Troy Baker Drinks Red Bull, So You Know He’s Evil.

I’m ashamed to admit that it was only after I finished watching the new Venture Brothers movie that I realized that Distributor Cap was a riff on the ‘66 version of Mr. Sparkplug.

Reading the wikipedia entries for minor Batman villains is like, “Mr. Sparkplug was introduced in 1969. He wore a rectangular costume that resembled a sparkplug, and had power to make electrical outlets stop working. After the Infinite Crisis event, he was reimagined as a serial killer with a fetish for electrostimulation. He had a cameo on Batman the Brave and the Bold where the Joker shoved him into a locker. In the New 52, the Riddler killed him and hung his costume over the mantlepiece as a trophy. He is now on the Suicide Squad.”

In my mind, this is the main theme for the late-’90s modern-fantasy real-time strategy game that depicts Kuvira’s campaign to unify the Earth Kingdom.

Legend of Korra - Kuvira theme song | cover by ForTiorI

download mp3: http://www.mediafire.com/file/p8blrdko8tgbb2n/The+Legend+of+Korra+-+Kuvira+theme+song+%28cover+by+ForTiorI%29.mp3 download multitracks: http://...

Jeremy Zuckerman forwarded me this badass, modern metal cover of his Kuvira theme by ForTiorl. I’m confident a certain badass, modern metalbending militaristic dictator would dig it too.

There's another Worm connection in No Man's Land with Poison Ivy. As the rest of Batman's rogues' gallery carve up Gotham, she ends staking out a derelict city park and caring for a bunch of kids who were orphaned or otherwise abandoned after the earthquake. Rather than rousting her out, Batman agrees to leave her alone for the time being, provided she uses her powers to generate produce for the rest of the surviving citizens to eat. While Ivy was less than pleased about having to go along with this, she still held up her end of the deal.

In his own discussion of Ivy's history on Twitter, Exalted_Speed has argued that No Man's Land is really where the interpretation of Ivy as an antihero (ahem) took root. The connection with Worm is obvious; however, Taylor's tenure as urban warlord feels like a more refined version of that concept. As noted in the thread, the attempts to turn Poison Ivy into an antihero often stumble on both the sheer amount of carnage she's caused over the years and on with her original characterization of "vicious plant-themed Catwoman" which is still a major element in her modern portrayals. By contrast, it's much easier to offer apologetics of Taylor's conduct on the Boardwalk, since she was explicitly written to fit the role that Pamela Isely was awkwardly retrofitted to play.

Got a Worm meta question for you. I'm starting on the early parts of Taylor's warlord era - I'm about to leap into Arc 13 - and the general concept of a ravaged American city being divided up by various supervillain groups is reminding me a lot of that Batman story arc No Man's Land from the late 1990s. Unfortunately my comics knowledge is rudimentary at best, and I haven't been able to any discussion comparing the two stories, so I was wondering if I could pick your brain on the subject. Was it just convergent evolution, or was Wildbow engaging with the Batman story in some way?

I myself have only read about half of No Man's Land- and several years ago to boot- so I've got limited ability to do a direct compare and contrast. No Man's Land is absolutely the sort of status-quo-shattering, history-book-making upset that, within Marvel and DC, nonetheless always inexplicably heals and loses salience until you can barely tell that it's still in continuity. Worm is heavily informed by Wildbow's irritation with that sort of thing, so I think it's totally reasonable to view the warlord era through the lens of "What if No Mans Land had no editorial escape hatch." Alternatively, I think it kind of makes sense to view it through the lens that it's working backwards from the premise of No Man's Land- In what kind of setting would it be plausible for the Federal Government to write off a sufficiently-damaged American City? In what context would the legal infrastructure have been established for that, in what context would that even fall within the Overton Window? What muddies my opinion on this is that the general concept of a ravaged, atmospherically-apocalyptic American city torn up by superpowered gang warfare is something that's kind of just been in the water in superhero comics since the mid-eighties at least, and it was a relatively common thing to see during the Dark Age- they were choice prey for all those overpouched musclemen with their poorly rendered firearms. I'd be surprised if Wildbow wasn't at least aware of No Man's Land, but it's definitely not the only cape book from the late 90s or early oughts where you could pick up that idea from. Ultimately this leaves me unsure if No Man's Land is the specific referent or if it's just part-and-parcel with trying to do an involved, thoughtful take on what cape comics were like at the time.

I used to think that, but a few years ago an old opinion piece completely changed my mind on the subject. To summarize the piece’s argument (in case the site ever goes down), the key differences between superhero movies and westerns is that:

1. People go to see superhero movies because they like certain characters; people went to see westerns because they like westerns. To put it another way, if you want to see a western, the genre is broad enough that you can see all sorts of different movies. But if you want to see a superhero movie, you usually just want to watch Batman acting like Batman and doing Batman things, or Cap acting like Cap etc...

2. Westerns were small enough and cheap enough to make that directors and writers could experiment widely within the genre; modern superhero movies are so expensive that's there far more pressure to play it safe just so you’ll earn your money back.

3. Great characters usually only have a handful of truly interesting stories. A controversial point, but I think this gets at why superhero films tend to focus on either origin stories or constantly feel like retreads of the same ideas. 4. The actor is the draw of the western, while the character is the draw of the superhero film. With the western you can make different movies that emphasize different aspects of the actor’s persona or even have him play against type, while in a superhero movie the actor is something of an interchangeable widget that takes second place to the character. 5. At the end of the day, the audience doesn’t really want innovation or personal films all that much. This is only a crude summary of the piece’s arguments, so I really recommend reading the linked article above.

Superhero movies are the cowboy movies of our time.

“Oh, and if you’ve been possessed by a sentient alien being, you’re gonna want to go across the quad to the Dexter Remmick Memorial Medical Center. Victims of energy beings meet up in 512, but if you were bodyjacked by a malevolent parasite you’ll wanna to head down to 337. Benevolent parasites are on 212, God knows why.”

Starfleet Support Groups

The scary thing is that Starfleet probably needs a separate support group for “people who have accidentally lived decades/entire lifetimes in alternate realities until it turned out it was just an hour in the real world.”

What? Oh, no, you’re looking for the “I was caught in a timeloop and went insane” support group. That’s next door.

“Mirror Universe trauma”? Down the hall.

“Dealing With My Duplicate Self” meets on Thursdays.

(O’Brien just attends all of them. If it hasn’t happened, it’s probably going to.)

Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.

There’s something deeply distressing to me about how there’s been this steady push over the past twenty years to transform all forms of media from things you can physically buy and use as you see fit into things you essentially rent in perpetuity from publishers and hosting services. It’s like there’s this assumption that we can rent these things forever and never have to worry about the Internet ever going down or one of these digital landlords deciding to take them away from us whenever they want. Movies and PC games are my beat, but I've certainly had to stockpile a number of hard copies over the years due to rights issues or lack of interest keeping them out of the digital marketplace.

On the Existential Fear of Losing Your Online Persona

…

“Digital is about access, it’s about sharing,” Schwartz said. “But once you digitize something, suddenly the object is not human-readable anymore—not readable like a stack of letters in your attic. With digital you have to preserve the letter, and you have to preserve the software, and the machine that can read it.”

That means that as technology evolves, the types of data it can read evolves as well. Think about the floppy discs you almost definitely have in a box somewhere—or DVDs, to pick a more recent example. My current laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive at all. I couldn’t watch my Mona Lisa Smile DVD if I wanted to. So you can see how delicate that media is.

Thinking a lot about this since Apple announced the demise of iTunes. One great thing about iTunes was the convenience of digital while still owning a physical library. I spent a good chunk of the 90s building a music collection. It defined me, which was the things worked then. It’s no coincidence that the transition from aesthetic to moral signal occurred alongside the transition from owning a physical to a virtual library. If the things we own can’t define us, then what does? When I was twelve or thirteen, I would have killed for something like Spotify where all the music I could ever dream of was at my fingertips, but there’s no hunt, no sense of personal value.

As a fan of alternate histories of various stripes, there’s nothing more disappointing that a story that imagines a world where history went differently, but almost everything is still exactly the same. The whole point of the concept is to have fun extrapolating the changes. On the subject of Beatles-themed alternate histories, Ian R. Macleod, one of my favorite sf/f authors working today, wrote a novella back in 1992 called “Snodgrass” which imagined Lennon leaving the Beatles in 1962 over a fight with a studio executive, only to spend the rest of his life being haunted by the road he never took. It was eventually adapted as a short drama a few years back with Ian Hart as a bitter Lennon in his fifties.

Can a Beatles Fan Believe in ‘Yesterday’?

Our resident hardcore Beatleologist on why this fantasy about a Fab Four-less world should have fixed its holes

… there’s no attempt to have fun with the Twilight Zone possibilities. There’s no humor about the “butterfly effect” in erasing the Beatles from the world they changed. It’s a parallel universe where Coldplay and Neutral Milk Hotel exist without the Fabs, and where all the men have longish haircuts that would have been unthinkable before the mop tops came along. As British critic Dorian Lynskey noted, “‘A world without the Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse,’ says one character, in a film where a world without the Beatles is almost exactly the same.”

Yeah… I was about to make the argument that you can’t make a movie where everyone save one schlub “forgets”: the Beatles without re-imagining a musical climate in which the Beatles, arguably the biggest pop band of all time, nor their inevitable influence, never existed, but apparently this is too pedantic for Hollywood. 

I wonder where this one came from. I want to say from the Allied front in Murmansk/Arkhangelsk, but given logistics I imagine it was probably shipped in through the Black Sea to aid Denikin’s armies and got captured and shipped to Moscow later. Reminds me of a story I read in a book on the RCW where the Whites in the south lost something like 3 tanks because they weren’t secured properly at the docks and just slid into the sea.

Captured British tank Mk IV, in the service of the red Army, during the parade on red square.1920.

Alternate title: “Ideology, A Triptych”

Paris during the 1937 International Expo

via reddit