Another reason to think "Horror" when someone mentions Atlantic City With a comics convention coming up this weekend I especially enjoyed this vicarious trip through a recent horror convention . I've never been to one, and it's good to get all the best out of it without getting near it. The guys at X-Entertainment did it up properly -- reminding me (not that I needed the reminder) that it's best to make a weekend of it and stay in a hotel either where the convention's being held or as close as possible for all the reasons Matt mentions.
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Someone else was in work today... ...besides me and, most likely, Mark Gibson , since someone at Wizkids slipped in another, unannounced, sneak peek. In the quirky spirit of their previous announcement, Arnim Zola, it's another character who popped up in the 1970's, set to make the DC fans and young'ens say "Who?!" Why, it's an aristocratic vampire with a bizarre fashion sense: Baron Blood . While I'm sure the sculpt is going to look goofy, I can't help but think that some of it's due to the perspective. With a name like that, still, looking goofy is just in keeping with a theme. It may be important to be aware that this was one of those retroactively inserted characters, created in stories written in the 1970s for tales set in the WWII era in the Roy Thomas series, The Invaders . Anyone who's visited the real comics from the so-called Golden Age knows that someone like this wouldn't stand out. Still, hey, given '70s fashions the B...
Eh? I’ve gotten a large pot of chili together – more as an anytime meal for Monday than anything for tonight, especially since it’ll improve with some long simmering – and somewhere along the line my mind turned to local accents. It’s not a new topic for me, as I’m a Crypt Leak and I find it comes up in conversation in the aftermath of most run-ins with stronger versions of it. I've probably touched on it at least once in the past year or so of blogging, but I don't recall it specifically, hence this post. It was probably a local call-in show I heard on the radio while I was riding around today that triggered this. Here in the area surrounding Philadelphia there’s a distinct, appalling accent. It’s amusing when jokingly overlaid on a foreign language, but in day to day life it’s an earsore. There are times when, if I’m not careful, I’ll slip back into it for a beat. A hideous sound, there are times when Stall...
Yet another one for the file (Thanks to Grant for pointing this one out.) It's lengthy, but this piece on the trail of lies leading back to the White House regarding torture policies is worth looking through. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld and Gerorge W. Bush himself are all among the implicated, though at the moment it's mainly their friends and allies who are in a position of prosecuting them or, as you might have guessed, waving the charges off and ignoring them. Substantiated charges of perjury strike me as a good place to start. It remains to be seen if the much-lauded American Heartland is capable of being riled up over charges of lying under oath that don't involve consentual sexual relations, but we can hope for a moral epiphany to strike enough of them. For now, I would ask that you digest the information and pass the gist of it along. Doing anything about it may take some time -- and there will simply ...
Weekend A trip to visit and have lunch with the in-laws on Saturday, and an early birthday celebration for Nick (who'll turn 13 on June 1st) on Sunday. Aside from that, there's plenty of housework that needs to be done, one or two sessions in work to clear out a forgotten mess that surfaced from the mists on Friday morning, work on my Legends zine for the June issue, and if something arrives in the mail Saturday (which should have been here today) I'll have a fun project to work on in there, too. More on that once it's a reality and after I spring the final product on a couple people. This will probably mean a few, cryptic "it arrived" and "work's going well on..." messages in-between, but that's the way of things. Beyond that, plenty of reading to catch up on. Next week will technically be a short work week. Even though I'll be in work for at least part of Monday, no one else should be so it'll be peaceful. If I can go in,...
Another Clix update (Will they never end?!) As expected, Wizkids quietly slipped in a few more previews early this evening. The Fantastic Four is largely complete with the addition of the rookie , experienced , and the Johnny Storm "super rare" piece --- but so far, no veteran. It's been several hours now, so it's either an oversight and they've gone home, or they're holding out on that one for now. As you can see (and as we all expected) it's the same sculpt as we've seen for the mail-away LE piece, just rendered in a translucent form. Having seen the more fully painted version I have a much better sense of the sculpt, but the shot they decided to put up for the translucent one makes it look like a mess. Many players will be happy to see on these in-set versions of the Torch he has the Energy Shield/Deflectio n he had in his Clobberin Time versions. This plays critically in many plans, because nearly everyone will be fielding these (at least th...
Masked (in)justice? Excuse me if this is something that was on every third blog yesterday; I haven't been making the rounds. When I first read about a man being arrested for wearing a Grinch mask in public , my initial reaction was that it was an ill-considered move. (Well, no. My first thought was that they should have done this when Jim Carrey left the makeup trailer a few years ago, but that's a different sort of crime.) Yesterday was a busy day as it was, so I didn't get back to it. This morning, Grant sent me a link to the follow-up , which focused on the city's defense of the action. It's one of those cases where it's easy to get a quick head of steam, but there are some practical considerations along with the feeling that it could be more energy than it's worth. All of that played a part in my letting it pass on Thursday. My gut reaction is to say that it's a "presumed guilty" issue, driven by lawsuits over liability, forcing local ...
Shibboleth One of Tony Collett's posts today was the result of a new online quiz to determine a best-fit belief match with established religions. Reminding me of the Kuder occupational interest survey they gave us back in high school (when the intent was to give us a similar, best-fit interest match with a career), we're required to react to each statement with either a Disagree, Agree, or three shades in between. Whenever I reached a statement which I found to be fundamentally flawed (the statement presumed a divine intent or station in life for someone as a basis for the question), or the question struck me as an irrelevant, unimportant issue, I stuck to the indifferent, middle space. The results weren/t much of a surprise, though it's easy to see how one or two minor shifts in my answers would have yielded some strong changes. I tried to do as Tony did and use the code the site generated to display the results, but the code it generated kept being identified by Blo...
Fantastic Forces: 5 weeks and counting (Another Heroclix post. Non-fans, run away!) Though they've choked back on the flow as compared to a couple weeks ago, we're still getting an unprecedented amount of information on Fantastic Forces , a Heroclix set that has better than a month until even the pre-release events. My continuing speculation is that people at one or more levels in the marketing chain are... let's say anxious about the market interest in this set. This will not only be the first set to include more than the one-per-case giant figure seen in the past two sets, and to include double-based figures with a new movement mechanic , it'll be the first set where the number of clix per box will be cut from 4 to3, to accomodate the larger figure in each booster box. Some of us ha ve rolled with it, and are simply watching to see the pieces justify the change, but more than a few are standing, arms folded, with variations on "there's no way you can prove...
24 skidoo So, who else watched this season of 24 through to the end? How many were increasingly disappointed, step by step, with (at least) the final hour? A stealthed nuclear missile has been flying from the midwest towards a coastal target, and is shot down over Los Angeles with no release of radiation? Okay... alright. I can almost buy it. Safety protcols would keep it from the carefully-controlled detonation sequence until it officially reached its target; it isn't as if the warhead's filled with nitro. I would still expect a crude "dirty bomb" release as the payload was blown apart in the air. But to layer on this Jack Bauer evading being turned over to the Chinese by faking his death? Are the Chinese this dim? I guess we're supposed to believe that after being so dogged in their pursuit, that all they really wanted was a little attention. And at least we know that Jack was willing to go through it, and only ran - with former-presidential permission, no le...
Putting their muzzles where their mouths are Mark Gibson relates the latest flap Bill Maher's being made a part of. It's Let's Be Treasonable . Along the same lines is a recent and ongoing battle going on over some chickenhawks being pressed on why they're not enlisting to serve the Bush Administration's great cause overseas.
Craven or Stupid? Having thrown my sleep schedule off terribly during the weekend, leaving me shuffling, zombie-like through much of my Monday, I went to bed relatively early last night. So it was that I awoke this morning to hear that a supposed "compromise" had been reached on the issue of judicial filibusters . I am so disgusted with this move as to almost be beyond words. A threat was made, the Democrats caved, and the "compromise" announcement was made in some feeble attempt for the Dems to make a pretense at dignity while the Republicans can pretend to have given something up. Oh, my, the filibuster over judicial nominees is preserved... providing it's rarely, if ever, used. Three of the formerly-blocked nominees (Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor) now get to sail through into a partisan shoo-in vote. Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen! A compromise has been reached, and the bar is now lower than ever! Of course, along with being ...
Another Monday morning person to be happy not to be The pictures say enough. Certainly, this is nothing compared to the scope of the ruined life mentioned this time last week, but hopefully this week's unnamed example provides views of a bigger, single blunder than any of us here have been responsible for. ( Credit where due : I'm a Crypt Leak passed this one along late Sunday night.) Oh, and I am going to harp on yesterday's topic concerning the fate of judicial filibusters. Please be sure your elected representatives know you're aware of the issue, informed about it , and (I hope) opposed to the change being proposed. Time's growing short, and while the GOP "leadership" has demonstrated its willingness to do what it wants to do, you will at least want to be able to say that you tried to temper the judgement of Congress by sounding a note of warning.
Senate Republicans claim they have the votes to go "nuclear" Hardly a new issue (including when I started a draft of this back in April, only to leave it sitting unfinished), but one that's close to becoming a reality, is a move by senate Republicans - irritated that 10 judicial nominees have been blocked from confirmation by Democrats exercising the filibuster provisions (never mind the roughly 208 nominees who ran through largely on party-line votes) - are looking to change the rules and prevent filibusters from being possible in such instances. The link above is to a piece from April 24th, but the situation's essentially unchanged. If you want to quickly come up to speed on the issue -- and to get a better idea of how well or poorly informed the media has kept you -- you could do far worse than to give a quick read to The Top 10 filibuster falsehoods . It neatly covers the key elements. As outrageous as the sanctimonious cries by Republican congressmen that the b...
Saturday with the Sith (and a little comics afterwards) This should prove spoiler-free. Overall, Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith gets a thumbs up. Not a "woo-hoo!", doing handsprings rave of a review, but a steady "I'm glad I went out to see it." Part of the reason is that it does a reasonably good job of giving us what we needed to put everything in order for things to pick up 16 or so years later (their time) with Episode IV, which we ancients simply refer to as Star Wars . Part of it is that it simply works so much better than the first two episodes did. There was so much that needed to be done in this film that there wasn't much time for screwing around. Action, deception, conflicts, deaths, slippery moral slopes, transformations, and a retreat-and-lick-their -wounds ending (as anticipated) reminiscent of 1980's Empire Strikes Back -- which I'm more than inclined to declare remains the pinnacle of the Star W...
More information leading to important questions I keep sitting on post bits concerning the upcoming showdown over judicial filibusters, and I'm going to continue to do so for a little longer. It's one of those issues where I quickly become too angry to maintain a useful tone. I'll correct that soon, for all the good it'll do. In the meantime, I was wondering when someone would make a point of how unbalanced the potential job & revenue loss will be to blue states while red ones will see a nice jump over-all if the Pentagon's proposed base closure list were to be followed. Why, I'm sure it's all a coincidence. It couldn't be as if there's any mix of pay-off or punishment for support or lack thereof for Dubya in the 2004 election, could there? I also see a useful follow-up to something I commented on back on May 9th as another one for the (impeachment) case file. I probably should have made more fuss about it at the time. I see that...
Those were the voyages... Over on his blog, Mark Gibson briefly shared some comments on this weekend's final episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise , in a piece cleverly titled Enterprise: Trip's End . I left a comment block over there - a mixed response and general commentary - which I may as well reshuffle into a blog entry here. (As is Haloscan's way frequently, though, at last check it was still showing 0 comment, though clicking on it shows the text to be there.) I understand the generally valid criticisms Mark made, but perhaps I went in expecting something worse, and so didn't take it as badly. This was thick in a last block of workweek-defying escape time, so perhaps I wasn't inclined to inspect the horse's mouth so closely. I missed these last two episodes on Friday, btw, and so its Sunday night rebroadcast was part of an unusually long block of tv watching for me. Starting with The Simpsons - a show I've become distanced from in recent years, but whi...
Sometimes "dark" is just murky Abbygal , having recalled that just before season two began I was gearing up to give it a second chance, passed along word of cancellation of HBO's Carnivale , delivered by the series' creator Dan Knauf. (Apparently the word became official the middle of last week, btw.) Much of the creator's announcement was calm and reasonable, and presumably his later mentioning that he considered their decision to cancel to be "bone-headed" was largely done with his small audience of devotees in mind, as even he had pointed out that the show was hugely expensive to produce and didn't have the audience size to support it. The assertion that it was "thrown into a hopeless time -slot" is ludicrous. Sunday night at 9 worked so very terribly for six seasons of Oz , five of The Sopranos , four of Six Feet Under (with a concluding sixth and fifth season of each to come), Band of Brothers , and others, and, my, isn't Dead...
Not far, far away enough for my comfort sometimes With another - the final, we're told (the tagline is "The Sage is complete") - big screen Star Wars film set to debut the middle of next week, all manner of fans and people pandering to the same are beginning to emerge again. Fans, and merchandise for the same, of the Star Wars franshise continue to be some of the most unsettling in fandom. Here we see a "Slave Leia Pet Costume," which could be innocently, if misguidedly cute, but is something I find vaguely disturbing. The sound's poor and the delivery isn't much better, but at least a little creativity and humor went into this flash spot for Yoda's Force Academy . I'm guessing that this "Yodas' Jedi Academy" diploma ad I'm a crypt leak forwarded to me, with all its punctuation and spelling errors, is also intentionally done up as a joke. In general it's nice to see that some of the fans try to have a sense of humor ab...
Saturday. Whenever. (Local techno-upgrade followed by much ado about upcoming clix, so read or skip as you wish.) Much local running around today. Having been nudged to get the kids (for nearly all intents ages 13 & 15) set up with cell phones, and knowing I resolutely that I did not intend to do that using an expansion of the awful AT&T plan we currently had, I'd been keeping eyes and ears open for the best plans available. I'm a Crypt Leak & Abbygal (feel free to let me know if you two want me to refer to you any differently, though "Batman & Robin"would probably be a little more kinky than anyone would be co mfortable with) had had a pleasant change-over to T-Mobile recently, so I pointed Ari in that direction. Sure enough, that was looking pretty good. After I took care of some errands (primarily quickly checking on some samples for a rush project at the lab, and finally getting a disc of computer fixes and a FCBD promo Batman on their w...
Dropping the F-bomb on terrorism? Tammy passed along a piece on fighting (some) terrorist organizations and international movements via feminism . The author at least immediately notes that the word itself is enough of a poison pill that it would have to be renamed for this effort. The bottom line is to lead an effort to press for education and human rights for women globally. The piece is worthy of some consideration, starting with stepping away from the vague naming of the enemy as "terrorism" - though it's unlikely this administration will do it anytime soon, since keeping the enemy as a vague, intangible thing allows them to keep the fear going and maintain the level of political power they've had. As soon as people start to deal in facts , they're going to lose much of the dark mystery that has allowed them to operate so freely. As for renaming the enemy as "extremist Islamic insurgency" I suggest we at least drop the "insurgency" - ...
Your papers, please Last night blogger was down for service and didn't come back up while I was on. One of the things to catch up on is how a national ID card was all but signed into law (Bush is virtually certain to sign it) passed the US Senate yesterday once sponsors of the Real ID Act glued it into an Iraqi military spending bill. Set to go into effect in May 2008, anyone without such a card will be effectively prohibited from riding Amtrak or by air, opening a bank account or entering a federal building. It's core based in xenophobia, its supporters tout it as an important homeland security tool. Attempts were made to warn the public last week but word didn't get around quickly and solidly enough to do any good. It's unlikely to make us one iota safer, but it will not only make it easier to track our every move beyond the local scene and make some contractors very wealthy, but it will also concentrate a great deal of information about each of us in...
Click on the graphic to read about the latest, potentially deadly item for the sadomasochist's kitchen. I was pleased to read that the bottles only contained a few crystals of the concentrate, wondering initially what awful things would be done with even a small bottle full of this by some well-heeled moron with a bent for practical jokes.
Free Comic Book Day 2005: Postmortem Okay, so the main section found here is a press release, but the word was generally positive and echoed by several of the responses in the comments thread there. On a more mercenary note, it's worth noting that the purple-ringed, promotional Batman clix that were give-aways have been selling briskly on eBay. Well over 80 of them have already sold and 40 auctions for them were running currently at last check.