New Comics: 12/17/08

Dark Horse

• Buffy The Vampire Slayer Vol 2 #20 (Season 8) Jo Chen Cover $2.54

DC

• Batman And The Outsiders Vol 2 #14 $2.54
  
• Robin Vol 4 #181 $2.54
  
• Supergirl Vol 5 #36 Regular Joshua Middleton Cover (New Krypton Part 8) $2.54

IDW Publishing

• Angel After The Fall #15 Regular Cover $3.39

Marvel

• Amazing Spider-Man Vol 2 #581 Regular Barry Kitson Cover $2.54
  
• Dark Reign New Nation (Secret Invasion Dark Reign Tie-In) $3.39
  
• Invincible Iron Man #8 Regular Salvador Larroca Cover (Secret Invasion Dark Reign Tie-In) $2.54
  
• Mighty Avengers #20 (Secret Invasion Tie-In) $2.54
  
• Samurai Legend #4 $5.09
  
• Spider-Man Noir #1 $3.39
  
• Thor God-Sized #1 $3.39
  
• Uncanny X-Men #505 Regular Terry Dodson Cover (X-Men Manifest Destiny Tie-In) $2.54
  
• X-Factor Vol 3 #38 $2.54
  
• X-Men Kingbreaker #1 (War Of Kings Tie-In) $3.39
  
• X-Men Legacy #219 $2.54
  

Maybe this will get me to actually get back to reviewing the shit once it's in my hands.  I've fallen behind on Samurai, and I'm unfortunately pretty sure Loeb is writing this issue of Buffy, but there's still a bunch of good stuff I'm looking forward to in here.  I wasn't a huge fan of Emperor Vulcan, but I like X-Force and plan to read War of Kings due to the DnA showrunning, so this is probably still a decent grab, but we'll see.  Mighty is probably coming off the list after this since it seems to be a romp through alternate universes penned by Dan Slott that I honestly couldn't care less about, but we'll see how that goes.  Probably for the best if it does since Dark Avengers is going to be more vital/better anyway, and both New and Dark are going to $4/issue.

Amatriciana Sauce

Strangely enough, earlier this week I made dinner of my own volition.  Not only that, but I made it from these things you'd actually call "ingredients" rather than taking something out of a package and heating it.  It's ludicrously easy to make, so anyone interested can follow the recipe I used, available here.  A word of caution to the obscenely stupid out there: a clove of garlic is one of the small bits inside the skin.  It is not the word for the whole damn thing.  In case you're wondering, I fell into that obscenely stupid category.  Peeling garlic is a pain in the ass, and having to do less than one whole bulb makes this pretty quick.  I'm going to have to make it again sometime, and this time avoid being an utter windowlicker to see what it's actually supposed to taste like, as the garlic drowned out the pancetta a bit.  It's recommended anyway.

Life on the Bleeding Edge

Background:

If you're a technologically inclined person like me, you've probably heard of linux, the free open source operating system.  You may even have run it once or twice on the side, just to see what the fuss is about.  I did so a few years back, and wound up building a box almost specifically for linux use.  That box is dead but its legacy lives on in the box I'm typing this from.

The specific distribution I settled on was Gentoo, at the time an upstart little distro that had the gall to require you to compile your packages for the mad optimizations.  It still gets flak for that, and rightly so in some cases.  Where this comes in handy though, is with up-to-date packages.  Unlike some distros, it's extremely easy to get packages ready for mass consumption, since you offload the building process on the users.  That as an aside I can make sure I'm not running a package built for only the capabilities of a 386 on my Core 2 Duo is just gravy here (if I was running 64 bit the difference between the standard Debian packages and my own would be much, much lower to the point of not mattering).  However, sometimes letting the Gentoo devs test packages before giving access to this source isn't fast enough.  For the mildly adventurous, there's the unstable branch, which you can hit on a per-package basis, or for the whole system.  Then there's the truly insane, where you get direct access to the developer repositories via source control (typically subversion or git these days).

Guess which category I fall into.

I've used wildly pre-alpha window managers before (compiz, beryl, and compiz-fusion), and vacillate between the newest and newest with compatable ABI (svn for ffmpeg breaks other packages at the moment, though it works on its own), but I've finally met my match.  The offending package here, astonishingly, is KDE 4.  To be fair, it was a subversion build of KDE rather than the current stable, but that didn't particularly matter as KDE being stable was a little horribly relative.

The Good:

KDE 4 finally dumps Qt 3 for Qt 4 as the main windowing toolkit.  This is mostly an under-the-hood thing, but I'm a programmer so I appreciate it.  Also, there are some nicer Qt 4 themes (both widget and window decoration) than are available in the older toolkit.  It's worth noting that Qt 4 is actually three years old now, and is only just becoming the standard.  The new window manager does 3D compositing, like OSX has for a couple major revisions, Windows Vista's Aero engine, and the three I previously mentioned.  If you have a modern 3D card, this basically means you'll have much better performance for basically every program window related function, as well as support for some useless but neat eye candy.  KDE 3.5.10 has no such thing, but dumping compiz-fusion in place of KDE's own KWin allows you to pretend it does.

The Bad:

Everything else.  No, seriously, it was an awful experience for a number of reasons.  For the unaware, the KDE suite includes far more than a default install of Windows from official Microsoft media (if your disc came from your computer manufacturer, it probably comes with things not originally intended to be there).  Most of those other things, however, don't work well yet.  Mapping keyboard shortcuts, for example, is an exercise in frustration.  KDE versions before 4 used an audio manager called aRts to do sound mixing, though most people these days make sure it is either never installed or at the very least never run.  The kernel level sound system allows you to perform the same function, but in a much less irritating way as it doesn't block out everything but KDE apps.  I'd list aRts' demise under the previous category, but sadly its replacement isn't good enough to make me cheer for it.  Worse still, you can't do a damn thing about it now.  Phonon is theoretically less intrusive than aRts was, as you can theoretically make it work with ALSA (the kernel drivers), but it takes a bizarre level of work that just raw ALSA users never had to touch.  Also, this impacts every sound playing application in the suite, like the music player Amarok.  An equalizer is something you expect in all modern music players, whether you use it or not (I do occasionally), but Amarok 2 stripped it because they're not compatible with Phonon.

Amarok is actually a whole can of worms in and of itself.  On the back end, Amarok 1 uses a database for its music library.  By default, it uses SQLite, a mature product designed to give you a database without a server, which makes it easy on regular users.  Odds are, you've used an application that uses SQLite and not even known it.  Any Mac user who has used Mail.app has, for example.  The user could, however, decide to use an actual standalone database server if he wants.  As someone who has done his share of web development, I have mysql running anyway, so using it instead of SQLite (good for most uses, can get slow for particularly large databases, like mine) was a no brainer.  Amarok 2 removes both of these, instead requiring MySQL embedded, which performs like SQLite but requires MySQL be installed (another virtue of SQLite is that you can just link the source into your program directly rather than requiring it installed separately), and is less free in terms of license.  If it performed as well I might not care, but it's definitely slower than my older version.  Worse, it seems prone to explosion with albums by more than one artist, as there are a number of bugs in the Various Artists handling, ranging from the inability to remove albums from that listing to creating pointless duplicate entries that also cannot be removed.  The scripting API from Amarok 1 has been completely removed, so there is no period of backward compatibility whatsoever.  If you cared about any scripts (I personally  use weekalarm and amarokpidgin regularly) you'd better hope that you didn't care much as they don't work and there's no alternative written in the new style yet, and the documentation for writing new scripts isn't even good enough to expect either available anytime soon.  Also, if you've used Amarok 1 and really enjoy the context tab, you're in luck!  The majority of the program's UI is now devoted to that data.  If, like me, you never used it, you now are stuck looking at it anyway, while the playlist is crammed off to the right side and collapsed significantly, and you can't do anything about it because the developers don't want you to.  A final insult here comes from the controls; the previous and next buttons (and functions via dbus) will actually start the player, rather than merely move around the playlist.  The play function will occasionally not work if the the playlist pointer isn't active (highlighting a track doesn't help this directly), and when it does work at all most of the time it starts playing the NEXT track.  If you want to play the first track in a playlist, typically you'll need to right click its entry in the now smaller and further away listing, and push play there, as the much larger button will sometimes skip it just because.  Some other more minor features have either changed or been removed, but since some are planned to return (not in time for 2.0 final admittedly), and because this is already too long, I won't get into them.

KTorrent's new release fares better, but not much.  Two extremely useful plugins were butchered: RSS and UPnP.  The RSS Plugin simply doesn't exist anymore, though it may return.  If akregator were more up to snuff (I'm getting ahead of myself) I'd give that a pass, but as it stands that's quite irritating.  Also, the UPnP plugin still exists, but it doesn't work properly; it is for whatever reason causing issues with all libupnp applications, so things like MediaTomb (not KDE and therefore working properly) fail to run while that plugin is active.  The KDE3 version has no such issue despite providing the same functionality.

Akregator is a special sort of mess, as the svn build I was using did not allow you to read articles in the default mode.  Imagine the value of an rss reader that fetches feeds and tells you when you have new articles waiting, but refuses to show them to you.  The mode I eventually stumbled on essentially renders the rss with an XSLT sheet applied to a set of the feeds, but does not let you pick which articles to read directly.  As a result, you must mark the entire feed read at once, since it's showing you all of the articles and therefore marking none specifically.  Adding torrent site rss feeds to this almost replicated the functionality of the ktorrent plugin, though the torrents could not be passed directly to ktorrent, but first had to be handed to Opera (my browser of choice).  Also, obviously the auto-download features weren't going to work.

The Ugly:

K3b.  The KDE4 subversion version of this (it's a CD/DVD burning front end, if you're unfamiliar) simply does not work.  The lead developer claimed yesterday on a bug report that it's pre-alpha, though I'm wondering why such things are in this sort of repository at all given that.  Typically these are for very early testing of usable applications rather than useless builds.  The most bizarre part of this though, is that the GUI seems to work perfectly fine, it's only the burning features that fail miserably, but the burning is not handled by k3b itself.  It basically passes off your file list and options to command line programs like growisofs.

Plasma's Plasmoids deserve a special bit of derision too.  Plasmoids are basically like OSX dashboard widgets, which KDE used to use via the application SuperKaramba.  There is a KDE4 version of SuperKaramba which is basically an interpreter so you can theoretically use old themes with Plasma.  It doesn't work reliably in that fashion, and the two I use (one is a system monitor, the other is a weather montior) don't work with it.  A few others I tried did, but there's no indication why mine were different here.  I mentioned OSX dashboard widgets specifically for a reason though; Plasma is supposed to be able to render them as plasmoids.  To some extent it does.  That extent, however, is not even remotely usable.  The alpha channel simply doesn't work, so each of them has a large solid color box in the background.  Also, the few I tried (all weather type) didn't even fetch data or let me pick my locale, so they weren't even functionally ugly.

If there's one thing KDE 4 had going for it, it was that KDE3 apps can run inside of it.  Unfortunately, this creates a bunch of mostly useless overhead as you need the KDE3 versions of every support library to do this, but worse Qt 4's Qt3 support does not let Qt 3 apps use the widgets of your current style.  This means you're able to use versions of the KDE apps that actually work, but only if you're willing to make your whole system disjoint and ugly.  Worse still, you lose the ability to change the KDE 3 apps' style/colors to even come close to what you're using for the Qt 4 apps.

Conclusion:

Needless to say, I dumped the overlay I was using from my system, but sadly much of KDE 4 (version 4.1.2) has made its way into the "unstable" branch of Gentoo.  This of course suggests that much of it is considered quite usable by the developers, and reasonably safe in a Gentoo system itself, as only full releases ever get unmasked at all.  This also means that I'm currently building a large number of these applications, because it's easier than manually masking all of them to keep them out, and much easier than adding the unstable keyword to every package I currently have built for the unstable branch (removing the keyword from a global context would keep KDE 4.1.2 from building, but require basically everything else to be downgraded).  Fortunately, they run side-by-side, but most of these things are a nuisance at best, so it's a bit of a waste of time, bandwidth, and harddrive space.  Best advice here is stay the hell away from KDE 4.  The best things about it can be replicated in KDE 3.5 without much difficulty, and the worst things require you to have most of KDE 3.5 around anyway.  Don't bother.

Pull Review 3/12/2008

Astounding Wolfman #5 - This was a much more mixed bag than I expected. The series has been running at a breakneck pace since the beginning. Kirkman explains in the letters of this issue that it was designed as such to soften the blow of the bi-monthly shipping schedule, though I feel it has the opposite effect. It certainly makes it feel like things are happening every issue, and therefore a year's worth of issues will have accomplished more than, say, Ultimate Spider-Man where you need the next issue as soon as possible to recompress the story into a useful chunk. However, it also means you're flipping through the pages absurdly fast and the end creeps up on you, leaving you with another two months until you can see what happens next. This issue takes that and makes things worse by devoting a number of pages to exposition. Don't get me wrong, I was wondering about the mystery cleared up within as well, but it cut down on the amount of plot movement, or even character building that we had available, and there simply isn't enough. Jason Howard's art, however, is still fantastic, so it's a joy to look over the panels even when nothing is happening, to say nothing of when there's actual action. Apparently 1-4 are going to be the first trade, so if you're not on board yet look that over, and see if you can handle that much story over an eight month span. If you can, this is Recommended. If not, wait for the trade.

Mighty Avengers #10 - This was a very fun book this month, if a bit fillery. Tony and Victor got sucked back in time last issue, and as a result so did the comic itself. The coloring, the tiny blurbs advertising old comics, the "CONTINUED AFTER NEXT PAGE" blurbs before ads, even the style of the narrator, they're all perfect little throw-backs to sell the overall effect. The banter between Tony and Victor is similarly perfect, and Bagley's art is quite nice. It's definitely worth a look. Recommended.

Green Arrow and Black Canary #6 - Let's start with the good: Cliff Chiang is a fantastic artist, and there are very few books I would not like to see him work on. Sadly, he's leaving this one after this issue, and didn't do the last one, but the five he gave us were gorgeous. Also, Winick really seems to get these characters. He's not so hot with most of the rest of the DCU he's played with on occasion, but GA and company he's got down pretty well. Now for the bad: the plot. We start mid-investigation with no real indication of how we got there, even after the fact. Worse, from the introduction, the plot takes a turn for the incomprehensibly stupid. Seriously, I don't know what the fuck anyone involved with this book was thinking. If you love Ollie and company this is Mildly Recommended, but if you're not already highly invested, stay the hell away.

Annihilation: Conquest #5 - The series is wrapping up and we're finally getting some answers, not only about how this all came about (and this would feel less weird if Cho didn't spend months crafting each ass drawn in Mighty Avengers during his run), but about what the hell he's doing. It definitely makes a certain amount of sense too, everything is properly connected in good ways. Also, things finally go well for Star-Lord and his buddies just long enough for them to get a whole lot worse, which is par for the course really. Wraith isn't given an opportunity to speak, and Phyla has very little, so the anchors that were dragging down the event are lightened significantly, though they'll obviously be around for the finale. I'm definitely more interested in that than I was in this beforehand, but overall the series is not living up to its predecessor. Grab the trade if you liked the first event, otherwise don't even bother.

Booster Gold #7 - I find it so hard to believe that the man who is writing this wrote Infinite Crisis. This is good in pretty much all the ways that was terrible. Michael and Ted back together is a glorious thing, even though we all know it will never last. Their banter is fantastic, and the plot is full of callbacks to old events that mire the story in the need to understand them, but rather just bring a smile to the face of anyone who knows what's being mentioned. I can say this firmly because I didn't know what the hell they were talking about for most of it, and was not mired in that lack of knowledge. Finally too we're getting some answers about who's behind all of the events of the book thus far. Jurgens' art reminds me of some terrible comics, but not because it's bad but rather because so many of his old ones were. It's pretty passable, if nothing particularly special. Highly recommended.

Fantastic Four #555 - I really wanted to like this book. I liked Ultimates 1, and I like the idea of the Fantastic Four more than some of the execution thereof, but this just isn't working out that well. It's basically all focused on the main of the three stories introduced last issue, which is good because I didn't find myself caring about the other two. The one that does show up again is somehow less interesting now, to the point that I really would rather Johnny not show up again, possibly ever. Also, don't judge this book by its cover, as it's misleading in ways I can barely describe. Sixties level misleading. Hitch's art is mostly pretty good sure, though I'd swear I saw some of Land's favorite faces in there at times. That is most definitely not a compliment. Well, the ending of this issue promises some actual action in our future, which may be exactly what Millar needs to make the book interesting. God knows something has to. Not Recommended.

Serenity: Better Days #1 - Speaking of books I really wanted to like... I'm an unabashed Firefly fan, and I quite liked the movie despite some of the... issues that many people had. Well this is set between the TV series and that movie, undoing all of the changes to move forward. Nevermind that the entire gap was bridged by the last miniseries so this is doing screwy things with continuity, if the story is good you can forgive it. Well sort of, it's much harder to forgive this sort of thing outside of big two comics than it is in them, as Marvel and DC love to play fast and loose with continuity in ways no television show ever really does. This gives us the full cast anyway. Well sort of, several of the characters barely show up, and characterization seems to be set back a bit on a couple that do. The start of the issue is a bit more hard sci-fi than I'm really comfortable with, considering how hard they tried to be a space western in the series. The end though, is quite interesting, if only because it's something that absolutely has never happened to the crew before. Conrad's pencils are good enough to let you pick out the characters by appearance properly. No real complaints about it, unlike the other of Joss' properties come to comics which are sort of okay at best or messy and terrible likenesses at worst. I'm in it for the duration, but mostly because I'm horribly hooked on the series, not so much on this issue's merits. Recommended for Browncoats, neophytes buy the TV series instead.

Nova #11 - Richard's on the Technarchy homeworld and.... things don't go so well. At least not for the character, they go great for the reader. This continues to be very well written and well illustrated, significantly better than Abnett and Lanning's other book. We get the return of an old character that I totally called months ago, though people called me crazy for even thinking of it. Of course I was wrong then, but the reasoning was sound enough that him arriving here still makes sense. Given the revelations of the book, of course, I'm wondering where they plan on taking this, especially with getting Richard less infected. It's damn good though, so it's worth the ride to find out. Highly Recommended.

X-Factor #29 - Remind me to grab the trades for the first few arcs of this book; I've made a huge mistake. The book is very good, dealing well with the human concerns spinning out of Messiah CompleX, and the character breakdowns that were inevitable. I've been reading only since the aforementioned crossover, but I already love the team that's made up entirely of people I never paid the slightest bit of attention to. That's all on the writing, which is a good thing in my book. The art works well too, showcasing the dreary city with the right level of realism. Looks like this is the beginning of the next arc rather than more denouement, though it's going to begin in earnest next month. I already know I'll be there for it. Recommended.

Last Defenders #1 - Didn't intend to grab this, but then I saw Giffen's name on the cover and caved. Sure he's not doing the script, but the man responsible for a large portion of the best Deadpool stories is, and with Giffen doing his thing on breakdowns and co-plotting. This simply could not be a bad thing, and it wasn't. My home state got itself a super-team, and it's quite a doozy. This isn't quite as over-the-top wacky as the last Defenders mini, though it definitely has its moments of hilarity. Art's good and cartoony to compliment the lack of seriousness, which is appreciated. Herein lies the single best or worst (depending on your point of view) team battle cry ever put to paper as well. Recommended for those of you who like the funny in your funnybooks.

Pull Review 3/05/2008

Buffy the Vampire Slayer #12 - Goddard begins a new mini-arc in the overarching Twilight story here, and he's reveling in the unlimited SFX budget of comics. I'm a little ashamed to admit I didn't recognize his name immediately as one of the series writers/producers, though I guessed that was the case given his handle on the characters, particularly their voice. Our new antagonists exhibit some interesting new abilities seen only once before, which should remind series fans of something. Sadly, this does run directly into another bit of last page blast-from-the-past revealing (you will have guessed it before you get there), but it promises to be interesting. The art... is the better of the two currently running Whedon TV continuations. It's generally easy to tell who is who, but it's far from fantastic. See Angel for what it could be, if you need reassurance that it could be worse. Also, if you've missed the world crapping on Buffy in hilarious ways, you're definitely in luck here. Of course, given the nature of this volume, you shouldn't even consider starting here, so all I can really say is Par for the course. Don't flee, but don't run out to grab this if you haven't been bothering.

Cable #1 - Seriously? Cable? I spent money on Cable. If you suggested that even a year ago I probably would have shot you, but here I am. And you know what, I'm happy with my purchase. Unless you're not reading X-books at all you probably know this is spun out of the end of Messiah CompleX, with Cable on the run with the first mutant born since M-Day in the future. There, you now know it either way. Anyway, we start already in the future, setting up the world a bit, and even giving basically the same brief recap I just did. We're moving pretty slow throughout, which could get annoying in the long run, but it mostly serves to establish Cable once again as a solo character (very little of Messiah CompleX was told from his perspective, so unless you read Cable & Deadpool he was either absent or a minor team player for ages), and lead up to the abrupt cliffhanger. This is one of Swierczynski's first comics, so it's possible the slow pace is a transitional issue more than a decompression one. Time will tell here, though he pulls off the workings of Nate's mind pretty well. I didn't have the ending spoiled for me via solicits, so I won't spoil it for any of you, but it certainly worked for me. What didn't work was the art. Most of it was beautiful, don't get me wrong, but it's all overlaid onto filtered photographs, which just feels lazy, and in some cases very jarring. Still, even just on the premise it's interesting enough to warrant a bit of a look, and with the ending I'll have to label it as Recommended. Seriously though, at least filter the photos better to make it less obvious.

Detective Comics #842 - Peter Milligan fills in for Paul Dini with another of this book's customary (of late) done-in-ones, spinning out of the event that brought him to the Bat-books most recently, Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul. Thankfully, this is written vastly better than his contribution to that abortive crossover. The vast majority of the writing here is Bruce's internal monologue, which is in character enough with recent representations, and Robin speaks little enough to avoid another horrible character assassination, in case nobody explained yet that he doesn't act the way he did during RORAG. There is, however, a bit of an irksome continuity gaffe, and I mean within the continuity of the issue here, not the DC universe at large. It's ultimately a forgettable story, but enjoyable for its duration. Dustin Ngyuen, however, can keep drawing Batman books as long as he'd like as far as I'm concerned, I love his vision of pretty much everything involved. Recommended.

Logan #1 - I admit it, I'm a Wolverine fan. Not enough to suffer through most of his solo run mind you. Certainly not enough to buy every book that plasters his face on the front to garner unwarranted sales either. This is different though, because it's Brian K. Vaughn writing. Brian K. Vaughn can essentially do no wrong in my book, and this is no exception. The story takes place in both the present and World War 2 eras, though we are only given a tease of the present day conflict. The past though, gives us a look at one of the many stories that make Logan the loner he is, all without the annoying over-the-top badassery so many writers fall back on with him. It's hard to deal with living forever, doubly so when you have to live with yourself for the amount of crap that's come your way, and the last page of the book promises a shitstorm of epic proportion. It's definitely nice to see Logan being the best at what he does without having to verbally remind everyone of it every thirty seconds to boot. Risso's art is fantastic, and I'm actually torn as to whether I should have grabbed the uncolored version to showcase it better, or stuck with what I got as it is well colored. You really can't go wrong either way though. Highly Recommended.

Uncanny X-Men #496 - Speaking of writers who can do no wrong, here's a book by Ed Brubaker. Sure his first arc was a bit of a mess, the second was kind of enjoyable if not the greatest. Then he got sidetracked by someone else's event, and was more than competent with it, but really it was Carey's show and he just kept the train rolling with quality. Now we're finally into a new arc and it's, frankly, fantastic. The book has split focus once again between Cyke and Emma going to their new base of operations to deal with the summer of love that exists for some reason, and Logan, Piotr, and Kurt in Siberia. All five of these characters are pitch perfect with their dialogue, and the stories are both very interesting. Of course, it would help if Giant-Size Astonishing had shipped, as this spoils the end (though everyone knew about that already) and further references a status quo that we haven't been introduced to yet. Hopefully that's out before 497 since it's going to be more important next issue, but I'm not about to let shipping issues get in the way of enjoying a fantastically written book. Also, Mike Choi's art continues to be utterly fantastic all around. Can't think of a single negative about the book that isn't based on someone else's book being absurdly late. Highly Recommended.

X-Force #2 - Speaking of books I'm shocked to be reading... this one is also pretty good, and utterly unlike its predecessor. Wolverine is not a leader, and nobody knows that more than him, including the fans that balked at the concept of Wolverine being a leader. I'm coming into the series relatively unfamiliar with X-23 outside of the high level concept. Well from here she feels a lot like Wolverine meets Cass Cain, which is a good thing. Also, Kyle and Yost were not kidding when they said despite the powerset similarities of these characters their personalities are very different. With more time to speak here, we're getting to see that more obviously, and it's appreciated. Also, to say the ending was unexpected would be the understatement of the year. I can't say I'm not extremely intrigued with where this is going, but if they get into a cycle of trying to one-up the shock factor issue by issue, it could get tiresome. Definitely not tired of it yet, and in fact can't wait for the next issue. The art is, well, most of it fits in with the Uncharted "Next Gen" mode. For the unfamiliar, it makes everything dark and brown. Of course, that was a joke about a number of early PS3 games, while this is intentional, and about the best possible aesthetic choice they could have made. The art is very dark and sometimes muddy, but attractive nevertheless, and the last thing this group needs is bright and crisp. God help me, I'm quite pleased with an X-Force book outside of the pre-X-Statix run. Recommended.

Paperboy

I got up this morning and looked out my front door to see if anything had been delivered. Upon doing so, I was greeted by the sight of no newspaper on the porch, and no newspaper further down at the edge of the driveway. This, curiously, is actually correct behavior, though you wouldn't know it if you had driven by any morning since Monday.

I should probably explain. For something like twenty weeks now, we've been signed up for Sunday only newspaper service. Before that we were getting Friday-Sunday service as there is no weekend only for whatever reason. Before that, for years, we were on daily service, which is the last time they got it consistently right. Shortly after downgrading to the three day service, we noticed that we would get the newspaper on seemingly random days. No two consecutive weeks would pass with exactly six papers delivered on the correct three days. This probably shouldn't be rocket science, but somehow they just couldn't get it right. Almost every time the deliveryman failed to deliver on a day he was supposed to, Mom called to complain about it. The dispatcher always had some excuse about a new deliveryman or that the regular one was sick for months at a time which caused a substitute or something else asinine and pathetic of that sort. Finally she was fed up and canceled the service entirely.

This should probably offend most of you, as newspapers for years were delivered by young children on bicycles with a far higher success rate than this. In fact they made a video game about it, sharing a name with this entry in fact. Of course, that was not unintentional. I was never particularly good at this game, truth be told, though I never really played it on anything but somebody else's Game Boy, so I never really had the time to get good. It occurred to me for a moment that perhaps I'm being too hard on the deliveryman as a result, but I quickly dismissed that as terribly stupid of me. For starters, newspapers are now mostly delivered by grown men in cars, not young boys on bicycles. Furthermore Paperboy, like all video games based on mundane activities, is full of artificial challenge boosts because if it were particularly realistic it would be a horribly boring game.

No, whoever was responsible for this mistake was a moron of the highest order. However, Mom quickly missed the paper, and the paper itself missed our money, so they offered to give her 13 weeks without payment, and if she was still dissatisfied no payment would be necessary. At some point during this mess, the deliveryman decided (though he is not alone from what I've heard) that the Sunday paper was getting too large with all the inserts and the added bulk of the paper itself, so he was going to add those to the thinner Saturday paper instead. Of course, this meant if he failed to deliver on Saturday (as he was wont to do) we wouldn't get them even if he did deliver a Sunday paper. Also this seemed problematic as this latest attempt at service (the free 13 weeks) was Sunday only. How would he accomplish this? Wouldn't that mean stuffing some papers with the inserts and some without? How does that help the overall problem? Wouldn't that actually be more work and make things more confusing? There are answers to these questions, and all of them are what you'd expect if you assume this was a stupid idea. Well, behold and lo, at the end of 13 weeks we probably had 13 papers delivered, but not all of them were on Sunday nor were all the Sundays covered. Not even close actually.

The dispatcher begged Mom over the phone for one last chance, and for some reason she gave it to them. Well somehow the moron managed to get it right, delivering a full paper between the storm door and main front wooden door on our porch. He also delivered the thinner paper-only bit to the porch, but not between the doors. Strange, but at least we got what we ordered. Well despite this not even bringing their accuracy to 50% she decided to pay up for the next cycle (thinking back I'm not sure if we had to pay for the previous weeks after deciding they were not worthless [though they were] or if they were completely free). Since then we've gotten the paper every Sunday but one, usually with the inserts on Saturday, and Sunday, and occasionally with an insert-free copy also on Sunday anyway, and usually on the porch despite there never being a request to do that. Also of course they would often deliver on various days that are not Sunday or even Saturday but not for the entire week as you expect of the promotional free weeks newspaper companies enjoy doing in vain.

I cannot understand how these buffoons fail so utterly at such a simple concept week in and week out, but I don't really care; it isn't my money paying for their mistakes, and frankly they're actually losing money on us due to their incompetence so I at least get a smile of schadenfreude. Perhaps we should actually return to the age of small children delivering papers from their bikes, or at least require some sort of test before allowing someone to take on this seemingly difficult job. Perhaps set a benchmark score in Paperboy for job acceptance. Can't make things any worse than they are right now.

Update: An unfamiliar newspaper on the sewing machine in my garage (don't ask) found when getting the mail leads me to believe I may have been premature in suggesting they got something right.  It's more likely he simply didn't deliver to the door for no good reason this time, but still delivered erroneously.

Pull Review 2/27/2008

Crime Bible: Five Lessons of Blood #5 - Rucka is a king of details, and this last issue is no exception. Once again the text of the Book of Crime wraps itself intricately with the story, exactly as you'd expect of a good prophesy. A large amount of the book was spent on the fight between Renee and Flay, but honestly I think the book suffered for it. If this were an arc of an ongoing I'd certainly have the opposite opinion, but there's basically no denouement at all, leaving us rather cold. At the beginning of the battle we're told it can end one of two ways, and without spoiling anything all I can say is it did, but that just brings up more questions than answers. On some level I suppose that's appropriate, given the internal name for the series, but without a continuation coming up in the near future I'm not sure what to think. The whole arc is Recommended, but not as highly as I'd have thought.

Batman # 674 - As always, Morrison's ideas make perfect sense after he's finally decided to explain them, and as usual they're more straightforward than we were assuming. Morrison has a bit of a (not altogether undeserved) reputation for insane ideas, and that has a tendency to trick people into over thinking things. As usual, the writing is also brilliant, but it's hard to imagine the guy who gave this interview writing anything but a spot-on depiction of Batman. Like most of the DC books I read the art wasn't praiseworthy, but it was very far from bad. I guess you'd call it effective enough, if not the sort of thing you'd write home about, which I can't complain about. This issue, as Morrison's whole run, comes Highly Recommended.

Blue Beetle #24 - The end of year two is here, and it's explosive. We get a pair of fights on different fronts, as Jaime proves himself more than worthy of the legacy of the Blue Beetle in more ways than one. All of Rogers' plots through the series thus far start wrapping up together as the major showdown against the Reach continues, and as always with the excellently human dialogue we've come to expect. The art, however, is as stylish and effective as always, fitting the series perfectly rather than not getting in the way. Just like last month, as soon as I finished I had to ask if it was next month yet, as we go out on a cliffhanger again, and it's a doozy. Can't Recommend Strongly Enough.

Captain America #35 - I always have problems talking about this book without basically falling into a play-by-play, as the same exact praise for any issue of this book can be used for any other. Well, most of the time that is, you can't talk about Epting/Perkins' pencils this month since Butch Guice was handling all the pencils (not for the first time either) for this issue, though Mike Perkins did some of the inking and Frank D'Armata did his standard stellar coloring job, so the art is very much in the vein of what we're used to. Which is to say it's very good and perfectly suited for a superhero espionage book. The pieces of Red Skull's plan start to fall into place as James is slowly learning to fill the massive shoes he was given. The wait for the next issue will be a long one indeed. Highly Recommended

Daredevil #105 - This is probably a sin, but I have to admit I didn't read any of Gotham Central, at least none of it that wasn't part of the Murderer?/Fugitive crossover that began my descent into reading as much of this stuff as I do. I bring this up because I know this book is 2/3rds of the creative team from it, and it's so good that I now regret the mistake. The Mr. Fear arc comes to a close and leaves us with yet another steaming pile left in Matt's lap. The writing is significantly slower paced here than on Cap, but it's a much different kind of story anyway. The art is, as always, dark and forboding, which is exactly what you want in a book like this, and it doesn't fail to work at any point, and the dialogue is up to par for Bru. This probably isn't his best book, but it's not even his worst, which is still pretty good. Recommended

Teen Titans #56 - Back on DC? Like clockwork I've run out of good things to say about the art here. I'm being unfair I know, but this just isn't that interesting overall, and in several places it's strange and not at all good. Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane was a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine as well, and parts of this remind me of why I liked it so much, but Terror Titans? Please tell me editorial mandated a second group of young versions of super-villains to attack the Titans again, and this isn't just McKeever showing that he should stick almost exclusively to teenage relationships. Sadly, it's not even all great on that front either, as most of the team are acting like assholes for no discernible reason. That's not true actually, the reason is to alienate Eddie further, but they typically aren't all that bad all the time. Not Recommended but god damn I'm going to keep reading for the nuggets of old fashioned McKeever goodness.

Thor #6 - This has never been a fast moving book. This issue is no exception. We start off with a number of stories from the townspeople interacting with Asgardians, which leads of course to some humor though it's all very typical fish out of water stuff. Can't say I didn't laugh at some of it though. From there we move on to a choice Thor has to make. He certainly didn't intend to bring Loki back, but now that he has he considers just releasing everyone at once. After all, the main reason to do it on the small scale is already messed up. Really, that's about it for the whole book, but it's still compelling nevertheless. Coipel's pencils certainly don't hurt any. Mildly Recommended, though if you're not on board yet you may as well wait for the trade and flip through a bit. This is very much not for everyone.

Young Avengers Presents #2 - We were all waiting for it since Mar-Vell returned, and here we have it. The bulk of this issue is about Teddy and his father, which I'm sure you can imagine would be quite a bombshell for both of them. Reed isn't the guy I'd consider the go-to for emotional moments, but he pulled it off here and the Marvel Marvel pantheon is his baby so it makes plenty of sense. Unlike the first issue we even get a minor bit of the unregistered members of the team doing what they do, which is nice though not as nice as getting a new volume of the ongoing for them. At least this confirms they aren't all in hiding 100% of the time anyway. Recommended to fans of the team.

X-Men Legacy #208 - This is spinning straight out of the most obvious mystery left at the end of Messiah CompleX, what happened to Charles Xavier? Well, the answers are within, as is the explanation to how he'll eventually (and nobody doubted this for a second) return to the world at large. Along the way it seems we'll be running through his past to reassemble his mind. I can't say I was overly enthusiastic coming into this; to be honest I planned on dropping it entirely. That said, Carey's team since his run started was full of characters I never really cared about at all, and I found it more interesting than this book has been in ages, so I took the leap at the last minute and am glad I did. This should be an interesting ride if nothing else. The art is good if disjointed. Part of that is for obvious reasons, but there are a full four pencillers which gets a little distracting in places that shouldn't be so obviously different thematically. Still, it's worth a pickup if you're following the X-Teams at all, as we'll definitely be seeing more of the plot threads from Messiah CompleX and before running through this book. Recommended.

Criminal #1 - I didn't read the last volume (or any straight up crime stories in any format truth be told), but after some rave reviews I decided what the hell? It's not like I don't read all the books Brubaker writes or cowrites at Marvel proper, why not jump onto his baby? Well, it was a good decision. Reading the backmatter makes it obvious that this isn't a new character for his universe, but it reads just fine not knowing that. The book feels a lot like his Daredevil without costumes or the bullshit science that allows random radioactive waste to do what it did to Murdock, or any of the other characters that require suspension of disbelief up the wazoo. This is a very human tale, just with the same feel, which is a good thing. The art is dark and opressive, to go with the mood, and the characters are all wonderfully flawed and real. This is apparently back story, but even still it's got me hooked. Time to grab the trades from Amazon and stick around for the ride from volume two. Highly Recommended.

They All Scream at Ice Cream

It's rare when you come across a perfect storm of any sort. Recently, I came across one mixing equal and large amounts of stupidity, masochism, gluttony, and bravado. A member of the Something Awful forums, medibot, had a vision. I'm not sure what prompted this vision, though I'm certain he'd be better off without it. He sought a challenge to conquer, and perhaps a sugar rush. The challenge that was decided upon was to ingest a concoction which would later become known as Thompson's Gambit, after his real last name. This substance involves taking a trip to a Coldstone Creamery and asking for a Love It size sweet cream mixin, with everything mixed in. That's right, every last one of their mixins must be, ahem, mixed in. For those who wish to live long enough to get married I should probably warn you of something. The most sugar in any Ben & Jerry's ice cream is their Chunky Monkey at 28 grams per half cup. This includes the stuff blended in. Coldstone's sweet cream has about 23 grams of sugar per half cup, just the ice cream. The Love It is about a full cup. You're ingesting 46 grams of sugar without a single mixin, and almost every one of the mixins is full of extra sugar. Also, this will cost you over $20, though the price varies by location and whether the cashier takes pity on you. Medibot's attempt at his own gambit was recorded, and can be viewed here.

This isn't really the end of the story though. Frankly, it was an amusing thought on the part of medibot when he attempted it, and to the best of our knowledge nobody had ever tried it before. It sounded like a bad idea, but it could have worked out, and at the very least would have provided some entertainment for the internet. If it ended there I wouldn't be typing this. Two more men rallied to the call of medibot though, and both filmed their attempts. The first is by forum member Syrg, and can be seen here. Note that this occurred after viewing medibot's video, not just after hearing about the challenge but not seeing the results. This is important in assessing the stupidity quotient. Note also that neither of these men are even moderately overweight.

Neither is the third man to try. Yes, yet another man with an average build attempted Thompson's Gambit, once again having seen both previous attempts, both times showing exactly how much money and pain are involved in the attempt, as well as giving a good view of the exact amount of blob that causes said pain for judgement of possibility. This man, SA forum member Oyster, is different from the others. Oyster practically seems to live to torture himself for the amusement of the forums. It began with an embarrassing admission that I won't repeat here, but let's just suffice it to say that anyone he co-commentated with on any of the Let's Play videos for months would rub it into his face. It'd be easy to feel bad for him for the level of crap he got in response, but then you have to remember he admitted this without any provocation, and he went far beyond a mere admission afterward. Oyster has a severe love for Megaman, and as such has started to run through the entire series for the aforementioned Let's Play forum, but not just showing gameplay. That would be much too simple, as he is very good at all of these games after playing them repeatedly over the years. No, he has the other forum members give him conditions to make things more difficult. That's not so strange on its own, but there's one particular condition that ended poorly, but no more so than you'd expect just from hearing it. He was told to spin in his chair for thirty seconds every time he took a hit, and well... I won't spoil it but you already probably know where this is going. Also, a minor source of severe masochism was his series of Civilzation 1 videos played on Emperor difficulty. This is really just an exercise in pain in and of itself, but that's horribly tame and not worth mentioning. I don't even want to possibly spoil this, so I'll just suggest you either watch the whole thing or skip to 20:00 in this video to find out what the real thing here is. It's not even just that this event happened, but that he admitted it to the forums. Well, I did call him the third man to attempt Thompson's Gambit, so here it is.

I can't claim to understand what drives a series of reasonable people to do this. I find it harder to understand what drives a series of reasonable people who have seen the results of doing this with their own eyes into attempting it themselves. I do know that there are actually less sane challenges in this vein that people undertake willingly and in greater numbers than this; the Vermonster comes to mind as one such that is even sanctioned by the parent company. All I can say with certainty is this: it's funny as hell to watch you all do it, so keep up the good work. I suppose that's the point really, except that I don't understand how anyone can put up with these consequences just for the amusement of others. You're all better, less sane men than I. Carry on sweet goons, carry on.

Happy Birthday Lisa McPherson

I'm actually a day late now, but I'm sure she won't complain. She's dead after all.

If you're the kind of person who is even likely to read this article, you're probably up to date on this affair, but I'm holding out the naive hope that someone accidentally stumbles onto the blog who didn't already know any of this. For you people who probably don't exist, a brief history can be found here. Yes, I know, wikipedia is full of all sorts of misinformation due to open editing ability, but feel free to confirm any of the events with other sources. The article is cited after all.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, a group of hackers based out of the *chan image post forums known as Anonymous delivered a manifesto to the Church of Scientology, in response to the Church's copyright abuse in trying to cover up the release of one of their propaganda films. Don't make the mistake much of the mainstream media did, the removal of that video was not the cause of the later actions so much as the last straw. The Church was extending its reach into their domain, and they finally were enraged enough to act, though it is certainly not solely in the name of that offense.

Please, do not make the mistake many made in response to the South Park episode that included the entirety of the OTIII revelations about Xenu. Many decided either that Parker and Stone were lying to the viewers, believing that nobody would believe that, (they weren't) or that Scientology is merely a goofy religion that is best ignored. It isn't. The Church has killed, and will kill again. The Church fanatically pursues legal actions to cripple or destroy dissenters, called Suppressive Persons or SPs. SPs were for a long time under the founder's (L. Ron Hubbard) directon considered Fair Game, which described a number of aggressive actions that could be taken to stop the dissent, including murder. Admittedly, the official position of the Church is that they no longer practice Fair Game law, though they still act like it. The Church requires its followers to separate ties from non-Church members, in exactly the same manner as your garden variety cult. All of this information can be found on well cited articles on wikipedia (which you can use the citations to track down primary sources and determine validity for yourself, and you really should), and more sources and even more damning information can be found on xenu.net.

L. Ron coined a word, "enturbulated," which apparently means "turbulent or agitated and disturbed." This is commonly used by Church members in the face of dissenting opinions, asking why the SP is coming to enturbulate them, and so on. Well, it may not be a word to those of us who have not paid extraordinary sums of money to be brainwashed into believing anything we're told, but it is to them, so in context it would make sense to say that Anonymous set out to enturbulate the Church. Shortly after that first manifesto, the members of Anonymous began a DDoS attack against every Church of Scientology web site and affiliate. They have more puppet organizations than you probably think, and most will be listed on xenu.net so I won't bother again here. Additionally, some members were faxing loops of black paper to cause infinite black pages to be printed on the receiving end, prank calling with a number of internet memes, or simply calling their 800 numbers from pay phones and hanging up immediately for an hour or so in hopes of running up their service bills (800 service is more expensive to the company than you probably think).

Yes, most of this is illegal, and it's certainly childish. It also wasn't the point. Mainstream media outlets caught wind of the offensive, and as the attacks went on they even started getting the facts right for a change. Fox News previously made Anonymous out to the second biggest threat to US national security after al-Qaeda, but as Rupert Murdoch is no fan of the Church of Scientology, NewsCorp outlets were giving an actual fair and balanced account of the crimes of the Church rather than pounding their fists into desks and crying menace. In these broadcasts (available on youtube, they are many so take your pick), actual awareness of why a large group of hackers would even bother to attack a supposed Church was spread. This was a victory.

Yesterday, on the birthday of Lisa McPherson, the next phase began. Protestors took to the streets outside of Scientology churches across the world in varying numbers. Most came in masks, for hiding your identity is all but necessary when your opponent is willing to sue you into oblivion. The most popular mask was that of Guy Fawkes, probably the only good thing about the hack job the Wachowski brothers put out was the fad rush causing high production of these props from a good comic. Anyway, some photographs of the events can be seen here, along with some news coverage of this round. Notable people who came out are the family of Lisa McPherson, Arnie Lerma (a former member of the Church who escaped and has turned critic), and the man who originally outed the OTIII document, among others.

The first post of that thread includes approximate counts of the people who came out to support the cause. If you know of the Church's evil but didn't think anyone was really willing to put in the effort to picket, you were wrong. If you are just learning of the things I shared and things I didn't (Operation Freakout and Operation Snow White are good places to start looking, without going into any detail) now, you know you are not alone. In either case, the opportunity to help is not past. Another round of protesting is scheduled for March 15th, L. Ron's birthday. Do not fear being the lone man with a sign, looking like a lunatic on the side of the street. You are not alone, and you can make a difference. Every person helps. Look for details on the forums of enturbulation.org to see where the churches are, and where there are already people planning to protest. If you know of a church that is not listed, feel free to start the process.

Salvation should be free.

Religion shouldn't harm its followers.

Edit: This will teach me to write on a massive sleep deficit. The Church did not attack themselves.

Climate Change

The modern world is full of wonderful technology to make our lives easier or better. The automobile allows us to travel long distances without exerting any significant physical effort. The computer allows us to automate menial tasks in order to exert less effort in our jobs. The internet allows us to view drawings of girls that have been horribly mutilated in a vain attempt to get sexually aroused. The list goes on and on. These technologies may or may not be leading to global climate change. None of these are relevant to this discussion though, as I am choosing to discuss a more insidious technology that is causing climate change right at this second: the thermostat.

Not what you were expecting? I'm not particularly surprised by that, but the thermostat does share much in common with global climate change. For example, everyone knows what they both are, but few people understand them. I'll get into the misunderstandings of the thermostat later, and I think the misunderstandings of the supposedly more important one are well documented. See also any United States government sponsored paper on the topic. More obviously, both affect the climate. This is a tautology in the case of global climate change, but I really wanted to at least get the list to two items. So there aren't all that many similarities in number perhaps, but both are very simple on a conceptual level, and they more or less intersect completely there.

They differ in several ways as well. Obviously, one is typically a smallish plastic box filled with electronics and a thermometer, and the other is a concept pertaining to a number of factors including but not limited to greenhouse gas production. Also, an informed person can trivially control a thermostat, while global climate change is not even necessarily caused directly or entirely by humans. That debate is for another time and probably another place.

The trouble for thermostats start with the fact that they're smallish boxes filled with electronics. Like most similar objects, most people simply don't know how to use them. Oh sure, they think they do, or are simply loathe to admit that they don't and attempt to squeak by anyway. The first issue people have is simply a matter of terminology: up versus down. People, not understanding exactly how a normal thermostat works, treat it like a temperature dial on their ovens or in their car. Perhaps instead they think it's something entirely different and the setting is actually an offset from some temperature. Of course it can't be offset from the external temperature or you'd typically be sweating constantly, but it's not my irrational belief so don't ask me to explain it. Turning the thermostat up usually means twisting the dial to the left or pushing an up button, which is fine if you want to heat up a room. Unfortunately, this is often uttered when the room is not being adequately cooled in the belief that cranking it will crank the air conditioning. In the winter, this particular mistake leads accidentally to the correct result. Turning the thermostat down has the opposite effect, causing the intended effect in the winter while freezing people in the summer. The worst part about this issue is that it's the sort of mistake you wouldn't expect someone to make repeatedly. After all, how many times do you typically have to get the same true/false question wrong before you figure out what the right answer is? If the current setting is wrong, the choices for correction are binary, but somehow repeating the wrong action in hopes that the degree of adjustment was just not enough yet is a common response.

That problem makes a certain degree of sense, though not how long it can persist. This next problem doesn't even warrant any acceptance. On more than one occasion, I've observed someone adjusting the programming of the heat, never the air conditioning for some reason, based on the external temperature. I don't mean the current setting, I mean the scheduled programming. For example, it was unseasonably warm a few days ago, so the weekend daytime temperature was set to 65 instead of the normal 68. When it's colder out, the programming will occasionally reach 70. Leaving out the efficiency issues of adjusting the regular program every time the temperature changes significantly, this betrays a massive lack of understanding of exactly what a thermostat does.

I may as well explain what they do if I'm going to keep demonizing people who fail to understand this. No matter what type of thermostat you use they will have a method of setting a temperature and a thermometer. When the temperature falls below the input temperature (in heating mode, the opposite is true for air conditioning), the thermostat sends a signal to the furnace to activate. When the temperature passes the set temperature by a small amount it sends another signal to deactivate the furnace. In so doing, you can set the average temperature of the room the thermostat is in, and by knowing the difference in temperature across a building affect the average temperature of an entire centrally heated structure to your taste. This is fascinating I'm sure.

Lowering the temperature setting in response to a heat wave is unnecessary. If the outside is so warm that the inside stays above your set temperature, the furnace simply will not activate. Raising the temperature setting in response to a chill is similarly unnecessary. If the external temperature is so low that the internal temperature drops rapidly, the furnace will activate more often and stay active longer to keep the temperature exactly where you wanted it. The interior air temperature of 68 degrees is the same whether it is 62 degrees outside or it is -13 degrees. The only difference is the amount of power required to maintain the 68 degrees. The only real difference anyway.

Upon asking why you'd do this, I was answered "Because it's cold outside." Obviously, I explaned what I just said in those previous two sentences, but that wasn't enough. "Well it seems colder inside." This is an entirely different matter, and one that can be easily remedied by overriding the program (in this case pushing the up button). Feeling cold in the room even at the temperature you want is possible if there's a drafty area that doesn't affect the area near the thermostat as quickly, or if you have strong somatic reactions, but if either was the case why answer how you originally did? Why not just skip the middleman and jump to "I'm not warm enough," and move on with your life? There are no good answers to that question, so I can't give you any. There are only irrational feelings causing somatic reactions and a total misunderstanding of how the whole process works. That's what I'm here for.