More Room For You And More Room For Me

My complete political nerditry is something that only really kicked in when I moved to the US; I’m not sure whether it was genuine interest in the then-current 2004 Presidential Elections (which were being held as Kate and I were flying home for my mother’s funeral; I remember the odd mix of sadness and anticipation, getting off the plane in Amsterdam for a layover and checking CNN on the overhead screens to see what’d happened) or simply confusion and too much time on my hands when it was happening, but it ended up fascinating me, the whole long drawn-out process that seemed tailor-made for television. British politics, I said to myself, aren’t anything like this.

Except, of course, now they are. A lot has been written and said about the televised election debates as part of this last UK election, but that’s not what’s seemed the most “American” thing about everything that’s happened (and is still happening) for me… No, that’d be the hung parliament situation that’s been going on since last Thursday’s election, with all the uncertainty and speculation and much-reported-on dealmaking and everything. What I used to consider relatively staid, in comparison with US politics at least, has become compulsive viewing and grand theater. Consider this round-up from today’s Guardian election blog:

Hearing a prime minister announce that he’s going to resign is always a big story. But Gordon Brown’s statement today was only one piece of the jigsaw, and perhaps not even the most important. What matters most is that this morning it looked as if the Tories and the Lib Dems were on the verge of forming a “confidence and supply” pact. Now it seems almost inevitable that the next government will be a coalition. But whether it will be a Tory/Lib Dem coalition or a Labour/Lib Dem coalition is anyone’s guess.

I feel sorry for Gordon Brown, in a strange way. I didn’t really like him as Prime Minister, I’m not convinced that he did a good job and I’ve become sadly depressed by the Labour part in general over the last few years, but I still feel as if he’s been slightly broken by everything that’s gone on recently, and pushed out by a party grabbing at its last chance for power. And yet, nonetheless, my past and upbringing and suspicion make me hope that Labour and the Liberal Democrats come to some kind of coalition deal, and that the Conservatives are kept out of office for awhile yet; growing up under the thumb of Margaret Thatcher tends to push that idea deep into your soul, I think.

Gone Conventionin’

WonderCon is around the corner; the first (or second, perhaps? I’m not sure if Emerald City Comic Con counts for everyone) big comic book convention of the year, and an old familiar haunt for me. After taking last year off – having just moved to Portland and having neither the time nor the money to be able to go back to San Francisco for a weekend – I’ll be back this year, in part to report for CBR (and other places of which I can’t speak, just yet. But soon) and in part to further provide proof that my public speaking skills are embarrassingly poor by appearing on David Brothers‘ Comics Journalism panel on Saturday evening (Strange but true: When the panel was announced, I was still with io9. By the time the panel happens, I’ll have been gone from the site for two weeks and feeling like a fraud for being listed with that credit), and I have to admit: I’m really strangely nervous about the whole thing.

It may be because last year’s San Diego Comic-Con was so overwhelmingly strange and… well, overwhelming; five days of constant everything that left me and everyone else I know who attended in a state of shell-shocked daze. That my last two cons have been SDCCs may have colored my idea of what it means to do a convention, and turned the idea into something terrifying. Or, maybe it’s that this con will be my first as a freelancer who’s looking for work, as opposed to writing for io9 or writing for fun while having a day job that pays the bills (Will I have to… *shudder* network?!?). It could be either, or both; it could even be the knowledge that I’m sure I’ll say something stupid on one of the panels, for all I know. But there’s something about the whole thing that makes me as nervous as I am excited about getting back to SF and seeing all my friends again.

Here’s hoping this is just some kind of Karmic Radar Wire Crossing, and that WonderCon actually holds all manner of wild and wooly excitement for me, and I come back next week full of work, optimism and randomly upbeat futurism. Or, at least, that I don’t manage to piss off even more comic professionals.

Back on Tuesday.

And So, We Return And Begin Again

Well, firstly, I hope you all saw this. Yes, I am no longer with io9, although there’s more than a small chance that I’ll be back for occasional guest posts every now and then. Instead, I’m now living the freelance life with posts already up at Comics Alliance and Savage Critic, and more to come in many, many other places. It’s a shift, don’t get me wrong, but the oddest things so far have been reading the comments on the goodbye post at io9 – It was like attending my own funeral, with people I don’t know saying lovely things! – and waking up this morning without the pressure of knowing that I had five posts to finish that day. It all feels rather unreal, still. Give me a few days to get my head around this whole thing, and I’ll be fighting fit and able, as the song goes.

Endless Love

I honestly don’t know why this amuses me so much, but it really, really does. Is it the red band of obvious warning? The beautifully succinct subject line? Or the mysterious mention of a condition I don’t even know I have? I have no idea, but I don’t care. Thank you, spam emailer Carissa Guaglidaro. Thank you for early morning comedy.

Rest In Peace, Luna Cat

As cliches go, “dearly beloved” doesn’t begin to describe how we felt about our favorite cat. She’s already missed, and the house seems larger and much emptier without her in it. As heartbroken as we are now, we’re very happy that she decided to follow us home that night, years ago, when she was a stray, and happier yet that she wouldn’t leave when we got home.

And I’m Looking From A Distance And I’m Listening To The Whispers

And so, the cat’s sick.

To be fair, the cat’s never not been sick at any point in the last… two? Three, maybe? years; it’s just that we’ve been keeping her cancer under control with medication, and she’s seemed fine as she outlived the “three months left” prognosis by more than eight times that amount. But this past weekend, that clearly changed; she stopped eating, but wouldn’t stop vomiting, lost all energy, started crawling under furniture and crying continuously. We took her to the vet on Monday, convinced that we’d have to put her down, completely heartbroken.

And the vet said, it might not be the cancer. Let’s run some tests and keep her in overnight. And, hours later, the vet called and said, we don’t think it’s cancer, we think it’s anemia, which can probably be treated. But why don’t you take her to your oncologist? So, on Tuesday, hopes slightly raised, we did. And the oncologist said, it’s not anemia, her bloodwork is pretty much the same as it’s always been. It’s possible that the cancer has grown to new organs, or it may be that her medication is also making her sick. We got new medication and brought her home, with the idea of waiting a few days to see how she reacts.

But last night, she just didn’t seem any better. She’s still not eating, and still has no energy. She’s not hiding under furniture, and not crying as much, but we can’t stop thinking that every possibility – that the cancer is all through her body, making her not want to eat and unable to keep food down when she does, or that the medication that’s keeping her cancer in check has decided to also attack her on a new front, or that it’s something else entirely that they don’t know about but would require invasive procedures to identify and maybe couldn’t be treated anyway – is a bad one, and that maybe it’s more humane, a better thing, to say goodbye.

It’s a cliche to say that I love Luna unconditionally, but it’s true. I love how talkative she is, or the way she purrs when she sits beside me. I love the way she’d sleep beside me in the bed, pretty much on my head, and the way she’d think that smacking me awake was the most direct way to let me know she wanted food. She could be annoying, frustrating and greedy, but I love everything about her. Considering a life without her seems cruel, even if it’s the best thing to do.

Print Isn’t Dying As Long As There’s Breakfast To Be Had

So, somewhere around the holidays, the Oregonian newspaper started being delivered to our house. We didn’t ask for it, we didn’t pay for it, but every morning without fail, it’s lying outside our front door waiting for me to take it in and read it over breakfast. Originally, it was something that seemed confusing and worrying; we were convinced that we’d get a bill after the fact asking for hundreds of dollars – I don’t know why we thought it’d be asking for that much; it’s not an expensive newspaper – and have to pay it because, well, we’d read and since recycled all those papers, so it’s not like we could give them back, but that disappeared somewhere around Month Two. Now, we’re just used to the routine: Get up, let the dogs out the back so that they don’t piss or shit inside the house, make breakfast and then read the paper.

It’s a weirdly insidious scheme, on behalf of the Oregonian, though; now, if the papers were to stop arriving, I’d miss them. They’ve become part of the morning, like the essential cup of tea and trying to stop the dogs from eating our/the cat’s food (delete as applicable). I’ve become accustomed to pulling out the sections that I don’t care about (Sports always, Business oftentimes, the classifieds and the several million trees’ worth of advertisement sections), scanning the regular op-ed writers, reading Pearls Before Swine… It’s the classic “the first hit is free” thing, except the first hit is actually the first three months’ hits and newspapers instead of The Horse.  Dammit, whatever happened to print dying already?

Of course, newspapers are just much more fun to read than laptops at the breakfast table, as well. That’s what they need to fix before the iPad is a winner…

This Is Reason Enough For The Phone Book To Exist

This ad is on the back of the new Portland phone book:

There are so many wonderful things about this ad – the literal interpretation of “whistleblowing” in the accompanying image, for example – but my favorite is definitely the seriousness with which it treats sexual harrassment cases: “We’ll Teach Them What Their Mama Didn’t!” Yeah, that makes me think they’d handle cases with the appropriate sensitivity.

Spin The Video Bottle

Signs that I am getting too old for the internet: Chatroulette terrifies me. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then consider yourself lucky; basically, Chatroulette randomly connects you to other internet users in webcam chat until you, or they, decide they’ve had enough and press the “next” button, at which time you’re sent on to another random connection, and so on and so on. It’s apparently the New Internet Thing, judging by all the all the press I keep seeing about it, but I’m convinced my reaction to it would be the same as New York magazine’s Sam Anderson:

I got off the ChatRoulette wheel determined never to get back on. I hadn’t felt this socially trampled since I was an overweight 12-year-old struggling to get through recess without having my shoes mocked. It was total e-visceration. If this was the future of the Internet, then the future of the Internet obviously didn’t include me.

Never mind the tales of the high percentage of users who’re just naked dudes masturbating; it’s the whole lack of control/being continually judged thing that makes me convinced that this is the kind of thing I could never, ever do without feeling as if I am someone who should crawl under a rock and never come out. It’d be all my high school horrors and nightmares turned into a shiny new internet experience, and just another step down the aesthetic Darwinism trail that is the internet’s video-centric social media whirl.

It should be pointed out, however, that I am not the most future-forward of internet users; I remember, in my old job, taking a meeting about Second Life, back when Second Life was starting out – We did work for a futurist organization, so we were getting early heads-up on a lot of stuff like that at the time – and thinking “That sounds fascinating and awesome!” An attitude that lasted until I actually logged on to Second Life and discovered that it was, instead, frustrating and unworkable. So maybe I’m not the best person to judge whether or not chatroulette is the new Facebook (Another site I rarely, if ever, check: Sorry, people who are waiting for me to approve their Friend’s Requests!), but still. If nothing else, I’d like to think that the future of the internet would have a name that wouldn’t include the word “roulette.”

10 Things That Dollhouse’s Finale Taught Me

#10: No-one will visibly age in the next ten years, except for the possibility of some grey appearing in women’s hair. This is, obviously, good news amongst a sea of bad.

#9: Having characters tell other characters how cool your central character is, instead of actually showing said character actually doing anything cool, is not only not convincing, but kind of horrifically awkward and embarrassing. Especially when the character literally tells the audience “She’s so cool.”

(Note: Echo was not cool. Ever.)

#8: While I’m considering writing tips I learned from the episode: Logic is less important than fan service and shock value. But then, I should’ve expected that considering the Buffy comic “Twilight” reveal, as well as the Boyd thing earlier in Dollhouse. Still, “I’m a former psychopath” struck me as particularly convenient/lazy, especially considering Alpha served no purpose in the episode than another character couldn’t have.

#7: By 2019, Mad Max chic will have made a comeback, meaning that the only designers to have survived the brainpocalypse were Project Runway contestants.

#6: In 2019, all fights will apparently happen in a series of fast-cut, close-up scenes that nonetheless fail to disguise the fact that angry mobs apparently consist of maybe six people at most.

#5: Apparently it doesn’t hurt that much to be repeatedly shot in the legs. Equally apparently, shooting people in 2019 means that they don’t bleed.

#4: Using hair metal music for a fight scene in a television episode that is already piling on the 1980s cliches as if it has bought them wholesale may make viewers wonder whether they are, in fact, watching scenes from a never-before-screened pilot for a Glen A. Larson-produced Terminator television show.

#3: The future will be oversaturated and yellow until someone has invented – but not activated – a device that will save humanity, at which point it’ll be blue skies for everyone. Therefore, optimism affects the color of the sky.

#2: Future geniuses can invent devices that will somehow bounce signals off of clouds in the sky so that they can be transmit all around the world from an office building in the middle of LA, but cannot figure out how to add a remote control to said device, meaning that Grant Imahara from Mythbusters may be the pinnacle of human intelligence and ingenuity and it’s all downhill from here on.

#1: The moral of Dollhouse ends up “Technology is really bad in the wrong hands, but give us a decade and everything will be just fine.” Which may, in fact, be a step up from “Objectifying women is a bad thing, and to prove it, here is Eliza Dushku in skintight leather as a programmable sexbot.” So: Win?