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« December 2014 | Main | February 2015 » January 31, 2015I hope Krugman is wearing his Ring of Mixed Metaphor Resistance New York Times columnists aren't supposed to pick fights with each other but it seems like Thomas Friedman has rubbed Paul Krugman the wrong way recently: There were people like that during the Great Depression too -- dismissing as naive any notion that you could put the unemployed back to work just by spending more, and surely technological unemployment was the real story, and anyway we should be looking at the broad sweep of history and institutions, right? A very feisty concluding paragraph too: Finally, I know that people who airily dismiss the austerity debate and all that and demand that we focus on the long run think they're taking a brave stand; but you know, they aren't. In fact, they're ducking the truly hard issues -- because let's face it, stimulus and austerity, QE or not, are politically charged issues where taking any kind of stand will get you attacked. And since they are also important issues, pretending that they aren't is a form of moral cowardice. By fnord12 | January 31, 2015, 12:02 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link
Star Wars is not a crime When it comes to complaining about retcons, comic fans are inevitably told that the old stories aren't changing and no one is taking their back issues. And for comics, it misses the point but it's technically correct; you can pry my longboxes from my cold dead hands. But for Star Wars - and i'm talking about the real Star Wars here - it's a different matter (unless you've managed to hang on to a VCR, i guess). Matthew Yglesias has more. By fnord12 | January 30, 2015, 2:23 PM | Star Wars | Comments (4) | Link
Lingering Horde This will be my last horde for a while. I am getting a little burnt out and/or my detail brush has become too frazzled. But the reason i did this last batch was i saw that i had missed a final Drider. My party is currently in the Underdark facing Driders and last time i had to supplement with some Centaurs, so having another actual Drider figure will help. One weird thing is that you'll notice from a previous batch that the female Driders are much larger than the males. I originally thought that whoever at Reaper was sculpting these miniatures decided that there would be some sexual dimorphism amongst the Driders (in D&D, there actually are no female Driders). But then i found this miniature, and it is a female, but she's the same size as the male Driders. So i don't know what's going on. Like the other females, though, this one was barechested, so i had to paint a sports bra on her. I didn't have to shave any nipples, though. Since i was painting the Drider, i also picked out a nice looking Drow elf. And some others just to round out the set, including this horrific slime monsters with its gibbering mouths and a skeleton in its belly. A standard armored guy... ...who does have a cool shield. Although the hidebound leather and monster teeth is an odd fit for a guy that is otherwise wearing full metal armor. I guess when you find a +3 Shield of Fire Resistance in a dungeon, you pick it up even if it doesn't match your outfit. Moving on, here's a dwarf: And a gnome (in D&D, dwarves can't use magic, so this short wizard looking guy must be a gnome): And lastly, another one of these humanoid demon characters. I painted a male fighter in the previous batch and a female sorceress a little earlier. You'll again notice that the male is wearing a lot more clothing than the ladies. I guess that's partially due to the fact that these demonkin or whatever they are seem to have character classes. We have the sorceress, the fighter, and this one's pretty clearly a thief. I wonder if Reaper had in mind some game system where demonkin are a playable race. By fnord12 | January 29, 2015, 5:45 PM | D&D| Link The Super-Deformed Marvel Horror Orchestra Not entirely horror since it includes Conan and the guy with the triangle (i can't figure out who he is)(Update: It's Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars. See the comments here.). By fnord12 | January 29, 2015, 10:27 AM | Comics | Comments (5) | Link
SuperMegaSpeed Reviews Ok, the reboot, if it's even happening, is still months away. So let's get focused and see what's going on with the few currents we're still getting. Elektra #10 - Well what did you THINK would happen? I don't know what W. Haden Blackman had in mind, but for me this arc will be remembered as the time that Bullseye was safely comatose and imprisoned until Elektra dumbly freed him. I still like Del Mundo's art and the plot did have trained attack monkeys, so it's a net positive. Thanos vs. Hulk #2 - Some interesting stuff going on here. Starlin shows that Kid Annihilus has an adult sized robotic stand-in, which is presumably to help with continuity problems. And he also has Thanos say that the Hulk and Banner have existed as separate personalities for so long that they are effectively two different people with different souls. If i thought anyone still cared, i'd be intrigued to see how that was intended to reconcile with the Peter David idea that Banner and the Hulk are two sides of the same personality. Beyond that, it's relatively classic style storytelling involving the Hulk, Thanos, Annihilus, and Blastaar, so i'm good with this. Daredevil #12 - Nice twist. It's more mileage than i'd ever expect anyone to get from the Stunt-Master. Waid and Samnee continue to deliver fun Daredevil stories. This is a book that would potentially tempt me to keep going post-reboot, but since the creative team is leaving i don't have to worry about it. By fnord12 | January 28, 2015, 3:00 PM | Comics | Comments (3) | Link
A rare post about wrestling I never watched professional wrestling with any seriousness. Min and i did get into WCW during the NWO period because a friend in college was into it, but we stopped watching it again after that. I nonetheless enjoyed MightyGodKing's write up about how the WWE seems to have screwed up their Royal Rumble last night. I do think there's a lot of similarities between wrestling and superhero comics, and the fans seem to have a similar love/hate relationship with the producers. I'd also be more willing to watch wrestling if they went back to acknowledging the campiness of it more, and had more characters with names like Rowdy Roddy Piper and less like Daniel Bryan. By fnord12 | January 26, 2015, 1:57 PM | TeeVee | Comments (1) | Link Around these parts we know how to deal with Blizzards You call up the Iron Man of the future (the, er, not too distant future of 2020), and he blasts them away. The above from Amazing Spider-Man annual #20, from 1986 when 2020 did seem a little further away. By fnord12 | January 26, 2015, 12:35 PM | Comics & My stupid life | Comments (3) | Link Mooooooar Horde The Horde keeps rolling in. I keep telling myself it's the last batch for now, but then i pick out a few more (and i've already got another batch in progress after this). Nothing too special about these first two. I used the guy on the left as a prototype for the wash that i wanted to use on the demon below. I did leave his short shorts bright orange, because i read too many superhero comics. This next one is the reason why i decided to do another batch. The next adventure coming up features a magic fountain, and lo and behold look what i found in the box. I don't normally use the Brush-on Sealer that came with my paint set, because it makes the figures look too glossy, but i did use it on the water in the fountain to make it look more wet (i also occasionally use it on the eyes of bigger creatures for the same reason). This next guy has a lot going on. First of all, he's a demon-man in armor, including on the tip of his tail. I therefore colored him the same as the demon sorceress from a previous batch, but that does raise a double standard regarding clothing (which is not surprising for these Bones figures). Second of all, he had a really jagged sword that looked like a lightning bolt to me, so i painted it bright yellow. He's also got a cool shield. And finally, he is wearing a wolf on his back. Notice the wolf's arms draping over his tail. Next up are two bigger figures. First that demon i mentioned earlier. I was a little unsure if that fireball in his hand was going to work out but it seems to be ok. Then this awesome giant skeleton. He's so huge he uses a tombstone that's as big as a regular miniature as the head of his hammer. He's also got all sorts of little details on him, like wooden planks and such to keep his body together, and (not shown) a sword sticking out of his side. Finally, for scale, here's the whole group together. The picture got photobombed by C'thulu, the ham. By fnord12 | January 26, 2015, 11:48 AM | D&D | Comments (1) | Link
Plain High Drifter This is from an ad for Marvel's Crazy magazine (found in Apr 74's Monsters Unleashed #5). I didn't realize they were doing pot jokes. By fnord12 | January 23, 2015, 11:06 AM | Comics| Link
Hording away old age Someone told me that if i wasn't so old, i would have finished these Bones miniatures already. So at great expense to my career, family, and health, i've been pressing on. Here's the latest batch. This group included an easy to paint but cool looking Stone Golem, and a Skeleton Knight where i decided to paint the head as metallic instead of bone. Maybe i'll introduce a villain into my campaign called the Silver Skull. My last batch had a pirate in it, so i fished out the pirate figure that came with the Bones set, even though she's a Sexy Pirate that i had to denudify a bit. I wanted to paint that wizard figure in a Modred the Mystic color scheme but not enough of his interior clothes are showing, so i'll see if i can do that with a different figure. I think the Ali Baba and the thief both came out pretty cool. Some generic creatures on the right, all repeats of figures i've painted in previous batches, but the point is to have a horde of them. For several of these figures i tried something new with the wash technique. Technically to make a wash you should just water down a color that is darker than your base coat and then brush that over the mini, and the darker paint will find its way to the crevices. But i can never get it to work right. But i do have two pre-made washes, a Black Wash and a "Flesh" Wash. And i think there is something in them more than just watered down black and "flesh" paint. Some kind of additional chemical that makes them work better as a wash. So for this set of minis, i tried mixing the black wash into my diluted colors, and it worked better. On the the armored figure above, i painted him a light grey and then mixed some dark blue with the black wash, and it worked pretty well. I did the same thing in green for "Modred" and in blue for the sorceress in the top picture. Of course you can't see any of it in these pictures even though i did break them down into smaller groups instead of taking one giant group picture. By fnord12 | January 22, 2015, 1:18 PM | D&D | Comments (4) | Link What i learned about Marvel's Frankenstein As part of my comics timeline project, i am going through Essential The Monster of Frankenstein. The first 11 issues of the series take place before Marvel Comics #1, so i'm not including them in my project, but there are a few tidbits i wanted to share here. For brevity, and because i know it bothers people and i am a jerk, i will be referring to the Monster as Frankenstein. Long post, so the majority is below the fold. Frankenstein got his coat from a bear that he killed and ate He modified the bearskin coat after living and observing humans for a while. Frankenstein lost his voice after a vampire bit into his larynx Frankenstein was initially an unrepentant murderer It's been a while since i read the book, but i thought that the creature only killed in retaliation for the acts of Dr. Frankenstein (e.g. refusing to create a Bride for him). In this, he kills some poor random lady to create parts for his Bride. It seems to be something Marvel regrets later. They later show the Monster regretting his acts, and then of course the brain damage makes it moot. Frankenstein fought lots of awesome stuff 1. Arctic Cavemen... 2. A female werewolf (that he briefly fell in love with): 3. Lots of weird little misshapen men (a repeat theme in his series): 4. A giant soul-sucking spider: 5. Dracula (!): And, if we go by the same rules used in Uncanny X-Men #159, Frankenstein must be a Christian. 6. A hunchback: 7. And a giant hunchback: The initial 11 issues by Gary Friedrich, and especially the first 6 with art by Mike Ploog, are surprisingly good and a lot of fun. But the stories taking place in the past weren't selling well (because it's the Marvel universe that people are interested in!), so the series was moved to the present so that Frankenstein could meet Werewolf By Night and Spider-Man. But either because of the change in creative teams, or because the Marvel monster fad had reached its limits, or because it was already too late for the series, it was canceled with issue #18. By fnord12 | January 22, 2015, 10:11 AM | Comics | Comments (3) | Link FBI Successfully Foils Their Own Manufactured Terror Plot Your morning Glenn Greenwald: Family members say Cornell converted to Islam just six months ago and claimed he began attending a small local mosque. Yet The Cincinnati Enquirer could not find a single person at that mosque who had ever seen him before, and noted that a young, white, recent convert would have been quite conspicuous at a mosque largely populated by "immigrants from West Africa," many of whom "speak little or no English." First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the "radical" political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups. They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a "terror plot": either because they're being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target. Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of "entrapment" that it could almost never be successfully invoked. As AP noted last night, "defense arguments have repeatedly failed with judges, and the stings have led to many convictions." By min | January 22, 2015, 9:16 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link Braille Printer Made of Legos He's 13, and he's already better than all of us combined. Link Shubham then did some online research and was shocked to learn that Braille printers, also called embossers, cost at least $2,000 -- too expensive for most blind readers, especially in developing countries. I love how his mom was at first not supportive of his idea. She was prolly annoyed with him for taking up space on her dining table with his Legos. By min | January 22, 2015, 8:37 AM | Science| Link
Why is this idiot my Senator? Menendez: Obama Admin's Iran Talking Points Are 'Straight Out Of Tehran'. He's bucked Obama on this and on Cuba. How can he be from the same state that elected Cory Booker? Can he at least not be the Dem's Ranking Member on the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations? By fnord12 | January 21, 2015, 6:43 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link Marvel Sales - oops nevermind I went to read this and found out that the Beat just republished an older article. By fnord12 | January 21, 2015, 12:55 PM | Comics| Link Personally i like rap music *and* disco One of my interests is music sample archeology, and i've closed the loop on a good one. I found it at Sample Watch, and their article has been up since 2011 so i don't know why this took me so long. I also never knew that anyone attributed the "Create rap music cause i never dug disco" line to Chuck D. It's pretty clearly not him. But i may have had an advantage since i had heard the rest of the vocals, not just that line sampled in the Dr. Octagon song. I knew it from this Deejay Punk Roc song, which basically samples an entire verse from what i now know is Urban Sound Surgeon by 4-Ever Fresh. I like the sped up vocals in the Deejay Punk Roc version a lot, to the point where the original is going to take some getting used to, but i've always loved the "Holy Calamity, scream insanity, all you'll ever be is another big fan of me" line, and now i know where it came from. By fnord12 | January 21, 2015, 10:15 AM | Music| Link Clean break I've heard so many rumors about the Marvel universe ending that i am now having trouble believing it when Marvel literally tells me it's the case, but it sure sounds like it's happening. At the moment this feels like good news to me. For a while now i've felt like the Marvel universe was already broken, but since it was still staggering along i've felt obligated to keep up with it. One of my biggest fears (in, you know, the context of comic books) was that the Marvel universe would sort of unofficially end but i'd still not be sure if it really had. But with the changes that seem to be coming with the new Secret Wars, it seems like a clean jumping off point. The event does seem to be designed in a "have your cake and eat it too" way, since there's a story reason why the Marvel universe is rebooting, unlike the most recent DC reboot (on the other hand, from the little i see this does sound a lot like DC's Crisis). But for me, at least, this signals a clean break and i won't be continuing further even if you can make an argument that it's kinda sorta the same universe. I may still pick up trades in the same way i read trades of, say, Saga or Walking Dead, but only based on the strength of the creators and buzz as opposed to it being a part of the Marvel universe i've been following since i started reading comics. Part of me now wants to read Secret Wars just to see how it ends in realtime, but from the article i linked to it seems like there's already going to be an unwieldy deluge of tie-in books, so i think i'll just let the dust settle and pick up the pieces afterwards. And hey, now i have an official end goal for my timeline project! By fnord12 | January 21, 2015, 9:55 AM | Comics | Comments (8) | Link
Cheap and fast internet access is not a technical problem Matthew Yglesias has some sad facts that are particularly relevant to the SuperMegaHousehold as we watch our internet-only Comcast bill start creeping up again. By fnord12 | January 15, 2015, 10:02 AM | Liberal Outrage & My stupid life| Link
Horde Attack As Penny Arcade says, some of us have overkicked and are buried in mounds of plastic, but i tried to paint my way out of it a bit this past month. Min always complains that the pictures of my miniatures are too small to show any detail. That's partially due to me not wanting to show off (i.e. trying to hide) my paint jobs, and partially because the minis are pretty small and hard to get good pictures of. But especially since this batch was a large one, i broke them down into smaller groups of pictures, which will hopefully show off / not hide the detail. They're still kind of blurry. We start with some basic wizards and warriors. I liked the flaming sword guy and went with an unusual color for his armor. The pirate figure is not a Bones; he's an extra piece from a Kickstarter that a friend gave me. These elves are not Bones either. They are metal miniatures. I originally bought them wanting to add some female Drow elves to my collection, thinking i could paint some regular female elves as Drow, but as i started getting ready to paint them and looked at them more closely, i noticed that one was actually a dude, and then another was actually a dude, and really their woodland themed armor didn't really work as Drow after all, so i painted them as regular elves. Some goblin type creatures. Since i already have a lot of standard green colored goblins, i went with blue skin for these. This guy is pretty funny: the over-encumbered adventurer. Half my party should really look like this. I tried to capture him from multiple angles to show off the various stuff he is carrying. His face kind of reminded me of Terry Gilliam's squire from Monty Python & the Holy Grail, so i let the eyes remain a bit bug-eyed when they came out that way. Mimics are one of the meaner creatures that a DM can foist on their players: a creature that disguises itself as a treasure chest until an unwitting character sticks its head in to see what's inside. And of course demon sorceresses can be pretty mean, too. So i balanced things out by including a bartender. I actually wanted the giant in my last batch to be a Fire Giant, but her armor and interesting mask convinced me she was really more of a woodland giant, so this one gets to be the Fire Giant. I have no idea what the other thing in this picture is. Min said it was maybe an egg in a nest, so i kind of painted it that way, but i think it'll just be some sort of dungeon creeper horror. These aren't Bones. A while back i bought a cheapo set of plastic minis because it included a really classic looking D&D Troll (seen here) at a time when TSR/Wizards/Whatever isn't making that kind of troll anymore. These are the other minis from that set. After looking at them for a while, i realized the larger creatures are Apes as in from The Planet Of, so i tried to go with that look. Love their shields. The shorter guys will be used as generic orcs or similar. Two wolf-like creatures. The one on the left is not a Bones. It's an official D&D miniature of a krenshar, a pretty weird thing. The one on the right is a Bones and "normal" Dire Wolf. Finally, a big group shot of everything i painted during my semi-break from my comic timeline project, and this one can be clicked to full-size: By fnord12 | January 14, 2015, 3:10 PM | D&D | Comments (2) | Link Scarlet Witch's hair color She's wearing green on the cover of her first appearance, and yet she's called the *Scarlet* Witch. Therefore her hair must be red. Q.E.D. It looks like Shar is going to have a more reasoned discussion of the matter. By fnord12 | January 14, 2015, 2:07 PM | Comics | Comments (3) | Link But then why leave home at all? Having just come off a two week staycation that was pretty awesome at least until the flu bug bit, i can kind of get behind the conclusion of this Why Americans Are Terrible at Vacation article: ...when visiting Paris, for example... skip the Eiffel Tower (most Parisians haven't been since they were five years old) and instead... [try] mirroring locally relevant activities like having sex, drinking wine before noon, reading a weighty philosophy book, and taking a nap. I definitely find the tour style vacation to be exhausting, and love the idea of just going somewhere to relax. But i can actually relax just fine at home, and home is where i keep all my stuff, so i can take the occasional break from relaxing to paint some miniatures or work on my comics timeline. And if i'm just going to hang out somewhere, i'm not really going to see anything, so what's the point? Any way you look at it, though, i think it's time to go back on vacation. By fnord12 | January 14, 2015, 1:39 PM | My stupid life| Link
Boring Auntie had better start spicing up her stories From the September 2014 Scientific American, in an interview article fretting about our growing inability to turn off the technology around us: And... People are also good with a robot that could stand in as a companion for an older person. But I take a moral position here because older people deserve to tell the story of their life to someone who understands what a life is. They've lost spouses; they've lost children. We're suggesting they tell the story of their life to something that has no idea was a life is or what a loss is. I never had these utopian family dinners and i never had Facebook, so a lot of what this article is saying sounds crazy to me. But i do know that one day me and Min are going to be old, and we don't have any kids, so we're going to need that robot companion. We were thinking it could be dog shaped. By fnord12 | January 13, 2015, 2:28 PM | My stupid life & Science | Comments (2) | Link Recap 63 Chunneling Deeper into the Underdark By min | January 13, 2015, 10:58 AM | D&D| Link
Marvel Sales By fnord12 | January 12, 2015, 10:24 AM | Comics| Link
OK, I see nothing special I'm sorry i didn't have any comic reviews today. You can blame Matthew Yglesias, who linked to a website that runs browser based DOS emulators, so i spent my review time playing Questprobe Spider-Man. I had this game as a kid but could never beat it. So i tried it again on my own today but didn't get any further than i did as a kid. In fact i probably did worse thanks to some problems with the emulator (like the delete button not working) which made things more frustrating than usual. So i figured it was time to use a walkthrough, and i finally realized how insane some of the solutions are, like shooting your web at a spinning fan like 5 times in a row with no feedback before you can shoot the web at the button that turns it off, or not being able to specify which chemicals you want to mix together so you have to keep dropping items from your inventory). With the walkthrough i thought i would finally beat the game, but i screwed up at the end anyway and got killed by an exploding Natter Energy Egg just like i always used to. But at that point i was close enough, so i'm declaring closure on this particular unresolved childhood matter. And after this experience, i have no desire to try the other Questprobe games that i never had as a kid. If you don't want to try the game, here's a fun walkthrough. It doesn't quite convey the frustrating experience of the game's poor syntax capabilities, but it demonstrates how insane the puzzles were. By fnord12 | January 6, 2015, 1:59 PM | Comics & Video Games | Comments (6) | Link
SuperMegaSpeed Reviews She-Hulk #11 - I was originally excited to see a fight with Titania on the cover until i saw the hair pulling. As for the interior... well, i've come to really like Pulido's quirky art on this title, but for the fight scenes in this issue... well, that definitely doesn't seem to be the right use of Pulido. And that Volcana! What happened to her? Is she supposed to look like that now or is that just Pulido's "take" on the character? I do complain that there aren't enough straight up fights with super-villains anymore, but in the future i guess i'd better be careful about what i ask for. I still enjoyed this and am looking forward to the development of the Blue File plot. Daredevil #11 - Hee, hee! The Stunt-Master! Actually, as is often the case, Waid takes a really goofy concept and gets a good story out of it. Enjoyed this quite a bit, and am sad that Waid is leaving the book. By fnord12 | January 5, 2015, 6:21 PM | Comics | Comments (1) | Link
Hello Kitty Cupcakes and Play-Doh Abominations By fnord12 | January 4, 2015, 4:47 PM | My stupid life| Link |