26
Mar
26
Mar
My friends, today we are gathered to mourn the death of the “I Drink Your Milkshake” gag line.
Every joke has its own lifetime. I remember when I was a young boy and “take my wife… please” coughed its last spastic breath. We never quite get over this experience, and some of us (like Mike Myers) go into a period of denial. But we must move on.
Much as “THIS! IS! SPARTA!” passed ignobly into the ether, “I Drink Your Milkshake” has been reduced to deadly repetition, drained of all actual humour and become a signal for imitation wit. Variations on “I Drink Your Milkshake” have sputtered forth until the line has lost all meaning and context.
“I Drink Your Milkshake” is survived by “I am an oilman…” and “You’re just a bastard in a basket.” Those wishing to donate charitably in the joke’s name are encouraged to send money to David Cross’s agent.
26
Mar
Now I know everybody has a geek hard-on from seeing those pictures of Ray Park dressed up as Snake-Eyes for the new live-action G.I. Joe movie coming out next year.
But Ray Park as Snake-Eyes, while undeniably and obviously the part of the G.I. Joe movie that will rule the most, is unfortunately only one part. I mean, Ray Park as Darth Maul was pretty fucking awesome too, but that doesn’t mean Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was particularly good. Just as for every Darth Maul there is a Jar-Jar, so too for every Snake-Eyes there must be a Chuckles, for every Shipwreck a Lt. Falcon, for every Wild Bill a Quick Kick.
Now, looking at the cast list, there are some good choices (Arnold Vosloo as Zartan, Christopher Eccleston as Destro), some interesting ones (Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander? Said “plays the terrorist character in every movie ever” Taghmaoui as Breaker?), some downright weird ones (the guy who played Mr. Eko on Lost as… Heavy Duty, rather than Roadblock or Stalker?), and some entirely predictable ones (Scarlett and the Baroness played by wholly replaceable non-entity actresses, I am shocked I tell you). So far, pretty par for the course.
And then I see it.
Marlon Wayans as Ripcord.
Oh my.
Remember the last time Marlon Wayans was in a movie featuring a property which nerds had been eagerly awaiting to see in live-action form for decades?
26
Mar
I’m not kidding.
This is not a Photoshop.
25
Mar
Despite the fact that, on the whole, I would prefer to see Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination to the Presidency than Hillary Clinton, I’ve tried on this blog to be reasonably evenhanded towards Hillary, whom I believed would make a decent President, all things considered. Yes, I just made fun of the whole Bosnia “misspeaking” thing, but come on – that video is pretty goddamned funny, and the fact that Sinbad was there (and has issued a statement saying Hillary was full of crap about the trip) only makes it funnier. I mean, come on. Sinbad. But in any case, I’ve said repeatedly she would make a decent President.
Well, fuck that. No more suggesting Hillary is a good or even acceptable candidate. You do not get to practice base gutter politics of this sort and still be considered “one of the good guys.” It’s not Barack Obama’s fault that entirely reasonable criticism of his health care plan hasn’t worked as a political tactic for Hillary. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault that the media has made sexist comments about Clinton, just as it isn’t Clinton’s fault that the media reminded everybody that they are White Privilege Central when it comes to racial issues over the past week.
Jeremiah Wright occasionally says passionate things. He is a preacher. Preachers do not speak in gentle, conciliatory tones all that often; it is not a job that requires one hundred percent temperance, after all. But accusing Jeremiah Wright of being a racist based on one ten-second snippet of video taken out of context from a twenty-minute sermon, claiming that said ten seconds is representative of twenty years of preaching? (Bear in mind the church is one of the largest mixed-race churches in America, so if Jeremiah Wright is a racist then a lot of his flock are self-hating whiteys.) Lest we forget, he’s also a former decorated Marine. If occasionally he gets pissed off at America for treating black people poorly – well, tough. Black people are officially allowed to have complex feelings about America. They get permission. Deal with it.
Hillary knows this. The Clintons invited Wright to the White House in 1998 and on several other occasions. Her own minister today issued a letter stating that Wright is a good guy and that the controversy is simply people taking him massively out of context and assuming that to be the sum and total of his message. Since we know that Hillary Clinton is not ignorant of the actual nature of Jeremiah Wright, that forces one to conclude that she is simply being disingenuous.
And “disingenuous” is by far too gentle a word to describe this tactic, born of desperation as her campaign flounders, as Obama regains his massive lead in North Carolina and slight lead in Indiana, and even slightly closes up a bit in Pennsylvania (which he will not win, but). It is base and crude and mean and dishonest and it stinks. It is the type of cheap political gambit one would expect from Karl Rove.
And that is why Hillary Clinton should not be President.
25
Mar
(SCENE. Two SNIPERS, BORISAV and CEDOMIL, crouch in the hills overlooking the airport at Tuzla. BORISAV watches the airport through the sights of his enormous sniper rifle.)
BORISAV: All right. Are we ready to begin our day of sniping?
CEDOMIL: That is certainly why I am here. I came to snipe.
BORISAV: All right. Let’s see… huh.
CEDOMIL: What? What is it?
BORISAV: There is a plane.
CEDOMIL: Well, yes, I heard the plane overhead. I am not an idiot, Bori.
BORISAV: I know, but this is an American plane.
CEDOMIL: Seriously? Hot damn! If we snipe Americans, then our little regional conflict will really make the big time! Perhaps we can even incite a new world war!
BORISAV: Oh, come now, Cedomil. Americans they may be, but would they send anybody particularly important to our little corner of the world? This is Bosnia, after all. We don’t even have any oil.
CEDOMIL: Good point. Look, just kill a soldier and we’ll –
BORISAV!: Cedi, shut up! You won’t believe this!
CEDOMIL: What?
BORISAV: It is Sinbad!
CEDOMIL: The comedian?
BORISAV: The very same!
CEDOMIL: If we were to assassinate Sinbad, what glories would fall upon us?
BORISAV: Certainly every movie critic in the world will give us thanks, promoting our cause. Did you see First Kid?
CEDOMIL: No, I missed that one. It was bad?
BORISAV: Oh my yes. I’m going for it. I am going to snipe Sinbad.
CEDOMIL: We are going to score with so many chicks because of this.
BORISAV: Excuse me, “we”? I am the one pulling the trigger.
CEDOMIL: But I am your spotter. I am the one who checks the wind speed so you can make your shot, and scopes the field for potential targets.
BORISAV: And yet you are not using your binoculars right now.
CEDOMIL: You said you did not mind if I made my Cup O’ Noodles.
BORISAV: That was then and this is now. Put down the Cup O’Noodles and check the damn wind.
(CEDOMIL reluctantly puts down his Cup O’Noodles and picks up his binoculars.)
BORISAV: Thank you.
CEDOMIL: You do not have to be rude.
BORISAV: Fair enough. I apologize. We will both get many chicks for having murdered Sinbad.
CEDOMIL: We will. All right. Wind speed three knots, correct.
BORISAV: Correcting.
CEDOMIL: Annd… wait, someone’s in the way.
BORISAV: I could shoot them first.
CEDOMIL: And give Sinbad the chance to get to cover? Pah. We will – oh my god!
BORISAV: What?
CEDOMIL: You don’t recognize her?
BORISAV: Recognize who?
CEDOMIL: That is the American musician Sheryl Crow!
BORISAV: I don’t know that one.
CEDOMIL: She does that song you like, the one where all she wants is to have some fun?
BORISAV: Oh, yes! I like that song.
CEDOMIL: Well, that is the woman who sings it.
BORISAV: Really?
CEDOMIL: Yes!
BORISAV: …could we not kill her?
CEDOMIL: I don’t know. I mean, you have to admit, she is an important target.
BORISAV: Perhaps we could say that we shot at her, recognizing her as an important target. And that we missed.
CEDOMIL: Due to a quirk of fate. A stray leaf drifting upon the wind, perhaps.
BORISAV: Yes. A quirky leaf. That seems feasible.
CEDOMIL: I will not say anything if you do not.
BORISAV: Agreed. Now, where is Sinbad?
CEDOMIL: Give me a second and I will find – OH MY GOD!
BORISAV: What? What?
CEDOMIL: IT IS HILLARY CLINTON, BORISAV!
BORISAV: Wait, the First Lady Hillary Clinton?
CEDOMIL: YES! YES! THIS IS IT! THIS IS OUR MOMENT, BORISAV!
BORISAV: Are we sure we want to assassinate her? Her husband will not be happy.
CEDOMIL: Look, we blame it on Muslims! The Americans will believe that! They can barely tell us apart at the best of times anyway!
BORISAV: That’s a brilliant idea. Although, I note that it means we can’t use this story to score with chicks.
CEDOMIL: We’ll come up with some variant where we attempt to kill the Muslim snipers. Come on, Bori!
BORISAV: All right, I am convinced.
CEDOMIL: Down four, windspeed three and a half knots, correct…
BORISAV: Correcting.
CEDOMIL: Take the shot!
(Pause.)
BORISAV: …
CEDOMIL: She doesn’t appear to be dead yet.
BORISAV: Well, she bent over to accept that poem from the little girl and I wasn’t expecting that, so…
CEDOMIL: So? Shoot her again!
(Pause.)
BORISAV: …dammit!
CEDOMIL: WHAT?
BORISAV: I missed again.
CEDOMIL: You’re the best sniper in Bosnia!
BORISAV: Everybody has bad days!
CEDOMIL: Oh, and look. Now she has people in front of her. Lousy shot.
BORISAV: I can still shoot Chelsea. She’s wide open.
CEDOMIL: Do we really want to do that?
BORISAV: Worth a try.
CEDOMIL: I suppose, but I’m not wild about it.
BORISAV: Just remember, we blame the Muslims.
CEDOMIL: Right.
(Pause.)
BORISAV: …all right, did you balance the sights on this properly?
CEDOMIL: I always balance the sights properly.
BORISAV: I’ve missed three times! Oh, and look, now the Clintons are getting in that armored car. No chance of sniping them now.
CEDOMIL: Damn. Well, you know what, killing them might have been counterproducting anyway. Let’s just settle for killing Sinbad. We can still kill Sinbad, can’t we?
BORISAV: Of course.
CEDOMIL: Good.
(Pause.)
BORISAV: All right, I never miss four times. What is wrong with this gun?
CEDOMIL: Well, we can forget about scoring chicks now. “Us? Yes, we’re the snipers who couldn’t kill Sinbad.”
BORISAV: What the – the gun isn’t loaded?
CEDOMIL: Do you mean to tell me you’ve been dry-firing all this time?
BORISAV: Well, it’s silenced and cushioned, so I wouldn’t feel much difference between a dry-fire and a real shot.
CEDOMIL: All right. We can deal with this. Sinbad is still there. Where are our damned bullets?
(Pause.)
BORISAV: You appear to be sitting on them.
CEDOMIL: Oh, for the love of –
(Pause.)
BORISAV: Are they -?
CEDOMIL: Yes. These rounds are ruined. And look, there goes Sinbad.
BORISAV: …perhaps we say that we had Sinbad in our sights, until another sniper’s careless shot scared the cowardly Americans off of the tarmac? Will that get us chicks?
CEDOMIL: I doubt it.
BORISAV: Oh.
CEDOMIL: On the other hand, we will look less like idiots, so I would suggest we use that story.
(Pause.)
BORISAV: Do you think they’ll believe it?
CEDOMIL: Why not? It’s not as if anybody is videotaping this.
25
Mar
At one point, a long time ago, Dabney Coleman was the king shit.
You have to understand that at this time, Dabney Coleman was the definition of irascible authority figure. If you needed a tough bastard who deep down (often very very deep down) had a heart of gold, Dabney Coleman was your first and only choice. (Well, unless Howard Hesseman was available, but let’s face it, Howard Hesseman carries with him a streak of anti-authoritarianism that sometimes fails to work in establishment roles.)
But sometimes, you gotta stretch a bit.
Wait, they made Super Mario Brothers, and that’s kind of like a Donkey Kong movie. I retract my previous statement.
Regardless. Considering that the Cloak and Dagger videogame did not, as such, have a plot, the screenwriters basically went apeshit and put the actual video game in the movie as a plot element, using it to smuggle important spy document sorts of things. Henry Thomas (Elliot in E.T.) stars as the kid hero who daydreams of being a super-spy, adventuring alongside his hero, super-spy (and star of both roleplaying game and video game) Jack Flack. And of course, his ludicrous adventures turn awry when he actually stumbles upon a real spy conspiracy – and of course nobody believes him.
And Coleman – Coleman plays a double role, and it’s a brilliant turn – as both the boy’s father and as his fantasy of Jack Flack. The two roles play off each other perfectly, the sober responsibility of the father contrasting in just about every way with Ideal Boyhood Companion (and pretty much insane) Flack; Coleman switches roles easily and smoothly, never letting Flack and Dad coincide, even for a moment – which works out perfectly when Flack turns out to be, unsurprisingly, pretty much useless for anything serious and Dad has to go full-on enraged papa bear to save his son from the actual real terrorists.
It’s an excellent family movie, and one of the few good family-appropriate thrillers extant period. (It’s not exactly a genre that gets a lot of play, after all.) It’s exciting on its own merits, frequently a little bit scary (and I am a firm believer that there is nothing wrong with family movies being a bit scary). And it has Dabney Coleman in it. What more could you ask?
24
Mar
My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.
24
Mar
From a very old issue of Batman:
(Incidentally, the story of this comic is that Signalman, pictured, keeps sending Batman clues – because he is a retard – and then narrowly manages to escape Batman every time without managing to steal what he intended to steal. Every time this happens, he celebrates, because he figures his repeated failures mean he is a big shot. Seriously. That is the plot. How did these guys manage to shave themselves without dying?)
24
Mar
I was reading the recently-deleted “Marvel B0y” Livejournal last week, by the guy purporting to be a “Marvel insider” and generally bitching a lot about Brian Michael Bendis and the like. And one thing he wrote stuck with me: that Bendis and Ed Brubaker and others were all submitting proposals on how to “fix” Doctor Strange, and how he, Marvel B0y, could fix Doctor Strange with ease.
And it’s weird. Because Dr. Strange doesn’t really need to be fixed.
The constant criticism of Dr. Strange is that he’s “too powerful” and can “do anything.” This is silly, of course – if nothing else, Dr. Strange obviously has at least the limitations placed on the Genie in Aladdin – no resurrections, no making people fall in love with you, and ixnay on the wishing for more wishes, pal… but I digress.
Let me put it to you this way. Dr. Strange is, well. A doctor. Are you a doctor? If not, kindly explain to me (without Googling) how chemotherapy works, beyond “they put radioactive crap in you and it kills the cancer.” And that’s complex. Explain how antibiotics work; how infection spreads into the bloodstream; how you get a sunburn. I trust you see my point here: simply, that doctors know more about something very complex and very important than most of us. (Stan Lee and Steve Ditko didn’t just pick the name out of a hat.)
And doctors don’t even know everything! As one medical friend of mine put it to me a while back, “look, twenty years ago, we didn’t have the slightest idea how aspirin worked. And now? We still don’t know, but we know enough to know a lot of ways that it probably doesn’t work. This is progress.” Apply that metaphor to Dr. Strange, now, and it works perfectly. Doc knows a lot more about the Dark Dimension and the neighboring areas than anybody else on the planet; it’s his job. But if next week the Fasdysops of Xxxxx7’l attack, he’s going to have to improvise.
That’s cool. That works fine. John Seavey already addressed Dr. Strange’s general storytelling module and why it’s good all on its own: the mystic superhero as guardian of our reality. And I don’t want to retread what he’s written, except to point out that the reason Strange’s model works so well is exactly the reason everybody seems to think he needs to be “fixed” – because he doesn’t really work all that well in a traditional superhero context. Yes, the Defenders, I know – but A) the Defenders never really worked that well as a concept, and B) the Defenders were, when you get right down to it, mostly a team book vehicle for fighting villains on a Dr. Strange level in the first place.
(I will, however, add the time-honored “superhero runs into problem his awesome powers cannot solve” shtick as being one that works quite nicely for Strange in particular – consider the recent entertaining Dr. Strange miniseries The Oath for a good example of this, as all of Strange’s power fails him when he needs to confront basic ethical conundrums.)
This is a classic case of trying to hit a hammer with a screwdriver. If you want to write straight-up superhero stories, there are no end of options for you to pursue. If you want to write Dr. Strange, then don’t write those stories. He flat-out doesn’t work in a lot of superhero stories because he really is extremely powerful, at the top end of the food chain. And that’s fine, and honestly, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to a lot of other characters; nobody insists on shoving, say, the Silver Surfer into a Daredevil story, but Dr. Strange constantly gets pulled into other characters’ stories whenever they go up against absolutely anything mystic, and writers routinely punk him out to make the Big Bad of their story look even meaner. That’s fantastic: Dr. Strange is the Lt. Worf of the Marvel universe.
In all seriousness, though, for his own series, Strange is simple: he fights Cthulhu and Dracula and Nyarlathotep and Hades and Mephisto and anybody else who is A) really mystical and B) really goddamned powerful and scary. And he doesn’t always know how to beat the bad guy. Why should he? He’s human, and for all his studying there are an infinite number of dimensions and therefore an infinite number of threats to Earth he won’t know about in advance, no matter how much he studies. This means that a lot of Dr. Strange adventures will end up being quest-model stories.
And finally, the powers issue. In the old days, this wasn’t a big issue, because in the old days, we had thought bubbles to say things like…
“…my Faltine blasts… useless against this new foe! Watoomb preserve me, but I must find a way to…” blah blah blah magic-cakes.
Hokey, yes, but they served the valuable purpose for the reader of establishing when Strange needed help. Nowadays, this type of writing is largely shunned. I’m not calling for a return to it. I mean, come on – stylistic shifts in the art form happen, and attempting to force things back to The Way They Used To Be, artistically speaking, isn’t gonna work any more than trying to make it to the top of the charts with a Buddy Holly cover band. But it does underscore the need for a way to exposit to the reader what Strange knows and what he doesn’t, what he can do (in this situation) and what he can’t.
Now, in a more modern style of writing, the easiest way to do this is with a DKS character. DKS stands for “doesn’t know shit,” you see. Someone who is not stupid, but completely unversed in the expertise at hand, so the expert character explains to him what the rules are right now. This is especially essential in any narrative about or involving magic, because whereas in other story settings you only need to explain the unfamiliar, in a magical story you need to explain pretty much everything. (In the Harry Potter books, for example, Harry himself was the DKS character, forcing everybody else to explain things to him all the damn time, or working his lessons into the “what the reader needs to know” portions of the book. This was actually a very elegant use of the storytelling device by J.K. Rowling.)
In short, Dr. Strange needs a non-magic sidekick. But now we run into a new problem: all his existing sidekicks know a lot about magic. Wong, for example, is himself more or less a walking magic encyclopedia second only to Strange. Clea arguably knows even more. And so forth. However, we’re lucky, because in The Oath Brian K. Vaughan put together the start of a relationship with Night Nurse that shows some promise in this regard, though, so even that problem is handled.
So tell me again: why is Strange broken? Because I honestly don’t see it. He does what he’s supposed to do very well, and it’s not his fault people keep wanting him to be an Avenger.
23
Mar
Read the reviews, then wonder if this is the worst hotel in America.
(And why is it that the only people who liked it are Germans?)
23
Mar
Lost this season?
All killer, no filler.
21
Mar
I’ve gotten maybe a dozen emails over the course of the last week from people asking me to weigh in on all the kerfuffle happening over and in regards to Livejournal, which recently has decided to abandon the basic “free” accounts in favour of the “plus” accounts which have web advertisements on them, and has censored (or not, it may have been accidental) fan-fiction “interest” listings. Apparently, since I am a fairly high-profile Livejournal exile, my opinion on this is considered noteworthy.
And it’s fair to ask me, I guess, although I’m not sure what I can especially contribute that anybody else couldn’t. So here we go.
1.) Whining about advertisements is goddamned stupid. (See what I mean when I say “what can I say that hasn’t already been said?”) This is the Internet, folks, and Internet means “requires revenue stream.” I know Livejournal was founded on the premise of paying for itself by using free accounts as content and advertising to drive the sale of paid accounts, but honestly, that was kind of a stupid premise considering that free accounts offered about ninety-nine percent of the functionality of paid accounts. A revenue model more or less based on gettiing people to pay thirty dollars a year for more user icons is a bad revenue model. Livejournal has to get its money from somewhere.
2.) Whining about censorship is fairly pointless. Not entirely pointless, I will grant – it’s of course possible that Livejournal’s new Russian owner people will put down their vodka and caviar and pay attention to hordes of fans yelling on the internet in order to provide good customer service. But it’s not particularly likely, especially when the reasons the Russians bought it in the first place is because they’re more concerned with their Russian customers – you know, the ones who use Livejournal more than any other country does and where its usership is expanding fastest.
Look, I am not pro-censorship; in case you couldn’t tell by my very last post and all the silly Photoshopping and parodic mockery I do, freedom of expression issues mean a very great deal to me. But calling Livejournal’s actions censorship is to ignore that censorship can really only occur when there is no viable alternative to make your views known/publish your work, and in this situation that simply isn’t the case.
(PS. As stated elsewhere: the “internet strike” concept is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have heard of in quite some time, not least because the geniuses behind it scheduled it on Good Friday. Why would anybody not be shocked by a downturn in traffic on a major statutory and religious holiday?)
3.) What Livejournal does well and what it doesn’t. Of course, this has also created the standard round of “I am leaving Livejournal FOREVER” commentary from the usual suspects. The sad thing is that they then say they’re going to Insanejournal or Deadjournal or one of the other half-dozen sites running older versions of the publicly available Livejournal code, all of which are about as reliable as George W. Bush in a liquor store.
As a Livejournal emigre, I’ve had more occasion than some to compare and contrast the service by what it offers and what it doesn’t offer. To wit: Livejournal is easy to use, quite possibly the simplest web publishing service going. But it’s customizable enough that advanced users don’t feel like they’re playing with Tinkertoys. Threaded comments are wonderful things. User icons are fun. The “secure publishing” tools, although they are honestly about as secure as a door made out of Swiss cheese, are for the majority of users good enough for maintaining a reliably private web diary that you can opt to let certain individuals read.
(It should be noted here that, apart from concern over legal issues, which I would honestly like to fight at some point, the reason I haven’t restarted Improved Archie is because Livejournal lent that enterprise a level of functionality that I can’t quite duplicate elsewhere yet, although I’m hopeful that the sifting I’m doing through WordPress plugins pays off eventually.)
And most importantly, Livejournal offers community. I honestly doubt I would have expanded my readership as dramatically as I did in the early days without attracting internet-friends through scans_daily and several other Livejournal communities. The friending system on Livejournal encourages community development in a way that most other social networking and publishing sites just don’t; you can have a blog on Blogger for years and just be a lonely outpost in the internet woods, but Livejournal is almost by definition a growth instrument; it offers all the belly-up-to-the-internet-bar nature of a good web forum or bulletin board without the limiting qualities of same.
The big downside to Livejournal is that it has a ceiling. You can’t use it to generate a profit off your site directly. Sales of creative work, yes. Commissions, yes. Money off advertising the content you’re producing, no. Work on Livejournal thus, in many ways, is work-for-hire at a very, very cheap rate. More notably, Livejournal tends to have a readership ceiling as well; the community nature of the site (and I am not the first to comment on this) tends in most circumstances to drive readers away when they see your large friendslist, countering the “he’s a good writer” appeal with “oh, he’s the most popular kid in school” negatives. There are of course exceptions to this, but they’re more often than not celebrities (well, writer celebrities, which is definitely a given value of “celebrities,” but you get the idea).
4.) On leaving Livejournal. I had honestly been planning to exit Livejournal as my primary web outlet for a few months prior to my expulsion; I had (and this will sound arrogant, but fuck it) outgrown it; it couldn’t do what I wanted and needed it to do any more. This is not to say that I’m happy about the booting – I lost a great deal of work apart from my own journal that I was rather happy with (my scans_daily posts, for example). Also, I lost the “Orlando Jones as Orlando Bloom” Photoshops entirely, which sucks because they were a lot of work.
Since I left, the story of my traffic has been a sharp dip initially (as people didn’t know where to find my new digs), then recovery, then steady and mounting growth in traffic with occasional spikes for something big. (The Mr. Men parodies have been the biggest spike thus far thanks to a major StumbleUpon hit.) That’s how web publishing works: you put out steady content, occasionally people really like a certain something, and some of them stick around and read you regularly. Which is gratifying. But more than that, the sense of community has stuck around as well. Some of the more esoteric stuff that I post doesn’t get a lot of commentary, but other posts get lots of chatter, and believe me, I recognize my regulars when I see them.
So to bring it back around to Livejournal again, my point is this: it’s good at what it does, but it’s not the only fish in the sea, and depending on what you want your Livejournal to be, it might not even be the best option. Yes, web self-publishing is more work. (Not much more work – trust me, the WordPress interface isn’t that hard to use once you get past the initial setup.) But it offers greater rewards in certain areas for those interested, and that’s not nothing.
PS. This is as apropos a time as any to remind those who might want to know that I am still readable via Livejournal; simply subscribe to “mighty_god_king”.
"[O]ne of the funniest bloggers on the planet... I only wish he updated more."
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