Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Dear Comic Creators.

Make covers like this:



THIS IS GOOD. I WILL READ THIS BOOK BASED ON THIS COVER.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Twitter (yeah yeah, you knew it was coming)

Alright, so twitter has taken away the option to see replies to people that you don't follow.

This means that if i say:

@someoneyoudontfollow you don't see this in your twitter feed.

This is how i have had my settings since the beginning, there are people that i don't care to see replies to, and it would make my feed enormous -- and whenever i want a tweet to be for everyone to see, i structure it in such a way that their twitter name is not the first part of the tweet, ie:

You would see this tweet, @someoneyoudontfollow

So i am not super upset about the whole situation -- HOWEVER, i don't think that choice should be taken away. If you want to see EVERYTHING that someone says (which is available by going to the twitter website and looking at their feed) you should be able to do that. You shouldn't have to access twitter.com for functionality that is already there.

The other problem that this raises is, when people try and get around the filtering of replies, i now HAVE to see tweets that i have chosen not to see.

I stopped following JoeQ because i like following Bendis, for the most part, but their back and forth was just intolerable, so i dump the Q, and now i don't see Bendis' tweets at him. However, if he started doing the:

.@JoeQ hey, here is an inside joke, we are so great and funny, want to go for beers and talk about how we are great??

then i would see it, and be sad. So this whole situation pretty much screws over the people that DO want to see the tweets, and then they try and get around that (which i can totally understand) which screws over those that DON'T want to see the tweets.

Come on twitter, remove your head from your sphincter and restore choice.

[little update] it was suggested that "head up their ass" was a little extreme, and really, i was just being silly. I dont think that taking away choice is a good idea, even if they made the option default ON for new users to keep them from being confused and overwhelmed. My concern is a selfish one, that if people start trying to get around the filtering, my feed is going to grow exponentially and become unwieldy.

Friday, May 08, 2009

#whycapes

I have often thought about why i like superhero comics almost exclusively.

I recently asked for some recommendations for other books from the kickass @madmarvelgirl from fantastic fangirls (Caroline).

She asked me some interesting questions that i actually had to think a lot more about than i thought. Why do i like the books i do, what do i like about them, average questions to get a feel for what to recommend.

I think that i like comic books because while bad stuff happens to the comic heroines *usually* nothing TOO bad happens, and they always kick everyone's butts. Good triumphs in the end, wrongs are made right, all that good stuff.

I think it became apparent to me why i like the books that i do, when i read the Spider-Man / Black Cat story by Kevin Smith. In it, there is a terrible scene where you assume that Black Cat has been raped. I had an immediate reaction to this, and it wasn't good.
I tried to figure out why i was so mad, or what the feelings were that i felt when i read it - it was betrayal. In the books that i tend to read things like this - real life terribly bad things - don't happen. I don't have to worry about having my guard up against them, I can just sit back and enjoy, secure in the idea that everyone gets what is coming to them.
I felt angry and betrayed on many levels. I felt like this was a stunt (it was, even within the book itself), i felt like it didn't need to happen -- it was just Smith saying "that's right, i am so edgy!" and it was cheap. The situation is handled poorly on so many levels, from people telling Black Cat what she HAS to do, assuming she is fragile and crazy, they are dismissive of her, I found it very hard to read. For someone who talks about his wife being a feminist, i dont know how he wrote that crap.

But anyway. In comic books the women are strong and beat up the bad guys, they can fly and are not pinned down by ordinary drudgery (cept for Spider-Man, but then, i dont read his book ;)). They can take matters into their own hands, heal wounds if any are inflicted, and are generally fabulous. That's why i read superhero comics.

When Did You Know You Were a Geek?

this is a reply i made to geekgirldiva's post.

i knew i liked playing video games, i knew that i tended to like "boy movies" instead of "girl movies", but i always thought that i would grow out of it. That i would one day choose shoes over games (i do like shoes, but i LOVE games) and that i would "grow up". I realized that this wouldn't happen when i was totally unhappy at my "grown-up job" (desk monkey at IBM) and that if i wanted to be happy in life, i needed to do something that i loved, and that thing was making video games.
I had gamed a lot as a kid, then i had sort of tried to get away from it, because i didnt know any people that shared my interest (pre-broadband internet) and it was lonely having an interest that i couldnt share -- when games had "2 player" on the box i knew i would only get to play 1.
But i had always kept up with industry news, i had continued to play various games, and then i knew -- that is what i would do.
And so i did. Now i make games.
Games lead me to comics, lead me to heroclix, and off the deep end into geekdom - but not being along in my interests anymore made a huge difference.