I Wanna Take You On A Rollercoaster

But The Thang Came Apart

So I suck at cheering people up! I'm not good with that sweetness and light stuff. Which may be why it follows me everywhere. It's like WTF? I'm not nice, I'm not nice! Oh, fine. Maybe a little nice. Maybe.

But don't tell anyone ^_-

Somebody I know seems happier, although that could be the concert tickets talking ;^) See? Told you, loud music solves everything ^_^

I wanna rock and roll all night
And party every day!

Yay! *Bounce*. Go have fun, you two :^D

Ugh. Look what I found in my Inbox *shaking the offending email*. "We're here in Rome, it's great, you'll love it!" and etc.

*Belts it out with Ricky Barrow*

Don't protect me don't respect me
Make it bad just for you baby
Heads, you win
Tails, too bad
You lose

Thank you, thank you! You've been a great audience! Now go the f*ck home! *Cheerily gives him the one-fingered salute*. I wonder if he'll stay an entire continent away from me for the rest of my life. Now there's a happy thought ^_-

I cannot run, I will not breathe
It must be that it's not enough
Enough to make-believe
I cannot run from you

God, I need to get some different MP3s. *Rejects Luke Slater and opts for Michael Sembello instead*.

In the realtime world, no one sees her at all
They all say she's crazy

My song!! *Happy laughter* ^_^

Let's see. (Throws in AHA, Cyndi Lauper, the Bangles, Twisted Sister, Wilson Phillips, and Heart, with a Traci Lords chaser.) There we are, MUCH better.

A week without Buffy. *Pound forehead on desk*.

It's one TV show. One. It's not like I sit and watch television all day, or anything. But no, we can't incorporate a single one-hour show into our busy schedules. Grrrr >^F
I can't wait for Monday. I suppose I'll camp out by the set and grab the remote as soon as 7pm rolls around.

Ten days on, four days off. That's the new pattern of my life. No sleep and plenty of general stupidity for four days, and then ten nice stable boring days, and then repeat. Not fun. I like my sleep. *Is dead tired.* I HATE circadian rhythms. At least it's almost over, one more day after this and then it's back to reality.

Fan fiction: came up with the perfect under-title for the second part. Finally. I'd tried three other possibilities, and none of them quite fit. I was sitting there two days ago, thinking about the chronological emphasis of the first under-title, ("The Present"), and going nuts. And then it clicked.

(Ta-da.) "II: Future Tense".

Not that I'm patting myself on the back, or anything. ;^P

I was just jazzed at coming up with something other than "Futures' Past". (Which I've seen a million times in titles for angstfics, regardless of fandom.) It's a fairly powerful word-image, and a very popular one. Which is precisely why I didn't want it. So I moved the concept laterally instead of changing it, gave it a pinch-and-twist.

Well anyhow I like it, and it's my fic, and so. ;^P

Yeah, more has happened besides that: the whole dynamic between certain characters is becoming progressively more clear, though I had to climb out of Mileena's viewpoint to see it. This is going to be one of those "forest for the trees" situations. She'll keep smacking her head against the trees and finally figure it out. Or not. I might keep her, and thus the audience, in the dark for all eternity. Mwa-hahahahahahha >^D

Nah, that'd be fun, but it's too clumsy for my taste. *Is fastidious*.

Gotta bounce! *BOUNCE*

Emails in the offing :^D

Storytime

The Spider Weaver

Not mine. Common domain. Addt'l disclaimer: based upon the Florence Sakade version, © Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1958. From Japan.

Long ago, there was a young farmer named Yosaku. One day he was working in the fields and saw a snake getting ready to eat a spider. Yosaku felt very sorry for the spider. So he ran at the snake with his hoe and drove the snake away, thus saving the spider's life. The spider scuttled into the grass, but before it left it gave a quick bow of thanks to Yosaku.

One morning soon after, Mr. Yosaku was in his house when he heard a tiny voice outside, calling his name. He went to the door and saw a beautiful young girl standing in his yard.

"I heard," said she, "that you're looking for someone to do your weaving for you. Won't you please let me live here and weave for you?"

Now, Yosaku was very pleased because he did need a weaving girl. So he showed the girl the weaving room and she started to work at the loom. At the end of the day Yosaku came by to see what she'd done and was very surprised to find that she'd woven eight long pieces of cloth, nearly enough to make eight kimono. He'd never known anyone who could weave so much in a single day.

"How ever did you weave so much?" he asked.

Instead of answering him, she responded strangely: "You mustn't ask me that! And you must never come to loom while I am at work."

But Yosaku was very curious. So one day he slipped up to the weaving room and peeped in the window. What he saw astounded him! For it was not the girl seated at the loom, but a huge spider, weaving very fast with its eight legs, and for thread it was using its own web, which came out of its mouth.

Watching closely, Yosaku realized that it was the same spider he'd saved from the snake. Then Yosaku understood--the spider had been so thankful that it had wanted to do something for Yosaku. So it had turned itself into a pretty young girl and come to weave cloth for him. Just by eating the cotton in the weaving room, the spider could spin it into thread inside its own body, and then use its eight legs to weave the thread very, very fast.

Yosaku was grateful for the spider's help. He saw that the cotton was almost used up. So next morning he set out for the nearest village, on the other side of the mountains, to buy some more cotton. He bought a big bundle of cotton and started home, carrying it on his back.

Along the way a terrible thing happened. Yosaku sat down to rest, and the same snake that he'd driven away from the spider came up and slipped inside the cotton-bundle. But Yosaku didn't know anything about this, so he carried the cotton, snake and all, home to the weaving girl.

She was very glad to get the new cotton, having used up all the rest just that morning. So she took the new bundle and went to the weaving room.

As soon as she was there, she turned back into a spider and began eating the cotton very, very fast, as though it were something very delicious, so she could spin it into thread inside her body. The spider ate and ate and ate, and when she had eaten down to the bottom of the bundle--the snake jumped out of the cotton. It opened its mouth wide to swallow the spider. Terrified, the spider leapt out of the window. The snake went wriggling very fast after her. And the spider had eaten so much cotton that she couldn't run very fast. So the snake gradually caught up with the spider, opening its mouth wide to gulp the spider down.

But just then a wonderful thing happened.

Old Man Sun, up in the sky, saw everything that had been happening, and he felt sorry for the poor little spider. So he reached down with a sunbeam and caught up the end of the web that was sticking out of the spider's mouth. He lifted the spider high up into the sky, where the snake couldn't even reach her.

The spider was very grateful to Old Man Sun for saving her, so she used all the cotton left inside her body to weave graceful fleecy clouds up in the sky. They say that's why clouds are soft and white, like cotton, and why spiders and clouds share the same name--kumo.

===============

It's just that someone I know seems very sad, and that story always picks me up, and so.
I'm not going to say, "cheer up". Everybody else has done that already ;^p

I have shoulders, you know. You might as well cry on them.

Take care, okay? Stay safe :^)

Measured By Deeds? Or By Circumstances?

Issues, Issues

Note: Apart from my usual ranting about my life, politics, the 80's, and ex-houseguests, I shall now proceed to rant about comics in general and Top Cow/Image comics in particular; specifically with an eye toward their so-called fans and supporters and their treatment of one of the company's keystone artists and creators.

We love you, Michael! *SHRIEK*

Ulp, nope, close but no cigar, I mean Michael Turner ;^)

Credits: Witchblade, Darkness, the original Tomb Raider/Witchblade Crossover Special that, for all intents and purposes, cemented Top Cow's off-and-on wooing of Eidos Entertainments "it" girl Lara Croft.

Or, in English: it's because of Mike's work on that book that there is now a Tomb Raider comic series (although he isn't drawing it.)

Instead, he proposed--and got--the chance to do his own book: Fathom.

I'll say it right now: I love this book. ^_^

Fathom is the title that dragged me back to comics. (I have a long history as a bitterly disillusioned "X"-Marvellite.) Fathom is at once a work of high adventure, intense drama, and the occasional bout of sarcasm and silliness. It's also breathtakingly beautiful. The use of texture, tone, scope and color all raised the bar for comics of this kind.

Fathom is also highly flawed. Let's skip the "everybody's naked" rant; this is a Top Cow production, people! EVERYONE in EVERY Top Cow book is naked! *Rolls eyes*. So we'll ignore that and take an even closer look.

First off, what the Hell is up with the names? Aspen Matthews, Chance Calloway, Tyler Kincaid? Either they're all ex-porno stars, or their parents really, really hated them.

The underwater folk fare little better in that regard. Sear, Baha, Vana, Cannon--of all of them, Killian's got the best name. He's only got brand-of-beer parallels to contend with. =^P

Next comes--hold your breath--the storyline.

Yeah, yeah, Michael's a genius. Sure, Fathom is captivating blah blah.

I don't care how pretty Aspen is. The storyline is sh*t.

Or anyway, it's become sh*t.

It started with some really good elements:

A brand new war breaking out between the US and Japan.
A corrupt US Navy official secretly backing the man behind it all, who has his own plans.
A race of underwater people locked in a bitter civil war that's about to bust loose on the surface world.
And one amnesiac surfer-babe with the fate of both races caught up in her history and actions.

BOOM! So went the story arc that lasted for a paltry nine issues. Others have whined about the dead-slow pace. I think it didn't last long enough. Nothing was really established. Everything got hinted at, at breakneck speed.

By the ninth issue, we still don't know what the hell is going on, really, except that Aspen is charmed by the villain, finds out who she really is--one of the good guys--and then beats his ass in spectacular glowing-energy-beam fashion.

Easy as that. *Snaps fingers*. Did I mention that none of us figured out what was going on?

But before anyone can process, let alone understand or complain about, the story's horrible resolution, the magnates at Top Cow have levied sufficient pressure on Mike to make him churn out another adventure for Aspen.

Cue the storyline going to sh*t, please.

We're treated to a two-issue rerun of Moby Dick, as drawn by Turner. I won't even go into the stupidity of it. By this time, rumors that Turner broke his hip in a scuba accident are flying around. They're deemed of sufficient credibility to be printed in Wizard.

Not surprisingly, after the disappointing conclusion of the first story-arc and then this utterly tripey little interlude, sales are down. The pressure on Mike increases tenfold. Then Top Cow does what it always does when sales are down: when in doubt, commission a huge crossover!

Now Sara (the Witchblade) and Lara (the Tomb Raider) will be giving Fathom a completely un-necessary cleavage boost. For Christ's sake! Am I the ONLY person on the entire planet who noticed that their names RHYME?!?! >_<

Thanks to sheer demographics alone (the story also featured a busty villainess, Vana) the crossover is a smash hit. Kinda sorta. See, it comes to a grinding halt after the first issue.

The newsflashes come a few weeks apart from each other:

Yeah, Turner really did break his hip.

Only it gets better: he's got bone cancer. Intense bone cancer. We're talking requires major invasive surgery, here.

A year later, miracles happen, and our man Mike is back at the drawing board. What followed was so below par it's agonizing. It made the Moby Dick fiasco of last year look like the triumph of the series.

Miracles happen, and nobody cares. The fan community doesn't give one tired damn. They've all jumped ship (and publishers) to CrossGen. A lot of lambasting and tomato-throwing and general Mike-lynching goes on. The fans' rallying cry seems to be "How Could You Do This To Us?"

I'm sitting here, doing my umpteen lookthrough of Issue Fourteen, and I'm thinking.

You have to wonder how much of this is really his fault.

It's not as if he woke up one morning and said, "Gee, I sure wish I could work under massive pressure and strangling deadlines so that a bunch of middle-aged guys who still live in their parent's basements can sit there and demand smut over relevance and plot."

Or do you suppose he thought: "Wow, the execs here are so good to me, I can't wait for them to demand that I cut ANOTHER scene because there aren't enough boobies in it"?

It's not like he got down on his knees and begged the heavens to reach down and give him a f*cking life-threatening ailment, for crying out loud!

My point is this: back the f*ck up off my man Mike. All things considered, he does a hell of a job.