Artist detained for writecrime

In another reminder of why individual suspicions can never be used to justify detention or arrest, artist Mark Sable was detained last week at LAX for a script to a comic found in his luggage. That's right - not a weapon, not pepper spray or an incendiary device, but a script.

Considering our First Amendment protections the content of the script is immaterial, but it involved terrorism and a burgeoning government police state. Regardless of whether the uncreative minds of the TSA agents thought this an appropriate subject for a script, or even subversive is also immaterial - printed words represent no threat to a plane or my nation, while using personal suspicions and biases as an excuse for oppression and harassment does incalculable damage to any civilized nation and to its values.

If you in opposition to the Fourth Amendment allow mere "suspicion" to be a suitable cause for a search or detention, it will be used inappropriately and it will result in further First Amendment violations as the subjective judgments of sometimes-corrupt, sometimes-stupid agents become law and trump any semblance of due process.

Comics artist Mark Sable detained for Unthinkable acts (SFScope)

The BBC Reviews "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

I wish I had thought of this. The page makes it clear that this is actually a review of all of Michael Bay's work, a sort of appropriate retrospective. Had I not edited the inch-long footer out of existence you would have seen that without my telling you.

Choose Your Own Adventure

To continue reading this post, continue below.
To read something a great deal more interesting, turn to page 177.

I remember reading the Choose Your Own Adventure series (and its spinoffs) ravenously as a kid, to the extent that I'm convinced they were the first paperback fiction I ever read. As a child unable to see the flaws and cracks in a system, they seemed to offer me the illusion of choice without the obligation of seeing a particular plot thread through to the end.

To the uninitiated (and you can see a more complete explanation here), the books were standard schlocky kid's comic book types of stories, with titles like You Are Microscopic (the first I ever read) and Prisoner of the Ant People, with the twist that the plot was comparatively fluid - after a few introductory pages, the story would begin to branch off and allow you to have a sort of control over your character's actions.

For example, after learning that your aged uncle is a mad scientist who has discovered the key to immortality, you may have the option of taking a swig of the serum or offering it to him first, with page numbers for each decision. You'd follow the appropriate page and continue reading, having made a limited choice of the plot's progression. Anyone familiar with these types of stories should recognize the inevitable events that follow depending on your choices (for example, you might take the serum, becoming immortal. Your uncle dies of a heart attack before being able to make any more, and you become a sort of filthy rich eternal celebrity, starring in films and endorsing whatever products immortal people still need, until the book closes in the year 3000).

Usually these books followed the ". . . with a HORRIBLE twist!" style of writing, however, so it's likely that about 80% of the endings would involve your being crushed or shrunk to nothing or left floating forever in space. It was fairly difficult to find the ending where your character is surrounded by a pool full of jewels and bikini babes, so most of us learned to save our places with our fingers when making a decision. In fact, the finger contortions involved in making a decision three or four levels deep (while trying to avoid having your character eaten by a spider or run over by a car) probably gave the young generation much of their motor control, directly leading to the computer age. (Hey, a quarter billion of those books were sold, let's not underestimate their impact.)

Anyway, these books offered only the illusion of choice, as I said above. Most of the choices fizzled out quickly, ending in your character's death or a similar unhappy ending. And most of the choices were fairly simple to accommodate the fact that it was really only possible to cram a few dozen into a 130-page book. Character development was more or less out of the question, so the illusion was precarious enough that most of us moved onto other things in middle school (Goosebumps! Animorphs! Boy Wizards!). Still, I admire the series for pushing the boundaries of fiction as we knew it, touching the video game receptors in kids' minds as they read books, and teaching us that free will was an arbitrary, impossible notion. Hooray!

The End
(Flip back a couple of decisions and leave that ancient skull alone.)

Eh, I'll get another fifteen minutes of fame in a couple of months. . .

I posted a semi-sly bit of editorial imaging onto Reddit about five hours ago, and came back after some Father's Day stuff to find it the top link on Reddit and on the front page of Digg, submitted by another user. It took me about a day to think of asking Alan Schaaf, the creator of Imgur, to include a watermark with my blog address in the image. He was familiar with it and glad to help.

EDIT: It was, in fact, the #1 link on both Reddit and Digg for the day.

Direct link: http://imgur.com/gQouk.jpg

Or click the image to view in fullscreen below:


Funny how Photoshopped borders and twenty minutes can get this kind of response.

Oh, and the attentive among you may notice that I've edited the image here. Frankly that particular word, however hilarious, isn't in my normal vernacular. Imgur doesn't allow you to edit submitted images so I'm stuck with it. (Ignore my explanation here if you don't care in the slightest.)

More Jibjabbery (He's Barack Obama)

JibJab can be hit or miss, but it's hard to argue that the production values on their political shorts have ever been less than stellar. The Spiridellis brothers have a grasp of Flash animation that's practically second to none, and their videos have gotten increasingly more epic, at least the ones that mattered.

The timing on this video seems odd, coming as it does a few months after the election, but I prefer to see it as a slightly sarcastic, still respectful take on our president. His sense of humor being what it is, I think he'd get a kick out of this.

Artist/Jailer Quandary

Though I believe that opening up your work to a wider audience always results in higher profits, I'd like to pose the following decision for artists, struggling or otherwise:

If, by releasing your work with a copyright license that allowed copying, sharing and the adaptation of your work into other mediums, your profit levels remained the same but some form of your work reached twice as many people, would you make that choice?

For the purpose of this exercise, we'll assume that the choice is in your hands rather than the hands of a label or syndicate which controls distribution rights. Even in our modern artist-side, independent climate such groups have a role, though they control much of the debate regarding intellectual property and tend to neglect both artist and consumer rights. So we'll ignore them for now.

I guess the question is: Are you an artist or a jailer? The question isn't even "artist or businessman," as independent artists are rapidly proving that it's possible to make a profit without controlling access to your work. The model is changing and many of us are changing with it.

Drag Me To Hell, Please (for about an hour and a half)

I've often thought that films should be able to get away with parenthetical afterthoughts much like our popular songs do. For example, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones. How about "(We're Going) Up?" Or "Land of the Lost (Plot)?" At any rate, if "Drag Me To Hell" were to follow this pattern it wouldn't need much more than a simple "(Don't)" before the title. Certainly the phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the movie, the event described not being particularly desirable.

So I'm forced to conclude that the title must refer to a desire by the film's audience for a little hellraising. And in this respect "Drag Me To Hell" does not disappoint. It's more or less pure horror in a schlocky, outrageous sort of way - the type you might see in an old "Tales From the Crypt" comic or a Stephen King short story. The film isn't a comedy in the sense that some other reviews may lead you to believe - the humor comes mainly from how audacious the film is, how thrillingly tasteless and outrageous it manages to be without treading into sadistic terroritory.

The film is appropriately tense, essentially one scare moment after another, each topping the last in grotesque, often groan-inducing fun. There isn't a moment in this movie that's meant to be taken seriously, which is probably a good thing - the film's peripheral characters are about as goofy and one-dimensional as the ones we've seen in Spider-Man. Unlike the Spider-Man flicks, however, this is actually an asset to the film, because the simple archetypes (the assertive jerk co-worker, harsh old-worlder Gypsy woman, or knowledgeable Indian fortuneteller) fit the B-movie "Drag Me To Hell" labors to be. Sure, elements of characterization are there: the main character's slide into madness and desperation, a spiritual medium's desire to prove herself against the demons that defeated her years before, and a proud old woman who becomes demonic, spiteful and vicious when shamed. But these character-driven moments are usually (successfully) played for comedy and camp, chills, or all three.

I say "chills," but this doesn't seem appropriate. Because most of the running gags (an old woman and later a corpse tearing out chunks of our heroine's hair, or various questionable substances of every variety going out of their way to drench her) are more likely to elicit squirm-inducing laughs than the type of unsettling psychological moments that linger after a movie's credits. Even the abrupt "twist" ending is meant to be seen from a mile away, making it funny rather than unsettling, much like the end of a "Seinfeld" episode. The audience I was with kept laughing to and through the credits.

My advice: If you're any fan of old-fashioned horror without any dismemberment but chock-full of stuff that's arguably worse, go see "(Don't) Drag Me To Hell" with some like-minded friends. This is one for the theater. Oh, and "Sam Raimi's Return To Horror" might be a good name for a rock band or album (there go the last vestiges of my Dave Barry fixation).

Clumpy gives this movie: Three turkeys and half a douchebag

It's not their fault, but they're pretty annoying

I found this image online (I forget where), and though it almost seems like parody it was written by somebody espousing the "red" personality. This chart basically explains every immature power struggle in business, government and other spheres of human interaction.

Let me get this straight: reds like to get work done, but they don't pay enough attention to know what on Earth they're doing and they have trouble seeing the big picture. They're quite preoccupied with looking and being busy, but don't always know what they're doing. Every unpleasant, self-assured supervisor that you've ever had needs to see this list, though they might get a different message from it.

Innocent Uighur Gitmo detainees released to Bermuda, plan to open restaurant

Four former Gitmo detainees were released after seven years to one of the few countries willing to take them - Bermuda, where they plan to open the first Bermudan Uighur restaurant. America (meaning of course the Bush administration) had determined that these prisoners constituted no threat to the United States, clearing them of all wrongdoing, and in fact asserted that they shouldn't even be called "enemy combatants."

Cue the reams of bulletheaded, ignorant conservatives who will claim that these prisoners must have been guilty or they wouldn't have been arrested, and that Obama is releasing terrorists to tropical vacations. These individuals fled oppression from their governments only to be captured by the U.S. in Muslim nations as terror suspects. The least we can do after holding them illegally for nearly a decade is put them somewhere where they can't undergo the same treatment.

Oh, and those people I mentioned attacking the president for releasing innocents - the ones with a disrespect for the rule of law, an inability to interpret reality, irresistible racist, fascist compulsions and partisan Tourette's syndrome? Get Parkinson's, stick your arms in a wood chipper, move underground - anything to keep you from typing. I have this thing against ignorant, hateful creeps. I hope you understand.

"Gitmo Four" released to Bermuda (DailyMail)

Ziggy Liberated reborn as "Ziggy's Journey"

About a month ago I wrapped up my year-long project Ziggy Liberated, a sort of guided tour of the world of Ziggy. Ostensibly it was also fueled by philosophy, though it should be obvious to anybody who read the feature that I used it more as a way of getting more mileage out of a comic strip I've grown to appreciate. Ziggy (both the feature and the titular character) has an odd resonance, as well as some very peculiar events and writing. I've grown to quite like the feature, to the point where I'm proud to tout it as one of the finest features on the comics page (acknowledging, of course, that competition in that area has been pretty scarce since the mid-90s).

This is a sort of formal announcement that I've rebooted Ziggy Liberated as Ziggy's Journey, a stranger, more plot-driven feature that will give me a chance to explore some more metaphysical concepts. It seems unlikely that I'll be changing the URL for the feature, though I'll be updating the visual style of the site over the next few weeks. The archived year of Ziggy Liberated will remain online, naturally. I hope you enjoy - I know I will.

Ziggy's Journey (Ziggy Liberated)