Monday, December 31, 2012

New year

I'm going to start over this new year, and I'm going to start by saying that I promise myself not to go on sites that will probably be no longer releveant anyway for reasons or another (ex. Comics Alliance, io9, The Patron Saint of Superheroes, TV tropes, certain comics forums where orthodoxy and such are to be mandatory and everyone else derided(such as one on Watchmen where they make fun of their reading material like it's ingrained and natural), I can go on but won't).

Thursday, December 20, 2012

December 21, 2012

If the world ends tomorrow, I would like to say my two regrets are not getting a driver's license, and not getting around to self-publishing a graphic novel, i had tons of free time in between school, and yet I did nothing. But f it doesn't end, then I shall go up to a 2012 believer on December 22 and do the most annoying laugh right to their face.

58 years

It's been 58 years since Seduction of the Innocent by Wertham was published, and I'm wondering if comic books and their derivatives are any better off than they were than back in the 50s (not meaning financially, but in public and private perception, that stuff). And if it's not comic books, then would it be video games, as a new scapegoat and/or target of derision?

Thoughts on a day trip

It's disheartening, planning a trip to UCLA to check it out, finding your way to the science library so you can check up on old aerospace periodicals, going there by intrinsic motive, and then seeing the graffiti drawn in pen on the reading desks, the cleanest one I can say was a dragon flipping off a knight, and a line saying to a block of text "whoever wrote this is a nerd!".

Monday, December 17, 2012

On The Science of Superheroes books

This is going to bug me all winter if I don't say anything, but the book The Science of Superheroes from years ago is a disappointing book. There, it weighed so much but slid off easily once typed. I thought it would be a great book, but it left me almost hopeless, the authors being condescending and making frequent errors about the comics, pardon the word, super-judgemental, come off as armchair experts who self-aggrandize and use the word "logic" very indiscriminately. I could go on, but it all screams a 2000s worldview, where everything's trained to be bollocks (taken from a Red Dwarf episode), and there's nothing but a post-meta-modern thing on everything, and it's all ridicule, or considered "modern mythology"(which sounds annoying anyway), there's no care, no enthusiasm, no imagination or filling in the blanks, I can go on, but I'm not happy writing this and want to not be involved at all, with all this. And on James Kakalios, it just comes off as a jerk move to go into The Physics of Superheroes, give it so full of life and hope, and then ruin it by being a total jerk with the words "inherently ridiculous", you no-good, I trusted you!

Thursday, December 13, 2012

A Less Emotional Follow-up to the Zehr Post

This is a addendum post, sort of like Dark Victory to The Long Halloween, and is more of some letting things off my chest while tired: I never liked the 2000s as a whole, and one reason why was the people self-appointed as intellectual leaders and warriors, such as two sides of a coin the authors of The Science of Superheroes (who in retrospect maybe were hacks who wanted to show off their savvy and trendiness in science while being super jerks, and also maybe it was like it was them making their own view of the world independent of observation) and certain American religious denominations and pundits (who in retrospect may have been hacks wanting to show off moral and intellectual superiority and making a world not based on observation), it got tiring to a point of thinking it will never end. Don't have an ending to this, so I'll let it peter off.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

An open letter to Paul Zehr

An open message to Paul Zehr, author of Inventing Iron Man(if he ever reads this, unlikely since he never read the email I sent him): Sir, I have to register a complaint against you, because when I bought your book and read it, I was so excited, enthusiastic, with the respect and belief to the material, until it got to the last chapters, where you just switch gears with your snarkiness and hatred and tongue-in-cheekness and such on stuff like Iron Man's heart problem (especially the line "It's a ridiculous idea, but then this is superheroes we're talking about", where I wanted to throw the book across the room), it all just ruined it. And it makes you look like a discredit to science, to comics, and so on. I hope the philosophy that you and other people of this era who write books on pop culture academia use to elevate then bring down people becomes lost to time.
(Come to think of it, this can be used for many examples, such as Psychology and Batman, to a lesser extent though)