Ahh, its that time of year again. Wintereenmas. The great festival of games.
Wintereenmas is one of my very favourite holidays, both because I am a loyal CAD fan, and because I am a card carrying member of the uber-nerds-society (not a real society). For those who don't know, wintereenmas is a holiday created by Tim Buckley in his popular webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del, to celebrate games and the people who play t hem, but more generally, it is used to celebrate all things geek, nerd, and the culture that is associated with them.
In previous years, I have done various things associated with video games to celebrate, from decorating a friends dorm with various video game themed decorations (triforce made of n64 games ftw), to having a marathon of RedvsBlue.
This year, in addition to playing with my wonderful guild on WoW, I will be taking the next step in celebration.
No, not that next step.
This year I will be working more heavily on my "for funzies" research, because from basically everything nerd culture celebrates, there is a root in some scientist or engineer or mathematician who sacrificed his free time (and likely his entire social life) to bring us forward. The goal is not to add in any significant way to our body of knowledge (as the odds of that are minuscule) but rather, to mimic their behaviors in hope of finding greater intellectual enlightenment, not unlike religious pilgrims that travel the paths of the prophets hoping for religious enlightenment. And I'll probably have some fun along the way, because, hey, robots.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Sunday, July 25, 2010
interna batali
The majority of today was spent reading Civil War, the Marvel series from a few years back. It was written in direct response to the Bush era war on terror, which is summarized in one of the first issues:
This is a little more blatantly liberal than the rest of the series, which admittedly has a strong liberal bias, but is a good summery of the sentiments at the time.
It starts with a depressing disaster in which a group of mostly well meaning "heroes" attempt to take on some villains that are clearly out of their league, and ends with 600 people, including over 60 children, dead. Not surprisingly, the blame falls on the "heroes" that should have never precipitated the event in the first place, and to some extent it is their fault.
And then the series plays on the most universal fact of earth:
People are stupid.
Really fucking stupid.
People freak out and cry to the government to help them. And just like any time the government steps in to attempt to fix a bad situation, things go straight to hell in a beautiful little hand basket, gift-wrapped, scented with lavender, and a gift card.
I'm about a quarter of the way through the series, which with all of the side stories comes to somewhere between 3000 and 4000 pages of comic.
As fun as the series is to read, and as many good points as it does bring up, sometimes its hard to read. One issue to the next of even the same series can have dramatically different artistic styles, and the writing is sometimes campy to the point of being sickening, especially spider man. Twilight has better dialog than that guy sometimes. (Stretch, I'm looking at you, with your butterflies line).
At this point, I'm calling it a night, and I've taken Fahrenheit 451 off the shelf to read that just to get some real literature into my brain. Not that its not good, but reading 4 months worth of comics in a day cannot be good for you. Nor is the desire to.
Peace.
Out.
This is a little more blatantly liberal than the rest of the series, which admittedly has a strong liberal bias, but is a good summery of the sentiments at the time.
It starts with a depressing disaster in which a group of mostly well meaning "heroes" attempt to take on some villains that are clearly out of their league, and ends with 600 people, including over 60 children, dead. Not surprisingly, the blame falls on the "heroes" that should have never precipitated the event in the first place, and to some extent it is their fault.
And then the series plays on the most universal fact of earth:
People are stupid.
Really fucking stupid.
People freak out and cry to the government to help them. And just like any time the government steps in to attempt to fix a bad situation, things go straight to hell in a beautiful little hand basket, gift-wrapped, scented with lavender, and a gift card.
I'm about a quarter of the way through the series, which with all of the side stories comes to somewhere between 3000 and 4000 pages of comic.
As fun as the series is to read, and as many good points as it does bring up, sometimes its hard to read. One issue to the next of even the same series can have dramatically different artistic styles, and the writing is sometimes campy to the point of being sickening, especially spider man. Twilight has better dialog than that guy sometimes. (Stretch, I'm looking at you, with your butterflies line).
At this point, I'm calling it a night, and I've taken Fahrenheit 451 off the shelf to read that just to get some real literature into my brain. Not that its not good, but reading 4 months worth of comics in a day cannot be good for you. Nor is the desire to.
Peace.
Out.
saluton mondo
Saluton Mondo!
I have decided that I will share my neediness with the web, for no reason other than that everyone else seems to be. Wheee....
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