. Disappointing.

- The nods to the rest of the franchise were generally good—Xavier's cracks about his hair, Shaw's helmet, and Hugh Jackman's wonderful cameo—but I'm of the school that less is often more, and they could've cut a few out.

- You know that other member of Shaw's crew I mentioned up above? Riptide? The guy who shot tornadoes out of his hands? I honestly can't remember if he had a single line in that movie at all. I'm pretty sure you could have just replaced him with a really big fan in every scene, and the impact to the movie would be nil.

Ted reviews Marimo Ragawa's Baby & Me

2011-05-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

I'm going back to a classic, here, in more ways than one. Marimo Ragawa's series Baby & Me was published from 1991 to 1997, which qualifies it as a classic in my book. But it's also a series that I finished reading last year, and which I haven't re-read since, so I may be a little fuzzy on some of the details. However, I'm not fuzzy on my general opinion of the series: it's very, very good, and definitely worthy of your time.

B&M has a very simple, very straightforward premise: ten-year-old Takuya Enoki's mother, Yukako, died recently in a car crash, leaving behind Takuya, his father Harumi, and his baby brother Minoru, who's only two years old. Harumi works long days and nights, leaving Takuya to care for Minoru most of the time. Now Takuya has to juggle school, caring for his brother and father, dealing with his wacky friends and neighbors, and the various crazy situations he occasionally gets dragged into.

Like I said: simple premise. It's practically a sitcom premise, really, the kind of setup that could generate three schmaltzy seasons on ABC. But it's handled with a sensitivity and depth that makes it well worth the read.

A lot of that strength comes from Takuya. Minoru is a cute kid, with a wide variety of adorable expressions in his arsenal, but he's too young to actually carry much of a story. Takuya, though, is a strong character, a good kid stuck in a tough situation. He clearly loves Minoru, but also resents him for taking over his life; he enjoys the responsibility of being a big brother, but at the same time, he's still a kid himself. Ragawa walks a fine line with Takuya: he's more mature than most of his classmates, capable of taking care of himself and his family, but he's still prone to emotional outbursts, childish tantrums, and the occasional bout of immaturity. He is, in short, still growing up.

The other strong point of the series is its supporting cast. Takuya and Minoru are clearly the main characters of the series, but the cast expands rapidly. The Enokis' neighbors, Takuya's classmates, Harumi's colleagues: they flesh out the world of B&M and make it feel that much more organic.

Many of these characters only appear in a chapter or two, but the best ones stick around. Takuya's father, Harumi, is given his own supporting cast of office workers, bosses, and secretaries. Their neighbors (I think—again, it's been a while) Seiichi and Tomoko have a new baby and money problems. Takuya's mother's aunt Fujiko still resents her niece's choice of husband and tries to manipulate Takuya against him.

At its best, this series reminds me of the criminally short-lived drama My So-Called Life: although the show's main characters were the teenagers, their parents weren't given short shrift. In a lot of similar shows, even when the adult characters get screen time, the focus would still be on the kids—we may be watching the main character's mother, but only to see how she feels about her daughter. In MS-CL, though, the parents were characters in their own rights, not just backdrops for the teen characters; they had their own hopes, desires, backstories, problems, and so forth. B&M doesn't always quite reach that level of quality—some of its supporting characters are still pretty one-dimensional, or at least only good for one story—but when it's good, it's very good.

Even those stories which focus on a character who's never been seen before and will never be seen again are still often pretty good. For example, in a chapter where Takuya's class has to interview their parents and learn what they were like as children, we get brief but fascinating glimpses of their lives.

In one of my favorite chapters, towards the end of the series, the Enokis' neighbor Tomoko meets another new mother, Shiho, who's having trouble raising her child. Her husband is cold and distant, and she feels stressed and incapable of caring for her son. It's a closely observed picture of a troubled family, and the story doesn't end with easy answers; although Shiho and her husband are making an effort to improve, both still have a way to go. Stories like these, tender and honest, are B&M at its best.

Artistically, the series is a pretty straight-ahead classic example of mid-nineties shojo manga: finely drawn hair and faces, sparse backgrounds, large, expressive eyes. Ragawa does do some interesting layouts from time to time, but for the most part the panels are arranged for maximum clarity. There are a few brilliant moments: when Takuya remembers going to the park as a family, before his mother died, the characters are drawn normally but the background is a scribbled child's drawing of a merry-go-round and ferris wheel. Or when he tells a fairy tale to Minoru, the characters are drawn with exaggeratedly thick linework and offset screentone.

Low points of the series? Well, there's a few. B&M largely but not entirely avoids melodrama; some of the stories are so corny and choked with tragedy that they're almost laughable. While most of the side-stories are brought in organically—a classmate of Takuya's, a friend of Harumi's—a few are pretty outrageous (Takuya and Minoru are in a pachinko parlor when a bunch of loan shark thugs start tearing up the place, how dramatic!).

The series' biggest problem may be that perennial sitcom bugaboo, the non-passage of time. Although Takuya is clearly on the cusp of puberty—there's actually a very delicately handled storyline about a classmate of his who's been having wet dreams and doesn't know what they are or what to do—and Minoru is at an age where he should be developing quickly, the characters are all stuck in the perpetual ageless limbo that is the episodic series time hole. It's a little bit frustrating; for all that characters talk about growing up and the differences between adults and children, we never get to actually see any of that.

Ultimately, though, Baby & Me is an excellent series about childhood, adulthood, and parenthood, and those uneasy zones of transition. It's a simple series with a simple premise, but wrings a surprising amount of depth and heart out of it. Too bad it's so far out of print you couldn't see it with a telescope.

Isaac & Ida, episode 7: U of C Guy!

2011-05-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

In this installment of the insanely popular comic strip Isaac & Ida, I introduce the sensational new character find of 2004: U of C Guy!

I wanted to do something outside my usual brand of "campus life hijinks" and put the strip in a different setting for once. I don't remember where the idea of a University of Chicago superhero came from, but it seemed like a decent enough concept at the time. (Note that, in practice, this is just another excuse to make jokes about the divide between academia and "real life.")

Stylistically, I went a little more "cartoony" than usual on this one, because of the obvious wackiness of the subject matter. I used the opportunity to play with angles, do some attempts at "noir" lighting (for example, in panel 3), and try some unorthodox panel layouts. I think I did a decent job at using panel shape and size to convey pacing—note the three small panels of U of C Guy punching the thug.

U of C jokes: in panel 4, our hero says "Vita Excolatur, villain!" This is half of the official U of C motto, vita excolatur, crescat scientia, which is translated as "Let knowledge grow from each to each, and so be human life enriched." (Which, honestly, is a pretty good sentiment, I think.) The reference to The Marx-Engels Reader is that it seems to be required reading for basically every single entry-level Sociology course. Plus, while the Economics school is pretty conservative, the rest of the university is fairly liberal—though not nearly as much as, say, Hampshire.

Lastly, I'd like to point out yet another theft from Kevin Cannon's college strip Johnny Cavalier: the way I drew laughter in the final panel is a direct lift from this strip. Thanks for letting me plunder your work to jump-start my comics career, Kevin!

Transsexuality and the Farrelly brothers

2011-04-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

So at some point in my life, I saw the movie Shallow Hal.

I honestly have no idea when, or in what context. Quite possibly I watched it on a bus, during my high school band's annual trip down to Branson, Missouri. (Yes, really.) But somehow I saw it, and there's a scene from it that's always stuck with me.

Let me begin by noting that Shallow Hal is by no means a good movie; it is in fact pretty terrible. Basic plot summary is as follows: Jack Black, the eponymous Hal, is a shallow guy (shocking!) who judges women entirely on their appearances. Due to a stuck elevator, he ends up hypnotized by a motivational speaker such that he now sees inner beauty, as opposed to the outer kind. Where everyone else sees a woman with, say, bad teeth or a lazy eye, Jack now sees her beautiful heart and her positive karma and so forth. Which is why he starts dating Rosemary, who looks like Gwyneth Paltrow to him, but looks like Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit to everyone else.

The scene I'm interested in takes place late in the film. Jack and Rosemary are at a restaurant when the booth collapses under Rosemary's weight (Jack, of course, assumes this is due to shoddy construction). He goes to complain to the hostess, a petite woman with a Mary Quant haircut and a pretty smile. She apologizes profusely and gives them their meal on the house. At this point, Jack gets a phone call from his friend Mauricio (played by Jason Alexander), who has discovered the phrase that will break Jack's hypnotism. He says this phrase over the phone to Jack—who has no idea what it means—and then hangs up. When Jack turns back to the hostess, he is surprised to discover she has been replaced by a six-foot-tall beefy man with a stubbly chin, but with the exact same haircut and outfit.

For those of you having difficulty keeping up with my terrible summary of this terrible movie, the woman is, in fact, a transsexual man.

Now, there are two elements of this scene that I want to talk about. The first is that, according to the rules laid down earlier in the film, Jack sees the "inner beauty" of the people he meets. The nice but enormously fat woman looks like a slim, and therefore pretty, woman. The adorable children with hideous scars and skin grafts in the burn ward (where Rosemary volunteers) look like uninjured, unblemished adorable children. The hostess looks like a giant burly man to the rest of the world, but to Jack she's a cute young lady. Assuming I'm understanding the dense metaphysics of this cinematic masterpiece correctly, that means that the hostess is not just a man pretending to be or acting like a woman, she is a woman, deep down.

I am by no means an expert on the transsexual experience, having been born biologically male and perfectly happy to stay that way. I only have one vague acquaintance who is not the gender that they were born in. (I don't even know if that's the right terminology; for all I know I'm being accidentally insulting.) Virtually the entirety of what I know about transsexuality comes from media: books, movies, etc. But one of the things I am pretty sure about is that it is not just some passing whim or experiment; people genuinely feel that they are somehow wrong, or rather not who they should be, and they will do whatever they can to correct this.

For the Farrelly brothers, noted raunchy types who have made their careers on being offensive towards various groups, to depict a transsexual person as someone who is not a "sicko" or "pervert" but is actually someone of the opposite gender on the inside, is pretty progressive. So, thumbs up for that.

The second element, though, is more complex. I wonder: is this scene funny? Or, rather, is it supposed to be funny?

Shallow Hal is ostensibly a comedy, and so you would expect every scene, every line, every character interaction, to in some way provide humor. (That it largely does not is immaterial to this question.) So this scene, logically, should be funny.

One can legitimately debate whether it is possible to create a joke (or any humorous situation) that is not at the expense of someone or something: a person, a profession, a nation, a concept, even the speaker or listener themselves. That's a question for another day, though. Right now I'm taking it as a given that it is not possible; that is to say, every joke must have a "butt," an object (person, idea, etc.) of mockery that is essential to the humor. If this is the case, then where is the "butt" of this joke? Whom or what are we meant to be laughing at?

Do we laugh at Hal, who is confused by the switcheroo of the petite woman for the burly man? This, to me, seems unlikely; Hal has a legitimate reason to be confused, not simple ignorance or prejudice.

Do we laugh at ourselves, for being uncomfortable in this situation, confronted by a person who is clearly trying to be true to themselves but unable to do so? I would like to think so. This seems the most positive interpretation: that the Farrelly brothers want us to confront our own prejudices and narrow-mindedness by placing us (by proxy of Jack) in this situation. But this also seems to be too subtle, too high-minded a joke for the Farrelly brothers, who, you will remember, also directed a movie starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins.

Do we laugh at the transsexual person, who is attempting to "pass" but clearly failing? This, unfortunately, is the most probable. A man believes himself to be a woman, and tries to dress and act and seem like one despite his physical limitations. We are meant to find this spectacle amusing (a man in a dress! hilarious!). We are supposed to laugh at someone who is trying and failing to be true to themselves.

In the trans community, there is something known as the Real Life Test, in which a therapist will, before prescribing hormone therapy to trans individuals, will ask them to live as their target gender full-time, in public. Of course, because these individuals don't have access to hormones, they have almost no chance of "passing" as their target gender, and will instead look like a man in woman's clothing or vice versa. They will be misunderstood, laughable, an object of ridicule. This seems incredibly cruel to me, and I can't understand the kind of therapist who would recommend this course—it sounds more like an attempt to discourage these "poor, sick people" from pursuing their "perverted fantasies." It would expose a person to exactly the same kind of humor that I think the Farrelly brothers are trying to evoke in this scene.

If this scene is meant to be humorous, and the butt of that humor is meant to be this woman, then I think the joke fails horribly, by the very nature of the way it's constructed. We see, first, a pretty woman who seems very nice and happy, good at her job and ready to help. We like her, because she seems like a genuinely likeable person. Then we see that she is a transsexual person, born male but female on the inside—but still, regrettably, male on the outside. This person whom we liked a moment ago is now meant to be an object of ridicule. This goes contrary to our very nature: how do we laugh at someone with whom we sympathize?

The answer, of course, is: we don't. Unless we're the Farrelly brothers, apparently.

P.S. It's entirely possible that I'm not giving the bros. Farrelly enough credit and we really are meant to laugh at our own prejudices and misconceptions. But until I get a copy of the DVD through interlibrary loan and am able to watch the various making-of videos, commentaries, and other special features, I'm going to assume the worst.

Isaac & Ida, episode 6: The Death of Theory (and Derrida)

2011-04-15T18:51:00.000-07:00

Yet another installment looking at the cartoons I produced for my college newspaper. Today's cartoon is one I'm actually fairly proud of, for a variety of reasons, and I'm pleased to share it with all of you. Please, friends: enjoy.

I got the idea of doing a comic strip over the summer after my first year, and ended up drawing several of them before school even started. (I think every strip I've shown here so far was drawn over the summer, in fact.) But this strip was drawn in response to an actual current event, obviously: the death of Jacques Derrida. Checking the dates, Derrida died on October 9, and this was published only a month later, so I must've done it in short order.

I like this one quite a bit. Doing a strip in response to an actual event, rather than an "evergreen" strip, gave me a feeling of being a real cartoonist. I even used a modified silent penultimate panel, a classic cartoonist's tool if there ever was one, to set up the punchline. I got to mock the pretensions of literary theory.

Plus, the background is (to my mind) a fairly good sketch of the Harper Quad, looking south. Unfortunately, I can't find a good image of the location right now, so you'll just have to imagine it, or (for those of you who went to UChicago) remember it.

Not actually dead

2011-03-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

So, yeah. Haven't been around in a while, have I?

There's two reasons for my prolonged absence. The first, the one that makes me feel good about myself, is that I've had a sudden influx of cool projects and opportunities that I need to spend more time on: a couple essays to write, a fellowship to make use of, a podcast to speak on, a book proposal to...propose. Also, my father just bought an Xbox 360 with a Kinect, so you can understand my need to explore this innovative and exciting new technology. Yes.

The other reason, the one that's a little more depressing, is that I'm in a rut. And after you're in a rut for long enough, you get to enjoy that rut, and resist any efforts to leave it. And writing blog posts simply isn't part of that rut.

Still working. Still alive. Still planning to tell all you lovely folks about my work and my alive-ness. Don't worry, I'm not going away.

Ted's triumphant return to podcasting

2011-02-26T18:05:00.000-08:00

Some of my long-time readers may remember that I was once part of a podcast made up of local comics geeks, called, appropriately, The Geek Report. Some of you may also remember that this podcast then stopped happening for a while. Well, fret no more, loyal audiophiles, for the Geek Report is back! Lance and myself are returning for "season two," and we're now joined by Lupi Loops McGinty (note: may not be her real name) and David Cohen. Enjoy our semi-coherent ramblings, won't you?

On video game design

2011-02-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

I've been talking a fair bit with a friend of mine about video games: how they're designed, what they do for us and our brains, and what makes the difference between a good game and a great one. In the spirit of sharing, I thought I'd put my two cents out on the Internet for all to enjoy. Join me, won't you?

One of those Big Questions floating around the Internet for the past few years has been, "Are video games art?" I think this is a worthwhile question to ask, and I'm pretty much on the positive side, but it's not necessarily the best way to approach video games as a subject. I talked a long while back about Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You, and in it he makes a good point about video games: video games may have gotten bigger, cooler-looking, and generally more sophisticated, but they are still games. All games, from Tic-Tac-Toe to poker to Scrabble to Grand Theft Auto IV, are a series of rules and constraints with one or more victory conditions meant to challenge a player's (or players') skills and cleverness. Video games can be used as a medium for engaging and interesting stories or experiences, but for them to truly be "games," there must be an interactive component—the aforementioned rules and constraints in which the player(s) act. Generally, a game creator can focus on one aspect or the other—either the story/characters/experience, or the gameplay—and deliver a novel experience in one of the two. Alternately, they can try to innovate in both arenas, but that's extremely difficult and there's only a handful of successful examples.

I'm being confusing here, I know. Let me explain by way of a few examples.

I just recently got a copy of the 2005 game Psychonauts, which was recommended to me by basically every gaming review site, gaming blog, and gamer friend I know. It's the story of Raz, a young boy with psychic powers who sneaks into a summer camp for kids with psychic powers, and who uncovers a horrible conspiracy to use these kids' brains to power an army of psychic death tanks. As you can probably guess, it is not a terribly serious game. It is, however, an amazingly well-written and hilarious game. Not only does every character have a distinct personality, they each have unique lines of dialogue for virtually every situation: you can use any of your dozen psychic powers or two dozen objects on a character, and chances are they'll have a unique and hilarious response to each one. The levels themselves are brilliant flights of weirdness and fancy, everything from a bullfight taking place in a black-light velvet painting to a Godzilla-style rampage through a city populated by tiny, talking lungfish.

But here's the thing: as a game, just as an exercise in performing tasks within a certain set of rules, Psychonauts really isn't that innovative. The way in which you navigate and interact with the three-dimensional environment is essentially the same as most other modern 3D platformers—everything from Mario Galaxy to Tomb Raider to the modern Prince of Persia games. You run, you jump, you hang off of ledges, you shimmy up poles, you swing on trapeze bars. Yes, you also have crazy psychic powers, but these don't substantially change how you play the game.

Now, let me be clear here: this is not a bad thing. I am not knocking Psychonauts for having a control scheme similar to most other modern 3D platformers. There's a reason this mode of interacting with an environment is so popular; it works. It's simple, moderately intuitive, and provides the player with enough tools to play the game without overwhelming them with control options. This way, you can pick up Psychonauts and, if you're at all familiar with any other recent platformers, you can grasp the essentials of controlling Raz within seconds. Psychonauts is a great game not because it forces you to learn an entirely new way of playing a game, but because it takes a relatively simple and commonly understood playscheme and uses it to tell a humorous and engaging story.

So what's the opposite look like? What does a game that trains you in new ways of manipulating objects or solving puzzles but has little or no story look like? Well, there's plenty: Pac-Man, Tetris, virtually any casual game now on the market. These games either don't have stories or give only the barest nod towards a story.

My favorite example, though, is a game which does have a story, and a pretty funny one at that, but for which the story is just an excuse to teach the player new skills: Katamari Damancy. I'm sure 90% of you have not only played this game or its spinoffs, you're even hearing the theme song in your head right now (naaa na-na-na na na na na, na-na na na-na na...). For the rest of you (hi, mom!), here's a quick recap of the game's story. One night, the King of All Cosmos (a man so flamboyantly dressed that Liberace would tell him to turn it down) goes on a drunken rampage and accidentally destroys all the stars in the sky. He instructs his son, the Prince of All Cosmos (the player), to make new stars out of junk he finds lying around on Earth. This isn't a bad story, necessarily, but it's pretty thin. But then, it doesn't need to be War and Peace, because the real purpose of the game is to show off a brilliant and innovative control scheme. As the Prince, you roll around a large, sticky ball (the "katamari" of the title) in various environments. This ball will stick to, and pick up, objects smaller than itself. As it picks up more objects, it gets larger, allowing you to pick up even larger objects. So in a given level, you may start off on, say, a table, picking up small chocolates and chess pieces. You then get large enough to pick up plates, books, small pets, maybe the table that you started on itself. (By the end of the final level of the first game, you're picking up entire islands.) The controls are literally unlike any other game: you use both of the thumbsticks (like little joysticks, mom) to steer the katamari, push it, reverse its direction, and so forth. It's confusing and difficult at first, but eventually becomes second nature.

Katamari Damancy's story is actually pretty funny—the King of All Cosmos is a wonderfully surreal character—but it's just there as a reason for you to roll up stuff in a giant ball and send it into the sky. Similarly, Psychonauts' gameplay is nothing new, but the story and characters are what make it such an incredible game. Each of these great games—and let's be clear, they're both great—does something novel in one area, even if that means making sacrifices in another.

The obvious question, then, is: are there any games that innovate in both arenas? Can a game have both an intriguing, well-written story and a clever, novel approach to gameplay? I say yes, but my list of examples is pretty short. Off the top of my head, the best example I can think of is Portal, which has received accolades from virtually every game reviewer and has a list of awards as long as your arm. I'm not going to describe the plot or the gameplay here; with few exceptions (still reading, mom?), every person reading this knows at least a little about the game. However, I want to point out two things: first, that Portal is a pretty short game; even poor players (i.e. me) can beat it in less than ten hours. This implies that creating a game that was both well-written and well-designed was taxing enough that it ended up being relatively small. Second, that the central gameplay mechanic of Portal was created by a group of video game design students for a game called Narbacular Drop, which had none of the plot or clever writing of Portal; those students were then hired by Valve to create Portal. They were the innovators behind the gameplay; another group entirely were the innovators behind the story.

In any case, my basic point is that video game creators tend towards innovation either in form—the media itself, in this case the gameplay—or in content—the story, the characters, etc.—and that neither one is necessarily better than the other. I'm willing to go out on a ledge and claim that this is true of most art and artists, but that's a philosophical debate for another day.

At least they thought Miles Davis was okay

2011-02-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

Back when people still bought encyclopedia sets, Britannica used to include a 'Book of the Year' for each new edition, summing up the changes in various entries for the previous year. From the Book of the Year 1957 entry on Music, Popular:

Most of the popular songs of 1956 had little to recommend them artistically, and the best of them were either revivals from the past or imitations of tried and true materials. The Elvis Presley hysteria began with a rhythmic monstrosity called "Blue Suede Shoes" and continued through "Heartbreak Hotel" to the primitive "Hound Dog." Eventually "the Pelvis" arrived at a straightforward ballad, "Love Me Tender,' which served as the title of his first motion picture and was copied note for note from the old "Aura Lee," also known as "Army Blue" and "The Violet."

Ted versus his past selves

2011-02-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

I have an adversarial relationship with the previous iterations of myself.

No, I'm not talking about reincarnation. (Although I'm pretty sure that, in a past life, I was an Aztec warrior.) I'm talking about the fact that not only do I feel disconnected from what I've done when I was younger, what I was like at previous points in my life, I'm downright hostile towards these previous selves. I don't want to be reminded of them, I don't want to acknowledge they exist, and when necessary I even try to erase evidence that they ever happened.

For example, there's video of me in, I think, kindergarten, doing some kind of group dance where we all went around in a circle. Only, I had just recently come across the concept of "winking," and so every time I went around the circle, I tried to twist myself around so I was facing my father and his video camera, and wink. I am absolutely mortified by this video, by proof that I used to act like, well, a dumb little kid. Living in my parents' house, there's all sorts of videos and papers and old school assignments and, basically, the paper trail that proves I wasn't always the suave, sophisticated man-about-town that I am today.

There's the old saw about how, because of cell death and replacement, after seven years your body contains none of the same matter that it once did. (Thus disproving the Blinovitch Limitation Effect and the premise of Timecop.) This is sort of how I feel about myself: after seven years (or so), my mindset, my personality, my whole brain has changed enough that I no longer feel any connection to that person. This shows up even in minor ways, like needing to reread/rewatch/reexperience books or TV shows that I saw only a few years ago. I'm aware that's not an impulse unique to me and others with similar neuroses, but still, I think it's connected. After all, how can I be sure which Ghibli film is my favorite when I—this I, this particular me—has only seen a few of them?

I wonder if anyone else has similar hatred for their past selves. Am I crazy, or am I just experiencing something normal in a crazy way?

Guys Read book club: summer '10, session 3, Mice Templar vol. 1

2011-01-19T16:17:00.000-08:00

Unsurprisingly, it's been so long since I actually did this book club session that I've forgotten most of what happened. The price I pay for my procrastination, I suppose.

Most of what I've already said about boys and books is applicable here, too: they like the ones with violence, they get off-topic easily, they think explosions are cool, etc. There is one thing I noticed with this session, though, which is that boys are competitive. Shocking, I know.

Mice Templar is a comic, or "graphic novel" if you're as pretentious as I am. And one of the complaints I got from the guys—or at least the loudest and most vocal guy in the room—was that it was too short. This kid was a huge fan of the Redwall books, which are notable for virtually inventing the modern Mice With Swords genre, but also notable for being thick enough you could use each book as a weapon. Seriously, those things are usually four or five hundred pages of close-set type, approximately 70% of which is author Brian Jacques describing in great detail the food at every single meal and 30% of which is furry creatures stabbing other furry creatures.

So I though Mice Templar would be close enough to this kid's tastes that he'd like it quite a bit. But, in fact, he was pretty down on, almost derogatory of, the book, just because it has fewer pages than a Redwall book. (Which, as I've pointed out, is not a rare thing; most bibles have fewer pages than a Redwall book.) I realized later, with the benefit of hindsight, that I should have pointed out that length does not always equal quality, but that retort unfortunately didn't occur to me at the time.

But it did make me realize that, while boys don't read very much (or at least as much as girls), they get very competitive about what they do read. They want to show off that they read the longest book, the heaviest book, the most complicated or new or whatever book. Which is a valuable lesson for me to have learned. Something to think about when I select next summer's books, assuming I'm still here next summer. (Which I mean not in a "I might be dead" sense, but a "I might be in another city or state" sense.)

Thoughts on Tangled, and kids' movies in general

2011-01-04T13:38:00.000-08:00

I saw the 50th feature-length fully-animated film from Disney Studios, Tangled, yesterday, and nobody was more surprised than I when I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. I've seen a lot of films made for children in my life, and maybe it's the prematurely crotchety old person in me, but it seems as though they've been getting steadily worse over the years. Tangled was by no means a perfect movie, but it had something that I've found to be missing from virtually every other children's film made in the last fifteen or so years: sincerity.

This is something of a nebulous concept; I've been wracking my brains to determine how best to describe what I'm looking for in kids' films for some time now, and "sincerity" is only the best that I can do. What I mean by it is, first, that the filmmakers are actually crafting a story, not just putting together a sequence of "hilarious" moments and songs. Their first priority should not making characters suitable for action figures and putting on lunchboxes, but making characters that live and breathe. But really, this applies to any film, not just kids' films.

The other thing I mean by "sincerity" is specific to kids' films, though: the understanding that the intended audience for these films, by definition, has less experience with stories, with genre formulae, with media in general. Children simply haven't been around as long as adults; they haven't seen as many movies or seen as much television or read as many books. Producers of media for children need to keep in mind that their viewers won't understand many allusions to older stories, or established character archetypes, or, really, most things from before they were born. Pop culture references are going to go right over their heads; even homages to other classic stories will probably not be understood.

This isn't to say that children's media needs to be dumb, just cognizant of the limitations of its audience. Think about it this way: if you're making a movie based on, say, Aladdin or Rapunzel or Beauty and the Beast, for at least some members of your audience, this is going to be their first exposure to the story of Aladdin or Rapunzel or Beauty and the Beast. They won't know about any other versions, any literary analyses of these stories, any ways in which these stories have been modified or retold in modern forms. For them, this will be the definitive version of that story, regardless of where it originated; kids reading The Thousand and One Nights or Grimm's fairy tales will wonder why these stories are so different from the ones they "know." As such, it's crucial that the filmmakers (or writers, whatever) should be trying to tell the Story, not something Based On The Story.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Tangled is pretty dang good at fulfilling both of these criteria. The filmmakers genuinely wanted to tell the story of Rapunzel—with some modifications, yes, with some additions and small twists, but still the Story. There were few jokes or references that required genre-savviness—not zero, but fewer than most films ostensibly for children these days. I was a bit disappointed at their use of slang and modern idioms ("For the record" and "Know what I mean?"), and one of the songs was a bit forced for my tastes, but like I said, the ratio is better than average.

Overall, it wasn't Pixar, which is the standard for Good Kids' Movies these days (and rightly so). But it was better than other Disney films in recent memory, and far, far better than a lot of other crap these days. (I still have to do a post on Bee Movie and how it's the worst movie ever made, largely for the reasons I've outlined here.)

Ted vs. the headlines

2010-12-19T09:53:00.000-08:00

Not the news stories, the actual headlines.

Specifically, a headline in the metro section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, from Thursday, December 16, 2010:

Dayton, GOP leaders begin with goodwill
The two sides said they seek common ground amid an ideological gulf.

The story itself, I assume, is about our new governor (finally!) beginning to work with the GOP in the state senate and house. But I didn't read the actual story, because I stopped at that sub-headline. Take a moment to parse its meaning.

According to our good friends at Merriam-Webster, a "gulf" is either a "part of an ocean or sea" or "a deep chasm." Either meaning is fairly suitable to describe an ideological split between two parties. But it would be literally impossible to find "common ground" in either of these natural features!

I suppose one could, theoretically, find an island in a gulf, as in the Gulf of Mexico. But such an island would be, by definition, very small and not terribly amenable to the governing of a state. Or, alternately, you could find common ground at the very bottom of an abyss, but getting there would either take very long or be extremely painful and probably fatal.

Come to think of it, maybe that metaphor isn't so bad after all.

Isaac & Ida, episode 5: The Clone Saga, Part 3

2010-12-10T17:07:00.000-08:00

Time for the senses-shattering finale! Complete with astonishing twist that will blow your mind! Or at least it would if I hadn't given the twist away long ago in the title I gave to this sequence.

Yes, that's right: the University of Chicago keeps a bank of cryogenically frozen cloned "That guy"s and "That girl"s beneath the surface of the earth, thawing them out every day and placing them in classes to artificially stimulate class discussion. It's just wacky enough to be plausible!

I am honestly pretty proud of the art in this strip. Check that perspective in the first panel, or the explosion in the fifth: that's real art, right there. Plus I took the time to painstakingly copy the University seal—

—just for that one panel. Of course, I didn't bother drawing a background in the last panel, but it's so cluttered with characters and dialogue I figured nobody would notice.

I also feel good about the writing side of things. The line "This C-4 explosive should put an end to these foul parodies of life!" is still a favorite of mine. (It has the feel of a Cat and Girl line to me, for some reason.) And I finally got to end a story with the classic cliche of "Not any more, [name]...not any more!" Seriously, that's an oldie but goodie right there.

One last easter egg for you fine folks. Take a close look at the cryo tank plaques: the serial numbers all begin with TG, for "That guy" or "That girl." I'm kind of proud of that.

Teens Read book club, summer '10, session 3: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

2010-11-30T11:17:00.000-08:00

Yeah, that's right, The Hunger Games. As in the teen dystopian romance-adventure novel that everyone and their dead grandmother has read. Normally I don't like to go for the big-name, super-popular mega-hits, assuming that the kids are more likely to read those on their own and that I should be finding more interesting/obscure/awesome works for them to experience.

But this time I put it to a vote, and the Games won, so: mega-hit it was. And honestly, it wasn't a completely terrible experience.

I asked my excellent friend Lindsey, who's well-versed in young adult literature, about the book and whether she'd read it. Her reaction, slightly paraphrased, was that it's a moderately okay book in most ways but that kids who are advanced enough to be reading it should skip it entirely and go straight on to Lord of the Flies. While I'm completely in agreement with her as regards the relative quality of these two works, there are some interesting aspects to Games that I wasn't expecting.

Quick summary: in futuristic dystopian country Panem, two children, one male, one female, are chosen every year to participate in the Games, a battle-royale fight-to-the-death that's televised live all over the country. Our hero, Katniss, volunteers for the Games in place of her younger sister, who was chosen in the lottery. Katniss trains for the Games, experiences life in the high-tech Capitol, eventually participates in the Games proper alongside the other Tribute from her district, the boy Peeta, and the tributes from all the other districts as well. Violence ensues, romance (possibly, sort-of) blossoms, etc.

For starters, no, not the world's most original premise. It uses the Standard Dystopian Setting that's become so widespread in teen fiction these days, adds some ultra-violence and high-pressure situations, stirs, and bakes. Like Lindsey noted, there's a fair bit of Flies in there, though a closer comparison would also be to the Japanese novel Battle Royale. As I already implied, the writing itself isn't exactly Faulkner, and the characters aren't really magnificent wonders of creation.

But Games does a couple nifty things with its premise that I thought gave it some added resonance for Today's Teens: for starters, these fight-to-the-death Games are televised. Not just televised; the players are aware that their every move is being watched at all times by the Gamemasters, regardless of whether they're on TV at that moment. They're under constant surveillance, and they're fully conscious of it: one of my favorite aspects of the story is that Katniss is not just thinking of her next move in terms of survival (where do I hunt, can I set a trap for another player here, etc.), but also in terms of how her actions are being seen by this eternal, unseen audience. Should I act helpless in order to gain sympathy? Should I seem remorseful about trying to kill this person? And, most cynical of all, should I pretend to be in love with Peeta in order to set up a "storyline" and keep the audience interested in me?

It's an evolution of the premise: in Flies, the characters were accidentally forced into this dog-eat-dog survival situation; in Royale they were deliberately put there, but the "game" wasn't revealed to the public until after there was only one person (the "winner") left; and now, in Games, these teens are not just being deliberately forced to kill each other but are being constantly watched as they do so. It's also a pretty clear metaphor for adolescence: not only are you thrown into a life of constant conflict, you're being watched by everyone at all times, as well.

Anyway. Still not a fantastic book. But the premise works well, it speaks to the Teens of Today, and maybe in a year or two they'll read Lord of the Flies and realize where this book came from.

As for the actual book-club-discussion-thing, I had a total of exactly three teens show up, one of whom didn't appear until about fifteen-twenty minutes in, but it still ended up being a relatively lively discussion. Apart from that, I don't remember much; it was, what, three months ago? Four? Something like that.

Pretty sure gay blood works the same as straight

2010-11-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

Every time you donate blood, you have to go through a lengthy questioning process, in which they make sure you haven't had a tattoo lately, or had an organ transplant, or that you haven't contracted any horrible diseases, or haven't been exposed to any horrible diseases, or may have been within sneezing distance of someone who may have once been within shouting distance of a horrible disease. And, if you're male, they also make sure you haven't had sex with another man. Ever.

This question always struck me as a little strange. The place I go to donate, they have a computer program doing the questioning, so there's nobody else in the room, and every time I get to hear a recorded voice say, "For males: from 1977 to the present, have you ever had sex with a man, even once?" in a very mild, non-judgmental tone.

The reason, of course, is AIDS. According to Wikipedia, a reliable resource if ever I knew one, the incidence of AIDS among men who have sex with men (or, as it's abbreviated, MSM) is sixty times higher than the general population. Of course, statistics are statistics, not arguments; all data requires context. Taking into account new screening methods, demographic shifts, and so forth, allowing MSMs to donate blood would probably be more beneficial than harmful.

I am not at all an expert on anything even remotely related to this debate, and I can't pretend to be one; however, I can make you readers aware that there is a debate. Heck, there's even a movie, Save A Life, on the subject.

When I was younger, I remember seeing a PSA in several DC comics about how AIDS isn't just "the gay disease" but can strike anyone:

(Incidentally, notice how the artist had to code these two men as "gay" through their clothes and hairstyles alone. I'm always interested in what signs artists use to identify aspects of characters that are otherwise difficult to depict.)

I'm kind of nostalgic for the days when superheroes did public service announcements—the blog Polite Dissent has a good collection of them. I'd like to see a superhero standing up for the rights of gay men to donate blood, though that might be a little too progressive for the big companies these days.

Also, according to Marvel (and, more specifically, Chris Claremont's Uncanny X-Men #159), while gay blood is probably fine, mutant blood is a no-go:

Anyway. Blood is fascinating, isn't it?

Ted reviews Tsutomu Nihei's Biomega

2010-11-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

Tsutomu Nihei's cyberpunk action manga Biomega is a big ol' slice of pointless explosion pie.

This is not necessarily a strike against it. If you want things like a plot, or characters with even a degree of empathy—well, you just keep on drivin', stranger. But if you want a gorgeously drawn comic in which a super-soldier with an axe on a motorcycle and a bear with a hook for a hand fight zombies for the fate of the world but don't want to have to turn on your brain, look no further.

The year is 3000 A.D. Zouichi Kanoe is a synthetic human created by Toha Heavy Industries, tasked to investigate a city filled with zombie-like "drones," mindless biological terrors, and look for any surviving humans. Naturally, this involves shooting lots of zombies with his futuristic super-gun, chopping them down with his futuristic super-axe, and/or running them over with his futuristic super-cycle. He's assisted in this by an A.I., Fuyu Kanoe, that rides with him in said super-cycle's computer.

Zoichi quickly comes across Eon Green, who is immune to the NS5 virus, has crazy special regeneration powers, and is guarded by a bear with a gun.

Naturally, things get complicated: the Data Recovery Foundation (which, as far as I can tell, is also a parody of Microsoft) sends in its soldiers after Eon as well, which requires Zoichi to terminate them with extreme(ly cool-looking) prejudice.

After this...it gets complicated. There's some sort of long-term plot involving humanity's colonies on Mars, at least two immortals, virtual worlds and clones, and a geosynchronous satellite headquarters, and after a while I lost track of it all.

But who cares? This isn't a manga that prides itself on its thoughtful and original plot. This is a manga where a dude shoots down nuclear missiles with a rifle longer than he is tall.

By sheer coincidence, I've lately been researching the Halo series of video games. These games, for those of you who don't know, also feature a heavily-armored super-soldier whose partner is an A.I. that manifests as a foot-tall hologram of a young woman and who mows down lots of grotesque zombie things with an array of futuristic weaponry.

The odd thing is, despite the fact that Master Chief (the guy on the right) never takes off his helmet and we never see his face, he's actually more human and relatable than Zoichi, who never displays any emotion other than Grim-Faced Seriousness. Same goes for the A.I.s: Fuyu doesn't do anything other than provide exposition and situation reports, but Cortana is a droll commentator who gets some of the best lines in the games.

It's not that Biomega is a bad series, per se. Certainly it looks great; Nihei's inks are beautiful, switching between delicate hatch-marks and chunky black spaces in order to produce both intricate landscapes...

...and brutal action scenes.

But the plot is either impenetrable or nonexistent, and the characters are, in a word, paper-thin. Even more embarrassing is when Nihei tries to be philosophical and talk about human nature and so forth.

But, hey. If well-drawn, well-paced, totally pointless action is your boat? If you thought Akira would've been improved if it had half as much dialogue and twice as many zombies? If you want to see a bear riding a motorcycle away from a gooey explosion?

Then Biomega is for you. Just don't be expecting anything remotely original or thought-provoking when you're flipping the pages.

Reminder: Ted has more than one blog

2010-11-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

Remember how, a while back, I started a second blog about a video game mod I'm working on? Well, I put up another post, talking about how I plan to use an aspect of the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset to model various parenting styles. Go take a look, if you're bored.

Ted has been bled

2010-11-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

Intellectually, spiritually, and literally.

The last few weeks—since before my trip to New York City, basically—have been kind of a grueling experience, like how I imagine a marathon to be. (You'll never catch me in one of those 22-mile death-marches.) It's not that there haven't been periods of rest and relaxation in-between my various assignments, duties, responsibilities, and so forth; it's just that, taken as a whole, this time has felt pretty damn demanding.

(Which is my roundabout way of saying: if you're waiting on an email or something from me, just be patient, I'll be a little longer.)

But now, today, having given blood, I feel as though my cares and woes have been drained away along with my red blood cells. (Platelet donation took place last Saturday, the day before Halloween, during which I watched the first hour of Heat and, disappointingly, only a single nurse was dressed up as Dracula.) Longtime readers of this blog will know that blood donation is a pretty big deal for me, and this session was no exception, especially as I got my three-gallon pin. Which I imagine is somewhat like getting a chip from AA, though come to think of it, a three-gallon chip from AA would probably mean something entirely different.

Anyway. Normal broadcast schedule will now resume. This has only been a test. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact your parole officer.

Isaac & Ida, episode 4: The Clone Saga, Part 2

2010-10-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

I realize too late that I kind of gave away the Shocking Twist Ending of this series in the title of the first post. I debated going back and changing it, but then realized I'd rather just get it over with and that I'm also very lazy. Anyway!

The University of Chicago, like all universities, has a variety of stereotypes, in-jokes, and bits of humor that only make sense to one who's been there. This particular strip uses several of these UChicago-specific bits, and I'd like to highlight them.

First off, "the Econ department's network of geosynchronous spy satellites." UC is well-known for its economics studies, to the degree that there's a school of thought named for it. Any department that well-funded and that influential probably has its own satellite network to spy on people all over the world, right?

Second, "they all just disappear outside of Cobb every night!" Cobb is where a large proportion of English, sociology, philosophy, and most other liberal arts classes are taught, and thus there's always a huge crowd of pretentious liberal arts majors standing outside and smoking. Hence, the joke about the cigarette smoke hiding their activities. As an English major myself, I always had at least one class every quarter in Cobb, so I was well-acquainted (and disgusted) with this phenomenon, and I wanted to mock it.

Lastly, the stone circle that Isaac and Ida are investigating in the second-to-last panel is indeed just outside Cobb; it was donated by the class of 1903, as you can see by the partially visible date behind Ida.

I'm moderately proud of this strip. It's the second part of a series, so it's connective tissue, leading from the opening problem (where do the "that guys" come from?) to the final confrontation. Thus, I had to work a little harder to put the jokes in, but I still have quite a few I'm proud of:

- The idea of a "smarminess index"
- "B-but robots and aliens are always evil!"
- "Almost instantaneously!"
- "Oh crap! Suspense sure is a bitch!"

Art-wise, this strip has its flaws—the size of Isaac's face in panel one still gives me fits—but I like what I did with the dramatic lighting in panel 4, and the flashlight beam in panel 5. The heavy shading in most panels also makes it a little more claustrophobic and emphasizes the late hour of the setting.

One final note: Isaac's shirt is an in-joke for anime fans. The 90-degree shirt was worn by a character in the supremely amazing six-part series FLCL (or Furi Kuri, or Fooly Cooly, depending on how you write it out). Unfortunately, I can't find a good image of the original shirt from the series, but trust me: it's there. I added a few more of these anime in-jokes in other strips; I'll point them out as they show up.

Keep watching for the final chapter in this thrilling three-part saga! Excelsior!

Back to the Future, Shame, and Abu Ghraib

2010-10-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, you read that title right.

For some reason, multiple channels on TV have recently been showing the Back to the Future movie trilogy, over and over again. I have no idea why, though if I had to guess, I'd say it might have something to do with the announcement that Telltale Games, one of the few remaining adventure games publishers, is making a series of games based on the franchise. (Hi, Dave!) Like most members of my generation, I watched these movies in my youth and remember them fondly, but only after watching them again, now, as a (nominal) adult, do I begin to see nuances and interesting themes in the films.

The Future movies are, in part, about the immigrant experience—that's one of the reasons my father, a film professor and former film reviewer, loves them. They also make an interesting comparison between the teenager and the immigrant—both strangers in a strange land, with new customs, beliefs, and languages. They're films about history, obviously, and choice, and change, and tradition. But the theme that I want to focus on here is a subtler one: they're about shame.

Back to the Future has spawned some great and memorable lines, at least one of which has been uttered by a sitting president. One of the most memorable, at least for me, was the oft-repeated challenge to Marty: "What are you—chicken?" Usually delivered by Thomas F. Wilson playing one of the various Tannens of history, with a superbly timed musical sting immediately after the final word, the delivery of this line has stayed with me into adulthood. What interests me right now, for the purposes of this blog post, is that, to the best of my recollection, this line doesn't actually appear until the second movie in the trilogy, which marks a turning point for how the idea of shame is discussed in these films.

In the first movie, Marty McFly meets his father George thirty years ago, when George is a shy, geeky, unpopular teen with dreams of writing science fiction novels and one day maybe talking to a girl. George is, quite simply, a loser: a coward and a weakling, a failure of American manhood. (Tangentially, I think this is why I identified more with George than with Marty as a child. Marty was the skateboard-riding, guitar-playing, super-cool dude who already had a girlfriend; moreover, he doesn't change significantly as a character over the course of that first movie. George, by contrast, is the nerd who eventually faces his fears and gets the girl by the end of the movie. Marty was already cool; George is the nerd who becomes cool. And like most of the movie's likely audience, I too was a nerd who wanted to make it big one day.) George avoids confrontation, trying not to bring shame upon himself ("What if she laughs at me? I don't think I can take that kind of rejection!"). But paradoxically, by trying to avoid shame, George is shameful; by not attacking his problems head-on he becomes a nothing. What finally triggers his metamorphosis is standing up to Biff, in one of my favorite bits of acting in the whole trilogy: Crispin Glover, shaking slightly from adrenaline and relief, staring joyfully at his hand, still amazed that he's done it; then, realizing the chivalrous thing to do, he reaches out his other hand to Lorraine and says gently, awkwardly, "Are you all right?"

Shame is not standing up to one's tormentor. Shame is not acting.

And yet this lesson is seemingly reversed in the second and third films. Marty is sensitive to being inactive, to not acting like a man (to acting like a chicken); he is quick to act and to react. This is ultimately his downfall: by acting on a challenge from Needles, Marty gets into a car wreck, permanently damages his hand, never becomes the rock star he's (apparently) destined to be, and ends up a white-collar drone with no future.

Or at least, that's what originally happens before he and Doc Brown start futzing with the space-time continuum. And that's what makes the Back to the Future trilogy such a great vehicle for talking about shame, because time travel makes it possible to see the long-term consequences of one's actions—and shame is all about consequences.

What are the consequences of doing this, or not doing this? Whose interests am I serving by acceding to this person's demands? If I do not stand up for myself now (as George did), when will I stand up for myself? If I let this person push me around (as Marty let Needles do), I may gain short-term prestige, but at what cost?

Marty's and George's respective dilemmas are really the same issue, seen two different ways: what I do in the present will determine who I am in the future. And here's where I start getting serious.

A while back I read part of a book by Philip Zimbardo, who is one of those unfortunate individuals who may have done many great and noble things, but will always be best known for one awful and ignoble act. In Zimbardo's case, he designed and led the now-infamous Stanford prison experiment, in which 24 middle-class, psychologically normal American male college students were put into two groups—"prisoners" and "guards—and were told to act out those roles. Over the course of the experiment, the guards became brutal monsters, resorting to psychological torture to control the "inmates," and Zimbardo lost sight of the nominal goals of the experiment and allowed actions that violated every ethical rule in the psychologist's book. The experiment was planned to last two weeks; he was forced to end it after six days. Some of the "prisoners" suffered psychological trauma lasting for years after the experiment.

Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, is about people in situations where they are coerced or convinced to act inhumanly, and how they react. He specifically cites the situational pressures that led to the abuses and torture of Iraqi prisoners by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison, how people were put in a situation where it seemed not only permissible but proper to physically and psychologically abuse other human beings.

In the back of his book, and on the book's website, Zimbardo gives several tips on how to resist these influences, these situational pressures that convince a person that right is wrong and wrong is right. One of these tips is the following (emphasis mine):

“I will balance my Time Perspective.”

We can be led to do things that are not really what we believe in our value when we allow ourselves to become trapped in an expanded present moment. When we stop relying on our sense of past commitments and our sense of future liabilities, we open ourselves to situational temptations to engage in “Lord of the Flies” excesses. By not going “with the flow" when others around you are being abusive or out of control, you are relying a temporal perspective that stretches beyond present-oriented hedonism or present-fatalism. You are likely to engage in a cost/benefit analysis of actions in terms of their future consequences. Or, you may resist by being sufficiently conscious of a past time frame that contains your personal values and standards. By developing a balanced time perspective in which past, present and future can be called into action depending on the situation and task at hand, you are in a better position to act responsibly and wisely than when your time perspective is biased toward reliance on only one or two time frames. Situational power is weakened when past and future combine to contain the excesses of the present. For example, research indicates that righteous Gentiles who helped to hide Dutch Jews from the Nazis did not engage in the kind of rationalizing as their neighbors did in generating reasons for not helping. These heroes depended upon moral structures derived from their past and never lost sight of a future time when they would look back on this terrible situation and be forced to ask themselves whether they had done the right thing when they chose not to succumb to fear and social pressure.

Recently, an article has been making the internet rounds: the story of Specialist Alyssa Peterson, who committed suicide in September 2003, after serving only a few weeks in Iraq—weeks in which she was assigned to an army prison in Tal Afar and ordered to use inhumane interrogation techniques. The article is a disturbing yet fascinating read, and I suggest you take a look if you haven't already. As both the author and Alyssa's fellow soldier Kayla Williams point out, suicidal depression (or any psychological illness) is never caused by only one thing, and it would be irresponsible to claim that it was solely her experiences in Iraq that led to Alyssa's suicide. However, a devout Mormon like Alyssa, placed in a situation where one is being coerced to do brutal and inhuman things—where one is being told to ignore the long-term consequences of one's actions—would have experienced severe psychological stress, which was certainly a factor in her suicide.

Now, obviously, I'm a pretty long way from talking about a movie with time travel and flying DeLoreans and people crashing into manure trucks in three separate historical periods. But the kind of psychological pressure that convinces a naive, easily manipulated teen that driving his enormous truck irresponsibly on a residential street is a smart thing to do is similar to, though certainly of a lesser degree than, the psychological pressure that convinces a person that forcing prisoners to form a naked pyramid of bodies and taking pictures is an acceptable thing to do. And in both cases, one of the keys to resisting this coercion is the same: looking to the future. Imagining what kind of person you will have become as a result of this action (or inaction). You may be shamed by your choice now, but how will you feel five, ten, twenty years down the line?

The future comes whether we want it to or not, and usually quicker than we think. Never forget that.

Busy busy busy, can't you see, sometimes your words etc.

2010-10-05T19:37:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't been around lately, folks, and I know you're all broken up about that. Things are just a bit crazy-go-nuts around here: I've got the New York Comic-Con this coming weekend, my semesterly trip down to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois next weekend, classes, job searching, and my various creative projects. In fact, I've just started up a brand-new project: Paracosm, a story mod for the computer game Neverwinter Nights 2. Details about the project, which is far too ambitious for me, especially considering I've only played the game for about two minutes total, can be found on my dedicated blog for the project.

I was inspired to do this project after meeting one of my heroes at San Diego Comic-Con: Chris Avellone, writer of some of the very best computer games of the last fifteen years, including Fallout 2, Knights of the Old Republic 2, and the legendary Planescape: Torment. I only got to speak to him in person for a few minutes, but he was very friendly and forthcoming. I decided then and there to make a computer game mod, despite the fact that I know absolutely zilch about writing for games—in fact, maybe because I know nothing about writing for games. I like to challenge myself creatively, after all, and nothing's more challenging than jumping head-first into writing for a completely alien medium.

In any case, I'll try and keep up this blog during this period of tribulation. Send me good vibes, people.

Isaac & Ida, episode 3: The Clone Saga, Part 1

2010-09-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

The next installment of our ongoing exploration of my college-years psyche! And also the first part of a three-part series!

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do a multi-week storyline with I&I, and this was how it started. I'm pretty sure anyone who's been to college or high school is aware of the phenomenon of That Guy: the one who's always got an answer to every question and says it in the most annoying way possible. So I thought, why not explain where That Guys (and That Girls) come from?

Art-wise, I feel pretty good about this strip. I wanted to try something new with the layouts, so I started with a large panel and then went on to two rows. Overall I think it worked, although it did screw up the timing of the dialogue in the first panel. Ida first says her line to Isaac, then he replies with a statement, and then Ida reacts with a question. The best way to do this normally would be to spread this dialogue out over two panels, so Ida can have two different facial expressions: one for her statement, then another for her question. This way, she's forced to have the same "hilarious anecdote" expression while asking, "The what?"

Other than that, though, the timing works fine. Putting the awkward silence at the end of that first upper row creates a natural transition point, as the reader's eyes have to jump down to the beginning of the bottom row. I did have to squash a lot of dialogue into those last three panels, but the total lack of backgrounds help.

There's a lot of dialogue in this strip, but I'm okay with that. The lines are all long and complicated, but I think they all function as jokes—I'm personally a fan of the "Howard's rebuttal to Das Kapital was based on the fact that he's an only child" line, as it turns a plot point into a mildly over-complicated joke. I'm also pretty proud of the "Next week: it does require!" caption box at the very end.

Stay glued to your screens for the rest of this exciting saga!

Guys Read book club: summer '10, session 2, Hatchet

2010-09-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

Remember when I used to do these on a regular basis? I do.

For the second of the Guys Read book clubs, I went, as so many of my generation do, to Facebook, where I asked for suggestions on what book might be a good choice. I can't remember who it was—if it was you, say so in the comments, please—but some obviously intelligent person suggested Gary Paulsen's classic adventure Hatchet.

Now, Paulsen's been the standard go-to writer of books for adventuresome young boys for decades, and I'm honestly a little ashamed to admit that I'd never read a word of him before this summer. I was immensely impressed. He's got a fine command of language; he can spend long paragraphs describing the sounds of the forest or the beating of a bird's wings, and yet there's a great minimalist vibe to the whole thing, as if he's only saying the absolute bare minimum that needs to be said. Brian, trapped in the Canadian wilderness with almost no survival equipment and no training, becomes a simpler person, less concerned with words and the civilized world; his life becomes both thinner and more textured, in a way, and Paulsen does a great job of conveying that.

The boys liked it okay, I think. I was hoping that they would enjoy the attention to detail and the information about wilderness survival, but ultimately I think it was a little slow-moving for them, and lacked explosions. Which, I believe I've already mentioned, are pretty much required for all "guys' lit" these days.

But I personally loved it, and wish that I'd actually read it at the same age these guys are at now. Maybe it would've made an outdoorsman out of me, as opposed to the perpetual indoorsman I appear to be. (As an online grad student and freelance writer, I have to find excuses to leave the house beyond getting the mail.)

Because apparently I have too much time on my hands

2010-09-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

I'm on a radio show/podcast! It's called The Geek Report, and it's me and three other geeks, talking geekily about geeky things, like a bunch of geeks. We're only on the Internet right now, but are in talks about getting ourselves on the actual radio waves, which, despite having only a fraction of the audience of your average podcast, will somehow confer respectability upon us.

The site is here, and the feed (for you to subscribe to in your podcast-listening program of choice) is here. To paraphrase the immortal Scott Pilgrim: We're terrible. Please listen to us.

Novelists and empathy

2010-09-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

So I just recently finished reading Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème.

For those of you not up on your 19th-century French semi-autobiographical literature, Chrysanthème is the story of a French sailor, Pierre, who goes on shore leave in Nagasaki, where he marries a young Japanese girl, samples the delights of Japan, and eventually leaves the country (and his wife), presumably forever. It was the inspiration for an opera of the same title, as well as the more well-known Madama Butterfly (which was, itself, the inspiration for Miss Saigon. It also caused a significant degree of cognitive dissonance in me for quite a while.

See, the character of Pierre is stunningly, unabashedly, imperialistically racist. He's racist in the way that only a 19th-century Frenchman who travels abroad can be: he treats the people and places around him as mere curiosities, the entire country of Japan as a dollhouse. He begins positively enough with his description:

What a country of verdure and shade is Japan; what an unlooked-for Eden!

But when the ship actually lands and the sailors begin strolling about the docks, he describes the people thus:

little men and little women coming in a continuous, uninterrupted stream, without cries, without squabbles, noiselessly, each one making so smiling a bow that it was impossible to be angry with them, and that indeed by reflex action we smiled and bowed also...each seller squatting monkey-like, hands touching feet, behind his fancy ware—always smiling, bending low with the most engaging bows...good gracious, how ugly, mean and grotesque all those folk were.

Or like this:

The more I look at [these women] the more uneasy I feel as to what my fiancée of to-morrow may be like. Almost pretty, I grant you, you are,—in virtue of quaintness, delicate hands, miniature feet, but ugly after all, and absurdly small. You look like ouistitis, like little china ornaments, like I don't know what.

The people of Japan, to Pierre, are either monkeys or dolls, either grotesque mockeries or delicate imitations of the human form. But either way, they are not actually human, not real, not to be treated as human beings should.

And this is what tripped me up for so long. Pierre, the character, has no empathy for these Japanese dolls and monkeys, not even the titular Chrysanthème: she is a toy to him, a temporary plaything, a wife for only so long as he is in this tiny country. But I expected Pierre Loti, the author, to have plenty of empathy for these people, these characters; after all, he created them.

(Now, I know that authors should not be conflated with their characters, but when A) it's a semi-autobiographical book, where B) the protagonist has the same first name as the author, and C) it's all written in first-person, it's difficult not to see Pierre Loti (the author) and Pierre (the character) as the same person.)

We expect authors to be empathic people: we expect that they will see the humanity in even the most pathetic, depraved, despondent, villainous, or unlikable characters. We expect them to show us the human beings inside all their characters, even the 'bad' ones. That's what a novelist does, after all; they take us on journeys inside the psyches of their characters. (The good novelists do, anyway.) They need to be empathic in order to do their work.

This entire book is written from the perspective of a man completely blind to the humanity of the people who surround him. It's not until the last page, chapter, and sentence (they are all the same) of the book that our protagonist seems to experience any understanding of what, exactly, he has done—and what his actions mean to others. So it was not until that very last page that I was able to mentally reconcile these two men, the author and his character.

It was a tough read, is what I'm saying; tough for a moderately sensitive 21st-century guy. But worthwhile, for what I learned about what I expect of a novelist: empathy, the ability to see inside a person's head and love them anyway.

Satoshi Kon dead at 47

2010-08-24T19:28:00.000-07:00

Legendary, award-winning anime screenwriter and director Satoshi Kon has died.

This is seriously depressing, folks. If you asked me who my favorite anime creator of all time is, I'd be hard-pressed to choose between Kon and Hayao Miyazaki, and anyone who's ever seen a Miyazaki film will know that's high praise for Kon. For both of them, really.

He's probably best known in the states for either Perfect Blue, a psychological horror film about the perils of fame and the loss of identity it brings, or Paprika, a wildly imaginative romp about dreams and storytelling in the unconscious that makes Inception look like a pop-up book by comparison. He's also the creator of the weird and disturbing 13-episode anime series Paranoia Agent and the surprisingly straightforward (but no less hilarious) comedy Tokyo Godfathers. For my money, though, his masterpiece was his 2001 film Millennium Actress: two documentary makers interview an old, long-retired actress about her many roles, but as they explore her past, they're slowly drawn into it, exploring her life and her films, and where the two intersected. It's a lovely film, with much of the same themes as Paprika and Perfect Blue but without the extravagance of the former or the horror of the latter. It's a beautiful, affecting work, and I can think of no better tribute to the man than checking it out for yourself.

Come on, people

2010-08-19T07:20:00.001-07:00

I can't keep this up all by myself.

Isaac & Ida, episode 2: Squirrels

2010-08-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

That's right, folks, it's time for the next installment of Isaac & Ida, my short-lived comic strip in the newspaper of the University of Chicago, the Chicago Maroon, from way back in October of 2004. This week's strip discusses evolutionary theory in an extremely high-minded and intellectual way and also features a squirrel smoking a cigarette.

Only the second week and already it was going straight to hell.

Okay, no, not really. But while the first entry in the series still manages to make me laugh, even to this day, this one is...well, just not as funny by comparison.

The squirrels on any college campus are usually so tame and domesticated that you can do things like squirrel fishing with them, and U Chicago's fuzzy rodents were no different. More than once I saw squirrels on the window ledge of my dorm room, just hanging out, minding their own business. In the fashion of bored/tired cartoonists everywhere, I thought to myself, "Everyone loves cute animals—what if I made a cartoon with cute animals?"

Some notes, in chronological order order:

* I was going for 'cartoony' with Isaac's legs, but I think I got off the bus somewhere around 'disturbingly flexible'.

* "National Stalking Day" does make me giggle a little.

* There doesn't seem to be any ornamentation on that building whatsoever, except for those windows. This is actually pretty well in keeping with the brutalist stylings of most of U Chicago's more recent buildings.

* 'Bartlett cookies': Bartlett is one of the (two? three?) major dining halls on campus, and I believe the largest, or at least most-trafficked. During my first year there, the cookies of Bartlett were legendary, delectable sheets of pure sugar and chocolate that were (like all cookies) at their best when just out of the oven and piping hot. When my second year began, those cookies were suddenly gone, replaced by standardized, plastic-wrapped corporate blandness. This strip, which I'd done over the summer but was printed early on in my second year, was thus outdated before it even hit the stands.

* I'm quite proud of the timing of the last three panels. The squirrels, in the foreground, do a modified penultimate pause, while Isaac and Ida finish their conversation in the background and leave the last panel open for the punchline. I think it works quite well, structurally speaking.

* A six-letter word for 'deadbeat' was an actual crossword clue from, I believe, a previous issue of the Maroon.

One last note: when this strip first appeared, several good friends of mine began complimenting me on the realism of my squirrels. Since then, some of them have failed to shut up about how great my squirrels are. Seriously, people. It's not that big a deal.

Next time, on Isaac & Ida: an actual storyline!

Teens Read book club: summer '10, session 2, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

2010-08-08T16:59:00.000-07:00

Because I am an absolute comic nerd, the second book I selected for my group of teens was Gene Luen Yang's marvelous book American Born Chinese. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is one of my all-time favorite books—comic or otherwise—and so I was hoping for a similarly enthused response from my teens. Unfortunately, although nobody hated it, they were mostly...lukewarm, let's say.

The kids were divided. Some of them disliked the disjointed plot structure (the book switches between three seemingly unconnected stories which are eventually brought together in the end), some didn't get the fantasy elements, and some just didn't get the story. And, unfortunately, I don't think I did a very good job of selling them on it.

I always feel awkward about entering into, or worse, leading, discussions on race or racial identity. This is mostly due to the fact that I'm white, from a predominantly white neighborhood/city/state, and very little experience with what I'm calling, for simplicity's sake, non-whiteness. Heck, I may have gone to school in Chicago, but the school I went to only had something like a 7% black student body. (It did, however, have an admirably high proportion of Asian kids.)

So I found it difficult to talk about racial identity in American Born Chinese. It was easier talking about identity in general, but that really only took us so far. I sometimes wish I'd been a teacher, so that I could design an entire unit around this one book and its implications; I wish I could take an entire semester, bring in cultural studies, other texts, speakers, authors, etc.

But you know what? I think I'm trying too hard. I think this is a sign that maybe I'm trying too hard to find books that will make my readers think, when all that's really needed is books that will make them read. That's the crucial step. When you can get a kid to read a book voluntarily, outside the school year, and then come together and discuss it, that's a pretty dang big step already.

Eh, whatever. As usual, I think A) I'm underestimating my own abilities, B) overestimating my impact on my readers, and C) writing an incredibly long and boring blog post. At this point, I'm going to wrap this up so we can get back to my usual recipe of borderline-coherent ramblings on pop culture and comics and crap.

P.S. Read American Born Chinese!

Keep On Keepin' On

2010-07-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Yes! I live! San Diego Comic-Con kicked my ass all up and down the street, but I survived the brutal assault of the USA's largest pop-culture convention. Every night, coming back from the con, I felt like I'd been beaten with a length of steel pipe, but in a good way.

I met a whole bunch of very cool people while I was there, and came back with a handful of business cards in my pocket. (Possibly the coolest moment was meeting Cullen Bunn, writer of the excellent Oni series The Damned and The Sixth Gun, not five minutes after stepping out of the airport into the San Diego sun.) I sat through several panels, some of which were more useful than others, and others of which served as impromptu naptimes. I received no fewer than four Scott Pilgrim shirts, none of which I had to pay for (at least, not in money). I shook probably a dozen peoples' hands, and am thus now probably carrying several new diseases. And I also spent something like $180 on comics, and thus my suitcase on the return flight probably caused the plane to tilt to one side on the tarmac.

But I'm alive, and it was a hell of a lot of fun, and I don't regret going at all. As an 'aspiring comics writer' (whatever that's worth), networking is key, and if you're going to network anywhere, Comic-Con is probably the place to do it. I certainly can't afford to go every year, and in terms of what I want to do, I should probably start going to smaller conventions instead, where the focus is less on movies and video games about comics and more on, you know, comics. But that's a bridge I'll cross eventually. Right now I'm just happy to be home and not surrounded by sweaty nerds.

Guys Read book club: summer '10, session 1, Sceptre of the Ancients (Skulduggery Pleasant series, book 1)

2010-07-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

Well, it's the day before my next session of the Guys Read book club, which means it's the perfect time to discuss the previous session of the Guys Read book club, from way back in June! Remember, kids: it's not procrastination if you can make up a good excuse for why it's late.

The book this time was the first in the Skulduggery Pleasant series, Scepter of the Ancients. This was recommended to me by my good friend and fellow library science student Carla as a good, post-Harry-Potter novel for young boys, and she was right on the money. I read only the first twenty pages before I realized that this was, indeed, a 'keeper': a young girl, spunky and intelligent, gets involved with the magical underworld by way of her uncle's untimely death and the eponymous skeletal detective, Mr. Pleasant himself. It was sharp, it had memorable characters, it was well-written; I dug it enormously. It was very clearly written in the wake of Harry Potter and the Buckets of Money, but it had an edge of danger and malice that the Potter books lacked, and overall could be very favorably compared to that series.

Which was, actually, my big mistake. We were having a decent conversation about the books, the five or six guys and me, and then I brought up Harry Potter. I was hoping I would get them talking about the big differences between the two worlds and the two systems of magic and so forth, but unfortunately it derailed the club a little: some of the guys got sidetracked onto what they liked about Harry Potter, some others started talking about the differences between the movies and the books, and in all it got a little muddled. We never went completely off the rails, and to be honest, I like a little chaos in my book talks, but overall I think we could've avoided the big HP just fine.

Last year's group was fairly coherent, in the sense that all the guys seemed to be at about the same level as readers. This year, unfortunately, it was painfully obvious that there is a very big gap between fourth grade and sixth: I had a couple boys who got easily sidetracked onto things like wands and guns (and combinations thereof) and others who really just wanted to talk about the book. I kept it together pretty well, I think, but it was tough.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's book club, wherein I blow the dust off of Gary Paulsen's classic Hatchet—which was ancient when I was these guys' age(s). We'll get to talk about chopping down trees and eating raw turtles' eggs and stuff. It'll be a blast.

I write this with a tube in one arm

2010-07-07T11:11:00.000-07:00

Yes! The time has come, the walrus said, for blood to be donated from Ted. I'm sitting in a faux-leather chair, smothered in blankets and with a needle in my right arm, sucking out my precious bodily fluid. This is a platelet donation, which takes around two hours, and so they give you a computer with internet access and—new since my last donation—streaming Netflix access, which makes me a very happy camper indeed. Heck, I'm getting such nice treatment here, I may never leave!

Gotta go—the masseuse is here.

Teens Read book club: summer '10, session 1, Flipped by Wendelin van Draanen

2010-07-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

Long-time readers of this blog may remember this post from way back when, where I talked about the wonderful experience I had doing the Guys Read book club for boys in grades 4 through 6. This summer, I'm not only running another three Guys Read sessions, I'm also running three Teens Read clubs for guys and girls in grades 7 through 9. I just did the first session last Tuesday, and I consider it to be another grand success.

The book we read was Flipped by Wendelin van Draanen, which I chose for a very specific reason. The story is pretty simple: it's about a boy and a girl who live next door to each other, and how their relationship changes from when they were in second grade all the way up into eighth grade. The gimmick of the book is that the chapters are told from alternating perspectives, one from the guy, one from the girl, so that you get both their views on events. Since this group is made up of guys and girls both—who may each have gone to the book clubs for the earlier grades and thus be used to hanging out mostly with others of their gender—I thought it would be a good way to start off this club, with a book that forces all readers to consider events from the other side.

Did it work? Maybe. The guys (three) and girl (only one, unfortunately, but at least she was talkative) got along fine, but I don't think it was due to an especially enlightened choice of book. I think it was more just that I had a good bunch of kids. We had an excellent discussion about the book, especially about the two main characters and their interactions. In fact, the readers were unanimous in agreeing that the girl in the book was, at times, pretty creepy in her pursuit of the guy—a view which, frankly, I agree with. (In fifth grade, she gets excited because she gets to sit directly behind the guy, and thus gets to smell his hair. I'm pretty sure you can get a restraining order for that.)

We also watched the trailer for the upcoming film version of Flipped, directed by Rob Reiner. We didn't take a lot of time to talk about the adaptation and what they'd changed—for example, the book takes place decidedly in the modern day, but the movie is set in an idyllic '50s America—but it did spur some more conversation. (Also, in viewing the trailer, one of the kids noticed the Avatar: the Last Airbender sticker I have on my laptop, which brought us to that topic for a short while.)

Frankly, I'm really excited for this group. They're eager to talk and share their opinions, and they're old enough now that they can focus on the book (for the most part) for forty-five minutes or more. Distraction is a constant problem with the younger group, which is grades 4 through 6—about whom I'll say more in my next post.

Isaac & Ida, episode 1: Parasites

2010-06-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

Since I never get tired of humiliating myself, I thought today I'd give my lovely readers a glimpse of my attempts at cartooning, from way back in my second year of college. For fifteen weeks, I put together a comic for the University of Chicago campus newspaper, the Maroon, called "Isaac & Ida," under the pen name of "Brian McEnergy." (It's a long story.) Here's the very first strip, from October 1, 2004.

Liberal arts college students in general, and University of Chicago students in particular, seem to be prone to obsessing over whether our fancy sheepskins will really help us contribute anything of value to the world. In general, I'm inclined to agree with Isaac's comment in panel 5, as well as add that the knowledge we acquire—lines from The Odyssey, the various types of stars, a history of samurai in pre-shogunal Japan—is not nearly as important as the skills we develop—critical thinking, analytical skills, and the ability to write a paper on two hours of sleep and three bottles of Mountain Dew. I thought this question would make a good topic for my introductory comic.

Looking back on this comic, there's a few flaws that stand out to me: Isaac's hands and arms in panel 4, Isaac's mouth in panel 5, Ida's arms in panel 6—really, all of the anatomy—Isaac's total lack of hairline, the unbelievable amount of hatching in the background. But overall, I'm actually pretty proud of this comic, despite all my humble protestations to the contrary. I like the polyptych of the first four panels and how it works with the layout: Ida opens the door, comes in, drops her bag on the floor, falls on the bed, and then we see Isaac at his computer. It helps organize the narrative. As much as that hatching in the background gives me the fits, I think the shading on the clothing worked out okay. I like how Ida's eyes make her look properly wasted. And I'm particularly proud of the overall joke of the strip, and the punchline specifically—I was really channeling the webcomic Cat and Girl, which has similar non-sequitur punchlines.

Note that I give very little information about who, exactly, Isaac and Ida are and what their relationship is: they're comfortable enough to share their personal space and/or beds, but are they dating? Are they siblings? Are they just really good friends? I intentionally left it vague, mostly because I'm lazy, though I do comment on this lack of information in a later strip.

Like I said, I did fifteen of these strips, so I can milk at least fourteen more posts out of this particular topic. For now, enjoy the crappy artwork!

Dear last twenty minutes of 'Toy Story 3':

2010-06-24T13:46:00.000-07:00

I just had something in my eye, that's all.

~~Love~~Sincerely,
Ted

Maybe the comics page isn't a decaying mausoleum after all

2010-06-23T10:32:00.000-07:00

On my comics page, three strips up and one strip over from Beetle Bailey (whose punchline today was not only unfunny, it required deciphering, like a Nazi U-boat transmission) is the strip Cul-de-Sac, which is one of the few strips left on the funny pages that occasionally makes me laugh. In fact, it's better than 'occasionally'; I find myself chuckling at the antics of Alice and Petey and the various other denizens of the titular traffic feature more often than not. But today, I got a particularly pleasant surprise.

Notice the book that Petey, the comic-loving introvert, is holding in his hands? I'm almost positive it's supposed to be the graphic novel Smile, by Raina Telgemeier.

(Sure, the cover's a different color, but I chalk that up to an ignorant colorist—the strip was originally produced in black-and-white, after all, and I assume it was touched up just for this website.)

Somehow it makes me incredibly happy that the creator of this strip, Richard Thompson, is enough of a comics nerd to put in a reference to a truly excellent, semi-indie graphic novel into his strip, at a resolution that renders it extremely difficult to perceive. Bravo, Mr. Thompson.

In which I insult an entire region of the United States

2010-06-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

Fifteen-year-old gay blogger complains about the lack of LGBTQ lit in libraries.

I've got two reactions to this, one selfish, one not. My first reaction was, "I hope my library isn't like this." I don't actually know, because I've never made an effort to seek out and read LGBTQ lit, which I suppose I ought to. I know that my library system has an excellent reputation and is, apparently, known nationwide, but I have no clue if that reputation includes a decent list of LGBTQ stuff.

My second reaction was, "I hope he realizes that not every library is like this." I don't mean to be—regional-ist? latitude-ist?—but this kid lives in Kentucky, and I don't know how popular LGBTQ lit is going to be in that state. It sounds to me that the best possible thing this kid could do for himself is, once he's got a driver's license and some disposable income, to leave.

On memory

2010-06-11T18:21:00.000-07:00

One of the many (many) webcomics I read on a regular basis, Sodium Eyes, had a particularly apt way of putting something that I've been aware of for a long time. In this strip, the character Miya states that "our brains have such a staggering capacity for knowledge, but the indexing method is way off"—or, to put it in a way that's more in line with the subject of this blog, our brains are like enormous libraries with terrible librarians. The sight of a particular object—a tricycle, say—might trigger a memory from years or even decades ago of another tricycle, or a tricycle that you saw a child riding, or a movie with a tricycle in it. Sometimes, these sense memories can be pleasant reminders of things gone past: a particular brand of hand soap (Dial, I think?) always takes me back to my paternal grandmother's home.

But sometimes it's unbelievably frustrating to be reminded of something, some random image or object from your past, without knowing what exactly it is you're reminded of. Just recently, for kicks, I rewatched one of the songs from The Princess and the Frog on YouTube, and in it there's a bit where one character holds up an oyster shell with a pearl inside. This reminded me of, I think, a video game where your character has to grab a pearl from an oyster down on the ocean floor—but I don't know which game. So for the past few days, I've been wracking my brains trying to piece together this memory-reference—was it a 2-D sidescroller? was it adventure, or action? did I play it, or did I see someone else play it? was it on a computer or a console?—but to no avail. It's slowly driving me insane.

Okay, insane-er.

Ted Reviews Mohiro Kitoh's Bokurano: Ours

2010-06-07T18:06:00.000-07:00

Mohiro Kitoh's manga series Bokurano: Ours fits into a few different genres. It's young adult, shonen (literally 'young boy'), mecha (as in 'giant robots'), and one more that seems to be more well-represented in manga than you might expect: the ontological mystery genre. I'll get to what I mean by that in a second; first, let's do a quick plot summary.

One summer in the near future, fifteen kids at a nature camp find a mysterious cave on the beach.

(Remember, kids: read right to left.)

In this cave, naturally enough, is a whole bank of computers...

...and a creepy old dude who offers to play a game with them.

This being a comic from Japan, of course, this game takes the form of giant robots beating each other up.

The story takes a few minor twists which are, if not exactly predictable, are at least unsurprising. The kids and Kokopelli win their first fight, the kids are teleported back home, they decide not to tell anyone about their adventures with the creepy old man in the cave and his giant robot, and the next night the kids are summoned again. Only this time, Kokopelli isn't around; one of the kids is the pilot. And here is where one of Bokurano's major flaws starts to shine, as it were: the series has a lot of characters, and not enough space to do them justice.

Fifteen kids are essentially dumped in the reader's lap all at once in the beginning, and there's only a bare minimum of characterization.

But it doesn't really matter, because here's the big giant shocking twist: after one of the kids pilots the giant robot in battle and wins, that kid then dies.

This pretty clearly sets up the narrative arc for the rest of the series: we get a long, detailed history of one character, only for them to become the next pilot, so we get to see how they perform under fire and what not. So Kodama, the second pilot, who reveres his crass businessman father...

...ends up coldly destroying some buildings while battling his opponent...

...only to accidentally be sent flying and land on a car containing his father.

The first volume—which is all that's been published in the States so far—ends literally a page later, so I have no idea how this particular battle ends, but after reading the Wikipedia page on the series, I can get a pretty good idea of how it all plays out. (Normally, I prefer to read the entirety of a series before doing a review of it—part of the reason that I do so few reviews—but I made an exception in this case.)

I mentioned the 'ontological mystery' genre earlier. What I mean by this is a story where the basic conditions of existence are unclear, where the main characters are not necessarily aware of whether what they experience is real or some sort of hallucination or dream, where they may exist in a liminal state between life and death, and where the truth about their condition may only be revealed very late, if ever, in the series. Bokurano is one of several manga series I've read and anime series I've watched that fit this category: Gantz is another one (which I dislike because of the over-the-top ultra-violence), Haibane Renmei and Red Garden (which are two of my favorite series ever) also fall into this category. In Gantz, the protagonist (who is far from a 'hero') is forced to participate in a 'game' where he must kill bizarre aliens in Tokyo, while his old life and all his friends' memories of him have seemingly disappeared. In Haibane Renmei, all the characters sprout (non-functional) wings and halos, have no memory of their lives before they were 'born' into this world at their current age, and are kept cloistered away from the normal people of the unnamed, vaguely rural European town. And in Red Garden, the four female protagonists are explicitly told that they are dead, that they now inhabit false bodies created to look like their old ones, and must now fight crazed, bestial dog-men on the orders of a mysterious family that may or may not be able to restore them to their original selves. In each of these series, and to a somewhat lesser extent in Bokurano, there are assumptions about the world that have in some way been changed; the characters live in a world with conditions that are somehow different from what they should be, possibly as a result of mysterious and inexplicable forces or beings.

But that's a post for another day. Did I like Bokurano? I guess, but not enthusiastically. The characters are, as I already mentioned, not exactly absorbing, and the story is that 'ontological mystery' crap I blathered about earlier. The art is remarkably bland—simplistic character designs, basic or even nonexistent backgrounds—except for the lovingly detailed giant robots, which each have a unique design.

Is is good? It's better than some I've read, sure. But it's by no means at the top of the young adult heap, or the giant robot heap, or even the ontological mystery heap. It's an okay buy for the young adults—there's some mildly salacious dialogue, a little bit of innuendo, and just enough blood to intrigue those violence-happy boys.

The Wire and Homicide

2010-05-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

So I've been watching Homicide: Life on the Street lately.

A few years ago, everybody and their mothers was telling me I needed to watch The Wire, an HBO series that had just ended a critically acclaimed five-season run. One day I happened to catch a sale on Amazon for the box set of the whole series for something like seventy dollars. At the time, I had something like seventy dollars (ah, those days of wine and roses!), so I bought the set on a whim.

Over the next few months, I devoured that series. The Wire is sort of a police procedural, following a group of cops as they target various criminal organizations and work to take them down. I say it's "sort of" a procedural, because often the most interesting and dramatic elements of the show had nothing to do with cops-and-robbers (or, for that matter, cops or robbers). Each season expanded out into a different sphere of life in Baltimore: the first season concentrated on the drug trade, the second on the slowly dying ports, the third on city politics and the dirtiness thereof, the fourth on the badly failing school systems, and the fifth on the media and journalism. (The fifth season might be my favorite, but it's hard to judge.)

The Wire was the brainchild of one David Simon, former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, in which he followed the detectives in the homicide unit of the Baltimore police for a year and detailed their experiences. This book was also the inspiration, as you can probably guess, for the television show Homicide, so as soon as I finished The Wire and started jonesing for some more excellent television, I decided to turn to Homicide.

I was expecting it to be a disappointment, honestly. The Wire was intricately plotted and crafted from start to finish; its creators described it as a "visual novel," in which the characters and plotlines and all elements of the story are as carefully and thoughtfully designed as they would be for a top-class novel. I expected Homicide to be the larval form of this, with attempts at doing long-running storylines and character arcs, a show trying to be something that network TV ultimately would be unable to handle.

So it was pleasantly surprising to find that Homicide was not just a watered-down Wire, that it was, in fact, entirely its own entity, and far more entertaining and thoughtful than I expected it to be.

Comparing the two shows is really apples and oranges. Or, to use the terms I've already introduced, if The Wire is a novel, then Homicide is a book of short stories. Because each episode in The Wire had to fit into the larger, overarching plot for that season, the episodes had to be watched strictly in order, so that you followed the intersecting lives of all the various characters. But Homicide episodes, for the most part, are standalone; they can be watched in any order. In fact, it's because there's no overarching plot that they had the freedom to make the kind of episodes they did. Often, Homicide episodes are constructed of three subplots, following three pairs of detectives, whose cases all touch on a single theme: fatherhood, for example, or obsessive love, or modern America. Other episodes will experiment with the format: one episode in season one simply followed the detectives in the squadroom one night, waiting for a call to come in, but no murders happened and none of them even so much as went outside; they spent the whole night talking and arguing and debating with each other. Because their characters don't necessarily have to follow an elaborate, season-long plot, they can be used to comment more generally on whatever issues they want.

What I'm saying, here, is that it's a pretty dang good show, and I don't know why it took me so long to get into it.

They've also got this really big canyon there, I don't know if you've heard of it

2010-05-24T11:03:00.000-07:00

So I am just now back at home after a nearly week-long family vacation to Arizona, also known affectionately as "God's oven." There were seven of us treading the sands and gravel: myself, my parents, my sister, her husband, and his parents. We spent several nights in Flagstaff, two nights at the rim of the Grand Canyon, and one night in Phoenix, all the while uttering prayers of thanks to the man who invented air conditioning. (Willis Haviland Carrier, for those of you keeping score at home.)

The thing you have to understand about Arizona is that it is an actual Goddamn alien landscape—at least to people from the Midwest. There's no grass, mountains everywhere, trees that look like nightmarish experiments in botany, a blazing eye of death in the sky, and all the while it is so incredibly dry that you could have used my skin to light matches on.

But, yes, it is also unbelievably gorgeous, and as soon as I get my hands on some of the many many many pictures I took, you will be seeing some of that gorgeous...ity.

Right now I am just glad to be back in Minnesota, where the air is nice and moist, the lawns are green and growing, and the temperature is a comfy...90 degrees?!? What the hell, Mother Nature??

OH COME ON NOW

2010-05-12T18:21:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, the Huffington Post reported that the University of Chicago was one of the nation's top ten anti-party schools, as I noted here.

Now they've posted another ranking, this time of the top ten grueling colleges in the nation—and U of C makes the list again. (The only other college to make both lists? MIT.)

It's not that they're really wrong in putting us on both these lists; it's just insulting, somehow. As if it were shameful to be an institution which encourages students not to drink themselves stupid and to study rigorously and dutifully.

You know what else the U of C is notable for? Producing our current president.

I LIVE!!!

2010-05-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

Yes! Somehow I have survived this last semester of library school without any major brain damage or organ failure. This surprises even me.

It's not that my classes were terribly difficult, per se; it's more of a combination of A) them taking more time than I expected them to, B) various other side projects and concerns (this blog among them), and C) me being a slacker and procrastinator. I did enjoy my classes, for the most part, but it's sometimes hard to translate that enjoyment into enthusiasm for doing homework and writing papers.

In any case, I'm only taking two classes next semester, which should give me more time for, you know, non-school things. Things like making a proper website for myself, pitching more comics projects, looking for a library job, punching giraffes, reading, writing, watching television, and so forth.

(The giraffes deserve it.)

This is both amusing and shameful

2010-04-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

According to the Huffington Post, my alma mater is one of the nation's top ten anti-party schools. Also on the list: West Point and Brigham Young University.

Personally, I think they miss the crucial distinction between not having parties and not having fun. Just because professors expect you to read, say, 300 pages a week (for a single class) doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself in between those moments of brain-bludgeoning.

Exhibit A.

Because I love the taste of innocence as it dies, that's why

2010-04-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, there's a lady in a nearby school district who wants to ban every volume of Jeff Smith's comic series Bone because it features smoking, drinking, violence, and fixing horse-races! (Well, okay, cow-races, technically.) You know what, lady? Not only did I have a group of 4th, 5th, and 6th-grade boys read and talk about the first volume of that series as part of a library reading group, I'm going to be a librarian myself!

That's right! I will be the one corrupting your children with the ten-time-Eisner-winning, eleven-time-Harvey-winning, one-of-Time-magazine's-Top-Ten-Graphic-Novels-of-All-Time series Bone! Listen to me cackle as they witness characters drinking beer! Watch my eyes glimmer with evil as I distribute copies of this evil book, in which the layabout Smiley Bone smokes a cigar! You send your children to the library, thinking they are safe—but you are wrong!

Ted Reviews Yuki Urushibara's Mushishi

2010-04-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

Yuki Urushibara's series Mushishi might be not just one of my favorite manga ever, not just one of my favorite comics ever, but possibly one of my favorite things ever. It's beautiful, fascinating, thoughtful, elegant, and endlessly original; it's thoroughly and firmly rooted in Japanese culture without being inaccessible to non-Japanese readers; it's difficult to define but easy to pick up.

Imagine all the plants and animals we know as the tips of your fingers. As you move down the fingers, following the veins, these beings become more and more simple; where the fingers fuse together into the hand, that's like bacteria, which are part plant and part animal. Progressing further towards the heart, we find simpler and simpler beings, until just above the heart, the source of all life, we find mushi.

(Remember, manga reads backwards. Start in the upper-right-hand corner, work your way left, then down.)

Normally the word just means "bug" or "insect" in Japanese, but Urushibara is using it here to refer to something entirely different, something almost alien. Mushi are neither dead nor alive; they exist only partly in the world around us, and only people with special awareness can see them. There are thousands of different types of mushi, each with different habitats, behaviors, habits, feeding patterns, and so forth. And some of these mushi, in one way or another, come into contact with people.

Some of these mushi are parasites or symbiotes: they latch onto a human being and have strange effects on him or her. Sui, in the image above, has a mushi in her eyes that cannot tolerate light, and so she is shut up in darkness. Other mushi exist on their own and people are simply caught up in them: the swamp that is migrating to the sea and the woman who is dragged along with it, for example. Fortunately, there are doctors who specialize in treating mushi problems: mushishi. (That's 'mushi' plus a suffix indicating a doctor or specialist.) Our protagonist, Ginko, is one of these titular mushishi.

Ginko is virtually the only recurring character in the series; he travels from town to town, curing the mushi problems he finds. The series is very formulaic in that sense: Ginko shows up—either because someone asked him to come and investigate a case, or he's heard rumors of some strange occurrence, and sometimes just out of pure blind luck—finds what mushi is responsible, and finds some way to fix the problem—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It's a formula, but with plenty of room for variation and experimentation, and it makes the few times Urushibara breaks the formula that much more interesting.

It should be noted that the mushi are never presented as malicious or intentionally harmful: they're just another lifeform, trying to live as best they can. If they're harming a human host, then Ginko will remove and, if necessary, kill them, but he's not out to eradicate mushi. They're alive, just like us, and they have the same right to life as we do.

The various and diverse effects that mushi have on their hosts are by turns beautiful and creepy. In one story, there is a secluded village where they worship a deity: a young girl who devours enormous amounts of food, and then ages to become an old woman in minutes as the sun sets. When she wakes the next day, she remembers nothing of the previous day, or indeed of anything before that moment of waking. Of course, she's not a deity; she just has a mushi-parasite with a peculiar trait:

Many of the mushi in the series have the qualities of ghosts: they're largely unseen presences, they create confusion and fear, and they're manifestations of a power we cannot understand. In several chapters, Ginko has mentioned that mushi live on the border between life and death, not fully in our world but not fully in the next, either. In a way, the stories in this series function as post-modern ghost stories: the 'ghosts' are mysterious but ultimately explainable; they are beings just like us, with their own desires and survival mechanisms. Urushibara even draws a direct comparison in one of her afterwords:

But as with the best ghost or monster stories, the tales in Mushishi say more about the people than about the monsters. Each chapter is really about the humans involved in these strange happenings, how their lives are affected by these tiny, ghostly beings. There are some incredibly powerful moments in this series, and very few of them are actually about the mushi.

All of these elements are enormously helped by Urushibara's delicate artwork. The people are fairly simple creations, with a cartooniness that allows a wide range of emotional expression, but the real treats are the mushi, with their multitude of forms and manifestations. Take a look at one of my favorite pages, where a boy with a mushi nesting in his ears hears sounds that no one else can:

Or even just this simple image of a boy whose drawings come inadvertently to life:

She even does some remarkably experimental things with the comics medium, which, frankly, I don't see nearly as much in manga as I do in American (or Canadian, or European, or just plain non-Japanese) comics. Maybe I'm not reading the right manga, but I haven't seen anything like this page, where a young girl discovers that the mushi that cured her blindness has given her sharper sight than any other human:

Overall, Mushishi is a cross between House and a ghost story. Because each chapter is self-contained (with a few exceptions of two-part stories), and there's virtually no backstory or recurring characters, you can pick up any volume and dive right into the stories. There's no objectionable language or behavior, so it's suitable for all audiences, although the complex stories and the subtle language and art is probably best appreciated by, say, junior high students and up. One of my absolute favorite works.

(I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend the television anime adaptation of Mushishi as well. It's an excellent adaptation, preserving the mood of the series and, frankly, improving on the look: some of the mushi designs deserve to be in color and fully-animated.)

A Curious and Coincidental Confluence of Classroom Concepts

2010-04-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

(For those of you who dislike that title: tough noogies.)

This semester of library school, I'm taking three courses: Reference and Information Services, Administration and Management of Libraries and Information Centers, and Storytelling. I chose to take the first course because answering reference questions is a pretty central part of many librarians' duties, I chose the second because it was recommended to me by my advisor as a good thing to have under my belt, and I chose the third because I needed something fun to do.

But it's interesting how those last two classes have started to overlap. One of the big ideas in the Administration class that keeps coming up is "telling the library story," convincing people—users, administrators, directors—of the importance of the library. This doesn't necessarily mean telling an actual narrative-style story ("Once upon a time there was an underfunded librarian who had to make do with really old books"), but it does mean considering the situation, the audience, the salient facts and how to present them in the best possible light.

These are all necessary tools for the conventional storyteller as well. One must always be aware of these elements while telling the story in order to be successful. Now, 'success' means two different things in these two situations: in one, it's to convince someone that your work is worthwhile (and, potentially, to give you more money), while in the other, it's to entertain. But in both situations, someone is listening to you, which gives you the opportunity to put something in their head that wasn't there before—and in both cases, the best way to do that is through a story.

I think it's kind of neat, myself.

This is why I'm not (around)

2010-03-29T14:55:00.001-07:00

Just got back from a week-long internship at a library system in Chicago. Thus, little time for posting, etc, etc.

"But Ted," you ask, "you only had the internship for a week, but you haven't posted for two weeks! What gives?"

My answer: laziness. Laziness and Homicide: Life on the Street episodes.

File me under 'S', for 'Super-cool dude'

2010-03-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

Ontario's Guelph University creates a library of people.

This is a seriously awesome idea. You find people in the community with interesting life stories, philosophies, careers, and so forth, then let people 'check them out' for a half-hour chat session. I really wish there was something like this in my community—I personally would volunteer my time as "Ted Anderson, complete nerd."

Ted and his smaller fluid volume

2010-03-12T17:21:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this blog may remember my failed attempt to donate blood a couple months ago. Well, enough time has passed that I can give again, and give I did.

This time I gave platelets, which are what makes your blood clot and promotes healing of cuts and so forth. You can give platelets every three days because they regenerate so fast, but the actual donation process takes about two hours. My blood donation center has special setups for platelet donors with a computer and a DVD library—I was hoping to actually post while giving blood, but the internet wasn't working on my computer. However, I did get to watch the entirety of Tod Browning's 1932 classic Freaks and two episodes of Arrested Development season three, so it wasn't all bad.

Best of all, since you can donate platelets so often, I can go in again on Monday and donate my usual double-red-blood-cells. And triple best of all, Monday is also my birthday, so I will be showered with gifts and well-wishes from all of my gifters and well-wishers in addition to getting life-sustaining fluid sucked out through my arm. Fun fun fun!

Ted hates all adaptations of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' books

2010-03-05T17:24:00.000-08:00

Let me start off by being clear, here: I'm not saying that I hate Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Rather, I have a severe, unyielding, constantly burning hatred for any and all adaptations of those works.

In fact, that's a good place to start. Look at the last word in the last sentence of that paragraph: 'works.' As in plural. People making movies or TV shows or video games out of the Alice books seem to forget that there are two Alice books. In general, I have no problem with mixing together events from Wonderland and Looking-Glass; I'm not going to kick up a fuss if you bring Tweedledee and Tweedledum into the same world as the Cheshire Cat. What really gets my goat, though, is when adapters confuse the Queen of Hearts, from Wonderland, with the Red Queen, from Looking-Glass.

Wonderland's court is built on the metaphor of a deck of cards: there's the Queen of Hearts, the King of Hearts, the Knave of Hearts, and all the various other cards in the heart suit. (Remember the Queen playing croquet? The soldiers, who were literally giant walking cards, bent themselves into arches for the game.) Presumably there's also a Queen of Clubs, and one of Spades, and Diamonds, but Alice stays entirely within the Heart court for the book. Looking-Glass, on the other hand, is built on a chess metaphor: there's the Red Queen and the White Queen, and while Alice meets them both in the course of the book, neither one is outright crazy and murderous like the Queen of Hearts is. ("Off with her head!") In fact, at the end of the book, the two queens come together and congratulate Alice on having become a queen herself.

So naturally I am quite pissed off at the new Tim Burton movie version of Alice, in which our young heroine faces off against a crazy, murderous Red Queen with the help of the White Queen and her army.

But I'll be honest: the queen thing is really only a small part of the reason why I dislike adaptations of Alice. The larger issue is that it's impossible to make a good adaptation of Alice because adaptations necessarily discard some elements and add others, while keeping true to the original story. And Alice doesn't have a story. Yes, there's a narrative of sorts—Alice falls down hole, Alice meets crazy messed-up critters and people, Alice gets involved in a wacky trial with a decapitation-obsessed queen—but Alice works best not as a story but as a series of improbable, nonsensical occurrences.

My favorite way of thinking about the Alice books is that they are lessons in anti-logical thinking. Quite a few conversations in Wonderland and Looking-Glass both take the form of a logical dispute, in which one person takes a position and then proves it with logic. But in the books, the arguments that these characters make use seemingly flawless logic to come to completely insane conclusions. One of my favorite examples is the Cheshire Cat proving that all cats are mad:

'To begin with,' said the Cat, 'a dog's not mad. You grant that?'

'I suppose so,' said Alice.

'Well, then,' the Cat went on, 'you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'

The logic makes sense, but the conclusion is complete nonsense. Carroll also loves playing with language and the absurdities thereof; my absolute favorite one of these is a section from Looking-Glass when Alice is talking to the White Knight about a song he's going to sing:

'The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' EYES."'

'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.

'No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."'

'Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?' Alice corrected herself.

'No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!'

'Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

'I was coming to that,' the Knight said. 'The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.'

The name of the song is called this. The name of the song is this. The song is called this. The song is this. That's four different phrases which are generally taken to mean the same thing, but as Carroll points out, they technically refer to four different things.

The Alice books are not so much stories as they are textbooks in how to think nonsensically. The plots aren't so much meaningless as they are completely irrelevant. Trying to adapt the story would be like trying to make a movie out of Plato's Republic.

Furthermore, Alice herself, as a character, is extremely limited and one-dimensional—what do we know about her background? About her personality? How does she feel about this or that? In fact, I don't really regard Alice as a character at all. Carroll, after all, originally came up with the books as stories told to the real-life Alice; her literary counterpart didn't need to be complex or interesting because she was just a vehicle, a way for Alice Liddell to explore the world of Wonderland. I think of the book-Alice as a diving suit: she has the shape of a human, and she can move and act like a human, but she's really just there as a means to explore an otherwise unexplorable world. Any attempt to explore Alice as a character will thus fail, because there isn't anything to explore. It's like trying to analyze the motivations and personality traits of a car.

In any case, I'm using way too many words to express a very simple thought, which is, "I hate the new Alice movie already and Tim Burton should just stop making films right now."

Libraries are communist

2010-02-23T10:20:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

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I mean, if you need a little red book, what better place to find one?

Ted Reviews Miwa Ueda's Peach Girl

2010-02-17T18:20:00.000-08:00

For my first manga review, I’m going to do Miwa Ueda’s series Peach Girl. I chose this series for a number of reasons:
1) I finished it recently, so it’s fresh in my mind.
2) It’s a fairly standard example of a major genre—a lot of the characters, situations, ideas, and so forth are hallmarks of shojo (young girl) romance, and it’s thus a good introduction.
3) It was a decent series—not great, but certainly not the worst I’ve read—so it’s a good introduction in that sense as well.
4) It illustrates some of the difficulties of translation—not just in the sense of complicated words, but also concepts and cultural ideas that Americans won’t know about.

You'll see what I mean by that last one in just a moment. Momo Adachi is a happy, normal high-school student who's misunderstood. She's got few friends, most of the boys tend to assume she's easy, and she can't confess to the guy she loves. The reason for her troubles? She's tan.

(Remember: manga pages read right-to-left. Start in the upper right corner, work your way left, then down.)

In the late '90s and early '00s, there was a fashion subculture among young girls in Japan, primarily Tokyo, known as ganguro, which involved a combination of deep (usually fake) tans, bleached-blonde hair, and bright, over-the-top clothes. These girls were often characterized by the media as loose schoolgirls, sometimes even prostituting themselves out to older men. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were greatly exaggerated and this was just another moral panic, but still: the stigma is there.

So Momo, who was on the swim team, her hair bleached by the chlorine and her skin easily tanned, is wrongly thought to be one of these girls. The translators use terms like 'playgirl' and 'beach bunny' to describe how people perceive Momo, but these don't really have the same cultural connotation and don't convey the same level of insult. They're acceptable substitutes, I suppose, but knowing the original term puts the situation more in context.

In any case, Momo's life isn't great. She's in love with Toji, the hunky blonde boy that she's known since junior high, but who doesn't like tanned girls.

Plus there's Kiley, the lovable but horny guy that comforts her and gives her advice on how to make Toji hers—but does he have an ulterior motive? Momo's first few meetings with Kiley don't...

...go...

...so...

...smoothly...

but she eventually warms up to him.

The other major player in this story is Sae. Back when Momo first entered high school, Sae was the only girl who'd talk to her, and now is her only real friend. Problem is, she's evil.

Complete and utter evil. Sae copies Momo in her fashion choices—only Sae makes the fashion look good—she compliments Momo to her face while talking her down behind her back; she schemes and manipulates and always has her own agenda.

I really like Sae—not in the sense that I'd like to be friends with her in real life, but in the sense that she's a character who adds an interesting spice to Peach Girl's story. To Momo, she acts like her best friends, but behind Momo's back Sae is constantly working to steal everything and everyone she loves—even though, as is made clear, she only wants it because Momo has it. Sae only wants what Momo wants, whether it's a cute bag or a boyfriend.

The first few volumes focus mainly on the conflict between Momo and Sae for the affections of Toji, the school superhunk: Momo tries to confess her love, Sae tricks Toji into kissing her in front of Momo, back and forth it goes.

Eventually, after several volumes of manipulations, misunderstood kisses, lies and more lies, Kiley and Toji finally trick Sae into revealing her treacherous nature in front of the entire class. Momo and Toji get together, they dance off skipping into the sunset, and everyone is happy forever.

Well, actually, considering that this takes place in volume four of an 18-volume series, there's quite a bit more.

The story meanders somewhat after this. Sae mends her ways for a while—in fact, there's a recurring joke after this point that she becomes two-dimensional, literally paper-thin, from the sheer crushing defeat she suffers at the hands of Momo and the gang.

For a while she butters up to Momo, in hopes of staying on her good side...

...and, surprisingly, Momo takes pity on the now-hated Sae...

...but eventually Sae goes back to her old tricks. Momo starts having doubts over whether she loves Toji or Kiley more, Toji gets ensnared by Sae's tricks again, Kiley expresses feelings for Momo but also has a secret crush on his former tutor, who is now the school nurse, Kiley's suave, manipulative, rapist older brother shows up...

My point is, it gets complicated. As with most shojo romances, there are a ridiculous number of twists and turns, obstacles on the road to true love. Our heroine agonizes over which of these two boys she truly loves, how to tell them, what love even is...

It seems a little anti-feminist that the protagonist's entire conflict is over which of two boys she likes, that she's choosing to define herself entirely by her attachment to somebody else and not by her own virtues.

But it should be pointed out that Momo is not unique in this: virtually every character in Peach Girl is defining themselves by someone else. Kiley is just as obsessed with romance as Momo is.

Toji chooses to give up his own happiness at one point to ensure Momo's. Sae is insecure and dependent upon the affections of others to validate her own existence.

(Sae's development actually ends up being more interesting, at least to me, than Momo's romantic worries. She temporarily reforms early in the series, goes back to being evil, bounces back and forth quite a bit, and is ultimately forced to confront the fact that she's so insecure that she's allowing herself to be put into horrible situations.

By the end of the series—spoiler alert!—she's more or less a good person, but not entirely reformed: she's tentative friends with Momo and the gang, but isn't averse to a little mischief every now and then.)

In any case, despite the various twists and turns that the story takes over the course of eighteen (!) volumes, true love is always the object of desire, and Momo does eventually find her One True Love. But as with most stories, the destination isn't half as important as the journey. Peach Girl ostensibly has at its core a fairly unremarkable message—Don't Judge a Book by its Cover—but for my money, the less obvious message—Don't Define Yourself By Another Person Because You are a Unique Human Being—is more interesting and well-established.

I should also mention the art in Peach Girl. Most manga are created at a fairly rapid pace—sometimes as many as thirty pages in a week. Manga creators often have assistants helping them do backgrounds and details and so forth, but even so, the demanding schedule means that the art often suffers. You see a lot of repeated poses, simplistic backgrounds, or other tricks to finish pages off as fast as possible. Compounding this is the fact that quite a few manga artists really aren't very good. Often artists will only be able to draw characters in a few very specific angles, or in a limited range of costumes or poses, and if they're forced to go out of their comfort zone the art quality drops dramatically.

This is not the case with Peach Girl, though. Miwa Ueda has a wonderfully tight grasp of anatomy and figure drawing—look, for example, at this:

That's a quite complicated pose, with an interplay of muscles and bone structure, and it's further complicated by the odd angle it's shown from. But it's all clear as a bell, with excellent details on the folds of Momo's clothes, to boot. Similarly, take a look at this montage of Momo working her summer job:

Note the hairstyles: they're all different, yet they're all fitting for a moderately hip teenage girl. Most manga artists—heck, a lot of comics artists, period—don't change their characters' hairstyles that often, because it's difficult to re-learn how a character will look from different angles. Miwa Ueda does it all the time—even, as we see here, multiple times on a single page.

In summary, Peach Girl didn't knock my socks off, but it did enough new things, and enough things well, that I give it a general thumbs-up. The story is a fairly standard shojo romance plot, with a few minor twists, but it's executed well, with some quite well-done art along the way. I'd recommend it to, obviously, teenage girls, particularly those who are just starting to get into manga.

On telling stories

2010-02-08T15:09:00.000-08:00

One of the most frustrating aspects of the life that I've chosen, where I make up stories and then try to get people to give me money for them, is coming up with what might be a totally brilliant story and then having no idea how to write it.

Right now I've got four characters, a couple situations, and some vague idea of a theme, but no actual plot to bring it all together. Moreover, I don't even know what medium to write it for. I've got a great deal of familiarity with the comics medium (okay, okay, "sequential art"), and I can do prose if I need to, though I don't like to. But this might work better as a play, or even a short film or something, and that's totally outside my realm of experience.

I think a lot about stories and media and which kinds of stories work best in which media, and it seems to me like a lot of other people don't think about this at all. You can do different things in television than you can in a novel, and vice versa—and, more importantly, there are things you really can't do in television that you could in a novel, and if you're used to writing novels then your television scripts aren't going to work very well. One of the things that bugged me most about the Watchmen movie was that people kept trumpeting how Zack Snyder had done such a faithful adaptation of the book, and look how these scenes are almost the exact same image as it was in the comics, and the dialogue was taken word-for-word from the comics, when it seemed to me that making a movie out of Watchmen was going to fail from the start, because it made such great use of the medium of comics to do things that couldn't be done in any other medium. (I should probably do an in-depth post on this...eventually.)

Every time I come up with a story, I try to ask myself: what medium would best serve this story? If the story doesn't particularly need impressive visuals, then prose might be a viable form. If it's action-heavy, or has a particular pace and tempo that needs to be maintained, then it might work best as a motion picture of some kind. If it focuses on relationships, if the interactions between different characters are the most important facet of the story, then maybe a play would be a good choice.

(I'll be honest here: I've never written a prose story, or a motion picture, or a play. But I like to keep my options open, you know?)

Anyway, this story is burning a hole in my head, and I've got no clue what to do with it, and I hate that. So: anger.

Still too many white folks, though

2010-02-04T14:18:00.000-08:00

The new trailer to M. Night Shyamalan's live-action adaptation of the American animated show Avatar: the Last Airbender.

I'm going to stick with "Hell yes" for now, but I reserve the option to go to a "What the hell?" or "Hell no" if necessary.

The library without books has lots of empty shelves

2010-02-01T15:43:00.000-08:00

Kind of an old article, but: prep school near Boston is swapping their library full of books for a 'learning center' with Kindles, laptop spaces, and a coffee bar.

I'm just going to point out a couple things:
1) Digital copies don't degrade and can be used by an infinite number of users at once, yes, but they're more often rented than bought, so the school had better keep their subscriptions up-to-date.
2) They'd better keep their technology up-to-date, too. I'd hate to be the guy who authorized the buying of a hundred Kindles and then saw Apple announcing the iPad.
3) To Mr. William Powers, who has written the forthcoming book Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal, and who notes "Without books, students are more likely to do the grazing or quick reading that screens enable, rather than be by themselves with the author’s ideas," I would say: yes, but with a laptop/iPad/brain implant, you can immediately browse outwards to check the author's facts, follow arguments into other texts, and generally expand the intellectual environment one currently resides in.

Actually, San Francisco is supposed to be a pretty good place if you're homeless

2010-01-26T13:38:00.000-08:00

San Francisco library system hires a full-time social worker to help with its homeless problem.

In one of my classes last semester, I read an article about how libraries are often hangouts for the homeless during the day: they're open to the public, have free bathrooms, and of course they're a source of information if you're trying to find out about other shelters in the area, or jobs, or what have you. I'm torn on the subject. Obviously libraries are a public good, and when I say public I mean the entire public, not just the homeowning part of the population. But, well, there's sometimes hygiene problems, and there's patrons complaining, and some of the homeless are going to have mental health problems, and so on and so forth.

Really, the problem is that it's not the library's problem. But until there's enough money for shelters to stay open 24/7 and enough social workers to take care of all the homeless—which should happen as soon as it starts raining solid gold—I applaud the SF library system for treating the problem as best they can.

Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You

2010-01-24T16:26:00.000-08:00

I just recently finished, and was quite heartened by, Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, a piece of cultural analysis that came out a few years ago. The book is essentially one long, well-formed, cogent argument on one single issue: that popular culture—video games and television primarily—is not, as the common opinion has it, making us into a nation of dullards and easily distracted simpletons, but is in fact making us smarter.

Johnson's argument is actually fairly simple, and boils down to the twin ideas of complexity and engagement: pop culture products are becoming more complex, forcing viewers/readers/players to pay more and closer attention. But rather than these complicated narratives being the high-brow entertainment, they're the prime-time hits that everyone is talking about; that is to say, their complexity is not driving away the audience but drawing them in. Shows like 24 and Lost force the audience to keep track of dozens of characters and plotlines, and yet they're the hottest shows around.

The same applies to video games: Pong, Pac-Man, and Tetris may have been state-of-the-art once, but compared to today's games, they're ridiculously simple. The controls are far more complicated, the stories are richer and deeper, and they often force the player to balance short-term and long-term strategic thinking. The worlds they create are also far richer than they used to be: you can spend weeks playing Grand Theft Auto IV without completing any of the main storyline.

Johnson emphasizes the importance of the Internet in this cultural revolution: without the ability to discuss the complexities, the hidden nuances of pop culture with fans from across the globe, the secrets buried within these shows and games would go unnoticed. There are thousands of bulletin boards and forums devoted to discussing the latest twists of Lost, and Johnson points out that not only do fans voluntarily surf through this enormous sea of information to understand the show, they even enjoy doing so.

If anything, I think Johnson actually understates the effects of the Internet in the development of these shows, and in the development of pop culture in general. I listen to several podcasts about comics, and one of the things that older comic creators keep saying is that they never knew how big of an audience they had. Fans would occasionally write in letters, but apart from that there was no contact between author and audience. Many creators felt as if they were working in a vacuum, sending their works out into a world that didn't care or even notice. But with the Internet, fans can tell creators exactly what they think—for better or worse. Comics get a brief mention in Johnson's book, which concentrates more on television and video games, but I think his arguments apply just as well to their increasing complexity over the past twenty years or more—certainly since Alan Moore's Watchmen.

In any case, it's a fine read, and rather quick: you can grasp the basics of his argument in a few minutes, but Johnson's explorations of the possible causes and the probable effects on our neural structures are fascinating and deserve a thorough reading.

Ted reviews Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong

2010-01-20T10:07:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, me and most of my friends were what you’d call nerds. We preferred the company of our computers over other human beings, we took advanced math classes and liked them, and the only books we read were genre fiction: sci-fi and fantasy.

Clearly—clearly—I’m much cooler now than I was then, but my memories of those genre authors remain. I read them by the handful: David Eddings, J.R.R. Tolkien, Timothy Zahn, Patricia C. Wrede, and all the rest. But one of the big names, one of the truly big-time fantasy authors, I never got into, and that was Anne McCaffrey, author of the long-running (18 novels and counting!) ‘Dragonriders of Pern’ series. Thanks to my class on fantasy last semester, I finally had the chance to read one of Mrs. McCaffrey’s novels, Dragonsong, and I have to say: this is what all the fuss was about?

Don’t get me wrong: the world she’s built is interesting enough (a fantasy world with a sci-fi backing; thus, scientifically feasible dragons), and the story isn’t terrible (young girl with musical talent who’s prohibited from expressing it due to the patriarchy ends up adopting a nest of fire-lizards, a.k.a. mini-dragons). But the writing is just so bland and awful that it was a struggle for me to get through more than a dozen pages at a stretch.

McCaffrey is guilty of Writer Sin #1, breaking the Big Rule that every writing teacher from your high school English teacher on up will tell you: Show, Don’t Tell. Here's a bit from early in the book:

This mild deviation from the absolute obedience to her father's restriction about tuning did much to ease Menolly's growing frustration and loneliness. What Menolly didn't realize was that her mother had been watching her closely, having recognized the signs of rebellion in her. Mavi didn't want the Hold to be disgraced in any way, and she feared that Menolly, her head turned by Petiron's marked favor, was not mature enough to discipline herself. Sella had warned her mother that Menolly was getting out of hand. Mavi put some of that tale down to sisterly envy. But, when Sella had told Mavi that Menolly had actually started to teach another how to play an instrument, Mavi had been obliged to intervene. Let Yanus get one whisper of Menolly's disobedience and there'd be real trouble in the Hold for the girl.

Is it just me, or would this whole passage work better if, I don't know, we actually got to see some of it happening? If we actually got to see first-hand some of these family dynamics and relationships, rather than just having them explained to us? Yeah, if McCaffrey wrote like that, the book would be about twice as long as it is now, but it’d probably be a better book for it. Example two:

That was the end of the first of Menolly's difficult days...As Menolly wearily got to her cubicle, her mother arrived to berate her soundly...Menolly was given no chance to explain.

That's a perfect opportunity to show the relationship between our protagonist and her mother, which is one of the most important relationships in the book. As it is, the distance that this telling-instead-of-showing creates makes for a reading experience that was alternately boring and confusing for me.

Moreover, this book is one of nineteen books in the Dragonriders of Pern series, and Wikipedia tells me that “while characters drop in and out of the stories, the major players are repeated in most of them in smaller or lesser roles...some of the books feature overlapping timeframes, describing the same events from different viewpoints.” Dragonsong is the fourth book that McCaffrey wrote in this world, and the events of the previous three come up in this book. In fact, not only do they come up, they're pretty central: by the end, there were a handful of characters I'd never met before whose lives and personalities were driving the plot that was, up until that point, about Menolly and her being prevented from doing what she wants. Who's Lessa? What's all this about the Southern Continent and the Southern Weyr? What happened to Brekke, and why should I care? Ultimately I got the feeling that things would make a lot more sense if I'd read the previous trilogy, but that I still wouldn't like this book any better.

One last note: every chapter in this book opens with a short bit of poetry or song lyrics, which ties into Menolly's desire to make music. Most of them are all right, kind of basic faux-medieval ditties, but a couple really don't scan:
Lord of the Hold, your charge is sure
In thick walls, metal doors, and no verdure
And:
The little queen, all golden
Flew hissing at the sea.
To keep it back,
To turn it back
She flew forth bravely.
Seriously, was her editor asleep at the wheel? Because unless my Syllable Sense is malfunctioning, both of those snippets skip a beat or two.

Final grade for Dragonsong: C-. Decent idea, okay characters, but poorly constructed and assumes that the reader has knowledge of McCaffrey’s other works.

The Many Levels On Which Ted Was Disappointed by James Cameron's Avatar

2010-01-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

AS A MOVIEGOER

I’ll start with this one, because it’s the most obvious. All along I’ve been hearing about how this movie is supposed to be some great paradigm shift, an incredible spectacle that will change the face of moviemaking forever—but to me, it’s just the newest toy. Cameron didn’t do anything new with his special effects; he just spent more than anyone else did.

Jurassic Park, in 1993, was a game-changing movie because it used computer-generated special effects—still a burgeoning field—and did something amazing with them. Filmmakers have been doing creature films since King Kong (and probably before, but I wasn’t a film major), and technology has followed: from stop-motion to blue-screen to experiments like Lucasfilm’s hybrid ‘go-motion.’ Spielberg took the latest and best technology, and made a dang good creature film with it.

But here’s the rub: CGI isn’t new any more. I saw Jurassic Park in the theater when I was—wait for it—eight years old. I grew up with this technology. Avatar is using the latest, the best, the sharpest computer graphics, but it’s still just computer graphics. It’s not a paradigm shift; it’s just the latest coat of paint. All the jungle scenes looked pretty, and those blue cat-people looked moderately realistic, sure, but to me, Cameron was just showing off how much money he could spend. And as a guy who likes movies, I want something a little more than that.

AS A SCI-FI FAN

Okay, Mr. Cameron. You’ve created this whole fantastic new world. You’ve got blue-skinned cat-people, six-legged horses, crazy-looking dragon-bat things, tentacle-trees, all these cool animals and plants and whatnot. And best of all, any fauna larger than a dog has a natural USB plug growing out of the back of their skull, so you can communicate with and control them with just your brain alone. But you don’t do anything with that.

I’ve read a lot of sci-fi in my day, and some of my favorite books—Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead (a weaker book than Ender’s Game, but still good), pretty much anything by William Gibson—take some technology or ability or feature, some fantastic premise, and thoroughly explore the ramifications and implications of that premise. You look at how society has changed, how people have adapted to this strange new world—you take the science, and you make fiction out of it. That’s the friggin’ definition of the genre.

But think about this: you’ve got an entire planet where all of the animals, for some reason, have direct brain-plugs sticking out of their head. What would their society look like? What would their relationship be with their pets, or their beasts of burden? What would their concept of ‘self’ be, if they can so easily interface with another living being?

None of these questions are satisfactorily answered in Avatar. The society of the Na’vi is just a straight-up tribal system—or, more accurately, some middle-aged white guy’s stereotype of a tribal system—with nothing that reflects their strange biological apparatuses. (Apparati?)

Look at it from the other direction, too: why would the Na’vi, and every other animal, evolve such a biological apparatus in the first place? What would be the reason for such a strange feature appearing in every species on the planet? Do they all have some common ancestor? Was there some unimaginable, planet-wide disaster or pressure that would cause such a feature to appear? Moreover, if every animal has such a similar brain structure, why are the Na’vi the only sentient species? If there’s some kind of planet-spanning neural network, can it somehow drive or even control the evolution of lesser species?

I’m not saying that any of these questions should have been asked in the movie—it was already almost three hours long; any more and my butt would’ve gone numb—but there’s just so much opportunity that was wasted. Cameron created this entire ecosystem that had the potential to be endlessly fascinating, but ended up just being…boring. Ordinary. And when I watch a sci-fi movie, I want it to be extraordinary.

AS A WRITER

I’m going to skip lightly over all the various ways in which Avatar failed as a piece of cinema—the overly broad characters, the dialogue that alternated between boring and ridiculous and pretentious, the overwrought climax—and focus instead on the opportunities the movie missed out on.

Basic premise of the movie: in order to make friends with the blue cat-people, the humans have created cloned cat-people bodies into which they can project their consciousness and drive around. As premises go, it’s not too shabby. It may not be the most original idea in the book, but there’s still plenty of interesting things you can do with it.

Except, of course, James Cameron didn’t do anything with it.

I remember watching an early scene where the trigger-happy Military Guy is talking with our Protagonist, the guy who can plug into a cat-person body, and the Military Guy is strapping himself into a giant mecha suit while he talks. I found myself wondering: is the movie perhaps going to make some kind of comparison between the Protagonist riding a cat-person and the Military Guy riding a mecha? Is James Cameron going to try and make some kind of statement about our tools and the way they become part of us, or we become part of them?

Lots of people have blasted Avatar for being a crappy rip-off of about a dozen other movies—Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, FernGully: the Last Rainforest, take your pick—and, yeah, it is. But what's sad is that it didn't have to be so derivative. A competent writer/director could have made this into a story about literally walking a mile in another man's shoes, or about borrowing culture, or about treating culture as something that can be borrowed. This could have been a movie about the omnipresence of our technology, about what happens when our tools become invisible to us. This could've been a story about self-discovery, about a character realizing that he's always been the odd man out and finding a family in the most unlikely place.

But it wasn't. It was loud and dumb and unoriginal. And the potential that was wasted makes it so much worse.

AS A MODERATELY ENLIGHTENED WHITE GUY

I want to be very careful about this bit, because it’d be very easy to accidentally offend a whole lot of people. Let’s start with this: I was pretty dang offended by large chunks of this movie, and I’m about as white as it gets, so I can only imagine how a person of color would feel after seeing Avatar.

The movie features an entire army of white guys coming in to a world they don’t fully understand, treating the native population like animals and eventually trying to murder them wholesale in order to get access to some fancy natural resources. So it’s pretty obviously an allegory for America, most of Africa, Australia, Afghanistan—really, any country that was exploited under colonialist/imperialist policies in the past three or four centuries, take your pick. And in the rich tradition of other movies about White Guys Doing Bad Things, it features a large cast of non-white guys: the Wise Old Shaman, the Hot-Tempered Warrior Guy, the Nurturing Mother Figure, and, of course, Sexy Young Warrior Chick.

Basically, if stereotypes about “native cultures” were a valuable ore, Avatar would make the California Gold Rush look like a tea party. That’s a given. But there’s a line about halfway through the movie that really just made me laugh out loud, it was so ridiculous.

Sigourney Weaver’s character, Noble Scientist Woman, has just discovered that not just the animals but some of the plants, too, have some kind of brain structure that connects them; thus the trees that cover the entire planet actually form some kind of gigantic neural network. Or something like that, I don’t know. Anyway, she comes out to tell this to Rapacious Corporate Evil Guy, who plans to bulldoze the blue cat-people village while cackling villainously. She explains her findings, he scoffs contemptuously, and then she says this:

“We’re not talking about some pagan voodoo here, this is real!”

Setting aside the problem of describing something as both “pagan” and “voodoo,” which is a whole theological-semantic argument that I really don’t want to get into, the implications of this line, at least in my reading, are tremendous. Think about what this means: what’s happening on this planet is “real.” The animistic belief structure these primitive cat-people have is “real.” So that must mean that the “pagan voodoo” beliefs of, say, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Africans, or any other Brown People are, of course, not real.

When the Na'vi talk about speaking with their ancestors, they mean it literally; they plug their brain-tentacles into a grove of tentacle-trees and hear the actual voices of those who have died. But when any of these “pagan voodoo” believers talk about speaking with their ancestors, of course, it's just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Clearly. Maybe if these people had real beliefs, maybe if their stupid religions were based in science, like ours, then we wouldn’t have wiped them out.

That’s what really cracked me up. Now, I’m sure that James Cameron didn’t mean it like that, I’m sure he meant it as a commentary on these ignorant white people who can’t accept the wisdom of these Noble Savages or whatever, but still, the implications are there.

AS A BIG FAN OF THE RECENT ANIMATED NICKELODEON SHOW AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER

This show is completely amazing, and now they're making a live-action movie trilogy out of it. But now, thanks to Mr. Cameron's crap opus, they have to use the shortened title The Last Airbender instead of the full name.

This makes me angriest of all.

IN CONCLUSION

Avatar sucks. It sucks on multiple levels. The fact that it was so widely hyped before release only makes the sucking more significant; the gap between what was promised and what was delivered was so huge that it totally cancels out anything good in the movie.

Don’t see it. Seriously. There are better movies to spend your money on. Lots of better movies.

This is why you should be nice to your librarians, people

2010-01-15T10:26:00.001-08:00

Because maybe, when they die, they'll leave you $50,000 in their will!

Google leaves China

2010-01-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

So I am far from the first person you should go to for trenchant insights on the geopolitical ramifications of information providers, but still, the fact that Google is no longer going to cooperate with government censors in China and will thus probably pull out of the country entirely is probably going to have some far-reaching repercussions.

Google's been trying to promote their search engine in China for four years now, despite the heavy government censorship that was applied to their search results. I have to say, I can understand their desire to provide as much free information as possible to the people of China—although I'm sure that the potential money to be made from being the primary search engine for a country of one-point-three billion people was a pretty big draw, too. But to cooperate with censorship, even if you're providing a necessary and commendable service to a repressed people, is still cooperation with censorship. Which I am, generally, not cool with. So I have to applaud Google for finally leaving China.

We now return to your regularly scheduled program of rambling about anime and dumb crap.

For those of you who care about this sort of thing

2010-01-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

I'm currently working on a five-issue comic with the supremely talented Aaron Quist, called Peculiar Jones, which we're trying to pitch to publishers--and we may have something about that to announce shortly. In the meantime, though, we've updated our DeviantArt page with another image of our work-in-progress. Share and Enjoy!

Japan-o-rama: What is anime and manga?

2010-01-10T15:28:00.000-08:00

One of the classes I took during my first semester of library school was Fantasy Literature and Media for Youth, and during this class I found out two things:
1) Anime and manga are rapidly becoming some of the most popular items for young people to check out of libraries.
2) A lot of librarians are totally clueless about anime and manga.
So, in my position as Young and Moderately Cool Librarian-To-Be, I figured that I'd be doing the older generation of librarians a service by writing about these pop culture products from Japan.

See, I grew up in between two Japanese fads: I was slightly too young to be watching Sailor Moon or Dragonball Z in the early 1990s, and I was a little too old by the time Pokemon came around. I didn't really start watching anime and reading manga until late high school and early college. I like to think this gives me a more mature, sophisticated perspective on Japan and all its wacky products, although using the words 'mature' and 'sophisticated' to describe me in any context is pretty laughable.

My occasional forays into the pop culture of the inscrutable Orient will (hopefully) be a semi-regular feature on this blog, and I'd like to start off by answering a question that I've heard more than one librarian ask: what, exactly, is anime and manga?

On one level, that’s a very easy question to answer: anime is Japanese animated television and movies, and manga is Japanese comics. Simple as that.

What makes it complicated is that Japanese animation and comics are, in a lot of ways, nothing at all like their American counterparts. This is the result of a great many factors: economic, historic, aesthetic, and more. I'm not an expert in the topic, and getting into it would take way too long, but I can give a general idea of what the differences are between their animation and comics and ours, and a brief (and hopefully semi-correct) explanation as to why that is. There's three basic ideas I need to emphasize about anime and manga:
1) Anime and manga are each bigger than a genre, but smaller than a medium.
2) Unlike in America, there is no expectation that comics and animation are “kids' stuff.”
3) Even when anime or manga is made for kids, they're made for Japanese kids, and may not necessarily be suitable for American kids.

For starters, the whole genre/medium confusion really bugs me, because it shows up in a lot of places—for example, when talking about American comic books. Superheroes are by far the most well-represented genre in comics, but that doesn't mean that every comic is about superheroes. Comics are a medium, which means that they can have content of any genre, about any idea. The same holds true for anime and manga. There are romance anime, action anime, horror anime, heck, even Western anime. I've read manga with all sorts of plotlines and every kind of character.

However, neither anime nor manga is a medium. Comics are a medium: the medium of telling stories through a combination of words and pictures. Manga is a kind of comics, from a specific culture, with certain cultural expectations and storytelling traditions. Similarly, animation is a medium: moving pictures created using a series of images created without the use of live actors. Anime is animation from a specific culture.

So one of the first things that librarians need to keep in mind is that if a patron says they like anime, that could mean a lot of things: do they like sci-fi? Romance? Do they want action or emotion? Are they in it for cool character designs, or excellent storytelling, or relateable characters, or what?

Now, my second point is closely related to my first: anime and manga are not just for kids. In America, there's been this expectation that if it's animated, or if it's a comic book, then it's suitable for kids. I honestly don't know quite why this is, although if I had to guess, I'd say that it's due to economic circumstances: comics first showed up in newspapers as harmless diversions, and even as they moved into 'book' form, they kept their juvenile sensibilities. The same is true of animation: the early strength of Walt Disney, who had no intention of making films for adults, meant that his vision of what animation could be used for became the dominant vision. Both of these perceptions are changing somewhat—thanks partly to their Japanese counterparts—but that knee-jerk reaction is still the majority view.

Not so in Japan. Again, the reasons for this are rooted in probably centuries of aesthetics and storytelling traditions, but regardless of why, the fact is that there is no assumption that animation or comics are always made for younger audiences. You can find manga made for all ages, genders, and tastes. Just because it looks like it’s for kids doesn’t mean it is.

And just because it is for kids doesn’t mean it’s suitable for American kids. This is a tricky point, and it’s the kind of point I can’t prove without copious examples to back it up, and, well, I don’t have copious examples right now. For now, let's just say that, much like how in Europe you can see shampoo commercials with naked breasts, in Japan—and, specifically, in anime and manga—you'll probably see more nudity than you would in America. (Unless you're watching Cinemax or something.) And just like in Europe, this isn't necessarily a sex thing; it's just an acceptance of casual nudity. Public bathing is still common in Japan—something else that shows up in a lot of anime and manga, incidentally—so kids, from a young age, are more comfortable with the human body.

At least, I think so. Like I said, I'm not an expert, I've never been to Japan; all my information is coming from travelogues and, of course, anime and manga series. Regardless, the point holds: just because it's targeted at Japanese children doesn't necessarily mean it's suitable for American kids. (Results may vary depending on individual parenting styles.)

Anyway, this should do as an introduction to the whole mess. From here on out, I plan to periodically review an anime or manga series and tell you not just what I think of it (because my opinion is ever so important), but also whether I think librarians should get it, and if so, where it should be shelved and what audience it should be marketed to. So stick around! Maybe you'll learn something even halfway interesting.

By My Own Circulatory System--Betrayed!!

2010-01-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows even a little bit about me—which is about 90% of the readers of this blog at this point, I’m guessing—knows that I’ve got a lot of weird interests. The one that I’m going to focus on in this post is my strange fascination with donating blood.

I honestly have no idea where this interest came from. My parents don’t donate blood, or at least haven’t lately; I don’t have any relatives or friends with anemia or blood diseases; I was never a particularly big fan of vampire movies. I think I saw an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy where he mentioned donating blood once, but that’s about it.

Yet there I was, in my first year of college, with a tube in my arm during a Red Cross blood drive held at the Hillel house on campus. I had trouble understanding the accent of the admitting nurse, and I very nearly blacked out after losing that pint of me, but the experience was not unendurable. Plus the juice and cookies afterward weren’t bad.

What really sealed the deal, though, was Scav Hunt. Now, the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt is a big enough topic that I’ll have to write it up eventually, but for now let’s just say that I had an incentive to give a pint of blood for a good cause. It was from these donations that I learned two things: one, that the university hospital has an excellent blood donation center, and two, that I’ve got O-negative blood.

Quick science lesson, for those of you in the audience who don’t know much about blood: there are four blood types in humans: O, A, B, and AB. Basically, the surface of every one of your red blood cells may have an A antigen (A-type blood), a B antigen (B-type), both types of antigens (AB-type), or neither (O-type). Whatever antigens your cells don’t have, you have antibodies to defend against—so people with A-type blood have B antibodies, people with O have both A and B antibodies, and people with AB don’t have any antibodies. This determines who can safely accept blood from whom. Basically, if you’ve got antibodies, you don’t want that type of blood in you.

(Interesting tangent: there’s a folk belief in a number of Asian cultures that your blood type determines your personality. There’s no scientific basis for this, of course; from what I can tell, it’s given the same level of credence as, say, horoscopes are in the West. I know Japan and Korea both have this system, though the types don’t mean the same thing to both of them. In official descriptions of characters in Japanese video games and anime, it’s common to list their blood types in addition to other vital information like height, weight, birthday, and so forth. There was a recent South Korean TV drama called My Boyfriend is Type B that plays off the negative stereotype of B-type blood. And the Korean teacher of a friend of mine had B-type blood, but her parents lied to her all her life, not wanting her to be discouraged at having the ‘wrong’ type of blood; she only learned the truth when she got a pregnancy check-up in the US, and refused to believe it at first.)

Since I’ve got O-negative blood (the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ thing is just whether you’ve got another, unrelated type of antigen), I can give blood to literally anybody else in the world. This is especially helpful in the case of trauma victims in the ER and infants, neither of whom hospitals have time to determine blood types for. Since my blood is super-useful to babies and car crash victims, every time I give I’m doing a lot of good, which totally ups my karma score. Plus I have an excuse to eat at Smashburger afterwards—hey, a guy’s got to replenish his iron, right?

For the past few years, I’ve been donating as often as I can, which is every eight weeks in the US. Recently I’ve been donating using an apheresis procedure, which collects twice the amount of red cells—which is the most useful part of my blood—but means I can only donate every 16 weeks. It’s a pretty cool procedure: first the machine takes out some whole blood, then it separates out the red blood cells from the other stuff, then pumps the other stuff back in, along with a saline solution. Overall it means I don’t lose any fluid volume, but I lose the equivalent of two units of red blood, which means that for the next few weeks, I get out of breath just going up the stairs.

But yesterday—ah, yesterday! Something went wrong with the needle: either it was in the wrong place, or it was too close to the nerve, or something else. Whatever it was, it made the process of getting the blood out very slow, and the process of returning the other stuff painful. Which is not a good thing. After a few minutes, the nurses had no choice but to stop the process and let me off early. I didn’t give nearly enough for a full donation, but I gave enough that I’ll have to wait to give again until the lab calls me back and says I’m full of bloodly goodness.

So all the pain and waiting of donating blood, without the warm glow of altruism and the self-esteem boost. It hurts, people. It hurts on the inside.

Guys Read Book Club: Winter '09

2010-01-03T18:50:00.000-08:00

So even though I'm only a library student and not yet an actual, for-real librarian (i.e. I don't yet have my official badge and decoder ring), I can still work every now and then at my local library, for money. Last summer, I did three sessions of a Guys Read book club, which is for boys in grades four through six. Boys tend not to read as much as girls, particularly at young ages, and peer pressure (“reading is dumb and punching is awesome”) only exacerbates this trend.

(Interesting tangent: girls score much higher on reading tests than boys, while boys tend to score higher in math tests. This trend is true in pretty much every industrialized country in the world, but here's the interesting part: in countries with greater gender equality, the gap in math scores changes, i.e. girls score as good as or better than boys, while the gap in reading scores grows. Peep this paper, people.)

My three books over the summer were:

The Seer of Shadows, by Avi
The White Mountains, by John Christopher
Bone: Out From Boneville, by Jeff Smith

And just last week I did a ‘winter break’ book, which was The Snow Spider, by Jenny Nimmo.

Saying that these book clubs have been a learning experience would be a dramatic understatement. Before doing them, I could count the number of times I’ve been in a position of authority over the under-10 set on one hand—heck, probably even on one of Nightcrawler’s hands. I talked with a couple veterans of the Guys Read program about what I should expect from the group, and I sat in on a few sessions as well, which was, again, an eye-opener. My first impression was that I would be lucky to get, in a 45-minute-long session, maybe ten minutes of actually talking about the book with these guys. Not that they hate reading and anything associated with it, and not even that they hate anything with a vaguely school-like setting, but simply that leading a discussion of ten-year-old boys—or, as the scientific community has termed them, “Nature’s perpetual motion machines”—makes herding cats look easy.

With my own guys, though, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much actual talking about the book we’ve been able to do. Going in to my first session, I had a little speech planned out, about how this isn’t school, and I’m not your teacher, and you can say what you want about the book, even “this book sucks,” and how you don’t need to raise your hand or talk only to me instead of your fellow book clubbers, et cetera. I only got about halfway through the speech before one of the guys interrupted me with a comment about one of the characters.

I can’t say that I really got any of the guys into literature, or that I changed their minds about how books are “cool,” or even whether I got them to actually enjoy reading instead of, say, playing video games. But it was fun, it was a new experience, and best of all, I got fifty bucks per session!

This last session was much the same as the ones during the summer—the guys seemed to have more pent-up energy, which makes sense if they’ve been cooped up all winter. (The snow in Minnesota is a living force, actively trying to kill all humanity and freeze our corpses into statuary.) There was a fair amount of running around and an impromptu game of tag.

We did get a small amount of actual talking about the book done, during which I had another confirmation of something I learned during the summer sessions: the books I like are totally boring. The guys liked the Avi book okay, but they were bored stiff by The White Mountains, which I liked as a kid but was written in 1967, and which features only three explosions, two of which you don’t even get to see properly.

Snow Spider is much the same; there’s no explosions at all and hardly any action to speak of. I remember being fascinated by the tense family dynamics and the strange combination of mythology and magic that fuels the plot, but apparently kids these days prefer laser guns and fart jokes. Or maybe guys have always liked that kind of stuff, and I’ve just got strange tastes for a guy. Either way, most of the guys expressed dislike, although a couple mentioned that they’d already reserved the other two books in the trilogy and planned to read them next.

Once we’d finished talking about the book (which took all of about ten minutes), we got quickly sidetracked by talking about video games. I also made the possible mistake of telling the kids about the Star Wars Holiday Special, which is widely regarded as a plague upon the Earth, and the Wookie holiday of ‘Life Day,’ which led us into the possibility of Space Christmas and Space Easter, with the corresponding holiday personifications of Wookie Santa, with his spray-painted beard, and the Easter Wookie. I also learned that, of the six guys who came to this session, five of them were familiar with the works of Jeff Dunham, which made me die a little inside.

Before the session was up, though, I was able to bring them around to the book just a little bit more, thanks to the Internet: back in 1988, the BBC did a TV adaptation of The Snow Spider, and I was able to obtain a copy through slightly underhanded means. I showed the guys a bit, and we all agreed that the special effects were awful, and the actors moreso.

(My laptop has been an invaluable tool for these sessions. For Seer of Shadows, I looked up some information on William H. Mumler, the historical basis for the novel’s character; for The White Mountains, I got the BBC’s TV adaptation, which was similarly crappy; and for Bone, I…can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure I found something to distract the guys for a few precious minutes.)

Overall, I think it’s fair to call this session a not unqualified success. The guys may have been bored out of their skulls by the book, but at least I got them to read it, and perhaps more importantly, to talk about it. After the session, I passed around little questionnaires for them to fill out if they wanted to tell me how badly I sucked (that’s the way I put it to them, yes); three of them gave them to the librarian at the front desk, and all three had circled the line saying that I was “Awesomely cool,” which I guess is something the kids say today?

Anyway, I’ll be doing another three sessions next summer, and hopefully doing a Teens Read book club as well, for boys and girls in grades seven through nine, i.e. the next level up. I’m really looking forward to those—they’ll be old enough to handle hanging out with people of the opposite gender, their reading skills will have improved to the point where I can give them some more difficult (i.e. interesting) books, and I will get another hundred and fifty dollars for doing very little work. Hooray for money!

My attempt at a vaguely sophisticated and intellectual post

2009-12-28T15:33:00.000-08:00

Probably the most interesting paper I've read in my one semester of library school so far has been Marcia Bates' 'The Invisible Substrate of Information Science'. Not necessarily because of the light it sheds on the field of information science, but because of the light it sheds on me, for being interested in information science.

One of Bates' basic assumptions is that information science is a meta-science; that is, as a field, it is concerned with the content of all fields. Academics and researchers within a particular field of science—particle physics, say—are only really concerned with the content of that field: major developments, the top researchers, the history of the field, and so forth. Librarians and other information scientists, however, must be able to organize, search for, and retrieve information from potentially every field and discipline; they must be able to use works of every style, content, and format, without necessarily knowing anything about the meaning of what they are organizing. (She identifies two other meta-fields—education and journalism—both of which also are concerned with the content of multiple other fields. And, like librarians, educators and journalists are also necessary for a healthy, functioning democracy. But hey, let's not get into politics yet, right?)

The comparison she makes—and a fascinating comparison it is—is to actors. In, say, a medical show, the best people to portray doctors are not, in fact, doctors themselves. This may sound obvious, but on reflection it seems absurd: wouldn't the person most able to act like a doctor is the person who does it all the time in reality? Similarly, the people most able to organize information are not those who create it—tell a bunch of biology professors to create a biological papers database or organizational system and they'll probably do a terrible job of it.

So—and not to sound too self-centered—what does this say about me? To be honest, my interests are diverse but my time is limited. I want to know about, say, high-energy physics, but I don't have the math skills (or the attention span) to study it in-depth. I'm interested in the political structure of ancient Japan, but studying several centuries of history is, you know, rather a large undertaking.

I want to know everything about everything—not necessarily because I think I can contribute something worthwhile to all these fields (I'm pretty sure I can't prove, say, string theory with just my pop-science knowledge), but just for the thrill of knowing. But if my expertise can help others—if, as a librarian, I can help the next Einstein find the books he needs—then I think I'll have gotten my money's worth from this degree.

Obligatory first post

2009-12-23T09:29:00.000-08:00

My name is Ted Anderson. I'm a library student, currently getting my Master's in Library and Information Science through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through their online program. I'm also an aspiring comics writer, even though I can't draw.

I've started blogs before, but I've never really had the drive to keep posting for long periods. I think that's partly because I didn't have a theme, a unifying idea behind the blog, some purpose that would keep me writing. But this blog, in case you couldn't guess from the title, takes as its driving purpose my library studies: what I'm learning about library science, what I want to do as a librarian, why I think libraries are important to society, my advice for other librarians, my experiences working in a library, and so forth.

However, this does not mean that this blog will be nothing but Dewey Decimal System jokes (as one of my friends suggested). I'm not writing just for librarians, nor will I be writing only about libraries. This blog is for anyone who's ever been in a library, or thought about how information is arranged, or even anyone who's ever read a book. This blog is for everyone.

And now, a funny picture of a dog wearing goggles and a hat.