Ask me anything. *

*Where “anything” means “anything that isn’t wildly inappropriate,” of course.

Back in 2005 or so, when I actually cared enough about DC to pay attention to them, it occurred to me that there was an interesting vacancy created by the departure of Wally West as the Flash and the arrival of Bart Allen. Specifically, it meant that the identity of Impulse was just floating around loose, looking for a legacy hero to step into the role. So I came up with some ideas that I thought would make for a good ‘Impulse’ series, one I hoped to someday submit, should I get the time, energy and confidence to do so. Obviously, that was back in 2005, and at this point there’ve been so many cast changes in the Flash family’s story, including one complete reboot, that the idea is pretty much moot. Nonetheless, I still have some fondness for the idea, so I thought I’d share it here: My plans for the all-new, all-different Impulse!

In this case, “all-different” definitely describes the character. Her name is Hannah Hunter (I’m sticking with “is” here, because “would have been” is such an awkward bit of sentence construction), and she’s a teenage high school student; both her parents are devoted to their careers, leaving her as pretty much a latchkey kid. There are pretty much two ways you can go when your parents barely pay any attention to you, and Hannah went the second direction; she’s hyper-responsible, almost an adult in miniature. She cooks her own meals, does her own laundry, and basically has a house to herself with parents she only occasionally sees. (The fact that she doesn’t use this house for wild, frequent parties tells you what the other direction was, the one she didn’t go.)

As can happen with children like this, she gets along much better with adults than other teenagers her own age; it doesn’t help that she’s somewhat bookish and has never had much luck trying out for sports teams. She almost made it onto the varsity softball team due to her pitching skills, but they had no designated hitter rule and she was too slow on the base paths. She tried out for the basketball team, but despite being a great shooter, she’s too slow on the fast-break. In short, she’s not unathletic, she just has lousy foot-speed. She idolizes the Flashes because they can do the one thing she desperately wants to: Run.

As a result of the above, she spends the after-school hours at the Flash Museum, doing her homework and chatting with the staff (who, as with many adults, admire precocious and mature teenagers.) She knows every exhibit inside and out (at one point in the development of the idea, she idolized Barry best of all because he was also a police scientist. When they reconcealed his identity, she idolized him as a person without even knowing he’s the Flash because she wants to get into forensics someday and admires his work. Yes, she is a teenager geeky enough and focused enough to know about prominent forensics experts. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who Justin Bieber is.)

She gets her powers when the Flash Museum gets attacked by Rogues’ Gallery members who want to make a statement about their feelings towards their arch-nemesis…the Flash shows up to foil them, there’s a fight, innocent bystanders get endangered, and Hannah winds up taking an inadvertent spin on the Flash’s Time Treadmill. She winds up back in the 30s, with all the powers of the Silver Age Flash…

…except one. She can’t think at superhuman speeds. Without the ability to process information and perceive time the way the Flashes do, her super-speed is utterly useless to her; the second she tries to run, she’s impacting into a solid object before she knows it’s even there. (Luckily, she has Wally’s super-fast healing. Even so, she spends time in the hospital in the 30s, as well.) As a result, she’s forced to use her speed-powers creatively, adding and subtracting speed from objects around her instead of using it just to speed herself up. (That’s why she calls herself Impulse–because momentum is mass times velocity and impulse is the physics term for an object’s change in momentum. Have I mentioned geeky?)

Her first story arc, where she learns to use her powers, involves her “bouncing” through time on her way back to the Flash Museum in the present. She meets the Golden Age Flash, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and comes back to the present day with a reasonable amount of skill at fighting and so forth (so as to gloss over some of the learning curve of being a superhero. Karate Kid teaches her judo, because using someone’s own leverage against them is a good fighting style for a scrawny teenager, and because throws and flips become extra-nasty when you can pump an extra 500 miles per hour of velocity into someone on their way out.) She helps the Flash defeat the Rogues’ Gallery, and becomes a crime-fighter in Central City when not attending classes.

I thought it had some potential; since she doesn’t have “run really fast” to fall back on, the character has to use her super-powers creatively to defeat bad guys. The high school setting is always fun for a comic book hero, and let’s face it, comics fans dig geeky teenage girls with weird senses of humor. But of course, at this point I’m not even sure whether there ever was an Impulse, let alone whether another one would be welcomed by comics fans. But I’m sure the current direction of DC makes perfect sense to someone.

Yesterday on Twitter, Tim O’Neill wrote that the best Twitter bot name he had seen yet was “Charsky Troublefield.” This is, no question, a great name.

However, I pointed out that in real life, about a decade ago when Columbia House was still a thing, my roommates and I received more than a few pieces of direct-mail marketing directed at “Goat Slywinkle,” which I staunchly maintain to be the best fake name created for illicit commercial gain of all time. (Fake Columbia House identities were the Neanderthal equivalent of spambot names.) Indeed, for a time one of my roommates registered slywinkle.com, until he got bored with it.) I keep meaning to use ol’ Goat in a story somewhere, but his name is so outrageous that it requires the proper character and he hasn’t shown up yet.

Tim then attempted to counter Goat with his personal favorite spam name, which was “Rbassus Obassman.” I think this does not come close to “Goat Slywinkle.” Your mileage may vary.

So, I throw it open to the floor: the best spam name (or fake record club name, or what have you) that you have ever seen?

Ta-Nehisi Coates is, as usual, completely right. So was Chris Rock when he made Good Hair (which you should make an effort to see, if you have not seen it):

That’s crazy, and white cultural norms should not necessarily be aspired to. I mean, come on. We invented coonskin caps. That is fucked up.

And, speaking as an admittedly white dude: I think black women look vastly more attractive with natural hair. Although I never really saw why “kinky” and “nappy” became the adjectives of choice. When I was little and saw black women with natural hair, I just thought of it as “curly,” and even today whenever I see a black woman with natural hair I just think “she has curly hair.”

I suspect that very few of you know what ‘The Shining’ is really about. You might think you know; you might talk about themes of isolation, claustrophobia, and the darkness in the human spirit made manifest as a “haunted” hotel. But you’d be wrong. You probably aren’t aware of the hidden messages about the dangers of going off the gold standard. You didn’t even know that it was a hidden confession from Stanley Kubrick explaining that he faked the moon landing footage. You hadn’t the slightest clue of its hidden warnings about the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. And you…okay, you probably knew about the secret subtext relating to America’s treatment of Native Americans. That one’s so well-known that even Cracked.com covered it. But you probably didn’t know about all of the hidden meanings, because you simply can’t. There’s so many hidden meanings that there’s a whole other movie coming out just about all the meanings in the first movie.

In all seriousness, what does make ‘The Shining’ such a popular subject for such a diverse range of “cryptic meaning” essays? Surely if Kubrick really had a message he was trying to convey, no matter how cleverly he concealed it, you’d expect to get some kind of consensus as to what it might be. But (for those of you who really don’t feel like sitting through a 40-minute YouTube video, or spend an hour or so looking at screenshots) Kubrick’s film almost seems to become a sort of Rorshach test, continually revealing cryptic messages that just happen to exactly coincide with the researcher’s personal perspective. Why? What is it about ‘The Shining’ that makes it more confusing than ‘The Prisoner’? What makes this film the one that people fixate on, while ‘Donnie Darko’ (to name another cult film that plays its cards close to the vest) seems to avoid these kinds of questions? I don’t know that we can ever know for sure, but here are my suggestions.

1) Kubrick isn’t talking. Well, I mean…of course he’s not talking now, but even when he was alive, he wasn’t talking about his movies. Kubrick had a reputation as a notorious recluse, but it would be more accurate to describe him as someone who just didn’t give interviews. He was perfectly content to be social, but he also hated the way that filmmakers who loved to talk about their work had reduced watching a movie to a sterile exercise in spotting the things the director had talked about in a magazine. He didn’t want you to be thinking about the technical reasons that the hedge maze had replaced the hedge animals (budget constraints, for the record–moving hedge animals weren’t technically feasible in 1980.) He wanted you to be watching the movie, and to let you come to your own conclusions about it. Seen from a certain point of view though, a reclusive movie-maker who doesn’t want to talk about his movies because he wants you to “work it out for yourself” can sound like someone who’s embedded a secret meaning. The more mystery invested in the process, the more people expect from the ultimate solution. “Some people are just crazy” is not going to satisfy them.

2) Kubrick had a reputation as a perfectionist. Time and time again, as you read these analyses, you’ll come across a phrase that’s almost word-for-word identical every single time: “A legendary perfectionist like Kubrick certainly wouldn’t allow such an obvious continuity error.” It is a prima facie assumption made in all of these analyses that any apparent mistake in the film must be placed there deliberately, as Kubrick was known for being a perfectionist. These must be hidden messages, because Kubrick doesn’t make mistakes.

This is, of course, an assumption so wrong that it almost has to be unpicked word-for-word. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, true, but “perfectionist” in this case doesn’t mean “meticulous about set continuity.” Kubrick’s reputation came from his habit of shooting far more film than was necessary, sometimes doing 80-100 takes of a single scene, in order to get the widest possible ranges of performance from his actors and to force them to genuinely inhabit their characters. ‘The Shining’ was no exception; Kubrick spent 200 days in principal photography for a 144-minute film. (This means that on average, Kubrick shot about 45 seconds of usable footage per day. Almost certainly, there must have been whole months worth of days where he shot nothing at all that he used in the final film.) Kubrick was a perfectionist in that he wanted the perfect take, and was willing to shoot as long as was needed until he got it; and once he was armed with all those perfect takes, he would go into the editing room and spend months assembling them into a finished film.

But there’s a big difference between that and being precise about continuity. In fact, Kubrick’s approach works against tight set continuity; when you’re shooting 30, 40, 50 takes of one shot, even going back the next day for more, then of course tiny details aren’t going to be the same from shot to shot. Kubrick wanted the perfect emotional resonance, not the perfect amount of sandwich eaten from moment to moment. Even if he did notice the continuity problems (and he almost certainly did) what was he going to do once he was in the editing booth? Throw out the best performance because the scrapbook was on the wrong page? Kubrick had to be aware that only obsessive viewers notice continuity mistakes to begin with, and he almost certainly had more important things to concern himself. But to the ‘Shining’ enthusiast, each of these tiny mistakes has to be a deliberate message, because they assume Kubrick is a genius who doesn’t do anything by accident.

3) The movie is different from the book. This is true of just about all adaptations, of course, but there’s a little more to it here. One, Kubrick didn’t discuss why he made the changes he made when adapting the novel. (See above.) Two, it’s assumed that a legendary perfectionist like Kubrick wouldn’t make arbitrary changes unless he had a grand vision to them. (See above.) And three, King and Kubrick were legendarily at odds over the adaptation, with King going so far as to write and direct his own adaptation that was more to his liking. With the theme of “changes from the book” highlighted, everyone’s attention is drawn to them. And again, we’re back to the “hidden messages” territory, with every tiny alteration assumed to have cryptic meaning, from the hotel’s origin to its final fate and everything in between.

Again, though, this assumes that Kubrick was able to work in the realm of pure art, with no concessions needing to be made to practicality. Subplots like the simmering conflict between Ullman the hotel manager and Jack, or backstory like his assault on a student at Stovington Prep? Dropped for time, perhaps, because the movie is already over two hours long and there’s not even a mention of them. Wendy and Danny seem different because the characters wound up being interpreted by actors, and because certain elements had to be emphasized and dropped to get the film down to a manageable running time. Logistically difficult effects, such as the destruction of the Overlook Hotel or the moving hedge animals, had to be dropped completely. Nobody ever gets to do everything the way they want to entirely…except maybe George Lucas, which may explain why it’s not such a good thing…and Kubrick is certainly no exception. But if you’re not willing to believe that, then each change takes on a special significance.

4) The ending is ambiguous. Sure, we know that Jack died. But then we get that last cryptic scene, of the photograph in the empty hotel filled with mysterious people and Jack at the center. The caption, “July 4th Ball, 1921.” It has to mean something. It’s the final shot of the film, the one that Kubrick wants us to leave on, the one he wants to resonate in our heads as we’re leaving the theater. He actually went so far as to cut an epilogue out of the film after it reached theaters, so that all we see is the cut from Jack’s body to the mysterious photo. A cryptic ending like that is one that demands endless analysis, deeper investigation, because we want things to make sense. And that ending really, really doesn’t, at least not in a logical and linear sense. (It says a lot that even after “notorious recluse” Kubrick came out and blatantly explained the ending to everyone, people still don’t believe it.) Whatever conclusions you come to about the final shot, you bring something of your own ideas and experiences to it…which leads us to…

5) People really, really like to create patterns. It’s human nature, and the final element that brings the first four together. Once you’ve decided that there is a hidden meaning to ‘The Shining’, once you’ve started looking at it not as a film but as a series of cryptic messages encoded into tiny details, then there’s a sufficiently large mass of data present that you can draw any number of connections between data points based on your own personal viewpoint as a lens. Think that Kubrick was a numerologist? Examine the time codes, you’re bound to find a pattern of significant shots at significant times. (Because Kubrick didn’t really put in any scenes that he didn’t think were important.) Want to find messages about your own personal political, mystical, or historical views? They’re bound to be there if you think symbolically enough and are willing to put in some work massaging the data. (Remember, numbers are infinitely transformable. Add, subtract, multiply and divide and 7/4/1921 can become any set of numbers you care to name.) And ultimately, you will come away convinced that Kubrick’s message was about exactly what you want it to be about. It’s a comforting thought, really. Kubrick must be a genius for hiding such an intricate message in the film, and you must be a genius for being able to find it. The two of you no doubt think alike, and wouldn’t we all want to think of ourselves as being in the company of geniuses?

For myself, I don’t think there is a hidden message in ‘The Shining’. I think that Kubrick, like all great artists, loved ambiguity, and loved to insert it in the work instead of forcing his own conclusions onto you. You are required, by design, to think about what’s going on in front of you because the answers are not provided, and Kubrick isn’t telling because your answer is probably better than his anyway. I think he’d probably be impressed at some of the creativity people have brought to finding meanings in his film…even if I can easily picture Wendy looking at Jack’s manuscript and reading, “It can be ruled out that Stanley Kubrick didn’t notice this obvious mistake as he precisely edited the shot that way for a reason and we all saw it happen…”

Recently, the whole “Nice Guy” topic came up again, well after the initial post had become a thing of legend. Many people jumped in on the new discussion, but it always seems like the same people respond in the same way. The phrase, “Yes, they’re being jerks, but they’ve got a point…” keeps getting bandied about in these conversations, with one user posting an old joke about the supposed underlying truth behind the complaints that Nice Guys have. As I am not yet an accomplished disembowler of bad ideas, I thought I might take a practice run at this one…anyone else want to join me behind the cut?

Okay, my apologies to anyone who’s a) not seriously into Doctor Who, and b) not absolutely mega-geeky. But this is an idea I’ve had for a long time now, and I wanted to get it out on metaphorical paper. So for those of you not into hardcore fan theorizing…sorry, but shit just got real.

From yesterday:

Last time someone asked you if you were homosexual. While I don’t have issues with any sexual orientation, I am curious.

I’m straight; almost embarrassingly straight, in fact. The sexual continuum theory is one I have no beef with, but I know perfectly well that I’m on the very edge: men do absolutely nothing for me. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing out, but then I remember I’m lucky enough to be straight and white and male and not even a member of some relatively marginalized religious or ethnic group and I feel better about it.

Heck, I can speak in an assertive, commanding tone and people automatically assume I know what they should do! In any given situation! Do you have any idea how great that is? Because it’s pretty great, I tell you what.

Danny Sichel messaged me to say:

The backstory to Nunsense is that a large group of nuns die of food poisoning. Food poisoning is not a comfortable death. Are we supposed to imagine, when attending this hit off-Broadway comedy, the previous group of nuns screaming in agony as they shit out their intestines?

Of course, Futurama used the same basic setup as regards the Planet Express crew prior to Fry, Leela and Bender. But they are cartoons, so the horrible deaths are more permissible, I suppose.

This video:

Now, predictably there has been the sort of “oh god those kids don’t know what an eight-track is I’m so old” commentary from around the internets, and that’s… predictable, I guess. But I don’t really see it that way, because other than that one kid who thought the 3.5″ floppy disk was a camera, the kids mostly were dead-on about what these things were. They identified storage media as storage media, the telephone as a telephone – hell, they mostly even figured out what the eight-track was, and honestly I didn’t recognize it as an eight-track until I saw the cassette. (Sure, the one kid thought it was a movie rather than an album, but so what? You can’t tell what’s stored on a piece of storage media until you play it. And anybody laughing at the kids trying to operate the rotary dial phone should think about how much work it took their most tech-unsavvy friend to master their cellphone.)

Hell, when the one kid started turntabling on the kiddie record player that made me feel the opposite of old. Not young, but rather… timeless. Give someone a record player, and they will start scratching with it. We don’t change as much as we think we do, and there’s good in that.

If I was to run a comic company, here’s how I’d do it. I’d start with a small staff of writers, a moderate-sized staff of artists, an editor (we’d have a small stable of launch titles, all of them family-friendly adventure stories, most of them super-hero comics) and an art director…and a few assistants for the latter two, for reasons which will become apparent. (And plenty of venture capital funding coming in, because you don’t expect this kind of company to turn a profit for a while.)

The art director is the key, because I’m going with the Archie route: We would have a house style, and all the artists at the company would be expected to conform rigidly to that house style. (Keep in mind that when I say, “the Archie route”, I don’t actually mean “looking like Archie”. I picture it as being something fairly timeless, a sort of Neal Adams/Jim Aparo hybrid. Something that you could still look at twenty years later and say, “Ooh, that’s nice.”) But the point is, we are not chasing big names here. If you come to my company expecting to be rich and famous, you’re coming to the wrong place.

Which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t have credits. On the company website, and on the inside front cover of every book, it would say, “(Insert Title Here) was produced by:” and it would proceed to list the writers, artists, editors, and art director that made the book possible. You would be able to say to your family, “Yes, I work in comics.” But you wouldn’t, y’know, be able to say, “I do all the work around here. Give me a raise.” This is not a place for rock stars. (Actually, you would, in a sense. Artists would be paid an hourly wage, but they would also get completion bonuses for every page they did that passed the art director’s approval. So the faster you draw, the more money you make.) To make up for the fact that I’m treating it like a job and not like a creative opportunity, you get the sorts of things you get in a job–hourly wages, health and dental, 401K, et cetera. This is a career for people who want a career.

The books themselves would be done assembly-line style. The writers break down the plot into pages, and each page breakdown is circulated to the pencilers to draw. They, in turn, pass the finished pages to the inkers, then back to the writers for dialoguing, then to the letterers, and then to the colorists. (Every step goes through an editor/assistant/art director/assistant, as well, just to make sure it all comes out nice.) Once the story is finished (all stories are thirty pages long, and entirely self-contained. No multi-parters, no exceptions) it goes up on the website, which is advertiser-supported free content. Anyone who wants to read the comic can do so there.

Or, if they don’t like that, they can read the magazine. It’d come out monthly, and be 120 pages long (90 pages of story, thirty pages of ads, contains three different titles.) This would be sold on newsstands, alongside magazines like Shonen Jump. For those who only wanted to follow one title in dead-tree format, there would be semi-annual anthologies, printed in manga-style digests, and cheap black-and-white “Reader’s Editions” that would be collected in eighteen-issue chunks. Oh, and the occasional hardcover “Best Of”. And, once there’s enough backlog material out there, cheap reprint editions that collect a few random stories together and can fit in supermarket checkout lanes, a la the Archie reprints you see everywhere.

So there’s my idea of the ideal super-hero comic book company. No big stars, heavy emphasis on the characters instead of the creators, self-contained family-friendly stories, and lots of reprinting. In short, the Archie model applied to super-heroes. So who wants to be the first to tell me I’m crazy?

So if you weren’t alert on the internets yesterday, you might have missed Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Man, basically going nuts on the internet for Old Spice – first sending Digg cofounder Kevin Rose a “get well” video, and then putting up an Ask Me Anything post on Reddit and answering as many questions from just about every social media thing where Old Spice has a presence as humanly possible. (This probably hit the high mark when he proposed to someone for that someone’s someone.)

Thoughts in no particular order:

1.) If anybody wasn’t impressed with Isaiah Mustafa’s acting ability, they should be now. Granted, his original commercials with Old Spice were extremely impressive, but almost anybody can deliver lines well with a lot of practice and a bazillion takes, and the commercials were as much about the clever visual play as they were about the Old Spice Man being the Old Spice Man. Yesterday’s video blitz, however, was basically Mustafa standing in front of a camera while wearing a towel, occasionally striking a bit of a pose, and delivering lines in Old Spice Man mode (injecting additional bass into his voice, maintaining pleasant poker face, etc.) – and given the speed with which they were cranking these mini-ads out he didn’t have a lot of time to practice.¹ Ironically, these mini-ads, which have to be vastly cheaper than the “real” ads Mustafa first performed in, required much more skill on his part. If nothing else, Mustafa has certainly earned a chance at his stated desire to play Luke Cage.

2.) For all that people are blathering about the “innovation” of the ad blitz – and I don’t want to take anything away from it, for it was clever – it relies heavily on tried and true comedic techniques. Overliteralism (pronouncing netspeak literally, saying punctuation aloud), silly phrases (“manly babies” is one of my favorites), grandiose boasting², shoutouts to other minor celebrities, and self-referential metahumour aren’t anything new, and if the Old Spice Man were posting on 4chan he’d just seem like another /b/tard trying to get attention. But if you hit people in the face with them fast and furiously enough in a slightly unexpected format, they seem fresh.

3.) But it also works because of the comedy of repetition creating lowered expectations for a laugh. After all, in most of these videos, the Old Spice Man is just standing there, so when he breaks out an easel and canvas or a snorkel or a giant trophy, even though he’s not really doing anything except holding a prop, suddenly it seems incredibly fresh despite the fact that, if you think about it for a bit, it isn’t fresh at all. (Not that it isn’t still funny; it is. But it seems funnier than it is out of perceived novelty value. Only a few of the prop gag pieces are actually really top-notch among the entire selection.)

4.) The only time Mustafa nearly loses it is in this one, which is probably the best of them all.

1. At least a few of them, I am sure, he did cold. I leave it to the comments section to debate which. [↩]
2. Whether you prefer to compare to Chuck Norris jokes or Will Ferrell routines is your call. [↩]

So, having just heard that they’re making a movie of Eagle of the Ninth – which when I had to read it in Grade Six I though was the coolest book ever – I fully expect every other book I have ever had to read for school to be adapted to the screen, post-haste, starting with The Endless Steppe. (Boy, was that book titled accurately.)

Don’t neglect the French books, Hollywood — I can’t wait to see mustard being used as a weapon in Jeanne, Fille du Roy or a post-nuclear Montreal in Surreal 3000, or four guys slowly dying of woods-related causes because they hunted a moose illegally in Revanche de l’Orignal.

Don’t think that you’re off the hook just because I can’t remember the title of a book, either. I’m counting on seeing that one where the girl with the harelip runs away and her whole family follows her, and her little brother sees the sea for the first time and decides he wants to live there. Also the book about John Cabot where he disses spices and his mom serves him a lasagna with no spices and rancid meat. Take that, John Cabot — if that is your real name (it’s not.)

And don’t forget the books I just made up because it was easier to do that than read them for book reports. Coming in 2012: “Shakespeare’s Planet,” based on Matthew Johnson sort of skimming the back cover of the book by Clifford D. Simak and hoping his teacher hadn’t.

See sale on Steam.

Purchase Max Payne and Max Payne 2 because they are cheap and I like those games and wouldn’t mind playing them again.

Install games.

Games do not work.

Go on Steam forums. Look for patches/issue fixes. Attempt fixes. Games still do not work.

Uninstall. Download warez copies of games. Install them. Games work fine.

(Well, at least I paid for them, I guess.)

(I am busy openin’ presents and eatin’ turkey and so forth.)