Worthwhile Reading Much happening around here this weekend, leaving me scant time for the 'Net. I'll get to that later, though. For now, though, while taking a quick look around I checked in on Tim's blog , and was soon directed to an interview with Scott Ritter , in which the former Marine lays out part of the case against the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, the obvious set-up for one in Iran, related Clinton-era policies and personages, the absence of a true peace movement in the U.S. and a general indictment of the indolent, comfort cocoon-wrapped U.S. public. Good, good material. I hope to comment on it later, but the man does a good job of speaking for himself.
Posts
## Meme-ries ## Okay, I'm getting into another of these memes a few days after averyone else. I saw it over on Tammy 's (where there are links to a few others in their comments) and I'm taking a stab at it via my recent birthday. I knew two of the events I'd choose before I even checked the date, though. The meme? Go to Wikipedia , punch in some special month and day -- birthday, anniversary, whatever, and list three events, three birthdays and three deaths from that date. As with nearly everyone else, if I like more than three then you're going to see more than three: Events 1755 - Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language published in London. 1912 - The British passenger liner RMS Titanic sinks at about 2:20 a.m. after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic almost three hours earlier. (That damned Kate Winslet escapes a much-deserved watery grave.) 1923 - Insulin first became generally available for use by diabetics. 1955 - The first McDonald&
Sinister Spiders (Well... some of them...) Okay, they've been spilling some more info from this set as the working week rolls to a close, likely expecting much to stand revealed by the middle of next week anyway, so I'm going to look at some of it in a little detail. This is a Heroclix post with some comics angles thrown in, and will likely lean heavily on Spider-man, so unless most or all of that is of interest then don't... When word came along that we were getting a full REV (Rookie/Experienced/Veteran) treatment for Spider-man in this set it wasn't the most welcome news for some of the players. After all, this is the eighth Marvel expansion since the game's launch in May of 2002 -- making it the ninth Marvel set when one kicks in the very first one, and we've had an REV of Spidey in four of the previous sets. Okay, the purist could point out that one of them was meant to be the Ultimates Spidey, but, really, who can really tell a difference in this form?
( Almost) Live From Tokyo! One of those pleasant moments is when email arrives from out of the blue from a new voice operating out on the 'Net, and they have something interesting and creative going on. So it was that this morning's mail included something from Dirk , a European artist currently staying in Tokyo who's been blogging about his experiences there in a novel fashion . While indications are that he has more than enough assignments on queue already to cover through the end of June, when this approach will have run its course, what he's been doing is to take assignments from readers and report in the form of a comic the following week. So far he's been sent to explore specific locations, strange cultural phenomena, food, religion, etc. While very much his own style, there's something in the shift of line styles from elaborate detail to comic simplicity and exaggeration that I'm reminded of what I've sometimes seen from Zippy's creator, Bil
Behold! The Anticlimax! Thanks for the check-ins, etc., but most of my time and energy's been taken up with things I'd rather not be doing. Worse, on one scale none of that matters because I still spend much of my day trying not to be seen, as I'm always one awkward question away from having to explain how I haven't found the time nor energy (and try not to let slip that even rarer is any interest in doing it) to get a particular, ne'er ending project rolling . The situation's an extremely important one or two steps more complicated than it seems, but I'm not going to be discussing that with anyone. It's all combined to put me back in one of my almost perpetural dark moods, and so I've been less fit company than I normally am, which isn't much in the first place. No one wants to be hanging around someone who's often dangerously close to sincerely hoping for a massive stroke to take him out of the game. Truly. So, hardly worth a nearly two
50 Things on the way to 45 A little while back I saw a couple "50 Things about me" lists, from Tammy - where it started- to Opus and L.C. among others. At first I had little interest in doing it, but with a 45th birthday set to rise just before Jesus does I gave it a second thought, a quick try and most of it came tumbling out. It dropped to a trickle when I had 18 spots still open, but they eventually filled in. I tossed them randomly into open spots on a numbered list. Once on the list I didn't remove anything, and once the last spot was filled up this went on the site, warts and all. I've tried to keep them all my own, though in several cases I read items on those other lists and thought that covered me, too, so in they went. If leaving big things off the list is cheating, then I've certainly cheated. However few people come through here, no place on the Internet is private and everyone has enemies or has simply run afoul of cretins who wish them harm as s
Quick Monday Morning Update (Including early evening update .) Sun's shining and I'd rather be looking ahead to a day of work in and around the house than the mountainous mess in the workplace, but except for the sunshine part that could be almost any Monday. All that sucked last week continues to do so this week and threatens to intensify if not this week then next, but we all have our problems. Knowing the problems faced by some of the readers I try to console myself; I wouldn't want to trade. I don't know if it'll come to anything, but in an overnight email the ebay user who gave me my first negative feedback has at least offered to withdraw it. I've never gone through the process, so I don't know how onerous it is -- hopefully it's fairly straightforward, though I don't know whether or not it depends upon some official review. He's so new to ebay that if it's not a quick and easy process... We'll see. ( Update I: Mutual withdrawa
99.7% Have you ever seen the movie Kind Hearts and Coronets ? It's an entertaining film from 1949 in which a man, Louis Mazzini, whose mother was disinherited because she married outside her family's wishes, grows to have a simmering resentment for the wealthy and aristocratic D'Ascoyn family. His mother died far before her time under circumstances created in part by her being cut off from the family's resources. His lowly status grates on him until he conceives of a plan to murder (in a series of actions cleverly executed to appear as accidents) every D'Ascoyn standing between him and a dukedom. Operating under his given name, he plans to clear the path and then allow the executors and legal process to discover and seemingly reveal to him that he is the heir. The always entertaining Alec Guiness played multiple roles in the film, specifically the succession of D'Ascoyns (male and female) who are creatively done away with. The twist late in the film is that whil
Despise the Prize This is my standing statement for my problems with prize-only limited edition pieces in the tournament scene for Heroclix. This way I can just link to this entry and not have to repeat myself. As ever, all of the following is my opinion based on my experience. It's a long and well-considered opinion, but on an issue that at its core is emotional it's difficult to take this cleanly out of the realm of opinion and the subjective. To be blunt, I have a difficult time sincerely believing when people tell me that the prize LEs aren't important to them or any of their players. But, for the sake of argument, let's say what they say is true...then why do we need prize-only LEs? They're either important or they're not. I objected to prize LEs in the early years of the game, and so I only went out to marquees where the random pull element made the matches less stacked and calculated. It was imperfect, but the best available. In general, I just tried my