Nizzibet has taken to herding geese. Most mornings we drive down to Golden Gardens, park, eat some sort of breakfast and stare at Puget Sound. The parking lot and lawns have a small flock of Canadian geese wandering on them. After breakfast, if it’s not raining, Nizz picks a goose, usually one of the males, and chases it. It’s not much of a chase. Nizz can’t really run. Neither can the goose. If it were a seagull it would just fly away as soon as it started getting annoyed. Geese would rather walk away from trouble if they can. So Nizz walks a couple of feet behind the goose. The goose walks away, swaying back and forth and twisting its neck to keep Nizz in sight. A very slow ambling sort of chase ensues.

Nizz usually ends up boxing the goose up to the edge of the sidewalk where the land turns to rocks falling down to the Sound. They poke along, back and forth for a time before she decides to let him slip past. Once he gets back to his mate he puts on show of honks and hisses and neck bobs. Victory over the human!

There’s No Place – another one of those grim Oz stories, this one with a rhyming psycho Scarecrow. I’d probably buy the series if I ran across it at a con (because if I could afford to go to a con I could afford to buy stuff, especially stuff that puts its hooks in my completist collector mentality) but I just can’t see myself making the effort to order it.

Oz/Wonderland Chronicles –

Says the promo copy – “Oz/Wonderland Chronicles takes Dorothy and Alice (now college students) on an adventure, back into the realms of their childhood. Even though Dorothy spent time in Oz, she has forgotten about it. Alice attributes hers to daydreaming, or childhood dreams. But what neither of them realizes is that Oz and Wonderland, and the creatures that inhabit those lands, are real. The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles is set in modern day Chicago, it will be a blend of the 3 worlds as Dorothy and Alice set out to find the cause of the disruption. Somehow, creatures from OZ and Wonderland are finding there way into downtown Chicago.”

Um. Blah.

I’ve updated the My Life in Comics essay over at my Sentient 39 site. Corrected some spelling and punctuation. Added scans of the covers for Dangerman and some of my minicomics. (Thank you Jane for the copies. Did you want them back? I do have copies in storage.)

The “missing image” spots are on purpose. I’ve still got a minicomic or two to scan. I am without the other minis at the moment though. I’m debating whether to leave those broken links in place in order to nag myself or whether I should take them down until I actually have the rest of the issues available.

I should also be updating some of the other pages at Sentient 39 in the next few days. No new Lado Perapek I’m afraid. Sorry. I’ll make note of the updates as I post them.

Oz, the Manga.

Looks pretty. No prose or dialogue in the preview so I can’t tell how faithful David Hutchinson, the adapter, intends to be.

OzF5 – that’s Oz Force 5. I think.

The art is nice. Can’t say that that the premise looks very original.

Dorothy of Oz

I think I posted a link to this site (or at least a site previewing this comic) many months ago but today is a new Oz comics day so … there.

Interesting combo of movies this weekend. Nizzibet and I watched The Final Cut on Saturday. On Sunday we went to JayDogg and TwoM’s new place to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on their ginormous TV. Both movies feature a technology that deals with memory.

In Cut there is a biological implant that records the sights and sounds of a person’s life. The story concerns a cutter, a person who edits the recorded memories into a presentable “rememory” after the person’s death.

In Sunshine there is a doctor who has invented a technology that he uses to erase unwanted memories.

Both movies are basically set in the present. There are no other special technologies in the stories, no evidence that the stories take place in “The Future”. Of the two, Sunshine is the prize. Its characters are messed up in the way people I know are messed up. Its story deals with the implications of erasing memories in ways that are surprising and clever and very well thought out.

In contrast, Final Cut occurs like an early draft for a better story. I enjoyed it and I spent a good chunk of Sunday thinking of implications that the movie doesn’t consider. (I won’t go into the character of the protagonist. He’s a cutter. A man who takes the lives of others and edits them into brief good times highlights. Anybody guess that he is distanced from his own life, only alive in dealing with the recordings of the lives of others?) Thing is, the memory recorder implact has apparently been around for at least 50-60 years. But –
Only one company controls the technology.
The memories are only accessible after death.

Not likely. No technologies last 50 years without being hacked and copied and built on. The original premise is weird too. The implants are biological. They are put into the brains of the unborn at some unspecified time prior to birth. The memories are then accessible after death. In normal circumstances that means that the persons who decide to put in the implants will be dead by the time the implants recordings are available. It’s grandparents having themselves recorded for their grandchildren. That’s some interesting long term planning.

Humans are egotistical. Humans play with technology. In fifty years someone would have figured out ways to access and download the memories of living people. Wills and contracts would deal with memory ownership. “I give my children access to memories of their childhood but to my rotten ex-spouse – NOTHING!” There would be memory artists – people who live exciting lives for the rest of us to experience.

Strange Days deals with some criminal possibilities for memory technology. It’s also livelier film than Cut. Not necessarily better but definitely livelier.

Aside from world building I spent time considering what I would remember. And I spent little time considering what I would forget. There are things I’d be happy to forget but nothing that I need to forget enough to have somebody else hack my brain. Lots I’d like to remember more clearly than I do.

This set of chain questions is new to me. It’s been passed to me by my EsteemedBrother over at Lovesettlement. Apparently The Pink Bee started this particular set of questions. Who that is I have no idea but she lives in Kentucky. I have a fondness for Kentucky because Nizzibet had some good times there. (Bad times too but we won’t get into that right now.) There’s no explanation what The Stick is. I’m assuming this refers to passing a talking stick because, despite what is said about assuming things, it’s automatic to assume an explanation for something that seems obvious.

the Stick: You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Skook: Confession time. I’ve never read Fahrenheit 451. Never seen the movie or the play. Being culturally literate I do understand the question. My first choices all seem obvious, books or stories that someone else would already have chosen. And being a graphic novel is too problematic. The Word For World is Forest perhaps? Maybe the Little Fuzzy trilogy.

the Stick: Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Skook: All the time. Modesty Blaise. Mrs. Peel. The heroine of MFK Fisher’s Not Now But Now. Dorothy Gale. Mrs. Darling. Like all crushes they pass and are replaced by new ones.

the Stick: The last book you bought is:

Skook: It’s been a while. Mostly I buy movies. Because Rain City Video is constantly selling off their VHS tapes at a price lower than rental and because Nizzibet and I can share a movie more easily than a book. And I’m trying to reduce my book collection ever so slightly. I think the last book was Changes by Matt Howarth. Off ebay.

the Stick: The last book you read:

Skook: The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm. Checked it out from the library with a bagful of other graphic novels.

the Stick: What are you currently reading?

Skook: The Illuminatus Trilogy. I haven’t picked it up in a few months but, since I intend to get back to it “one of these days”, I tell myself I’m still reading it.

the Stick: Five books you would take to a deserted island:

Skook: I do like the first part of Luvset’s response – “One wonders whether one is marooned, thus these five would be the only books one will ever have resort to, or whether it’s just a nice island where there’s nothing to do but read.

If the former I’d start with a book of matches.”

I’m not really good at having favorites. I like so much. And it changes. The favorites don’t go away so much as gain the companions of new favorites. For the marooned island I’d like a blank book of a thousand pages to draw and write in. Two really useful survivalist manuals. A book on boat building.

For the pleasant island I’d have to look around. How long am I supposed to be there?

the Stick: Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?

Skook:
Schuyler, because I never answer her letters
Jenn, because I never write her
Nick, because I need to finish drawing that story

Holy crap. I just got an email from Lambiek.net asking me to submit biographical info so they can include me in their Comiclopedia. I’m speechless.

Either the things I’m thinking when I’m in front of the computer are too trivial to make it worth writing them down or they’re more complex than I think I’ve got time to type at the moment.

See the galloping vampire bat!

Found via The Esoteric Science Resource Center

– A majority of us think that only somewhere between 1 and 5 million Americans live in poverty in the US.

– The actual number of Americans living at or below the poverty level is 33 million.

– 47% of us think the poverty level is $35,000 a year for a family of four.

– The actual poverty level for a family of four is $18,104 a year.

(Stolen from Long Story, Short Pier.)