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Post by Johann Chua on Feb 24, 2010 7:06:30 GMT -8
<khan>KIRK!</khan>
1) For various reasons anime porn is more readily available than manga porn in the U.S. Comics porn in general doesn't seem to do well. Are the few U.S. companies that still bother to publish manga porn wasting their time?
2) Have you seen the Spectacular Spider-man cartoon? If so, what do you think of it?
3) Which, if any, company-wide crossover would you recommend to a casual superhero fan?
4) Comics on e-readers: yea or nay?
5) Moore and Gibbons obtain the copyright to Watchmen by an odd twist of fate (everyone who wants a copy already has one). Who would publish it then?
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Post by K-Box on Feb 24, 2010 20:34:09 GMT -8
<khan>KIRK!</khan> 1) For various reasons anime porn is more readily available than manga porn in the U.S. Comics porn in general doesn't seem to do well. Are the few U.S. companies that still bother to publish manga porn wasting their time? 2) Have you seen the Spectacular Spider-man cartoon? If so, what do you think of it? 3) Which, if any, company-wide crossover would you recommend to a casual superhero fan? 4) Comics on e-readers: yea or nay? 5) Moore and Gibbons obtain the copyright to Watchmen by an odd twist of fate (everyone who wants a copy already has one). Who would publish it then? Gimme a minute on these ...
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Post by Johann Chua on Mar 6, 2010 15:22:28 GMT -8
Is Kirk traveling at near-light speed?
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Post by K-Box on Mar 6, 2010 21:46:33 GMT -8
Shit, sorry 'bout that. 1) For various reasons anime porn is more readily available than manga porn in the U.S. Comics porn in general doesn't seem to do well. Are the few U.S. companies that still bother to publish manga porn wasting their time? I kind of suspect the Internet has killed porn comics in a non-online form, which is a shame in certain respects, because it means we've gone from comics porn with narratives to comics porn that's almost exclusively pin-ups. 2) Have you seen the Spectacular Spider-man cartoon? If so, what do you think of it? A surprisingly good synthesis of various versions of Spider-Man, which actually manages to be a better Ultimate Spider-Man than Ultimate Spider-Man itself. I especially appreciate the fact that they clearly went into it with a long-term gameplan, unlike Bendis, who's spent half of his USM run undoing his own earlier continuity. 3) Which, if any, company-wide crossover would you recommend to a casual superhero fan? I honestly can't think of any at the moment, if only because the greatest strength of a good line-wide crossover (which is rare enough in itself) is how heavily it draws upon the continuity of the line as a whole. 4) Comics on e-readers: yea or nay? Not until they standardize a reliable format. Until then, people are already reading comics on their computers, so unless the new formats can offer measurably greater convenience, why should they change from their current practices? 5) Moore and Gibbons obtain the copyright to Watchmen by an odd twist of fate (everyone who wants a copy already has one). Who would publish it then? If everyone already has a copy, isn't the question of who publishes it from now on moot?
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Post by Johann Chua on Mar 7, 2010 4:27:18 GMT -8
Shit, sorry 'bout that. 5) Moore and Gibbons obtain the copyright to Watchmen by an odd twist of fate (everyone who wants a copy already has one). Who would publish it then? If everyone already has a copy, isn't the question of who publishes it from now on moot? True, but after reading Watching the Watchmen I thought there might be a market for a super special edition with Moore's participation. Obviously he'd never do one now while DC has the copyright.
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Post by jkcarrier on Mar 7, 2010 10:00:56 GMT -8
Moore seems to have a pretty cozy relationship with Top Shelf at the moment, so I could see him taking the book there as a show of good faith/gratitude. On the other hand, Watchmen would be a huge feather in the cap of any mainstream book publisher's graphic novel line, so I can easily imagine an epic bidding war among the likes of Doubleday, Harper-Collins, et. al.
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Post by jensaltmann on Mar 18, 2010 1:09:53 GMT -8
Kirk, your questions and your next victim, please.
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Post by jensaltmann on Mar 27, 2010 1:35:09 GMT -8
KIIIIRRRRKKKK!!!
Questions and victim, STAT!
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Post by K-Box on Mar 27, 2010 10:59:25 GMT -8
Since you asked nicely. Jens, back to you: 1. The zombie genre seems to have inspired you. What in particular do you find it easy to key into there? 2. Not exactly fandom, but as a German, what about American politics makes the least sense to you? 3. Biggest problem facing the modern sci-fi genre, in your opinion? 4. What's the best writing advice you ever received? 5. Name an author who started out good, and stayed that way throughout their career, and speculate on how they stayed good.
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Post by jensaltmann on Mar 29, 2010 1:03:23 GMT -8
1. The zombie genre seems to have inspired you. What in particular do you find it easy to key into there?
I don't even like zombies. What makes them easy as a tool, however, is that they are like a blank page of paper. They are nothing, they have no real intrinsic attributes. They are a force of nature, similar to a swarm of locusts or a river of lava. A good zombie story is never about the zombies, but rather about the people who try to survive the zombie attack. Basically, you can do anything with them.
2. Not exactly fandom, but as a German, what about American politics makes the least sense to you?
Let me start this one with oversimplifications and generalizations. As in, you need to take two premises as given:
a) All politicians are corrupt and don't care at all about the nation or the people they are supposed to serve. All they care about is the power, the fringe benefits that come with that power, and how to keep both.
That's a global thing, however, not just an American thing. In the US, it gets compounded by the fact that the politicians are Americans. As in
b) Americans as a group are children. They are immature, ignorant (sometimes willfully so), arrogant, selfish, and they believe that Might Makes Right.
As I said, oversimplified and generalized, but that's how the rest of the world sees Americans. Anyway, if you take those two premises as given, almost everything about US politics makes perfect sense. Except... The one thing that I have never figured out, that has never made sense to me even when people have tried to explain it to me, is your voting system. That electoral college thing. It just doesn't make sense. And not just for the fact that it seems to totally disenfranchise the individual voter by introducing a totally redundant middleman into the equation.
3. Biggest problem facing the modern sci-fi genre, in your opinion?
Lack of courage. Lack of vision. Overabundance of playing it safe. SF used to be about pushing the boundaries, about envisioning a bold future. These days, SF no longer looks into the far future. Instead, they play it close to the here and now with just some slight tweaks. Some people blame the abundance of media tie-in novels for that. Some people blame Vernor Vinge's Singularity concept. Some people blame the fans, who feel ever more entitled and, from what I hear, become increasingly hostile. I think it's a combination of all three. Vinge postulated that technological progress will become so fast that the future becomes unpredictable. In combination with the other two factors, writers seem to have become afraid of looking too far ahead, and perhaps to look ridiculous as a result.
4. What's the best writing advice you ever received?
"Don't plan for nothing else."
5. Name an author who started out good, and stayed that way throughout their career, and speculate on how they stayed good.
Robert E. Howard. Why he stayed good throughout his career is probably because he died young, before he could burn out. It happens to everyone, they burn out, they run out of ideas, they start catering to the audience rather than a vision. Of course, it might be the other way around, that I simply get bored with them.
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Post by jarddavis on Mar 29, 2010 19:44:58 GMT -8
Because without it, the combines populations of New York City and Los Angeles Alone would mean a largely Democrat Only White House for the next 50 years.
The majority of American Urban areas, ie, Cities, tend to be more democratic in the high population center areas, with it becoming generally more conservative as you head out into the rural areas. This is not always a given. I live in Colorado. Denver is mostly a stereotypical example. But! Head further south and you have a fairly large urban area called Colorado Springs. Predominantly conservative due to being an Air Force Town. To the northwest, is Boulder, or The People's Republic of Boulder as we like to call it. Not really a highly populated urban area, Boulder is a college town. And it's a far more conservative than when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was like Austin or San Francisco. And people had to be reminded that the streets where not literally paved with Marijuana.
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Post by Anders on Mar 29, 2010 20:44:35 GMT -8
But the original reason is that the Founding Fathers, though in favor of democracy, didn't really trust the people. They wanted insurances against the kind of "mob rule" you get when the hoi polloi can vote for whomever they want without someone to keep them in check. Hence the electors.
The electoral votes are, if I've understood it correctly, because the founding states with fewer people wanted to have a say in who got elected president. It's got nothing to do with democrats or republicans specifically.
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Post by K-Box on Mar 30, 2010 21:49:38 GMT -8
The electoral votes are, if I've understood it correctly, because the founding states with fewer people wanted to have a say in who got elected president. It's got nothing to do with democrats or republicans specifically. Correct, but what Jard said is true as well, in that it keeps whatever party is more popular with urbanites (and, by extension, more urbanite states) from dominating the shit out of elections and subsequent public policy decisions. See also: The reason why we have a Senate, with two Congressmen from each state, in addition to a House of Representatives, whose numbers of Congressmen are allotted by their respective states' populations.
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Post by Johann Chua on Mar 31, 2010 2:38:33 GMT -8
Apparently the official reason why the Philippines has a Senate that's elected at large (so each senator represents the entire country) is so we have a training ground for the presidency. Having more representation for the less populous areas of the country might be a good thing (say, two senators per region), but I think a constitutional amendment would be needed. Given that our legislators haven't been able to push one through to lift term limits, I don't think something that's actually good has a chance.
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Post by Anders on Mar 31, 2010 7:44:21 GMT -8
Correct, but what Jard said is true as well, in that it keeps whatever party is more popular with urbanites (and, by extension, more urbanite states) from dominating the shit out of elections and subsequent public policy decisions. And if one wanted to put a negative spin on it - which I don't, though I do think it's a weird system - "one man, one vote" it ain't. A voter in Montana has more influence on who becomes president than a voter in New York, for example. (Montana: ~1 million people, 3 electoral votes -> ~350 000 people/EV; New York: ~20 million people, 31 electoral votes -> 650 000 people/EV - a Montanan vote is worth about twice of a New Yorkian one.) That's still kind of reasonable for the reason you state, but what isn't is that all the electoral votes are given to the candidate that gets the most votes in the state in nearly all cases. (IIRC there are two or so states that split their votes proportionally.) This means that in theory a president could get elected with around 25% of the popular vote by gaining just over half the votes in states holding half the electoral votes. (Less than 25% with the weighting effect that favors the less populous states, actually. You could probably get away with 20%.) It also means that if you belong to a party that is in the distinct minority in a particular state you're shit out of luck when it comes to representation in the senate or White House. But I should stay out of this type of discussion. I'm just a bit riled up because lately Sweden has been moving towards the type of IMO incredibly idiotic two-party system that has dominated US politics for so long and it's an election year here so the verbal faeces is flying fast and thick.
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