Hope you all are having a lovely day today, whatever this day means to you (or doesn’t). Consider this an open thread, to discuss whatever, from presents to politics to cats to whatever holiday stress you might be feeling.
And here’s some stuff I found on the Twitter.
— David, who is hanging in there
Merry Christmas, everyone! 🎄🎅 pic.twitter.com/YfyTsQ95de
— Maggie Serota (@maggieserota) December 25, 2017
At this time of year, take a few moments to remember who Christmas is truly about… pic.twitter.com/TQ9tSP5EED
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 24, 2017
I haven’t laughed this hard in a while. I needed this. pic.twitter.com/2aQFpugdis
— deray (@deray) December 7, 2017
Brian Eno, Paris, 1973 (with Christmas 2017 augmentation) pic.twitter.com/hRwMDTOUKv
— Brian Eno News (@dark_shark) December 25, 2017
“Fun” pic.twitter.com/tsAdsZeez8
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 24, 2017
#MerryChristmas 🎄🤶🏻 pic.twitter.com/IahMZhf5gc
— Melania Trump 45 Archived (@FLOTUS45) December 25, 2017
Same. pic.twitter.com/kcNPdrLy6R
— Adrenalin (@adrenalindenver) May 24, 2017
🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅
All of a sudden …
🐾🐾🐾🐾 pic.twitter.com/fza8NZioI0
— The Cult Cat (@Elverojaguar) December 25, 2017
Human: My cat has an easy life
Me: pic.twitter.com/e8kvlVhUdR— Curious Zelda (@CuriousZelda) December 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/945193410662682624
> Shadowplay
I had first copy the text of the manifest found in Le Monde (the one signed by 100 women).
Then as i was still browsing for the news, there is a manifest against this manifest. So, i had edited the post you had read with a link to said manifest. Which is why i believed it is in moderation.
GOM
It is not important thst putin is communist or not communist. he wants same totalitarian leadership as former USSR.
also when USSR collapsed he was working in Dresden as KGB agent – he said ‘humiliating and frightful’ to describe USSR collapsed and that all USSR agents and personnel must withdraw from these Warsaw pact states.
he is building back what he lost which is why he tries to take Ukraine.
Mentioned a while back I’m a fan of one particular section of Notalwaysright, called Not Always Hopeless. It is a nice antidote to the news.
There’s a post today that’s worth sharing with my fellow feline underlings.
I read it and went, “Yep.” 😀
@occasional reader
Ah, fair enough. It was an edit as hid it. 🙂
@Shadowplay,
I really, really needed that kitteh story – bloody brilliant. And then more stories in the comments! My mum and brother got a new kitten just before xmas, and she did the same thing: climbed onto my mum and just stayed there, purring.
The kitten now has my brother wrapped around her … paw, I guess? My big scary ex-con bro – sees tiny kitten, melts into a puddle of awwwwwwww 😀
All three of ours just showed up (sort of).
Zampas arrived as a two day old kitten – his mother was a feral that hung around and was killed by foxes. She’d had kittens in our shed. His sister didn’t make it, but he did, with a LOT of care.
Larry just showed up one day. Came downstairs one morning and he was asleep on the sofa, perfectly at home. Stayed ever since.
Tak was born in the house – again, her mother was a stray who just showed up, gave birth under the bed in the spare room, raised her one kitten, then buggered off . Not seen mom since.
Really should do something about the cat flap being accessible to all and sundry. 😛
Why … why would you want to do that? 😀
(Love the kitty names, btw).
Unrelated to cats (sadly), Jordan Peterson has launched a very rigorous scientific study to prove that our pal Damore is right about Google’s Evil PC Agenda From Hell. He’s urging people to image search “bikini” on different search engines and compare the results.
I saw this half an hour ago, and I’m still laughing.
Savage lemur attack!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-norfolk-42610996/banham-zoo-lemurs-mob-bbc-news-reporter
Partner named Zampas and Tak (short for Taccino – means both little arch and accuse.) she’s the one with skills – I’d probably wind up calling them cat one through three. Larry, he just looks like a Larry. 😛
@weirdwoodtreehugger
I’d never noticed before, but if you look at the triple facepalm image you can see that Worf’s hand casts a white reflection.
I dislike Steve Bannon, intensely, for several reasons.
Still, when Scaramucci Ten Days has the front to call him a “bad hire” it sort of pings my anti-pile on reflex. 😛
@Moggie
The Intel CEO is getting side eyed by Senators for his
insider tradingfortuitously timed share saleI read through the comments a couple of days ago, and I wanted to say:
@Lea I’m sorry for all you had to deal with – you are strong and responsible, and thanks for sharing your story
@Skiriki – I’m glad you’re recovering and I hope things continue to get better. That’d be terrifying for me because I’m scared of losing too much blood – partly physical, as I’m rather light and even small blood samples make me feel dizzy, and part psychological, because feeling dizzy makes me panic, being something that happens in panic attacks too…
Anyway, I have to leave now, so sorry for the abruptness, but best wishes everyone!
Remember, Intel pulled ads from some publications (can’t remember which) at the behest of Gamergate. I’m not sure how it’s related to the current situation with them. It probably isn’t. I just think it’s funny that the company who looked at GG and actually thought “ethics!” turned out to be so shady.
On the subject of kitties, might as well share my kitty story. So our family was really not one for pets; my stepfather was allergic to dander and before that me and my brother were too young to properly take care of a pet. But one day my dad’s long-time on/off girlfriend came to him and said that her elderly mother had to move in with her and was deathly allergic to cats; as a result, she had to give up her cat Winnie and thought my dad might be able to take Winnie in. Dad said sure and Winnie became part of the family.
Winnie had a mysterious past. We know she was middle aged by the time she arrived in my dad’s care and little is known about her before that. We know that dad’s girlfriend got her from a shelter, and it took her some time to warm up to us, so we surmised that maybe there was some abuse in the past, but that was mere speculation. She was definitely an independent indoor/outdoor cat… and was clearly resourceful enough to find places to hide outside during the day. Her mousing skills were second to none as she brought my dad live rodent gifts on multiple occasions. I also remember one time she came back with a missing patch of fur on her leg and we always wonder what she tangled with that did that. She had one or two skunk encounters in her time as well.
Winnie had her quirks. Straws fascinated her (is that a thing with other cats?). And speaking of other cats, they were the only thing that I ever saw her get freaked out by. I remember one incident vividly; it was summer and we had the back door open so that she could come and go as she pleased, then all of a sudden, I hear this “REEEEOWWWRR” and she comes zooming in the house with her tail all bushy. Dad tells us “Yeah, probably shouldn’t touch her for an hour or so” and takes a peek out the window. Sure enough, the motion sensor lights show another cat just sitting there in the yard, innocently as a cat can look. That happened twice that summer, same cat, just sitting there in the yard, then bushy-tailed Winnie just flies into the house scared out of her wits.
Yeah, Winnie was great. Wish I had pictures to share, but she departed this earth before digital photography was really a thing.
(Aside: We didn’t name her, nor did her prior human. We have no idea where “Winnie” came from, nor what it referred to, be it Pooh bears or Winifred.)
@weirwoodtreehugger
Eh, they did at least apologise after the fact, reinstate their advertising with gamasutra and eventually commit to investing money in increasing diversity in intel and the gaming industry, for what that’s worth.
Hope you folks don’t mind a subject change, but I recently watched MovieBob’s third installment of why Batman v Superman was terrible, and it touched briefly on Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film, which MovieBob said was good. I haven’t seen any of Snyder’s films and I’ll likely avoid 300 and Sucker Punch, but it did spur me to go out and finally purchase the Watchmen graphic novel and… wow, I mean, I knew it was good, but holy hell is it ever layered. I bought the Annotated Watchmen, which points out stuff in each panel that is easy to overlook and lays out the necessary historical information directly on the page. I knew most of it (Vietnam, Watergate, Afghanistan), but some of it can be pretty obscure, like references to Kitty Genovese, which only New Yorkers would really get.
I’m only halfway through, but since I know how the story ends, I’m really interested more in the characters, particularly the ones that aren’t irredeemably awful (Silk Spectre, Nite Owl and somewhat Doctor Manhattan). Laurie really is the emotional heart of the story from what I find and if anybody else has read Watchmen, I’d be curious to hear what you think of the story and the characters. I’m seeing a lot of eerie parallels to the world of today–the nuclear tensions, the lack of empathy, the egotism of Ozymandias, the toxic masculinity of Rorschach and Comedian etc.
The Annotated version cost me a pretty penny in hardcover, but it was worth every one. I’ll probably watch the film eventually just to see how Snyder treated the characters (reviews sadly indicate a softened Rorschach and an MIA Silk Spectre, but I’ll reserve judgement until I see it).
Loved the story. Well, both stories – Tales is a really good graphic novel in it’s own right. 😛 Read it about twice a year and I’m still finding new things even now (I actually bought them when they first came out).
About the only character that didn’t work for me was Doctor Manhattan – deus ex machina characters never sit right with me, though Moore got closer to the complete sense of alienation and otherness that someone with those powers would actually have than anyone else I can think of.
Nite Owl I alternate between admiring and really disliking. 😛 Silk Spectre (Laurie) – eh, she’s WAY underused and, as always, is a foil and plot device for others more than a character in her own right.
The Comedian I get. Him I understand like we’ve known each other for decades.
The movie – yeah, it was a thing. It’s not bad at all – it’s just the comic book version of the novel, with some of the fangs and poisonous spines of the original filed down. A fun couple hours, but not world changing.
Missed edit window:
Just wanted to add I deleted a freaking essay about Silk Spectre before posting. It boiled down to:
Look superhero writers. I have friends. Respected collegues. Women who can drop a hostile from a mile away or 6 inches away with equal facility, and look good while doing it.
Women are just not life support for tits or plot support for male characters.
That irritates me though it is improving, slowly. 😛
@Katamount, Shadowplay:
One fellow in the con suite at our local SF con, Ad Astra, mentioned that the simplest way to describe BvS was “When dealing with something in his wheelhouse, Zack Snyder is capable of creating some absolutely amazing cinema. However, Superman’s level of optimism is not within Snyder’s wheelhouse.”
I read Watchmen, but haven’t seen the movie. Yes, it is intensely layered; not unexpected given Moore’s writing in general, and Moore writing this as a ‘farewell to superheroes’ in specific, with all the meta-text that implies.
(A friend of mine said that in one point at the climax the movie of Watchmen actually made more sense. I’ve seen other people say that the nonsensicality of the plan was actually part of Moore’s take back to the four-colour comics, and changing that removed one of the layers mentioned above.)
Kitty Genovese is known in a lot more places than just New York, the events as a parable on the diffusion of responsibility. That said, what really happened was a lot more complex than the short version included in the comic, though that was probably all the version that Moore heard because of the reporting on it. (People in the building did chase away the attacker and call police; said attacker hid and caught up with her again later where she couldn’t scream. Combining the events made for a good ‘tut-tut, aren’t those people horrible’ story but diminishes what really happened.)
I’ve mentioned Philip Sandifer before, and his Last War in Albion work; he does a lot of analysis and history of Watchmen as well, though in his case the history is more the history of the disagreements between Moore and DC.
@Jenora Feuer
I had heard the name Kitty Genovese (although I might have just been confusing it with the Genovese crime family), but hadn’t connected it with the whole “bystander effect” thing.
And yeah, totally agree with that quote on Snyder, at least based on his filmography. He was certainly not the right choice for director, but the fact that Warner Bros. tapped him to be the guy does force me to ask: why can’t Superman’s level of optimism just be dealt with at face value? Why not just make a straightforward Superman movie where he embodies the ethos of “truth, justice and the American way” just updated for this post-9/11 post-Trump world? I refuse to believe there’s no longer a place for it; on the contrary, in dark times we need it more than ever. Are we too cynical about the process? About the money? Would it engender too many comparisons to the Donner films? Are we too jaded to accept it? I’m not saying it wouldn’t be difficult to execute, but with WBs money, they had the power to do anything… and they just made him Doctor Manhattan, basically.
@Shadowplay
This in spades. I was reminiscing about my own muted comic fandom as a kid… I was never big into comics, but I made it a point to know the characters and I had a friend who was obsessed enough to tell me every character’s biography. And honestly… the ones that were just “do-gooder fights big bad, saves day” just didn’t appeal to me. The more offbeat heroes were the ones that drew my interest… Venom when he wasn’t fighting Spider-Man, Spawn or the Excalibur team just to name a few. But what really lacked in my wheelhouse (and comics’ wheelhouse in general) were female heroes. They were either love interests, considered “not for boys” like Wonder Woman, or members of ensemble casts where the guys overshadowed the gals. But a few stood out. Wolfsbane’s identity crisis throughout the 90s was fascinating (although seeing what they’ve done with her recently has me kinda scratching my head), She-Hulk was always great, and I really wish Monica Rambeau had remained as Captain Marvel and lead the Avengers for longer (not to slam Carol Danvers, who’s also great but not one I read as a kid).
If there’s one thing I’d love to see is an all-female version of Excalibur where it’s mostly a female superhero team hanging out around the house, but they keep getting roped into the machinations of really annoying and stupid dimensional beings. If such a thing exists, TELLMETELLMETELLME!!!
Bringing back the “Roseanne” discussion, I’ve been watching it through and am up to the 4th season (works great for the ipad over the kitchen sink while doing dishes). It really is very conservative. They do bring up topics that were mostly unspoken at the time, but the general arc is pretty darn conservative. Just watched the episode where Jackie got married, it ended with them kissing over the head of their nursing baby, which was really sweet and nice to see. But it was the culmination of four seasons of Jackie failing at being a single woman with a career.
I haven’t unpacked Dan’s extreme squeamishness of anything not coded masculine, are they poking fun at men that have to be masculine or poking fun at men with non masculine traits or interests? I’m not sure.
There is a gay male character, but he is mocked much more than female character for her same sex relationships.
I remember it being known for all the positive things WWTH mentioned, so that’s why I started to watch it. In context of Roseanne’s current trumpiness, I see a lot of rigid conservative thought in it as well.
Watching it as I do dishes has made me prone to think about it a bit too much, I guess.
And so happy to see David pop in, take care and best wishes for continued improvement in health!
@Katamount
If you do find a female Excalibur team type GN, let me know!!!!
See if you can hunt out the Durham Red graphic novels. There are three.
I think you’ll enjoy them – and they’re not too Brit centered (apart from some of the early in jokes when she was a supporting character in Strontium Dog).
Still a bit of the “life support for tits” aspect, depending on the artist (she has had several) but she’s well worth the read.
2000 AD was actually pretty amazing for stories that broke the stereotype. Ballad of Halo Jones is another goodie, but the art style is … strange. Very angular. Not bad, just different.
Oh, wow, Halo Jones. Of course, that was another work by Alan Moore, and one in which he was deliberately trying to break stereotypes by doing something that wasn’t another guys/guns/guts/gore serial.
Moore has his issues (as a friend of mine used to say, ‘he doesn’t have issues, he has the collected boxed set’) but he’s done a lot of very interesting work in many different directions. You want something with a similar multi-layered approach as Watchmen, try Promethea. It gets a bit more actively preachy in spots, but it’s a very deliberate take on literature as creation.
@Jenora
Ordered. Had a minor heart attack at first – I looked at the 3 vol Absolute Edition (it were the first ISBN that came up). Alan Moore is good, but he’s not $1000 good 😛
@Jenora
Have you been watching the Supergirl TV series? Christopher Reeve will always be my big-screen Superman, but Tyler Hoechlin is now my small-screen Superman. I nearly cried with joy when I saw Hoechlin portray a Kal-El who loved his cousin and fought for truth and justice as Clark Kent and as the Big Blue Boy Scout. When he gave a cheerful wink to a family he rescued, I punched the air because YES. That’s the hero we need right now: somebody who connects with the people he saves.
Thirty years, and I’m still sad that Halo Jones stopped after three books. There was so much more to tell.