How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

Study paints Kindle e-reader a dark shade of green

According to a study by the Cleantech Group, you need to download 23 books for the Kindle before it breaks even in CO₂ use.

Also, as pointed out in the comments, Kindle versions are $9.99 compared to maybe $15 for a new book, but you need to add $299 to the price of the device. At that rate, you have to buy a Kindle and 60 books ($900) before the Kindle’s prices win out.

Frank Quitely's Daredevil, Superman, and More

Just wanted to share a few amazing Frank Quitely images. He’s one of my favorite artists, partly because he works with Grant Morrison so much, but also because, well, I think you’ll be able to tell why from this Daredevil he drew:

(click to embiggen)

How fantastically dynamic. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discusses how a single panel, like the one above, can show both one moment in time and have a narrative. The drawing originally appeared in Daredevil 65 as a standalone piece of art. It wasn’t part of the issue, just a piece of eye candy by Quitely (along with other artists’ work), so there’s no story to go with this. Just a Daredevil vs. ninja smackdown. But it does have a story. Let me amateurishly draw in a few gutters:

Suddenly we’re not just looking at one moment in time, we’re seeing a story. Daredevil versus a sneak of ninjas, swords flying. We have three different things going on. At the top, two ninjas are prepared, ready, posed, jumping into the fray. In the middle, Daredevil is ably dispatching a few of their friends. And in the bottom, the ones Daredevil has already defeated, their weapons in freefall below them. All in one image. This is visual storytelling.

The piece also makes homage to Frank Miller, who famously wrote Daredevil in the 80s and more or less created the treatment of the character as a ninja. Compare the composition to this iconic drawing by Miller from 300 (along with its movie version):

Birds of Prey

Just for fun, Quitely’s cover to Birds of Prey 125:

All Star Superman

And to show some mood, and not just action, All Star Super­man 1:

This cover, drawn by Quitely, came from an idea Morrison had for his never-realized Superman 2000 collaboration with Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, and Mark Waid (which Tim Callahan and Chad Nevett covered extensively last year). Morrison met a fan dressed as Superman in the middle of the night outside of a hotel and had a long conversation with him, in character. Superman.nu covers the meeting, about which Morrison says:

The thing that really hit me, wasn’t so much what Superman was saying as how he was sitting. He was perched on a bollard with one knee drawn up, chin resting on his arms. He looked totally relaxed… and I suddenly realized this was how Superman would sit. He wouldn’t puff out his chest or posture heroically, he would be totally chilled. If nothing can hurt you, you can afford to be cool. A man like Superman would never have to tense against the cold; never have to flinch in the face of a blow. He would be completely laid back, un-tense. With this image of Superman relaxing on a cloud looking out for us all in my head, I rushed back to my hotel room and filled dozens of pages of my notebook with notes and drawings.

Look again at how Quitely draws this scene. See how relaxed Superman is as he watches over Metropolis. Now look at how much depth is in that picture. It’s easy to focus just on Superman, but there’s a fully-imagined city below those clouds. You can see The Daily Planet just peaking up by Superman’s boots, with Centennial Park just beyond. The plane of clouds Superman is sitting on is hundreds of feet up, where it’s calm. Quitely captures the scope of the entire world there, floating hundreds in the sky. The city under those clouds isn’t just background filler, it’s the real focus of the image.

More of his stuff at Comic Art Community.

Sending a Ping to PubSubHubbub from MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a handy Macintosh application that I use to compose entries for my website. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, when I publish a post with MarsEdit, none of Movable Type’s plug-ins seem to fire off. At present I use Multiblog to rebuilt my Debigulated URLs blog, which allows short URLs to work for all of my main blog’s entries, and I use MT-PubSubHubbub to ping Google’s PubSubHubbub hub when I post a new entry. If Multiblog doesn’t get triggered, the short URL I’m declaring in my page’s head won’t work because the .htaccess file at my link shortener hasn’t been rebuilt. If MT-PubSubHubbub doesn’t fire, the hub won’t get notified of a new post. I can work around the first problem using Bob the Rebuilder, and I’ve written up a sloppy AppleScript to deal with pinging the hub from MarsEdit.

I am absolutely certain that there’s a better way to do this, but here’s what I’ve got going for now. It works in testing using FriendFeed, which updates within seconds of a post that pings Google’s hub¹. Here’s the script:

tell application "Safari" activate do JavaScript "window.open('http://david. ely.fm/davextreme/')" in document 1 end tell  delay 2  tell application "System Events" tell process "Safari" tell menu bar 1 tell menu bar item "Bookmarks" tell menu "Bookmarks" tell menu item "Bookmarklets" tell menu "Bookmarklets" click menu item "Publish to Hub" end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell  delay 2  tell application "Safari" to close the front window 

I placed the script in my MarsEdit scripts folder (found easily by going to MarsEdit’s Scripts menu and selecting “Open Scripts Folder”).

The script requires that you have:

1. A “Bookmarklets” folder in your main Bookmarks menu in Safari; and
2. Google’s “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet in that folder, which bookmarklet can be found on Google’s site near the bottom of the page².

From there, I post an entry using MarsEdit, then select my “Ping Hub” script from the Scripts menu. It opens my webpage, waits two seconds for it to load, invokes the “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet, then closes the window.

My hope is that someone develops a plugin for MarsEdit that does this more elegantly, but maybe this will be helpful to people in the meantime. (Or someone can tell me why those plugins don’t activate when my xmlrpc updates go through.)

1. The only use I have for FriendFeed being testing this push stuff. ↩
2. Yes, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace, so I use “which” in new ways and employ footnotes too often³. Hopefully it’ll wear off soon. ↩
3. Also I go out of my way to point out that I’ve been reading DFW (and call him DFW). ↩

The Conversation

A few weeks ago, Khoi Vinh wrote “Conversation Pieces” about one of my all-time favorite movies, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Then it was playing in The Galaxy Hut last week when I was hanging out with @princeofwhy. And now Jim Emmerson’s Scanners blog writes an Opening Shots piece on it. See also, from a few years ago, “What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood”, which goes into how Netflix has allowed The Conversation to become popular again despite being relatively obscure (Long Tail and whatnot).

I first saw the film in a class called “Philosophy of Narrative Art” at William & Mary, taught by Professor Lawrence Becker. Aside from getting “When the Red, Red Robin” fucking permanently stuck in my head, we looked at how the film was inspired by Julio Cortézar’s short story “Las Babas del Diablo” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Blow-Up features a photographer who thinks he sees something in a photo (and also the first instance of full-frontal female nudity in British film), where The Conversation moves the concept to an audio technician who becomes obsessed over a recording (and also an amazing performance by Gene Hackman, a different and ultimately more lasting claim to fame than that of the preceding parenthetical). Coppola naturally doesn’t credit either influence, but he didn’t mention Joseph Conrad in Apocalypse Now, either.

Both The Conversation and Blow-Up are available from Netflix.

If/Whether

Here’s a finer point of grammar that I probably learned years ago. On page 763 of Infinite Jest, Mario is talking to his mother:

Mario: “How can you tell if somebody’s sad?”

Avril: “You mean whether someone’s sad.”

Not being able to recall the distinction between “if” and “whether”, I asked the question of the Infinite Summer forum and got this response from user isabella:

From Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (which DFW discussed at length in “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage”):

It’s a good practice to distinguish between these words. Use if for a conditional idea, whether for an alternative or possibility. Thus, Let me know if you’ll be coming means that I want to hear from you only if you’re coming. But Let me know whether you’ll be coming means that I want to hear from you about your plans one way or the other.

Copyeditors (I am one) generally try to maintain the distinction.

Voilà! The Wallace essay is online here.

THE WALKING DEAD MAP - Google Maps

Annotated map of all of the events of The Walking Dead (which I’m a bit behind on).

Mac OS X Over The Years

Mac OS X Over The Years

It’s neat to see how the interface has been refined over the years.

Project Runway Episodes (Barely) Online

Staci D. Kramer reports that Lifetime will not offer Project Runway on iTunes. You can watch it on Lifetime’s website starting two days after it airs, but that’s it. This quote by Lifetime Digital’s Dan Suratt shows, characteristically, that Lifetime still thinks of the internet as a nuisance that detracts from their real business of television: “I think what it really goes to is we firmly believe in the power of our site to drive people to our channel and that’s what we use it for.” Because clearly everyone gets Lifetime. And wants to watch your show on Thursday nights, and certainly would make time in their schedules if only they saw a glimpse of it online. Because while you can’t stop the internet, you can funnel traffic to your site where at least you can limit the damage. Forget Hulu, which offers a nice user experience with lots of shows from different networks. Forget iTunes, where people will actually pay you to download a show. Just build a site and force people who don’t want to/can’t watch Lifetime to watch your show on a tiny computer screen instead of their nice, big TVs.

So yeah, I’m bitter. I really like Project Runway. I have an Apple TV and prefer watching shows on my TV instead of my laptop enough that I’ll (gasp) actually pay for episodes, yet they don’t want my money.

Labeling Tie-Ins

For future reference, Secret Invasion reading order.

One of the things that annoys me about superhero crossover stories is that they’re very hard to reread later. Secret Invasion was a miniseries with tie-ins in New Avengers and Mighty Avengers. Many of those (horrid) tie-in issues respond to events in the main series, so it’s important that they be read in the right order. But how, a year later, am I supposed to remember that, say, New Avengers 47 comes after Secret Invasion 8?

DC’s solution has been to putting little “triangle numbers” on the covers of its Superman books that correspond to their placement in the larger storyline¹. This approach works, and DC has actually been very careful about making sure that each book in the line² can be read on its own, with each following a different subplot of the larger story. So you can just read Supergirl on its own, but if you’re rereading the whole Codename: Patriot story, you can look at Supergirl 44’s red “three” and know that 1.) it’s part three of the story and 2.) whatever book has a “four” on it is next. The approach mostly works, and it’s good bait for completists who can’t stand not having every issue of a crossover story.

Publishers need to be careful with the power they hold over fans in this regard. Serious fans will buy every issue of a crossover, but only as long as it holds their interest. It’s helpful that DC tries to clearly mark which of its Superman comics are part of a given storyline, and even more helpful that the label gives you the reading order, but it also means that DC needs to make sure that those issues really are important to the story. If there are other stories to tell that relate to the events of the crossover but aren’t needed to follow its plot, they shouldn’t be assigned badged numbers on their covers. Blackest Night: Batman, for example, might be of interest to people who are enjoying Blackest Night and want to see how it has affected Gotham’s heroes, but its events aren’t likely to lead back nor be largely important to the main Blackest Night story. Reading Blackest Night years later I might want to read the Batman tie-in issues, but I wouldn’t need to read them to understand the story and it largely wouldn’t matter if I read them out of sequence with how they were originally published. Issues of Green Lantern or Green Lantern Corps., however, that do directly follow events of Blackest Night are somewhat more “required” and should be labeled with a reading order (and are not). Something like “Blackest Night Week 5” would be fine.

While numbers on the covers are I think the plainest way to show a reader how to easily find the next issue of a crossover, another classic approach has been to print a checklist at the back of the first issue of a crossover. These checklists, though, tend to list every tie-in and not just the “crucial” stories. Not that I expect a publisher to say, “you can skip these ones”, and it’s easy enough to browse the list knowing that I don’t care about, say, Hulk, and decide to skip The Incredible Hulk’s miniseries. The initially-published checklists also rarely encompass all of the tie-ins that eventually get published, as more books get dreamed up during the course of the crossover. Civil War: The Confession, for example, was about best tie-in to Civil War and wasn’t on initial rosters. Finally, using a checklist years later requires that I find a book containing a checklist (usually just the first few issues of a crossover) and lay out all the involved issues ahead of time for rereading, or I’ll have to keep going back to reference the checklist whenever I want to read the next issue. And printing a checklist in every issue means the publisher has to give up a page that would otherwise be advertisements (though mainstream comics often contain lots of house ads, and a checklist is just an ad for their own products, likely more effective than any other house ad could be, considering it just means trying to convince people to read more of a story they’ve already bought into).

The best comic crossovers don’t just happen out of nowhere. Careful writers will spend years building up to an event, as Geoff Johns did with The Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night and Brian Michael Bendis with Secret Invasion. As the craft of comic storybuilding has matured, with continuity stretching back decades, it becomes very difficult to trace these things. Secret Invasion is mostly an Avengers story, but contains major developments in the life of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Their story started in Alias long before either joined the Avengers in New Avengers. Should Marvel go back and stick “Secret Invasion Precursor” stickers on trades of Alias and Pulse? Certainly not, but since they’re all part of the massive story that Brian Michael Bendis has woven throughout his work at Marvel, they are connected.

This is one of the very cool things about comics and their shared universe, but outside of comics, Stephen King did a similar thing with Dark Tower, weaving together many of his stories with characters who appear in other books. And going beyond direct prequels, homage plays just as important a part in understanding stories. Grant Morrison’s New X-Men doesn’t have any lead-in issues, but it’s impossible to decode without knowing the 70s and 80s Chris Claremont stories that Morrison plays up as tropes. Wolves of the Calla is Stephen King paying an extended homage to Seven Samuari, but it’s a western so we might as well mention The Magnificent Seven (and don’t forget that the villains look like Doctor Doom). Hamlet and The Iliad are everywhere, and woe to the discerning Simpsons viewer who hasn’t seen Citizen Kane.

Even then, I haven’t ever actually read the Claremont era X-Men stories, but they’ve been retold in cartoons and referenced enough times that I know what the key events in them are and can recognize homages to them. Someone who’s never seen The Shining could enjoy The Simpsons’s parody of it nonetheles. So much of popular culture depends on these touchstone stories that I think we’d helpless without the ability to turn into personal simulacra the ones we’ve never read out of their repeated appearances and parodies.

Anyway, to return to my initial point of how best to label superhero crossovers, there are, I’d say, five parts to any comics event:

1. Setup issues that establish the main conflict (ex. the New Avengers stuff with Elektra skrull, but not going back as New Avengers 1, despite Bendis having planted seeds that much in advance);
2. The main book (Civil War, Blackest Night);
3. Crucial tie-ins, usually written by the author of the main book (Superman Beyond);
4. Ancillary tie-ins, ideally that don’t require referring back to the main book once they’ve started; and
5. Aftermath stuff that shows how characters are dealing with whatever happened in the main book, or that play with a new status quo resulting thereof.

My preference would be that the trade dress of books in category one have some sort of label like “Prelude to Blackest Night” and maybe a countdown. Books in categories two and three should be numbered on their covers, either in a full sequence (Blackest Night, Green Lantern, and Green Lantern Corps would all have numbers on them) or by week/month (something like “Week 5”) that let you easily know which issue to read after the one you’ve just finished.

1. The triangle numbers originated during the Death of Superman storyline, which ran through Action Comics, The Adventures of Superman, The Man of Steel, The Man of Tomorrow, and Superman. Each book continued directly from one to the next, so you had to buy all five to be able to understand it all. ↩
2. Action Comics, Supergirl, Superman, Superman: World of New Krypton, and a few special issues and annuals. ↩