Day Off
(This is take two under this title as I was foolish and shot out a long, rambling post without saving it once, and when I went looking for an image Windows was offended by something and killed every browser window I had open. On the up side, this one's almost certainly going to be a much briefer post.)
Owing to no one particular thing, but contributed by several, I decided by late Wednesday (when I found myself needing to go back into work at 8pm to Make Something Happen in less than half the time it would happen according to normal specs) that I would be taking Friday off.
This particular client is one who honed his skills while working for a company that tried treating us like a department of their own company. Sure, there's an upside to this, but the downside is that they started treating us as if they could drop anything on us at any time and have us treat it as the priority issue. One way they'd accomplish this was by reaching to the very top any time they couldn't immediately get hold of the people in the company they were supposed to be dealing with, or if they didn't think the people they were talking to had adequately dropped everything else and fallen in on solving their problems. Unleashing the 800 lb gorilla that is The President may have comedic possibilities from a distance, and it may get something done for someone sooner, but it also breeds a lot of resentment and truly wastes a great deal of time as people have to deal with his needing to be brought up to speed on something he doesn't really want to be brought up to speed on because, well, he has us to handle these things.
Augh.
Anyway, that I had to come back in Wednesday night all but cemented the idea of taking Friday off. I have vacation days accruing, too, and as I look at the remainder of the year, the days I want to take off, that I can only carry 5 over into 2007 and that taking a block of days (aside from trying to bridge the gap between Christmas and New Year's) isn't going to work. Taking a Friday off here and there along the way to bleed off the excess and some tension... it's a good path.
By Thursday afternoon I found out that something I was looking for was already on the way, and that FedEx is scheduled to bring it today, so that was either more validation or icing on the cake, depending upon how philosophical or hungry you may be. If the delivery goes off as planned I'll doubtless have a post about that later today.
As always, too many things going on in the world to comment on.
A belated, public Happy Birthday to Tammy!
Over on Highlander's blog is a post & comment give-and-take over the issue of the depiction of women in mainstream comics. It was in response to a piece written by someone going by the name of Willow trying to quickly deconstruct the problem. It's all over there, just follow the link. Had I not been more preoccupied I would have commented on it shortly after it posted, but once Willow came in for some give and take with H I decided I didn't have anything new or constructive to add, and so stayed out of it.
H appears to have genuinely taken what Willow wrote as a revelation, which is always a nice development. What she wrote mostly struck me as obvious, but I'm coming from a different perspective. I've never been the really sexually-driven type, and I was raised by my mom and two older sisters... no really strong boys club atmosphere, no porn stash, and cheesecake shots have always generally bored me. What passes for costumes on most superheroines -- especially as depicted in the past 15 years -- has been a source of embarassment for me as a comics fan. No one could hang a "horndog" sign on me.
Willow's piece otherwise put me on edge with its tone, though that's always such a matter of perspective in a written piece. Over there it mostly could have been the repeated use of the term "fanboy," which may be one of those terms like "nigger" that is acceptable if we say it but offensive if someone else does. Whatever the reason, I was getting an arch vibe from it that initially followed her over into her comments on H's blog (again -- all of this as it struck me), though H appeared to have bowed long and low enough that she loosened up. (That isn't meant to be demeaning to H, merely my noting that he took considerable pains to show his intentions were pure and honorable.)
Crypt Leak sent me a couple of things along the way last night, ranging from the Census Bureau losing 217 laptops and a piece on signs of global warming that has a nice array of associated pieces and satellite images.
Meanwhile, I see from my fly-by runs of Wizkids' site and boards that overnight they added REVs of the Vision and Ant Man to the REV of Legacy/Captain Marvel/Photon they'd put up earlier in the week. Very cool additions - going purely as named additions. While duly tempted to look I will resist. I'm generally trying to avoid details - especially pictures - of each, so I'm likely to stay away from all threads and posts having to do with the set prior to late October (if I attend a pre-release on the 28th) or November... 16th or 17th, I guess. November 16th I expect to be opening my brick, and the 17th my case.
In the meantime, I'm keeping to Boneyward's list and getting no closer than this to the actual pieces -- I just don't click on any of the individual entries. At the moment there are 13 figures in the gallery, and since Wizkids hasn't officially added this Friday's sneak peek yet this may go up before the end of the day.
From this distance it's looking like a good set, and I'm mostly catching a positive buzz from the people who are looking.
Okay... back to a mostly domestic day.
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Comments
Thanks for all your help yesterday! I really appreciate it!
(a) Willow put things in a way I hadn't heard before. I didn't find her particularly arch or confrontational. When she pointed out that how a character like Huntress dresses seems to her, as a woman, to simply be something that that person WOULD NOT DO, I realized that, yeah, a male artist's choice to expose every square inch of skin imaginable might not realistically coincide with what a martial artist crimefighter would actually wear into combat. It was a new thought to me. Along with that, I also realized that in my experience, most women do not respond well to women who choose to dress very provocatively all the time, for no particular reason, and nearly all superheroines do this. Again, this would cause a conflict with most women readers that men certainly wouldn't get. We don't go "she's a hero, but she's dressed like a slut, how can she be a hero?" We simply go "wow, she's hot, and look at her kick ass". It's a different way of perceiving things, but the female way is just as valid as ours, or perhaps more, since, you know, the character actually represents, to some extent, their gender.
(b) at the same time, I recalled the Mike Grell Cosmic Boy thing, did a search on the 'net, turned up a few more Grell covers from that era, and realized that one of the myths I was promulgating in defense of sleazy good girl art -- guys don't mind when male characters are idealized, so why should women -- is crap. Guys certainly DO mind when male characters are SEXUALIZED, as Grell pretty explicitely did... and women aren't complaining about Black Canary being pretty, they're complaining about the fact that she's decked out like a fetish queen in clothing that a character with her competence, skills, and job requirements would never wear.
So, the two... or three... things came together and the light bulb went off. I'm sorry you took that as me bowing and scraping; I like to feel that I'm someone who can admit it when I'm wrong.
Glad you took the day off. Hope you're feeling better. I put a thank you for the Man of Steel fig on my blog, I hope you saw it. I deeply appreciate the gift.
H: You did a fine job of explaining yourself the first time, no worries. I wasn't belittling the revelation, simply that I wasn't in the same starting place as you were in this, and nothing Willow said was news to me. It's just a difference in backgrounds and levels of comfort.
The way most superheroines have been dressed has always struck me as impractical at best and often embarassing on top of that. As the hyperbolic styles of rendering "ideal" female anatomy has run towards the freakish over the years the combination's been one of the larger factors in keeping me from feeling good about recommending (or even being seen with) some modern comics.
The arch and confrontational aspect in my reading may have almost entirely arisen from my being unable to read fanboy as anything but something she'd spit at the screen, something that wasn't in the least allayed by her "generic catch all term" aside the first time she used it. As I mentioned in this posting it would have been as if someone was discussing the perceptives of Blacks and kept referring to them as niggers. Fanboy is a term that either has to be used with comradely affection or as a derision, not as if it's some flat, emotionally-disconnected shorthand. All, of course, IMHO.
That led into my general perception of "bowing and scraping", as you were continuing to be solicitous.
As for me, I took the day off, but I can't say I'm feeling better. The desire to switch off permanently is a strong one. It's combination of things.
I saw the thank you post but didn't have something come quickly to mind that wouldn't have felt like me just stepping into the spotlight to take a bow. I was hoping you'd like the piece, so mission accomplished. (We'll all have to work hard to revalidate that phrase this century, won't we?)
'Fanboy' has never irked me. In fact, I find the word somewhat complimentary. Perhaps that's strange of me, but I have no trouble identifying with it... perhaps I've just taken the old 'make it your own and they can't hurt you with it' to an extreme. I've done the same with 'geek' and 'nerd'. I'm happy to be a geek, geeks don't start fights with anyone and tend not to be mean; geeks are usually smart and imaginative and while we're often socially clueless, still, I'd rather be inept than cruel. And fanboy... I don't know. I'm a fanboy, and given that I'm getting a lot of traffic right now due to a link being posted to the entry at a linksite called When Fangirls Attack!, I just can't take it as an insult.
But, as you say, we are coming at it from two very different starting points. I didn't see anything in Willow's post that was derisive, patronizing, or demeaning. If you saw it that way, then of course you're going to see me not being actively confrontational to her as being placatory or 'solicitious'. I just can't see it that way. She's young and as her comments on my blog indicate, she can be overly strident. But I didn't find her disrespectful or unpleasant, in the way Ragnell often is, and so, I didn't speak to her from that place.
I am very pleased with, and touched by, the gift of the Man of Steel figure. And, by the way, the Ant-Man fig looks superb, as does the new Vision, and both have terrific dials... perhaps not perfect, but very good. I'm VERY psyched about Supernova.
So far no realistic complaints from me about the figure list. I'm hoping the Majestrix Lilandra piece has an interesting surprise and works well with the Shi'ar pieces.
Oh, I was wondering when it came to the Badoon if they might have at least considered making one of the REV a completely different sculpt and gone for that big, gorilla-like with a metal trapjaw "Monster of the Badoon" as one of the three? They could make it at the same scale as Blockbuster in Legacy, though I suppose technically it would be a giant.
Plenty to conjure with in the set.
At last count there were 25 characters/REV sets confirmed, (I'm presuming the Super Apes are a single REV with different sculpts) so that leaves 15 characters to be confimed. Plenty of fun to be had!
I'm watching to see when I finally just give in and start pulling through the gallery... ;)
There's still a few places left in the pool if you're interested...;)
Still, even I doubt I'll make it.