THE CULTURE WAR

Wake up people, we need to get to work or we are gonna get fucked again by the ignorant, fearful and bigoted masses.

Vote OBAMA/BIDEN!

Posted by ryan on 08 Sep 2008 at 10:24 pm

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THIS TOO WILL BE IMPORTANT.
cancelled-flight.mp3
More HERE

Posted by ryan on 27 Mar 2008 at 01:31 pm

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actually these ones probably could.

Posted by ryan on 08 Jan 2008 at 04:07 pm

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I just woke up.

It’s 5:36 PM on Sunday, August 12 and, just as the late-90’s Internet-entrepreneur hype kept reminding us was a possibility, I walked 5 feet from my bed to my “office” and am now writing in my pajamas. The main difference between me and, say, some mythical Internet-paper-billionaire is that I’m not an entrepreneur. The things a I do aren’t all necessarily just for fun but they are certainly activities I’ve chosen to do which is a lot better than having some boss bark at me all day.

But the point of the above paragraph is to illustrate what is the recurring, bothersome and possibly fatal flaw of the “blogosphere”: the false cult of personality attempted by so many “writers” is, even when presented in a down-home, “hey, how ya doin’?” style, winds up being inevitably condescending. With the easy availability of blogs and blogging software, not to mention the lightening pace of the Information Superhighway, any half considered, off-the-top-of-your-head idea can find it’s way to the other side of the world in an instant. Writers wind up telling people all kinds of information because of an assumed relationship between writer and reader. This relationship rarely, if ever, exists, and a quick check on ones traffic stats will indicate this pretty quickly (e.g. You really think you have a relationship when the average time spent at your blog is less than 2 minutes?)

Which is exactly why I started this off by telling you i just woke up. You didn’t need to know this, couldn’t possibly care and this information doesn’t really add a whole lot of context to what I’m writing about anyway. It was merely a cheap way of setting the stage so I could enter the circular logic of what I’m talking about: I started with a folksy, hey-how-ya-doin’ intro as if we’re old friends then used that false-familiarity to engage you in a post about how doing that sort of thing is nearly always a big, ringing bell of phoniness and arrogance.

Maybe I’ll be forgiven this arrogance, though. After all, I just woke up.

Posted by admin on 12 Aug 2007 at 04:52 pm

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Anyone who has been reading my posts here or in my blog knows of my affinity for the nerd-arts. This much is common knowledge. Well as a giant nerd I am dying a little inside on account of the fact that I am currently not in lovely downtown San Diego kicking it with my fellow freaks at the coolest fucking thing ever. In my quest to quell the sadness (and try to forget that Kindercore comic artists Travis “Foxy Brown” Fox and the Eisner Award nominated Josh Cotter are currently trolling the convention floor) I thought I would post some of the pictures and announcements that have been piping through this great series of tubes we call home.

First there was the unveiling of the Iron Man Mark I armour which looks amazing - Blurry pics can be found at the always excellent Toys Are Evil Blog!! There has also been a slight update to the official site, some footage was shown (write up at Super Hero Hype), and Samuel L. Jackson has been confirmed as a cast member though no word on if he will indeed play the Ultimate Universe version of Nick Fury. I am sure more news will be revealed on Saturday and hopefully we will see some of that footage online so those of us not able to make the Con might bask in a little glory as well.

Empire Magazine also has Iron Man on the cover (click to watch it grow):

Super Hero Hype has the story on the full cast of the upcoming Watchmen movie

If you want to see the Marvel toys you won’t be able to find because they are convention exclusives go HERE.

The US Postal Service (not the one with the guy from Death Cab, the other Postal Service) unveiled Marvel stamps.

And tons of other stuff happened that I can’t find pictures or links for and even more will happen today and tomorrow (like the Lost - oh how I miss thee - panel). I will post more cool crud as I find it but I think it is time to power down the nerd machine and head back into the trenches of the working world.

Until next time - Excelsior!! Sorry Stan!

If you want to look for more crap like this check out:
Toys are Evil, Super Hero Hype, Marvel’s news section and a little thing called Google.

Posted by ryan on 27 Jul 2007 at 01:40 pm

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HBO’s series about the daily trials of a suburban polygamist family is, as of half an hour ago, three episodes into its second season. I caught up with season one over the past month, and there’s something about this show that’s a little hard to shake. Given the subject matter it might sound obvious to say Big Love is weird, but if anything this weirdness comes from the fact that they treat the whole thing so normally. Even though they live in three houses connected by a shared backyard, at the end of every episode I still feel like they’re just a regular family. It isn’t until I see the horrified reactions of the non-polygamist characters that I remember how I felt last year reading about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the corrupt polygamist sect that most likely inspired the, well, corrupt polygamist sect that’s a major plot device in the show.

“Wait a minute, isn’t polygamy terrible? Isn’t it just an excuse for child abuse, misogyny, and the continued rule of the patriarchy?” It’s a conflicting thing watching Big Love. It’s hard to dislike the husband, played by Bill Paxton, because it’s every writer’s job to make you like the characters. Still, it’s even harder to ignore when he bosses around one of his three wives, then apologizes by buying them something nice. Obviously Harry Dean Stanton’s sect leader, with his fourteen year-old bride-to-be and manipulation of everyone around him, is meant to depict the seedy underbelly of “plural marriage,” but the overbelly isn’t exactly seedless either.

The women in Big Love repeatedly get the short end of the stick, but is the show really following a sexist agenda? I doubt it. The richest parts of the storyline almost always involve the three wives and their relationships with each other. It’s this attention to their side of the story – most successfully done by Eileen Myers, one of the four female writers for the show - that keeps it from turning into the standard cowboy story, with one man against the world, knocking down anyone in his way. In the end, it’s hard to say just what kind of image HBO is projecting with Big Love, but at the very least it’s complicated enough for someone to get whatever message out of it they’re expecting to.

Posted by Mat on 02 Jul 2007 at 08:37 pm

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