Dear flist, PLEASE SUPER-SIZE ME
Okay, dear readers, I need your help.
DC has this new blog called The Source, and they post previews and little puff pieces every day about upcoming or current books. It's a nicely simple layout, not all cluttered and Las Vegas Glitterati like Marvel's blogs are, but there is one glaring problem: half the time when you go to click an image to see the full-size version, you get error messages all over the place.
So DC posted these pages highlighting all the different Corps in the upcoming War of Light, and I can't see the full-size versions of half of them, and this is causing me to become mentally distraught. I mean, my soul hurts. I've been waiting to see what the Indigo Compassion Lanterns are gonna look like for over a year.
Can someone please upload the full-size versions of the Indigos and Blues to LJ Scrapbook or Photobucket and then link me so that I can see them? Please please please pretty please? People have been bitching at DC to fix the errors with their images for a week now (I'm not the only person having the problem), and DC obviously ain't doing jack, so I now must turn to you, the people of the blogsphere, to help a fangirl out.
Please. Do it for great justice!
There was this page, though, from Blackest Night:
That gave me goosebumps. Is...seriously, is that Black Hand eating someone or trying to bring them back from the dead? Did he really go that batshit insane? And are those Black Lantern rings that are spewing forth there into the universe like swarms of zombie bees...are those rings being made from the Anti-Monitor's freakin' body?
And I'm still waiting for confirmation that the scarred Guardian who fought the Anti-Monitor back in The Sinestro Corps is in fact the first Black Lantern because she died as soon as the Anti-Monitor touched her. She keeps weeping that black stuff, so it's not like Geoff Johns isn't dropping hints left and right, is it? Face it, she's a ZOMBIE Guardian, and that is just so unbelievably creepy that I get a little surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline in my stomach every time I think about it.
Speaking of creepy, I just read Joe Hill's The Heart-Shaped Box, and I am sad to report that although the first third was disturbing and scary the way a good horror novel should be, I was not nearly scared enough by the rest of the novel to call it a satisfying read, and I am the EASIEST SELL EVER when it comes to ghost stories, particularly when it comes to vengeful ghosts that send you e-mails and wage a campaign of psychological warefare against the living.
So, onwards to other things.
Lest you think I joke when I say how big LiveJournal is in the Russian blog-o-sphere-o-rama, as many of you probably already know, the President of the Russian Federation now has a LiveJournal. That would be, of course, blog_medvedev. After reading the article in The Moscow Times about it, it appears that his posts attract thousands of comments and that a great deal of these comments are complaints about corruption, pleas for assistance in individual circumstances, etc., and surprisingly? It appears that some of these complaints are actually being investigated by the office of the Russian president. It's an interesting way for a politician to connect directly with the populace, certainly, although doubtless most of the posts will be fraught to the brim with pinwheel-eyed shallow boosterism and propaganda.
It's only a matter of time before his LJ gets hacked by some of Medvedev's fellow Russian citizens, of course, and I'd definitely view Medvedev's LJ with NoScript just in case. I look forward to seeing how many Russian bot accounts friend his journal, and I fervently wish to be a fly on the wall when LJ Support starts getting support requests from the PRESIDENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION (or his minions). "Dear LJ Support, I would like to get rid of the annoying navbar strip because it is playing havoc with my carefully coded LJ layout that has tons of custom CSS, can you please assist, sincerely yours, etc., THE PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA."
Time to polish up my Russian again, wade in, and start reading about fraudulent property developments in Sochi and whatnot.
So I spent Tuesday stuck in a conference room downtown at the W Hotel for a work meeting. You know how the W Hotel, with its polished chrome everywhere, chairs straight out of Woody Allen's Sleeper, black light in the bathrooms, etc., constantly has music piped into every common area that is nothing but cheesy house remixes of every top forty hit of the last five decades? And when I say "cheesy house remixes," perhaps I'm being too generous, because it's more like they took said songs, added a hi hat and diva vocals, and called it a day. So every time I went to the bathroom, there was Roxy Music's "Dance Away the Heartache" houseified, and I'd find myself boogying AGAINST MY WILL whilst touching up my Nars eyeshadow. (I hate top forty, so imagine my PAIN.) At the end of the meeting, we all emerged from the conference room to hear a soul diva chorus chanting "it's ALL ABOUT AUF WIEDERSEHEN!" It was, in a word, surreal.
During this meeting, there was a well-known physician -- a prominent treater in his field -- who gave a fascinating presentation about the sociopolitical aspects of disease and its cascading effects in shaping outcomes in international relations and the internal political landscape of various European countries in the early 20th century. His thesis is that hemophilia was, in a very tangible way, one of the primary causes of the Russian Revolution, WWI, and WWII due to the fact that by 1900 so many royal families in Europe were stricken with the disease. (He also took hilarious potshots at the British, saying that the English royal family back in the 12th century had hemophilia but handed it off to Europe, thus reinforcing a pattern of Britain creating huge steaming piles of excrement and leaving them out for someone else to clean up.)
Anyway, his presentation also included, surprisingly, a ton of superhero images. He had slides showing Supergirl, Wolverine, Deadpool, Gambit, etc. The first slide he brought up of Supergirl had MICHAEL TURNER ART of Kara, and my manager, who was sitting CLEAR ACROSS THE ROOM, saw my wince -- okay, let's be honest, it was an open-mouthed horrified grimace -- and shouted "NEXT SLIDE, PLEASE!" to said physician in a crisp tone of voice. It was too late, though, because I'd already hissed an incredulous "Michael Turner art yeahbuwha?!" This, of course, was audible to the entire gathering.
In a nice bit of serendipity, I was seated next to the only coworker that I have at my company who is as into comics as I am, and who also happens to report to the same manager as I do, so it appears that my manager has learned the dangers of Michael Turner via osmosis. Then a few slides later we had Ed Benes art of Supergirl, which caused a furious whispered debate between Comics Fanboy!Coworker and me regarding whether or not Ed Benes should be dumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, it all went downhill from there.
Anyway, said physician, upon learning that I am a modest student of Russian history, asked me if I thought that his theory of hemophilia causing the Russian Revolution was sound, and here I had to be tactful, because I do understand that people who specialize in a field sometimes make the cognitive error of wildly extrapolating outwards from their sub-specialty and using that perceptual lens to model big events in history. So I couldn't just say "No, sorry, not on," but I did point out that he'd vastly oversimplified and/or ignored complex sociopolitical and economic realities in his analysis. He was so excited to talk to someone about Russian history that I had to back away slowly.
Finally, ambitious cat is ambitious:
And via oakenguy:
Moral of the story: quit bothering the animals. They obviously don't like you.
DC has this new blog called The Source, and they post previews and little puff pieces every day about upcoming or current books. It's a nicely simple layout, not all cluttered and Las Vegas Glitterati like Marvel's blogs are, but there is one glaring problem: half the time when you go to click an image to see the full-size version, you get error messages all over the place.
So DC posted these pages highlighting all the different Corps in the upcoming War of Light, and I can't see the full-size versions of half of them, and this is causing me to become mentally distraught. I mean, my soul hurts. I've been waiting to see what the Indigo Compassion Lanterns are gonna look like for over a year.
Can someone please upload the full-size versions of the Indigos and Blues to LJ Scrapbook or Photobucket and then link me so that I can see them? Please please please pretty please? People have been bitching at DC to fix the errors with their images for a week now (I'm not the only person having the problem), and DC obviously ain't doing jack, so I now must turn to you, the people of the blogsphere, to help a fangirl out.
Please. Do it for great justice!
There was this page, though, from Blackest Night:
That gave me goosebumps. Is...seriously, is that Black Hand eating someone or trying to bring them back from the dead? Did he really go that batshit insane? And are those Black Lantern rings that are spewing forth there into the universe like swarms of zombie bees...are those rings being made from the Anti-Monitor's freakin' body?
And I'm still waiting for confirmation that the scarred Guardian who fought the Anti-Monitor back in The Sinestro Corps is in fact the first Black Lantern because she died as soon as the Anti-Monitor touched her. She keeps weeping that black stuff, so it's not like Geoff Johns isn't dropping hints left and right, is it? Face it, she's a ZOMBIE Guardian, and that is just so unbelievably creepy that I get a little surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline in my stomach every time I think about it.
Speaking of creepy, I just read Joe Hill's The Heart-Shaped Box, and I am sad to report that although the first third was disturbing and scary the way a good horror novel should be, I was not nearly scared enough by the rest of the novel to call it a satisfying read, and I am the EASIEST SELL EVER when it comes to ghost stories, particularly when it comes to vengeful ghosts that send you e-mails and wage a campaign of psychological warefare against the living.
So, onwards to other things.
Lest you think I joke when I say how big LiveJournal is in the Russian blog-o-sphere-o-rama, as many of you probably already know, the President of the Russian Federation now has a LiveJournal. That would be, of course, blog_medvedev. After reading the article in The Moscow Times about it, it appears that his posts attract thousands of comments and that a great deal of these comments are complaints about corruption, pleas for assistance in individual circumstances, etc., and surprisingly? It appears that some of these complaints are actually being investigated by the office of the Russian president. It's an interesting way for a politician to connect directly with the populace, certainly, although doubtless most of the posts will be fraught to the brim with pinwheel-eyed shallow boosterism and propaganda.
It's only a matter of time before his LJ gets hacked by some of Medvedev's fellow Russian citizens, of course, and I'd definitely view Medvedev's LJ with NoScript just in case. I look forward to seeing how many Russian bot accounts friend his journal, and I fervently wish to be a fly on the wall when LJ Support starts getting support requests from the PRESIDENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION (or his minions). "Dear LJ Support, I would like to get rid of the annoying navbar strip because it is playing havoc with my carefully coded LJ layout that has tons of custom CSS, can you please assist, sincerely yours, etc., THE PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA."
Time to polish up my Russian again, wade in, and start reading about fraudulent property developments in Sochi and whatnot.
So I spent Tuesday stuck in a conference room downtown at the W Hotel for a work meeting. You know how the W Hotel, with its polished chrome everywhere, chairs straight out of Woody Allen's Sleeper, black light in the bathrooms, etc., constantly has music piped into every common area that is nothing but cheesy house remixes of every top forty hit of the last five decades? And when I say "cheesy house remixes," perhaps I'm being too generous, because it's more like they took said songs, added a hi hat and diva vocals, and called it a day. So every time I went to the bathroom, there was Roxy Music's "Dance Away the Heartache" houseified, and I'd find myself boogying AGAINST MY WILL whilst touching up my Nars eyeshadow. (I hate top forty, so imagine my PAIN.) At the end of the meeting, we all emerged from the conference room to hear a soul diva chorus chanting "it's ALL ABOUT AUF WIEDERSEHEN!" It was, in a word, surreal.
During this meeting, there was a well-known physician -- a prominent treater in his field -- who gave a fascinating presentation about the sociopolitical aspects of disease and its cascading effects in shaping outcomes in international relations and the internal political landscape of various European countries in the early 20th century. His thesis is that hemophilia was, in a very tangible way, one of the primary causes of the Russian Revolution, WWI, and WWII due to the fact that by 1900 so many royal families in Europe were stricken with the disease. (He also took hilarious potshots at the British, saying that the English royal family back in the 12th century had hemophilia but handed it off to Europe, thus reinforcing a pattern of Britain creating huge steaming piles of excrement and leaving them out for someone else to clean up.)
Anyway, his presentation also included, surprisingly, a ton of superhero images. He had slides showing Supergirl, Wolverine, Deadpool, Gambit, etc. The first slide he brought up of Supergirl had MICHAEL TURNER ART of Kara, and my manager, who was sitting CLEAR ACROSS THE ROOM, saw my wince -- okay, let's be honest, it was an open-mouthed horrified grimace -- and shouted "NEXT SLIDE, PLEASE!" to said physician in a crisp tone of voice. It was too late, though, because I'd already hissed an incredulous "Michael Turner art yeahbuwha?!" This, of course, was audible to the entire gathering.
In a nice bit of serendipity, I was seated next to the only coworker that I have at my company who is as into comics as I am, and who also happens to report to the same manager as I do, so it appears that my manager has learned the dangers of Michael Turner via osmosis. Then a few slides later we had Ed Benes art of Supergirl, which caused a furious whispered debate between Comics Fanboy!Coworker and me regarding whether or not Ed Benes should be dumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, it all went downhill from there.
Anyway, said physician, upon learning that I am a modest student of Russian history, asked me if I thought that his theory of hemophilia causing the Russian Revolution was sound, and here I had to be tactful, because I do understand that people who specialize in a field sometimes make the cognitive error of wildly extrapolating outwards from their sub-specialty and using that perceptual lens to model big events in history. So I couldn't just say "No, sorry, not on," but I did point out that he'd vastly oversimplified and/or ignored complex sociopolitical and economic realities in his analysis. He was so excited to talk to someone about Russian history that I had to back away slowly.
Finally, ambitious cat is ambitious:
And via oakenguy:
Moral of the story: quit bothering the animals. They obviously don't like you.