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Not mentioned in the video: what a pain it is to draw! Thanks a lot, Curt! I use a template on the pencil layer when drawing digitally so the final digital ink still looks hand drawn, though there have been times I’ve tried doing it by hand even when not on paper where the template option isn’t available. I never get it right to my satisfaction.
Years ago, when I had a stronger readership and most of the blogs I followed were active, I was nominated for a “Liebster Award“. It’s not an official award from any particular organization. It was just a way for bloggers to promote fellow bloggers. Nowadays, as equipment has become cheaper and more people make videos for YouTube than write for solo websites, or so it feels (and I wouldn’t mind getting back to the occasional video myself), I don’t have a strong a readership as I used to. A couple of boosts by Instapundit only helped for a short time, as I expected it too. I still have people who show up, but I’m half of what I was before the forced hiatus in 2016, where I probably lost most of my readership, and the recent attempts to stay out of the culture war as it keeps forcing itself into storytelling, despite being only one of the many problems with storytelling today and the types of stories I tend to follow (sci-fi superhero stuff). This will become more important later on.
What’s important for the intro is that the independent blogger isn’t dead, just most of the sites I used to follow. Some of us still are out there posting stuff and reading others’ work. For example, novelist Caroline Furlong of A Song Of Joy enjoys myself enough to like most to all of my articles and I have also used a few of hers for the Saturday article link. She also nominated me for a Sunshine Blogger Award. That was nice of her. Like the Liebster, the Sunshine Blogger Award rules are answer a series of questions provided by the nominator and then charging 11 other sites to answer your questions, but it can’t include the blogger who nominated you. Which seriously reduces my nominations since most of the sites I follow these days are multi-contributor news and commentary sites. Who do I nominate on Bleeding Fool or Geeks & Gamers?
While I figure out a workaround, I have below the 11 questions Caroline has asked of me and her other nominations. You can read her responses to her own nominee’s questions at the link in the previous paragraph. Here are my responses to her questions of me. To make up for the limited nominations, I’m going to ramble a bit, and it seems I’ve broken my 2000 limit more than I’d like. She’s been here long enough to be used to that, so blame her. After all, I started this site to talk about the stuff I’m really into that nobody else I know in friends or family think about in the same way I do, and hoping to get into discussions with others who think the same way. It doesn’t seem to happen if you see how blank most of my comments are, which is also why I want to get back to videos and try livestreaming again. Also, go read the rest of her site after you see her own Q&A session. It opens in a new tab so you don’t have to scramble back here.
DC’s current Plastic Man wouldn’t have missed the woman changing in there.
Police Comics #6
Comic Magazines, Inc (January, 1942)
I don’t have to tell you what became of Plastic Man. In recent years he’s become one of their bigger characters, but that was a long time coming. His first post-comics appearance I’m aware of is a cameo in the first season of Superfriends, getting a mouse out of a computer. Like fellow cameo Green Arrow (from a later episode), he didn’t get to join the full team, but he did get his own cartoon as an agency superhero working with a woman named Penny, who was really into him, and Hula-Hula, a Hawaiian with bad luck who also happened to have informants all over the world. This was never explained.
In the next season Penny somehow won over Plastic Man, who in the first season was into his Chief (though she seemed to hate his stretchy guts). They married and had a son, Baby Plas. We’re not up far enough in the comics to know if Plas had a child in the comics, but I like to think this is the same son from the alternate universe “Injustice” stories, in which Plastic Man has really shined besides appearances in Batman: The Brave & The Bold and Justice League Action. The others that DC have picked up from the future Quality Comics haven’t fared as well, but we’ll touch on them in later comics.
Last chapter we saw Pocket Vinyl start their goal of 50 states in 45 days (unofficially breaking the 50 day record) with the local states. Now it’s time to truly venture from home. 3 states down, 47 to go.
I’ve never been interested in beating a world record. Some records sound really cool and other seem to exist just to exist, but I’ve never wanted to be the best at anything. I’m not against becoming the very best like noone ever was, but if I ever achieved that it would be a bonus, not a goal. I just want to be better now than I was then and better later than I am not. I do find trying to achieve a record interesting and I’m rooting for them…even though it actually already happened and what the result was they’re still active and together. If someone else has that goal, more power too them and I wish them luck provided no innocents are hurt in the process and no damage is done to the attempters. It’s just not for me.
In this case I would think some of the nuance of the travel would be lost just trying to perform every state, sometimes twice a day. If I was going to go cross-country (and me being me that would require an RV with a decent bed, toilet, shower, and kitchenette) and visit every state, I’d like time to really enjoy the place. In Kino’s Journey, the title heroine only stays in a town three days, enough to understand the place but not enough time to settle down and miss out on the rest of the journey. I might go a week, then depending on the state just go to a different part of the state (Texas and California are huge) or just move on to the next one. It might be fun, but I know I’d miss being home. I never even had a sleepover more than a day because I just wanted to go home that bad, probably obnoxiously so (little brat that I was). I’ve stayed in a hotel for conventions over the weekend but nothing was better than sleeping in your own bed. And not getting up early for a press junket.
Enough about me, though. The homepage is filled enough. Let’s get back to our performers.
“You should know I taste terrible.”
Prime #13
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (July, 1994)
SELECTED COVER ART: Norm Breyfogle
COLORING (BOTH STORIES): Mickey Rose & Violent Hues
“Double Dangerous”
WRITERS: Len Strazewski & Gerald Jones
PENCILER: Darrick Robertson
INKER: Mike Machlan
ADDITIONAL COLORING: Keith Conroy & Tim Duvar
LETTERER: Dave Lanphear
EDITOR: Hank Kanalz
“The Destiny Trail” prologue
WRITER: Gerald Jones
PENCILER: Scott Kolins
INKER: Jon Holdredge
LETTERER: Patrick Owsley
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A relevant comment was posted by Rakso5809:
Snape fails point one too, because his background is culturally relevant. He’s a man who grew up in the brutal, gritty poverty of Cokeworth, a fictional former factory settlement, dominated even years later by the smell of coal and soot, broken, cobbled stones and the chimney of an old mill looming over the whole area. He’s a representative of this British subculture, a child whose parents never managed to escape poverty, despite the mother being a witch. His character was formed by his abusive childhood under a father who represents this impoverished lowest cast of a society who moved on from them and forgot them. That history is defined by certain traits Snape absolutely personified in the books. The harsh and unforgiving treatment of children, as he himself experienced it during his youth as a standard he could never shake, the ruthless bitterness, the lack of emotional regulation. That’s all part of this heritage we learn about in The Half Blood Prince. He’s a remnant victim of strict authoritarian upbringing, of a father who most likely compensated the shame about unemployment by excessive drinking, and the poverty grown from industrial revolution and technology. There were no blacks in those communities, and they were often incredibly racist and bigoted, breeding grounds for nationalism and extremism. It’s a culture that bred the hooligans and Britain’s white supremacist equivalents.
So it adds a very important baseline for the character of Severus Snape, it explains why he was drawn to Voldemort, who provided scapegoats he could blame for all his misfortunes, and offered a alluringly easy way out of his misery.
It makes his eventual betrayal of the Death Eaters so much more impressive. Very few young men ever managed to leave those hate groups in real life. They rarely ever get out. It shows why he could never overcome his bitterness, he’d never learned how to do it. It explains why he hates Harry so much. With his authoritarian upbringing, Harry seemed weak, snobbish, ungrateful for all the attention he got and all the chances he had. Coming from a London suburban area, Harry was the impersonation of everything Snape grew up to despite, and he couldn’t see Harry’s suffering as it was, due to his own harsh background.
The host agreed that he did miss that, as he isn’t from England, and thus the swap actually does break all five rules.
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
BW Media Spotlight 