Exodus: Movement Of The Bloggers

I have to get out of here.

Soon, Blogger will stop supporting FTP publishing, which means that my little experiment with "trusting" servers I don't own will soon end in tears and I won't be able to go to the web to post these crazy little missives. If you see the little orange and white "B" next to the URL of this site, you'll note that this is a Blogger-driven website. Change is coming to me whether I like it or not.

I am less than pleased about that, especially given that I don't have much time to do anything about it. I mentioned this briefly already.

A host (pardon the pun) of alternatives present themselves, each zanier than the last. A good, good friend installed a Wordpress server on my personal domain, where I'm doing some experimentation. Here's the options I'm debating:

• Go back to plain jane HTML blogging, manually FTPing files to my domain(s), creating my own RSS feeds (pain in the butt) and writing the blogs "on the road," transferring them from plain text to the blog when I can sit down at a computer ... retiring The Hundred and Four in the process and moving all blogging operations back to the mothership on The Operative Network.
  
• Let Google shake me down on The Hundred and Four for a custom domain and suck it up (less than attractive)
• Finagle the Wordpress install my homeboy did on my domain and somehow make it look like a page that doesn't make me wanna throw up in my soul.
• Taking my year-long sabbatical from social networking a step farther into getting offline completely. However, given how therapeutic and helpful for my writing it's been to shout from the digital rafters, that seems "un-possible."

I have to make a decision by March 26th, a date that's bearing down on my wife much harder than me (more on that in a bit ... scratch that, probably just links when she's ready to make her big reveal).

What's funniest is that this happens less than a year after I finally completely relented to "blogging engines." I'd done (literally) more than a thousand posts at MySpace and still considered myself keeping the torch burning since I was maintaining my Soapbox by hand, the way spirit intended you to. I created a client site which had Blogger integrated and was like, "oh, that's not so hard" and now I'm screwed. Stupid trusting Google to not change up the game!

Playing (Music): "The Great Divide" by Vertical Horizon

Commentary Track for The Buy Pile from February 17, 2010

First, some adminstrivia: these commentary tracks could hit a snag when Blogger goes dark on FTP (more on that shortly). I'll see what I can do. There's several possibilities, and I'm working on a blog about that, so I wanna stay on topic here.

Doomwar feels like the vindication of Christopher Priest's run, as it does similar things as the two "Enemy of the State" storylines (in my mind).

As somebody who remembers Bob Layton's Hercules series with great fondness (Recorder was the man!), the idea of a Marvel universe without the brash son of Zeus is oddly bittersweet. Wonder Man's still shlepping around and Herc had to pass? Some comics shop pundits noted the circular path of divinities, much like Alan Moore hinted at when the officers of Top 10 investigated the murder of Balder, but I can't imagine a way to bring him back and not have it take away a lot. Maybe the whole "Giffen/DeMatteis League Going To Hell For Tora" tactic. I can't see any other way.

The opening strains of All Hail Megatron were the last time I enjoyed a Transformers comic as much as Last Stand of the Wreckers and that's a good thing. Hopefully, unlike AHM it won't fall apart at the end. Kup's stepping up as a great point of exposition, Springer's an interesting leadership type and the sole human has yet to annoy. Shocker!

Deadpool ... when he's on, he's on. What more needs to be said?

As for Doctor Voodoo, I note that Earth's new main mage has yet to be called in on a really high profile consult, and he didn't make the "main" Avengers team (not publicly, anyway, a team which has zero non-Caucasians as of yet, but the Secret Avengers remain unrevealed), so even though he housed two major threats, I kind of feel like he didn't get an appropriate moment to shine. Also, that coloring and muddy ink work didn't help. Que sera sera.

If comics cost less, many, many books would have been contenders. I'm looking at you Incorruptible, G.I. Joe Cobra 2, Dark Avengers and ... heck, all of the honorable mentions. They're all good issues, just not good enough to justify the cover price.

Magog going "meh" was a surprise, but it just kind of Rashomon-ed stuff I'd already seen. Power Girl could probably reach just a little farther and make "Honorable Mention" status.

The bad ... you know what? No need to give it more light. I'm sleepy.

More news as it develops ...

Playing (Music): "Karma Police" by Radiohead

Commentary Track for the Buy Pile, February 11, 2010

Another week, another set of reviews from "the critic comics fans love to hate" (according to Timelord, posting anonymously about me on a message board I've never heard of -- thanks Google Alerts). To be honest, if I knew I could cheese off this many people by getting paid and doing something I love, I'd have started years before I actually did (and now it's been ... spirit, almost seven years of the Buy Pile come next month).

In any case, this week ...

* Yes, I'll be glad when "Blackest Night"/"Brightest Day"/"Mauvest Afternoon" are all over because it'll let nice, weird books like Secret Six and R.E.B.E.L.S. get back to the depraved, sick things they do best. I'm not quite to the point where a Deadshot/Vril Dox team up book would get me to buy it sight unseen, but I'm not far from it either. Some of the best characterization around some of the worst people you'd ever wanna avoid on a dark street. In my meanest dreams, I want Amadeus Cho to grow up and be like Vril Dox (but more on young mister Cho in a bit).

I should really note that the cover for Phonogram: The Singles Club #7 shown in this week's reviews is not what was available at retail, and that the cover I bought is so, so much better. The same was true of issue #6 ... lemme see if I can find what I bought ... here we go. Shame I didn't find that last night while I was working on the reviews. Que sera sera.

There are so many stories I could write in the Phonogram universe. I have a third of an idea about a story about an American phonomancer (who's very, very different from anything David Kohl would have ever seen) that could set the world on fire, and Kohl would be forced to deal with him (and that's not always what you think). Maybe that's too superheroish. Anyway, it rattles around in my head every time I see Jamie McKelvie's perfect artwork (I would literally sacrifice puppies to Cthulhu to get him to work with me on a project) and see the all-too-clever riffs of Kieron Gillen's scripts.

What else? Hm ... I'm watching Human Target on TV and loving Mark Valley's deadpan take on, well, everything. If the comic could capture that and match the content density at a decent price point, they'd have something. Queen and Country used to feel like that, but smarter, less popcorn.

Here's a short story about Nate Grey: no.

Colt Noble and the Megalords was a web comic? Overpriced but funny, I could see signing on for an ongoing at a lower price point.

Explanation of "TV good" re: "Ultimate Comics Armor Wars." It was good enough to watch on TV ... for free. Paying money for it? Maybe not.

Coincidentally, I'm super excited about The Prince of Power featuring Amadeus Cho. An Asian male lead with no kung fu, just brains. I love it.

See you in the funny papers, kids, gotta run.

Playing (Music): "Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore" from the first volume of the Glee soundtrack

The One About Abortion

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I was part of a group called Junior State of America. We held little debates at school, we traveled to a convention, lots of kids got drunk and felt up and danced to terrible music. It was a hoot.

During said convention, I was asked to take place in a number of debates, some scheduled (I prepared for my strict constructionist constitutional debate for three weeks) and some were discussions where ad hoc statements of support for one position or another. After obliterating the diminutive Indian student in the constitutional thing (he was actually tough, though, but I got under his skin, funny story, ask me some day), I saw everybody and their mom rushing for this huge ball room in a larger section of the hotel holding the conference, so I followed the pack squeezed my way in.

Inside were probably three hundred teenagers. At the front of the room was a raised dais, with two long tables draped with white cloth, each having five seats separated by a mic-wielding podium between them. The debate taking place was one about abortion, and it'd just started moments before I got there. Notepad in hand, I listened and jotted down notes, cautiously working my way near the line for people to speak after the main debaters got done. I should note now that this is all the preparation I had, as I'd not thought about the topic beforehand.

To be fair, the pro-lifers were kicking a lot of behind in the debate, looking to be probably four points ahead on most scorecards. Weaving biblical references with biographical tidbits about founding fathers, they presented a much better show and story than their opponents, three girls and two guys, all of whom looked shaken like they'd eaten some bad shellfish. After the main arguments and rebuttals were presented, I was called up as the first audience speaker.

I stood behind the podium, my lips near the mic, wearing a baseball cap tilted to a 45 degree angle off my forehead, a bolo tie, a gray cardigan sweater and gray cargo pants (What do you want, it was 1990, Chubb Rock was jumping on the scene?). I held my words for a moment, letting the tension build in the room as people murmured, all eyes on this weird Black teenager on stage, before I finally spoke.
"It is my studied opinion that the government should keep its damned hands off of women's bodies," I said simply. Letting it hang, I was only slightly surprised when the cheers and clapping and standing and what not began. I wasn't able to continue for probably fifty seconds as people yelled back and forth and the applause finally died down.

"I am not a woman," I continued. "I would hope this comes as no surprise to any of you." (I glanced at a girl who was standing in the back of the room. I'd made out with her at the dance the night before and she giggled at my regard, her hands flying up to cover her mouth) "I don't know much more than the basics any teenaged boy would know about a woman's body, but I am absolutely certain that I don't want any woman making decisions for things that happen to my body. Therefore, with all due respect to the distinguished panelists here ..." (there I gestured to the pro-lifers, all but one of whom were male) "neither I nor any of these guys deserve any opinion in this discussion."

More standing, more applause, blood everywhere. The pro-choice team looked relieved, I actually heard one whisper "thank you."

"So let's start with that," I said. "I'm all in favor of considered and contemplative debate. I believe this is an important issue and respect that many people have strong feelings about it. However, in the same way none of us can vote due to disqualifications of age, I believe that nobody with my gender assignment gets to weigh in on this topic. Unlike voting, I will never grow the requisite experience to have a say here, and neither will most of these guys ..." Again I gestured to the pro-lifers, and the laughs from the crowd were loud and lengthy.

"Now, once we have the people who will be actually affected by the outcome of this discussion as the sole participants, maybe they can come up with something reasonable. My mother always tells me girls are smarter anyway. But for me, or most of the presenters to my right, or most elected officials, or most members of the Supreme Court, to have the unmitigated gall to even believe they deserve to debate this ... well, I don't know about you, ladies, but I find that pretty damned insulting. So, to that end, I'll yield the rest of my time, and hope only people who deserve to discuss this can find their voice. Thank you."

I walked off the stage to thunderous applause. The stairs were rushed by dozens -- mostly girls (yes, I planned a lot of this as I was approaching the stage) -- as the moderator (another guy) struggled to retain control. To be honest, I didn't even stay for the rest of the debate. I left with a group of people -- six girls (including the one from the night before), a guy I knew who came with my team and another guy we met who we thought was cool -- and we all went to get something to eat together and discuss politics and policy.

I was told the original debaters got closing statements. When I read the report on who won what the next day, pro-life went down by a margin of two points.

In my mind, all was as it should be.

So, in case you're asking, here's my position on abortion: women should be able to do whatever the heck they want. Anything I might believe they should or should not do, anything I feel about when life begins, anything I think about what is or isn't murder ... sophistry. None of that matters. It's a woman's body. It's a woman's decision. End of argument.

As with all things, your mileage may vary.

Playing (Music): "La Vie Boheme" from Rent

Commentary Track for the Buy Pile, February 4th, 2009

Let's do this week's second look at my reviews quickly, in that I haven't had lunch and I also need to drop the kids off at the pool. TMI? Sorry, I'm sleepy, filters may be clogged with confusion ...

Anyhoo, I love Dingo. I love, love, love this story. Ever since I read the whole thing as prose (which I recommend) and I can't believe how effective the adaptation is, even while it cuts corners in presenting the stuff. The novel's writer Michael Alan Nelson's doing the comic and he's doing good stuff. Very happy with that.

A guy on Twitter once promised me he'd break down how badly The Great Ten mangles what being in China is actually like ... but I've never seen it. The book reads well and I've enjoyed literally every page of it, and the structure Tony Bedard has laid out is simply flawless.

I will say -- and I do this with great trepidation as not only do I vastly like and admire Dwayne McDuffie, he's also considerably larger than I am -- that I wanted more from Milestone Forever. There's two scenes of just people standing and looking with name captions nearby. That made me a little sad. What happened with Holocaust makes zero sense to me, based on some displays of power I've seen him run. Unless Wise Son has a Lucas Bishop thing going on, I just don't get it, and even then, there's the Flash Rule of Protection from Your Own Powers to consider ... ah, I've said too much. Still, I'd pay six bucks to spend time in Dakota that way, even with those disappointments, and that's a sad statement of how emotionally invested I got with those characters.

Now for some events comics stuff. HOW MESSED UP WAS THAT PAGE WITH THE SENTRY? Siege #2 was wild, as spectacle if not as story. However, I believe Norman Osborn's not too well versed in myth, because gods rarely really die, and their nature is cyclical. So the idea that he can just take on some of the things he has afoot ... it's masochism at a scary level. It was nice to see Bob step up, finally, and not whine his way through something. Ever since that run in with the Molecule Man in Dark Avengers, he's been slowly getting more impressive.

I feel I do a disservice to books like Jonah Hex and Scalped because I am just not the right reader for the material. I can recognize that those were two of the best comics printed this week, based on scientific applications of craft and what not, but I just didn't like them. Like a beautiful person you're not attracted to, there's no accounting for taste. To an extent I feel this way about Criminal (and it's not even due to finding out that Ed Brubaker had a message board beef with me some years ago that only Google Alerts revealed to me -- which is ironic if you read another recent blog of mine, but I digress), but sometimes that noir'll do it for me if it really pushes the envelope.

Nova ... you were doing so well. Your own take on the GL Corps, your new recruit mechanism, it was cute. What's with the time travel? Dude! Dude!

That'll do, y'all. That'll do.

Playing (Music): "Never Get Enough" by Raul Midon

These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For: Cloud Computing is Bad Weather

Let's start out with a simple, yet largely unpublicized thesis: cloud computing is bad.

Many people, even many powerful and profitable businesses would love you to believe otherwise. They assure you their shiny, distant machines can be trusted.

" ...one of us, one of us ..."

From security failures with Google Docs to Paris Hilton's hacked Sidekick (as the biggest of many Sidekick-related tragedies, without even looking at the Blackberry problems), there's ample evidence that cloud computing is "chock full of fail."

The idea seems so idyllic. Create and store your data -- documents, music, whatever -- and store it "in the cloud," on distant servers you don't own and don't control, accessing your material via the internet. The problem is that, like, say, communism, it only works in an idealized state. When real life and real people are involved ... preposterous.

Why? Well, let's look at a number of elements ...

- I CAN'T GET ONLINE: You and your co-workers have a presentation to do on Monday morning. All week you worked on it, collaborating with Google Wave and posting the results on Google Docs. You're feeling confident about your work, and on Sunday night you're gonna fulfill your responsibility to download the file so it can be prepped for a laptop and tested on a projector, since you're first up at the meeting first thing the next day. But you live in Los Angeles, and the rains were heavy as hell and knocked down a tree, which snapped wires that fed your DSL connection (true story, happened to me). You're not getting online tonight, and you can't just drive out to a cyber cafe or something because, oh, your husband is sick and can't be left alone. You are, as they say, screwed.

"... and that's how I got fired ..."

- I CAN'T TRUST YOU: Let's say your phone is, oh, I dunno, a Verizon Droid. You enter your contact information into the device, or maybe you sync it up via Gmail. That means your contacts are on a computer somewhere, available to anybody smart enough to hack into 'em. Why do you care? Well, let's say you work for, oh, I dunno, a design firm that manages the website for a defense contractor, and you talk to lots of department heads to get sign off (true story, happened to someone I worked for). Suddenly, all your contacts -- name, your notes about them, job titles, et cetera -- are a national security risk. Good job, you just encouraged Al Qaeda! You are, not to put too fine a point on it, caught out there.

- I CAN'T KEEP WHAT I PAID FOR: Let's say you own an e-reader like, let's just say an Amazon Kindle. You buy a book that you love and bought wholly legally. One day, you go look to read your book to go do a report on it and whammo, your content got remotely redacted, player! As David Pogue at the New York Times explains: "apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price." When you spent your money, you didn't buy the book, you licensed it, and that license can be revoked with or without your approval or knowledge. You are, just for kicks, anally raped.

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Some say that moving some content (entertainment based) to float in the ethereal nothingness is a fix for a season of The Office hogging up 20GB of hard drive space, and that "most average consumers are not going to ... buy terabyte external hard drives" to keep their purchases. Really? So, if I wanna keep the stuff I buy at the store, I'm not just gonna find a place for it at home, I'd expect the store to keep giving it to me when I want it? That kind of westernized laziness saddens me deep in my soul parts.

Me? I can't buy it -- literally. For years, I was elated with my Treo 680, which allowed me seamless integration of notes and contacts with my Mac, let me do web browsing and word processing, had basics like cut and paste, but most importantly let me manage my own security. Aside from the unavoidables of SMS and voice call records, I decided what went out and what stayed. Then, on one horrible December night before the birth of my latest daughter, my Treo 680 leapt to its death out of the camera bag I use as a "utility belt" and down the cold, cruel hard wood steps of my apartment's atrium. I was crestfallen at best.

Luckily, my research had already led me to what I believe is the best phone on the market, and as soon as my financial situation slows down a little, it will be mine. Not for the technologically faint of heart, the Nokia N900 once again keeps all the data local (being largely plan agnostic helps with that) while bringing me new 3G speeds, 48GB of hard drive space (I'm happy to keep my own files, thank you very much), Linux OS capable of installing OpenOffice and a video player that handles multiple formats natively, plus oodles of other bells and whistles. I tingle just writing about it.

Let me be clear that I'm not an anti-Google person (even though I am a pro-Apple person and recognize the antagonism between the companies as Nexus One moves to compete with the iPhone). I use Google Reader every day (as is shown in the right nav here). On an everyday basis, I would not search with any other engine (sorry, Icerocket, although I do go to Ask.com for specific things I can phrase properly). Also, as you see, I not only criticize Google's cloud aspirations, but Amazon and other companies -- and if you ask me about the iPad, I'd have similar concerns about not being able to control my own machine. Google just happens to be the public's vision of a leader in the drive for cloud computing, and I feel they're going in the wrong way (even if I understand their reasons). I have to paint them all with the same brush.

When I see "a bare knuckled bucket of 'does'" ads for the Droid, I think about what it can't do -- be free from the tentacles of the cloud (and yes, that's a weird mental image, but factual). I look at the G1 or the Nexus One (and how screwy is that thing, huh?) and I shudder. Avago Technologies chief information officer Bob Rudy told the San Francisco Chronicle that "The days of owning software are coming to an end." I don't think he, or anybody else, has the right to tell me what kinds of products I can't own (unless the products are people, because that's clearly not cool) especially based on decades of consumption. I'd no more trust a Photoshop in the clouds than I'd trust public transportation to get me to work.

Which, essentially, is what's likely to happen. Those that have to will live in the cloud, because doing it my way, the safe way ("the safe way is the slow way, Muadib") is both challenging (maintaining your own security, hard for a culture weaned from personal responsibility) and expensive (the phone I want has an MSRP of -- brace yourself -- $650 with zero carrier subsidy). The continued tiering of society in a "post-racial" world. Good luck with that.

Playing (Music): "Thank You" by Lupe Fiasco off of his Enemy of the State mixtape

UPDATE: Mere hours after this blog got updated, Nokia announced that they'll be shipping Maemo 6-based smartphones in the second half of 2010. Yes, the $650 phone I want is a Maemo 5 phone. I can't wait like Nu Shooz.

UPDATE 2/5/10: Google strikes back ... *sigh*