bradhicks

The commandos herded the men into a school and the women and children into a church. The violence began before dawn. One of the soldiers, César Ibañez, heard the screams of girls begging for help. Several soldiers watched as Lt. César Adán Rosales Batres raped a girl in front of her family. Following their superior officer, other commandos started raping girls and women. ...

The commandos brought the villagers one by one to the center of the hamlet, near a dry well about 40 feet deep. Favio Pinzón Jerez, the squad's cook, and other soldiers reassured the captives that everything would be all right. They were going to be vaccinated. It was a routine health precaution, nothing to worry about.

Commando Gilberto Jordán drew first blood. He carried a baby to the well and hurled it to its death. Jordán wept as he killed the infant. Yet he and another soldier, Manuel Pop Sun, kept throwing children down the well.

The commandos blindfolded the adults and made them kneel, one at a time. They interrogated them about the rifles, aliases, guerrilla leaders. When the villagers protested that they knew nothing, soldiers hit them on the head with a metal sledgehammer. Then they threw them into the well. ... By the end of the afternoon, the well overflowed with corpses.

solarbird

I’m gonna street-play Folklife this weekend – and attend, too, particularly as weather changes. XD Say hi if you seem me! Also, this is the last weekend for the review raffle, so post a public review of Cracksman Betty and let me know!

Also, I signed up for ReverbNation. Who should I tell it I sound like? I’ve dropped a couple of bands but I need more.

ReverbNation is also making weird things happen where Facebook is telling me people are liking my activity there but not linking me over, but when I go there directly it’s not showing up there. I’ll figure out what that’s supposed to mean when I’m not so busy. If you’re doing stuff, where does it go?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Echoed via dw:ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん. comments at Dreamwidth.

jimhines

We just watched the latest (I think) episode of Legend of Korra, “The Aftermath.” I’m continuing to really enjoy this show for a number of reasons.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD

Pacing: One of the things that bugged me was the love triangle between Korra, Mako, and Asami. It felt, not necessarily cliche, but easy. It’s an oft-repeated trope, one that could push characters into more cardboard, stereotypical roles and — if other shows are any example — drag out for far too long.

Instead, Asami’s character quickly developed more depth and conflict. The plot moved along, changing her role in the story. The conflict between Korra and Asami progressed through conflict into understanding and sympathy. I loved the quiet moment at the end where Korra tells Mako, “She’s going to need you.”

I’ve seen that pacing elsewhere, and I appreciate that the show doesn’t seem to get bogged down. There’s always a sense of movement.

Lin Beifong continues to be awesome. In many ways, I think she’s my favorite character. Partly because she’s an older woman kicking all sorts of ass. Partly because she, more than anyone else I’ve seen, seems to take full advantage of her bending abilities. The firebenders throw fire. Earthbenders throw rocks. Beifong, on the other hand, manipulates metal cables like Spider-Man, grows blades from her armor to punch through mechs, and seems to push the “What else can I do with this?” angle.

Complexity: The scene with Tahno’s character really jumped out at me. This is a character who’s introduced as a full-on asshole. He’s arrogant, he cheats, and you really wanted Korra to kick his butt in the tournament. Instead, the White Falls Wolfbats won … and thus became the targets of an Equalist attack.

In the next episode, you see Tahno without his powers, and he’s utterly broken. Korra feels for him. She knows what he lost and how close she came to losing her own bending. It was a fairly short scene, but that’s all it took.

The relationship between Tenzin and Lin Beifong is another interesting example. Their history, the contrast of their apparent discomfort with how well they work together in a crisis … I have no idea where that’s going, but I like the dynamic, and at this point I’m trusting the show not to go somewhere overly cliche with it.

While there are certainly characters who seem flat-out Evil, at least at first, I appreciate that things generally aren’t presented in a simplistic black-and-white way. Neither people nor power are simple, and this show respects that fact.

The Animation: This is a very pretty show, particularly in the way it portrays movement and the grace of the different benders. I get done watching, and other cartoons suddenly seem clunkier.

Trusting the Viewers: I was trying to figure out how to phrase this last bit, and “trust” is the closest I can come. I’ve never seen a single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it hasn’t stopped me from enjoying Korra. It doesn’t surprise me that they wanted a show that could welcome new viewers as well as old, but it struck me that there just isn’t a lot of exposition or hand-holding, period. There’s no talking down, no assuming that things will be too complicated or difficult to understand. Elements are explained as they become relevant to the story.

I know there are things I’m missing from Avatar, but I can catch up on my own, and I like that they don’t slow down the story to spoon-feed information.

In Conclusion: Okay, I get it. I’m officially a fan, and I have added Avatar: TLA to my list of things to catch up on (when I find the time).

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

robin_d_laws

Ever since I switched to blogspot as my main blogging headquarters last summer, I’ve been manually mirroring posts here to LJ. In an effort to pare annoying tasks from my morning routine, I’ll no longer be doing this. If you still want to read me on LJ (as opposed to the main site, or by following me on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+), I have set up an LJ feed of the blogspot content, which you can subscribe to here.

If you want me to notice your comments, please make them on any of the above platforms.

To make sure everyone who needs to see this announcement catches it, I’ll be repeating it periodically over the next week or so. Apologies in advance for the redundancy.

ludickid

Thanks to recent “data”, I am sad to report that it is no longer permitted to talk about the following topics until all the other problems in the world have been completely solved, beginning with global poverty and ending with the fact that there is nowhere near my apartment to get Slurpees.  I understand that this will be a difficult adjustment for many of you, and I sympathize, but “data”.  Here is the list of embargoed discussions:

- Any complaints about the War on Christmas.  This is not a thing.  I promise, you can celebrate Christmas in any way you choose up to and including drinking three bottles of Old Overholt and puking yourself to death all over the local crèche.  No one is taking your Christmas away.  You can talk about Jesus until His surely imminent return and the law will do nothing to stop you.  The cashier at Wal-Mart saying “happy holidays” is not a form of oppression.

- Similarly, no more talk about the Obama Administration taking your guns away.  It’s just not going to happen. As long as you keep shoveling money at the NRA, and you will because you are an easily manipulated dunce, not even the tiniest little baby steps will be taken toward the slightest bit of firearms regulation.  All you are doing by stockpiling ammo is helping put the children of Winchester executives through college.  The government — or a Republican one, anyway — is more likely to take your Medicare and Social Security away than it is your guns.  Just…just calm down.

- Complaints about being asked to press 1 for English.  In fact, complaining about anything that “inconveniences” you for less than five seconds is forbidden from this point forward.

- Hand-wringing over the fact that there are now more ‘minority’ babies than there are white onesˆ.  Look, honkies:  the only reason you would need to worry about this is if you have consistently treated non-whites like shit for all of recorded history.  And you haven’t done that, have you?  You have?  Oh.  Well, in that case, there are two options for you:  either stop reading this and get fucking so you can shore up the stockpile of Cadens, Makaylahs, Brysons, and Dakotas; or start treating the dark-skinned kids decently so they won’t want to put you up against a wall once they’re old enough to start buying the guns Obama didn’t get around to outlawing.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which will be easier.

- How Muslims are taking over the country and will soon impose their evil Sharia law on us.  This isn’t even remotely happening in Europe, where there are a lot more Muslims than there are here.  Muslims, on the other hand, would be pretty justified in worrying that Americans are going to take over their country and impose their laws and standards, but let that one drift.

- The disgraceful manner in which everyone but you chooses to raise their children

- Decrying the death of pop music.  Look, I understand.  You’re old now.  It took me by surprise, too, and there was nothing pleasant about it.  But let’s not pretend that there’s been a cultural apocalypse that just happened to coincide with the appearance of your first gray hair.

-  The defense of worthless garbage on the basis that you “don’t want to have to think about things” or that “you just want to turn your brain off for a while”.  First of all, if there is one problem America most certainly does not suffer from, it is thinking too much about anything.  Second, what do you do that your brain is so fucking taxed?  Rough day down at the copy-editing factory?  Lose a thumb entering numbers into that Access database, did we?  The whole idea of the necessity of escapism is sheer bafflegab; as my friend Tom Block put it, “an escape from what?  We live in Disneyland, for crying out loud.”  If exercising your brain is causing you that much fucking grief, stick an ice pick in your earhole and be done with it.

-  Saying that anything, especially the pointing out of obvious racism, is the new racism.  No.  It is not.  Racism is the old racism, and is also the new racism, on account of its being racist.

-  Defending the shitty behavior of anyone, but especially famous people, government officials, or huge corporations, by pointing out that “they didn’t do anything illegal”.  When did we become a nation of unpaid trial lawyers?  Unless someone’s paying me at least three figures an hour to do so, I’m not particularly interested in acting as a loophole detector for some million-dollar cretin.  And for a country that is relentlessly and drearily moralistic about just about everything else, we seem to delight in doing free PR when it comes to letting rich people off the hook.  It may come as a shock, but people like this literally make the laws, so explaining in a patronizing tone that some egregious misdeed that would shame anyone’s grandmother wasn’t technically against the law isn’t the dust-off-your-hands-and-walk-away defense that people seem to think it is.

That’s it for now.  Carry on.  Data!

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.

solarbird

Echoed via dw:ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん. comments at Dreamwidth.

solarbird

Echoed via dw:ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん. comments at Dreamwidth.

robin_d_laws

Ever since I switched to blogspot as my main blogging headquarters last summer, I’ve been manually mirroring posts here to LJ. In an effort to pare annoying tasks from my morning routine, I’ll no longer be doing this. If you still want to read me on LJ (as opposed to the main site, or by following me on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+), I have set up an LJ feed of the blogspot content, which you can subscribe to here.

If you want me to notice your comments, please make them on any of the above platforms.

To make sure everyone who needs to see this announcement catches it, I’ll be repeating it over the next week or so. Apologies in advance for the redundancy.

ludickid

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.  (Elie Wiesel)

I’m not especially familiar with the work of Scott Kurtz.  Cursory investigation reveals that his webcomic, PvP, is quite successful, though, which may explain why his recent post regarding creator’s rights and the Avengers movie shows such a staggering lack of empathy and an inability to understand why anyone might seek redress for an injustice.  This is America, after all, land of Steinbeck’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, where everyone assumes that success is a birthright and that any protest against the powerful is nothing more than the hurling of a bunch of sour grapes.  What is harder to understand is why Kurtz wraps his argument in robes of nobility and altruism, as if he is doing quite a wonderful thing by exhorting his readers to abandon the very notion of pointing out injustice.  Every self-flattering moralist likes to dress himself up in a mantle of optimism and faith in the goodness of mankind, but Kurtz’s bewildering deployment of the concept of cynicism suggest that his biggest problem is not one of belief, but of simple comprehension.

Kurtz gets entangled in definitions right away, when he characterizes as “slacktivism” the notion that it would be a good thing for anyone who enjoys Avengers to donate the cost of a ticket to the Hero Initiative.  ”Slacktivism”, as it is commonly understood, is the process of mounting a protest or sponsoring a social cause by doing something that costs nothing in terms of money or time, such as retweeting a feel-good statement or tinting your Facebook icon a meaningful color.  Donating money to an organized charity, conversely, is just plain old activism, since it requires both action and expense.  Perhaps Kurtz is angry at the Hero Initiative plan (started, by the way, by my good friend Calamity Jon Morris; you can read more about it here) because, benefitting as it does hundreds of comics creators in financial need, it blows a hole in his already-flaccid argument that this is all about Jack Kirby, who at any rate is too dead to enjoy it.

Kurtz really tries to push the unmade-by-anyone point that this is just about Jack Kirby getting credit for creating the Avengers, when it is, of course, about the fact that artists and writers for all Marvel books are routinely cheated out of money, credit and a decent degree of compensation for the success of the characters they helped shape.  He does this, oddly enough, by displaying panels from the original Lee-Kirby Avengers and the Millar-Hitch Ultimates and asking the reader which more resembles the version of the team they saw on screen.  This doesn’t make the profound point he seems to think it does; indeed, it’s hard to tell what point it’s intended to make at all.  Baz Luhrmann stranding Romeo Montague in South Beach and equipping him with a silver-plated handgun does not stop the play from having been written by William Shakespeare; and, more to the point, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch no more own those characters than Jack Kirby did, and will receive no more compensation from the film’s gargantuan profits than I will.  (They may, indeed, someday find themselves in financial need, and will no doubt be met with sneers from Kurtz telling them they’ve got nothing coming.)

It only gets worse from here:  once again mischaracterizing the argument of the compassionate defenders of creator’s rights that so infuriate him, Kurtz notes all the other people — Walt Simonson, Bob Layton, Jim Steranko — who helped define the characters we think of as Thor, Iron Man, and Nick Fury.  This is fine so far as it goes, but no one is arguing that Kirby and Kirby alone be compensated for his work on the characters.  Those of us who are repulsed by Marvel’s treatment of its writers and artists would be just as happy to see Simonson, Layton, and Steranko get a bigger slice of the pie as well, something that is in no way incompatible with the simple factual admission that the characters were originally created by Jack Kirby.  His examples are somewhat bewildering on their face, as well; Steranko frequently feuded with Marvel, Simonson is a board member of the Hero Initiative, and Bob Layton has recently struggled in the indie comics field that Kurtz cites as evidence that creator’s rights is no longer an issue.  All three are outspoken defenders of creator’s rights.

The attempt that follows to argue that creator’s rights issues are no longer worth our attention is beneath mention.  Especially coming from a successful webcomics producer — one of the few — it smacks of successful women who spurn feminism, or bourgeoisie blacks who argue that racism is dead.  The I-got-mine argument is essentially irrational and selfish, and ignores the greater shape of the industry in which everyone must work. Citing things like Kickstarter and the B&W comics movement of the 1980s is arguing that a minuscule portion of the overall business excuses the egregious abuses of the two companies that dominate the industry, and doesn’t even address the central issue, which is that Marvel’s creators still do not own their creations.  Pretending that things are much better now is quite daring in light of recent developments; the case of Alan Moore and the “Before Watchmen” books alone should argue that the multi-million-dollar corporations that control the vast majority of paying comics work are in no way ready to give up one inch of their control of the material that fattens their bottom line to the people who make it.

Now that he’s really wound up, Kurtz ends his nonsensical tirade by really going for the gusto:  ”It’s not as simple as ‘Give Jack’s estate some money, Marvel. You can afford it.’ That’s not pragmatic thinking. That’s cynicism. And I’m so tired of the cynicism.”  Actually, it is as simple as that — that is the very definition of pragmatic.  Take a small amount of money you don’t need to correct an injustice that was all your fault; you score a huge public relations coup that will buy you enough goodwill to weather the next 20 years of screwing your employees, while still coming out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead. It’s as practical as can be.

As far as the line about cynicism, I’m frankly flabbergasted.  Supporters of the Hero Initiative and creator’s rights advocates are attempting to get comics fans to donate money to the creators of the books they love, to compensate for how they they were routinely underpaid, overworked, and cheated out of the financial gain their bosses got from their hard work.  Kurtz, meanwhile, is arguing that it doesn’t matter who got screwed, because things are better now probably, and besides who cares, the Avengers movie was awesome, so everybody shut up about who screwed who.  And we’re the ones being cynical?  What we’re asking for has nothing to do with cynicism. It has everything to do with justice, or at the very least decency, which are the opposite of cynicism.  Cynicism is saying what Kurtz says: this has always happened, it will always happen, we can’t do anything about it anyway, let’s all shut up and pretend it’s fixed and move on. That is precisely cynicism.

Having thoroughly ensured that the boots of people he doesn’t even work for are well and truly spittled, Kurtz ends his flailing around by telling us who the real villains are:  internet commenters.  (As Calamity Jon pointed out, this is a man who calls it childish to define the Marvel vs. Kirby feud in terms of good guys and bad guys, but he ends his essay by comparing people who disagree with him to a comic book supervillain.)  People who want Kirby and other creators to get what’s due them aren’t decent people looking for justice; they’re “worms” trying to “make themselves feel powerful”.  (Never mind that virtually all the power in this scenario is held by wealthy corporate executives, as it pretty much always is.)  The real bad guys aren’t big business shot-callers or billion-dollar movie studios, it’s internet cowards “getting in a good dig” because they never had the courage to create anything themselves.  (Never mind that hundreds of the people supporting Kirby and the creator’s rights movement in general are themselves comic creators, making the quite rational decision that if they don’t stand up for creator’s rights for others, no one will bother to stand up for them.)  Scott Kurtz bases his whole argument on the idea that he is trying to break free from a hurtful cynicism; but there is nothing fresh, new and optimistic about defending the bosses when they try to step on their workers for the millionth time.  He may think he’s letting sunshine into the room by telling us all to stop living in the past and just take what we’re given, but the real cynics — the big shots his argument will ultimately benefit — have heard this song before; because they’re the ones who wrote it.

Mirrored from LUDIC LIVE.