[A Pleasurable Headache] I understood that reference
Let’s get straight into it.
The aforementioned Project Greenfingers is now being submitted in the usual places. One stock rejection already so far. I’m not about hiding the crappier aspects of this process. This part can be frustrating, waiting for submission windows to open, close, etc. Other times you are waiting on one person operations dealing with a huge slush pile, none of which I envy.
Anyway, the story is now titled Future Tense and we will see if it lives or dies in the marketplace of ideas. I’m already onto the next thing, a project born of a tweet from an AI-run Twitter bot of all things.
Everfrost #4 is out in the wild, the conclusion to the story (a gorgeous looking sci-fi joint I edited for those keeping track). This is some of the best work for all involved (Ryan, Sami, Lauren and Jim). It’s always a relief when an ending lands or is received the way you hoped. Usually the ending is what people will remember and it contributes hugely to how people look at the project as a whole.
So it was cool to see that Everfrost‘s final issue got a sweet 10/10 over at Comicon.com. Take a bow all!
If, for some reason, you missed out on Everfrost the first time round, the trade is coming in December.
Links
How the cookie poisoned the Web
https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2021/05/14/poison/
Doc Searls on the ubiquity and effect of the lowly internet cookie.
“Lou’s idea was just for a server to remember the last state of a browser’s interaction with it. But that one move—a server putting a cookie inside every visiting browser—crossed a privacy threshold: a personal boundary that should have been clear from the start but was not.
Once that boundary was crossed, and the number and variety of cookies increased, a snowball started rolling, and whatever chance we had to protect our privacy behind that boundary, was lost.”
Radicalised normal: how Britain fell to the conspiracy movement
The article itself goes over a lot of the ground covered in previous links I have posted here. That said, there is a paragraph in this piece that is absolutely on the money as a summation of where Britain is as a country (and has been for the last 5-10 years):
“There is a gamut of hysteria in this country that encompasses everything from village hall spiritualists to dressing your children up as Captain Tom, recreating a scene from the Battle of Passchendaele in your front garden, weeping and waving an EU flag in Parliament Square or ripping your shirt off and defending some long-ignored bronze bust of an East India Company trader.”
I despair.
‘I wish there was a plan’: The inside story of DC’s infamous New 52 reboot
https://www.polygon.com/comics/22679756/dc-comics-reboot-new-52-writers-oral-history
I love a oral history. This one, put together by Graeme McMillan at Polygon is a doozy. As you can see it’s a lengthy piece on DC’s New 52 reboot. I remember this relaunch at the time and being incredibly stoked that DC were going to be doing war comics again. That didn’t really pan out. Reading this piece I can see why. There is a feeling here that a large part of the reboot was DC throwing stuff at the wall, winging it, and seeing what stuck.
Writing tools for the wandering mind
https://hidetheeraser.com/writing-tools-for-the-wandering-mind
I enjoyed this short blog entry on writing tools for the less organized.
The haunted heart of Constantine
https://www.polygon.com/22715780/constantine-movie-2005-reconsideration
Another Polygon piece, this time by Priscilla Page. I have a soft spot for Francis Lawrence’s 2005 movie, despite some of the changes it makes with the source material.
Deathly Silence: Journalists Who Mocked Assange Have Nothing to Say About CIA Plans to Kill Him
Surprising absolutely no one, the story that the CIA made plans to assassinate Julian Assange has been met with indifference at best and outright silence. The piece, incredibly well researched and written by journalists at Yahoo! News, has had little no impact. The piece linked above, from FAIR, covers the media’s response to the claims.
Unmasked: Tory councillor is secret supporter of UK fascist organisation
Also lost in the shuffle is this revelation regarding a Tory councillor joining a regional Telegram group set up by Patriotic Alternative (you can just feel the racism there, can’t you?) and posting such zingers as:
“My view is Covid is a loss maker for us, we just need to centre on white genocide […] because many of our white race are convinced about vaccines, but not about our replacement, and need to be informed about this?”
My despair persists.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife review – a slimy, stinking corpse of a sequel
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/11/ghostbusters-afterlife-jason-reitman-paul-rudd-review
This is a review of a movie I had not planned on seeing, and probably never will. That said, there is a paragraph in here that again gets to the crux of a larger issue, the modern blockbuster and its increasing dependence on what came before:
“Every time another anti-spectral doohickey first appeared on screen, it was met with orgasmic roars of excitement from the audience. Same goes for the awestruck glimpses of the old car, the old costumes, some of the old dialogue, and the rest of the myriad nods to Ivan Reitman’s canonized blockbuster. His son Jason, the director who announced a desire to see his installment launch a whole universe of Ghostbusters content during his pre-screening panel, aspires to little more than this deadened rat-pulls-lever pleasure of recognition. His approach banks on a sycophancy proved reliable in real time at the Javits Center, that the automatic delight of knowing what things are will supersede the need for the humor or smart-ass charm that initially made Ghostbusters worth watching. At the box office, this underhanded tack may very well pay dividends. This is for the fans, after all, but a peculiar breed of fan more interested in identifying objects than what’s done with them.“
Emphasis mine.
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I’m off to dwell on the slow burn majesty of the ending of Midnight Mass.
See you in two!