i really, really don't get it. i mean, i have a lot of ideas. every day i have ideas. all kinds of them. the other day i had this idea about jetpacks. that was a cool idea. yesterday i had an idea that i should make a joke about my girlfriend's weight. that was a bad idea. some ideas are good, some ideas are bad. the trick, as i found out when i had the idea to dive for a softball, even though i had no idea how to properly dive and ended up breaking my collarbone, is to not follow up on the bad ones.
it seems like marvel has a lot of ideas, too. and they should, too, because they've got some really creative people working there. the problem with marvel, it seems, is that they'll just take any idea and run with it, whether or not it's good or bad. i mean, how else do you explain this? how did marvel get to this? don't they understand that the continuity of this whole civil war thing, although potentially cool, is falling dead on the floor?
they really should have done what DC did with 52: PLAN THE FUCKING THING OUT BEFORE STARTING TO PUBLISH.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
more
1) spencer is crazy.
2) yesterday in my desk at home i found a $30 gift certificate for a comic shop. i had completely forgotten about the thing, and it was a great way to start the week out. last night i burned it all (plus 15 bucks), and got some great shit:
girls, vol 1: conception
MAN. i was so into this thing i ran to the computer and downloaded them all so i could find out how the fucking thing ended (and rest assured i'll be buying all the trades cuz it's awesome). a while ago i had somehow stumbled across the penultimate issue of this series and was completely fucking confused by these identical naked girls hatching from eggs and running around, beating up women tied to poles, and then said naked girls having their heads chopped off with hatchets. but after reading the first trade, it all made a lot more sense. well, as much sense as something like that can make. despite the last couple issues sagging and dragging, worth reading for the giant homicidal sperm alone.
agents of atlas hardcover.
i haven't read the whole shebang yet (because of that fucking creepy giant sperm thing from girls that i got hooked on) but i was pretty into what i got through last night. the art was better than i expected from the covers, and the dialog was snappy. snappy. i just said the dialog was snappy. i think i deserve being hit for that.
i looked everywhere for the new issue of iron fist. the fuckers at that store file shit confusingly, to say the least.
NEW TOPIC: is it poor form to read comics at the store when you're on the fence about them? like, is it ok to go expressly with the intention of getting the stuff you want, but then spend another hour reading other books out of curiosity/disdain? just wondering.
2) yesterday in my desk at home i found a $30 gift certificate for a comic shop. i had completely forgotten about the thing, and it was a great way to start the week out. last night i burned it all (plus 15 bucks), and got some great shit:
girls, vol 1: conception
MAN. i was so into this thing i ran to the computer and downloaded them all so i could find out how the fucking thing ended (and rest assured i'll be buying all the trades cuz it's awesome). a while ago i had somehow stumbled across the penultimate issue of this series and was completely fucking confused by these identical naked girls hatching from eggs and running around, beating up women tied to poles, and then said naked girls having their heads chopped off with hatchets. but after reading the first trade, it all made a lot more sense. well, as much sense as something like that can make. despite the last couple issues sagging and dragging, worth reading for the giant homicidal sperm alone.
agents of atlas hardcover.
i haven't read the whole shebang yet (because of that fucking creepy giant sperm thing from girls that i got hooked on) but i was pretty into what i got through last night. the art was better than i expected from the covers, and the dialog was snappy. snappy. i just said the dialog was snappy. i think i deserve being hit for that.
i looked everywhere for the new issue of iron fist. the fuckers at that store file shit confusingly, to say the least.
NEW TOPIC: is it poor form to read comics at the store when you're on the fence about them? like, is it ok to go expressly with the intention of getting the stuff you want, but then spend another hour reading other books out of curiosity/disdain? just wondering.
special little snowflakes
1) i have the coolest girlfriend in the entire world, and will harp on this fact for all it's worth. how cool, you ask? so cool that after me blathering on and on about how i've seen both spider-man movies at midnight showings, she bought us 2 tickets. man. i love that girl.
2) yes, i teach special ed. and, yes, i will harp on this fact for all it's worth, too. yes, it's hard. but it's also one of the funniest jobs you can have. people often ask if the kids in my classes are... you know... like, retarded or just learning... disabled? and i have to tell them that no, they're not retarded, on the whole they just have processing difficulties and it takes them about a week to learn what other kids can master in like a day. where the synapses in some kids' brains are highways, the synapses in my kids' brains have sections like this
often this manifests itself in something you could describe as a general slowness: it takes them a longer time to respond, you gotta repeat stuff a lot, etc (although every kid, yes, is a special little snowflake, yes, and all have different strangths/weaknesses). so, as their teacher, what i do is try to find alternate routes around their roadblocks, finding a way to get curriculum shoved into their brains. most of them don't really like learning, or thinking, because it's just a lot harder for them than playing video games or just sitting there, doing nothing. i think of it like having to do wind sprints whenever you want to take a nice, leisurely walk. often they don't really have that creative spark, so if you want to do creative writing with them you really have to pump them up, give them a lot of examples to use as templates, and just be generally weird.
2 years ago, i had a student named andrew. he was the strangest little man ever. he was more unique than most kids because he was really creative, but he kind of didn't know it. he would give these bizarre answers to mundane questions, but not because he was trying to be weird so much as those answers were genuinely his opinion. for instance: andrew loved vacuum cleaners. LOVED them. whenever there was a sale at like best buy, andrew would come in to class, all smiles, and march right to my desk and show me the sunday advertisement with the one he wanted. he was the maestro of cleaning, and vacuum cleaners were his string section.
andrew transferred schools for some reason, and i kind of miss him. looking through my desk yesterday, i found an old vocabulary story he wrote. i used to teach them 10 vocab words, and then as a review exercise i'd give them a story topic and have them write a story about that topic using the 10 words, which they'd underline. i have decided to transcribe it here, for you, because it's standardized testing ALL WEEK and i'm bored and you all need to know why my job is rad. without further ado, andrew's story, verbatim, written in class, straight out of his wee head, misspellings his. the boldfaced words are the vocab words.
this writing exercise pales in comparison to his district essay proficiency essay. that one he chose the topic "how i would improve the world," and basically rewrote plato's republic, but with a flying robot police force
and him as general andrew, president of the world. i'm not joking, and neither was he.
2) yes, i teach special ed. and, yes, i will harp on this fact for all it's worth, too. yes, it's hard. but it's also one of the funniest jobs you can have. people often ask if the kids in my classes are... you know... like, retarded or just learning... disabled? and i have to tell them that no, they're not retarded, on the whole they just have processing difficulties and it takes them about a week to learn what other kids can master in like a day. where the synapses in some kids' brains are highways, the synapses in my kids' brains have sections like this
often this manifests itself in something you could describe as a general slowness: it takes them a longer time to respond, you gotta repeat stuff a lot, etc (although every kid, yes, is a special little snowflake, yes, and all have different strangths/weaknesses). so, as their teacher, what i do is try to find alternate routes around their roadblocks, finding a way to get curriculum shoved into their brains. most of them don't really like learning, or thinking, because it's just a lot harder for them than playing video games or just sitting there, doing nothing. i think of it like having to do wind sprints whenever you want to take a nice, leisurely walk. often they don't really have that creative spark, so if you want to do creative writing with them you really have to pump them up, give them a lot of examples to use as templates, and just be generally weird.
2 years ago, i had a student named andrew. he was the strangest little man ever. he was more unique than most kids because he was really creative, but he kind of didn't know it. he would give these bizarre answers to mundane questions, but not because he was trying to be weird so much as those answers were genuinely his opinion. for instance: andrew loved vacuum cleaners. LOVED them. whenever there was a sale at like best buy, andrew would come in to class, all smiles, and march right to my desk and show me the sunday advertisement with the one he wanted. he was the maestro of cleaning, and vacuum cleaners were his string section.
andrew transferred schools for some reason, and i kind of miss him. looking through my desk yesterday, i found an old vocabulary story he wrote. i used to teach them 10 vocab words, and then as a review exercise i'd give them a story topic and have them write a story about that topic using the 10 words, which they'd underline. i have decided to transcribe it here, for you, because it's standardized testing ALL WEEK and i'm bored and you all need to know why my job is rad. without further ado, andrew's story, verbatim, written in class, straight out of his wee head, misspellings his. the boldfaced words are the vocab words.
the day i built a robotI, Andrew always want to build a robot, humanoid, or robotic to see it like us. I invented the three laws of robotics, A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law. A robot must protect its existence, as long as this does not conflict with the first or second law. I hope this is not inferior. I worked with Sony & this day we are going to build Qrio the robot it can walk, talks, runs, dances, plays ball games, surfs the web, recognizes voices & faces, can differentiate between sounds. It's height is 2 ft (61 cm). Some of the equipment was savage. So we bought new ones. This robot is not colossal. that's good the the robot is not unstable. Many years ago we invented a girl robot names Maria. Qrio was trying to woo at her & it was intention. We are the most valor people making robots and robotics. We hope not that a instruder won't come in the lab or we will go to the den. Few days have pass & I went to a rite at church & my teamates scorched some of the extra equipment. What a thing we invented a few days ago.
this writing exercise pales in comparison to his district essay proficiency essay. that one he chose the topic "how i would improve the world," and basically rewrote plato's republic, but with a flying robot police force
and him as general andrew, president of the world. i'm not joking, and neither was he.
Monday, April 30, 2007
they are assholes
sometimes working with kids is the best thing in the world. other times, it's so infuriating you want to either beat the shit out of them or just quit and walk away. and then there's the days you want to do both.
Friday, April 20, 2007
...the FUTURE.
here are some predictions for the year 2000, written in the year 1900 for the ladies' home journal. some are right, some are wrong, and some are just plain awesome -- particularly the one about aerial forts and war-ships. mostly they just predict things getting HUGE, and airplanes not being particularly important.
APE is tomorrow. i'm stoked. and i plan on getting spencer carnage very drunk and having him barf on the dog. or my trainwreck roomate, angela. degrees of difference, i suppose.
APE is tomorrow. i'm stoked. and i plan on getting spencer carnage very drunk and having him barf on the dog. or my trainwreck roomate, angela. degrees of difference, i suppose.
Monday, April 9, 2007
the joy of teaching
the best thing, hands down, about being a teacher is the breaks. i'm on spring break right now. whenever i have breaks and nothing scheduled for myself to do, i'll come up with little assignments for myself. this week, i've given myself the assignment of watching the entirely of "lost," season 1 and 2. in the last 2 days i've plowed through something like 20 hours of television. it's nice to feel like you're accomplishing something, even when you're not.
Monday, April 2, 2007
rundowns
i've been consuming a lot the past couple weeks. a quick rundown:
the host --
not quite as good as i'd been led to believe, but still a lot of great moments (i never really know if foreign movies are good or not; often i feel like subtle things are either lost in translation, or that the narrative just plays out differently in its native culture). some scenes went on way too long (all the shit when the family's in the hospital seems like they're trying to figure out how the movie's supposed to go while filming), but the basic stuff the movie was made of -- the fucked up family, the love despite it all, the awesome fucking monster -- was great. well worth supporting, and if a decent director gets a shot at the american remake it should be awesome.
godland: another sunny delight TPB --
if i knew how to type that o-with-a-line-through-it thing i would, but i can't. this makes me feel like a failure, as a teacher and as a man. sigh. regardless, i've managed to get both the godland trades used for super cheap and i have to say that although i like them, i don't think i like them enough to pay full-price. the art, as anyone reading this would know, is good-ish jack kirby styled (although i could do without some of the cartoonier aspects of scioli's stuff), and is the selling point for a lot of folks. but for my money the dialog is where it's at: joe casey's writing reads like it was ridiculously fun to write, which is my favorite thing in writing. the ideas don't let up, and although the main character's kind of a pussy (i know he's learning as he goes, but he never actually does anything right), the characterization isn't too shabby either. i deem this a good read for when i come home drunk and want to stare at something before i fall asleep/good hangover reading material.
starman: sins of the father/starman: night and day TPB:
this comic's amazing because: a) its run started in '94, a dark time for comics in general due to the overarching theory that spandex and FUCKING retarded superheroes drooling and fighting made for good comics, and b) it ran for something like, what, 80 issues? that's fucking awesome, especially for a comic whose main character actively avoided costumes and only was a superhero after being kind of forced into it. even then he only did it part-time, when he wasn't running his vintage store.
my review of starman is this: a superhero comic written by neil gaiman that wasn't actually written by neil gaiman. i deem it: something to read when i have time to sit and actually digest it and enjoy it (a.k.a. a rarity). although the trent reznor vibe of the main character is kind of freaky -- he is a very, very good summation of mid-90's dude (the tattoos, the haircut, the vintage clothes thing, the boots; i keep looking for the front 242 record in his collection) and it makes me feel like i'm in high school again, which isn't really the best possible result of reading a comic.
battles, mirrored:
fact: ian williams, the insanely good, weight-carrying guitar player from don caballero's american don days, and the kinda-superstar of battles, makes me so jealous of his melodic and rhythmic sense that it makes my balls hurt. fact: battles' last couple records, B ep and ep C, were both totally underwhelming, with a couple tiny exceptions, especially considering the other band members included john stanier from helmet on drums, tyondai braxton on weird avant garde jazz blips and bleep noises, and some other dude doing everything else. fact: it should have been an amazing group, but it wasn't. fact: the new battles record is fucking amazing. BALLS-HURTING amazing.
x-factor #17 --
peter david rules, but for some reason i've not been able to reread this issue. i think i'm getting too old to buy comics as they come out; all i can think of when i pick up an issue of 52 is how much i'd rather read it in the trade all at once. i'm a dick that way. i have faith that this x-factor arc will pay off, but waiting is not my strong suit.
the host --
not quite as good as i'd been led to believe, but still a lot of great moments (i never really know if foreign movies are good or not; often i feel like subtle things are either lost in translation, or that the narrative just plays out differently in its native culture). some scenes went on way too long (all the shit when the family's in the hospital seems like they're trying to figure out how the movie's supposed to go while filming), but the basic stuff the movie was made of -- the fucked up family, the love despite it all, the awesome fucking monster -- was great. well worth supporting, and if a decent director gets a shot at the american remake it should be awesome.
godland: another sunny delight TPB --
if i knew how to type that o-with-a-line-through-it thing i would, but i can't. this makes me feel like a failure, as a teacher and as a man. sigh. regardless, i've managed to get both the godland trades used for super cheap and i have to say that although i like them, i don't think i like them enough to pay full-price. the art, as anyone reading this would know, is good-ish jack kirby styled (although i could do without some of the cartoonier aspects of scioli's stuff), and is the selling point for a lot of folks. but for my money the dialog is where it's at: joe casey's writing reads like it was ridiculously fun to write, which is my favorite thing in writing. the ideas don't let up, and although the main character's kind of a pussy (i know he's learning as he goes, but he never actually does anything right), the characterization isn't too shabby either. i deem this a good read for when i come home drunk and want to stare at something before i fall asleep/good hangover reading material.
starman: sins of the father/starman: night and day TPB:
this comic's amazing because: a) its run started in '94, a dark time for comics in general due to the overarching theory that spandex and FUCKING retarded superheroes drooling and fighting made for good comics, and b) it ran for something like, what, 80 issues? that's fucking awesome, especially for a comic whose main character actively avoided costumes and only was a superhero after being kind of forced into it. even then he only did it part-time, when he wasn't running his vintage store.
my review of starman is this: a superhero comic written by neil gaiman that wasn't actually written by neil gaiman. i deem it: something to read when i have time to sit and actually digest it and enjoy it (a.k.a. a rarity). although the trent reznor vibe of the main character is kind of freaky -- he is a very, very good summation of mid-90's dude (the tattoos, the haircut, the vintage clothes thing, the boots; i keep looking for the front 242 record in his collection) and it makes me feel like i'm in high school again, which isn't really the best possible result of reading a comic.
battles, mirrored:
fact: ian williams, the insanely good, weight-carrying guitar player from don caballero's american don days, and the kinda-superstar of battles, makes me so jealous of his melodic and rhythmic sense that it makes my balls hurt. fact: battles' last couple records, B ep and ep C, were both totally underwhelming, with a couple tiny exceptions, especially considering the other band members included john stanier from helmet on drums, tyondai braxton on weird avant garde jazz blips and bleep noises, and some other dude doing everything else. fact: it should have been an amazing group, but it wasn't. fact: the new battles record is fucking amazing. BALLS-HURTING amazing.
x-factor #17 --
peter david rules, but for some reason i've not been able to reread this issue. i think i'm getting too old to buy comics as they come out; all i can think of when i pick up an issue of 52 is how much i'd rather read it in the trade all at once. i'm a dick that way. i have faith that this x-factor arc will pay off, but waiting is not my strong suit.
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