Comics Daze
Hey! It’s time to read some comics.
It’s hot! I’ve made some strawberry milkshake (ingredient list: strawberries and ice cream; it’s not ultra-processed which means that it’s healthy).
| Various: Pretty In Pink |  |
14:04: True-Man The Maximortal Volume Two by Rick Veitch
This was published a year ago, but I missed it. It’s print-on-demand and apparently only available through Amazon, for some reason? Yuck! But here’s a link anyway.
So this continues the story… which I’ve mostly forgotten all about, since I read the previous instalment years ago. But, er, it’s about how DC Comics is deep-stating the existence of Superman, and it also involved Marvel Comics, because why not. (Stan Lee working hard above.)
Which reminds me that I’ve been getting posts from this Facebook group in my feed lately. It’s apparently a group dedicated to documenting Stan Lee’s methods, and every other article is about how Lee is a totally untalented hack, and has never done anything of note ever. They’re probably right, but it’s starting to feel like some kind of obsessive cult…
| Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore: Tragic Magic |  |
Speaking of cults… this volume is pretty odd, and besides involving the Symbionese Liberation Army and James Bond, we also get Tarzan? Was he in the first volume, too? I forget.
Anyway, it’s classic Veitch — very dense and a lot of fun.
And as usual, the last 50 pages collect version old Veitch things, but, er, not all of it’s thrilling.
| Irreversible Entanglements: Future Present Past |  |
14:53: Meet the Gang by Austin Ansbro (Desert Island)
This is a collection of illustrations.
It’s cool.
| Various: When There Is No Sun |  |
14:55: Our Little Wild Time by Fred Noland (Fantagraphics)
It’s all transgressive and stuff.
And then half of the book is drawings based on mug shots or something.
OK, I gotta run some errands.
17:39: What We Mean by Yesterday Vol 2 by Benjamin Marra (Fantagraphics)
OK, I ended up taking a nap. Oops!
This is one of those books that collects a strip that was originally serialised on Instagram, and… it feels like it? The lack of ambition is palpable.
It’s about a hapless asshole going on a quest, which is the perfect framework for this kind of stuff. The humour is mostly derived from people talking in very stilted, formal speech, and… that doesn’t really work?
But it’s OK. It feels kinda video game derived, but the storytelling works, and it doesn’t go exactly where you expect it to go.
| Adult.: Kissing Luck Goodbye |  |
18:07: Mary Pain by Lola Lorente (Drawn & Quarterly)
That’s a very striking cover.
This is a Spanish book. I really like the mood it’s got going on — it seems to flow like a viscous liquid from panel to panel.
It’s about a woman moving back to her childhood home… which is a tried and true setup, but it goes somewhere else than normal.
It’s also got all these scenes that you first think are going to be dreams or symbolic or something, but then they turn out to be real.
It’s good stuff, but I wasn’t as gripped as I think you’re supposed to be.
| Various: The Best of Black Jazz Records |  |
18:35: Realicide #3 by Mikey Reger
Wow, love the artwork.
The first half of the book is mostly in the age-old underground comix tradition of ranting at the reader about random thoughts, many drug and sex related.
The last half is (I think?) a reprint of earlier issues of Realicide? They are quite different — it’s mostly autobio stories about growing up punk in San Francisco, and about parents dying and all that kind of stuff.
It’s really good. The artwork is engrossing and the stories are interesting.
…
OH FUCK! I thought that this was the start of a followup series or something — the title is “The End of The Arab of the Future vol 1”. Fucking Fantagraphics… this is really volume 5 of “The Arab of the Future”, which I’ve read in a different translation already.
Grr.
19:31: Super Creepshow #1 (Image Comics)
Errr… I have no recollection of buying this — perhaps Midtown just sent it as a freebie?
So the schtick here is that this is one of those twist ending horror anthologies, but it has super-heroes.
I guess it’s not horrible, but it’s kinda meh.
19:39: Leif by Anne-Kristin Strøm & Daniel Østvold (Ford Forlag)
This is a book about the author’s father…
… and I’m not sure how much is true and how much is made up, but it’s very entertaining, anyway.
| Squarepusher: Kammerkonzert |  |
20:03: Fox Bunny Funny by Andy Hartzell (Uncivilized Books)
Well, the artwork certainly is attractive.
So this entire thing is metaphorical?
But… it just doesn’t seem… well conceived. It feels pretty confused.
20:14: Palookaville #25 by Seth (Drawn & Quarterly)
Hey, it’s the latest Palookaville. He seems to have discovered his inner Rick Geary here — so many objects.
As usual, half the book is take up by his serial, which is about Seth reminiscing about his youth — and now he’s reached Toronto, which makes a change. I still really enjoy the mood he’s going for.
And as usual, we also get some of his art projects…
… and then a story published elsewhere.
It’s a solid, solid package. I’ll be here next year or whenever the next issue appears.
| Peaches: No Lube So Rude |  |
21:14: The Corten Steel Phoenix by Rich Tommaso (Floating World Comics)
Oh! I’ve read this before. This is a collection of those Spy Seal comics… but it’s been a while since I read those, so I might as well read the book.
Tommaso sure does that Tintin well.
This book is hugely enjoyable on a page-to-page basis, with Tommaso cribbing I mean paying homage to specific Tintin panels all over the place. But I must say that I found the storyline to be pretty… “eh?” That is, we get a lot of action sequences, and then we get a couple pages of infodumping, and then repeat. Sure, that’s very Bond, but it just doesn’t quite cohere?
But it’s fun, anyway.
| Maria BC: Marathon |  |
21:38: The End
I think that’s enough comics for one day. I’m exhausted. Even with the nap in the middle.
Super Simple Spam Splitting for Gnus
Spam is an eternal problem, and while SpamAssassin is pretty good (I get around 700 mails per day, of which 670 are rejected as spam), there’s still some stuff that persistently gets through. A goodly portion of that is traditional random spam from random accounts, and there’s not much to be done about that, but there’s a recent trend of legitimate-looking things coming from persistent accounts — like BackerHome and BackerHive.
I’m guessing that eventually these will get so bad reputations that they end up on RBLs and will disappear into the mists, but meanwhile… I just thought that there should be a mechanism in Gnus to split these message to the spam group — without having to do much work.
Tada!
It’s a small package, and you can find it on Microsoft Github. It’s basically a tiny minor mode that adds a couple of commands, so you just hit z, check the entry (or not) and then C-c C-c.
(There’s also a command to edit the split data if things go off the rails, or just because you want to.)
B t to check the split trace, as normal.
So there you go. May your inboxes be slightly less spammy.
(And it’s fun doing some Gnus work again for the first time in years… I’ve forgotten what all the functions are called, though, so I had to use Claude to remind me. *gulp*)
The state of TV shows these days tsk tsk
I’ve been watching 70s movies lately, and it’s reminded me how much fun it is to watch Cybill Shepherd on the screen. Which eventually led me to wonder… “was Moonlighting any good?” I saw some episodes of that back in the 80s, and I remember it being an amusing if dopey show, but I don’t remember much else.
I looked around for it, and:
Er… OK… so it’s a sought-after item, but not enough to make them re-release it on 4K blu ray or anything.
It’s available for streaming — but not around these parts. So I went all “arr arr” and half an hour later, I had the complete series. It’s apparently so popular that it’s well seeded, too.
So how is it? Well, it’s amusing but dopey, so I remembered correctly, but the most striking thing about it is:
Look at this! This is a short sequence to illustrate how dull her life is. But over 40 seconds, there’s five (or six) complete setups, and each one is perfectly, intentionally lit and blocked well.
(And not only that, she isn’t talking on a phone saying “I’m so bored and I’m so dull” to a friend, because you need that these days to inform the audience what’s happening (they’re on the phone, too).)
Look how great it looks!
Compare this to something modern, that also (I think) has a larger-than-average budget, The Four Seasons. (Chosen at random because it’s also something I watched yesterday.)
Look at that! It’s horrible! Totally flat lighting, because that’s easier to set up, and because that makes it easier to deal with post processing — perhaps they’ll decide to fly in a new background instead of that bar, and if there’s anything but this unsaturated, dim greigeness, that’s much more difficult to do.
(And The Four Seasons is much better than the average TV show — there’s a lot of location shoots and stuff. But still.)
Watching Moonlighting really brings home how visually unpleasant modern TV and movies are visually — and for economic reasons, not for creative reasons.
Another thing we also need to bring back:
Stunts where the long shots feature a stunt person who’s 30% taller and 70% wider than the actress. It adds a certain jennesequa.
Anyway. That’s today’s “tsk tsk kids these days” talk. You’re welcome I’m sure.
Pull the rug on the rye
There’s an amusing word pair in English and Norwegian: English rug is rye in Norwegian… and Norwegian rye is rug in English! *slaps thigh in amusement*
It’s sort of the opposite phenomenon of the “false friend” thing, where the same word has different meanings in different languages. Sort of. If you squint a bit.
Of course, this led me to wonder whether there are other word pairs like this… in any language. And this is impossible to google for, because… what are you gonna google for?
So a couple of years ago I asked ChatGPT, and it, of course, just output complete nonsense:
It’s like… it’s like… Yeah, that’s pretty stupid.
But now the LLMs are all brilliant and stuff! Let’s try ChatGPT again.
That’s indeed much better! It “understands” what the issue is. But of course “plage” isn’t spelled the same as “plague”, so nope. I prodded it some more, and asked it to take its time:
Well, See/meer and meer/zee is pretty close, actually. But no cigar/zeegar, I guess.
And that’s after five minutes of thinking.
What about Claude?
It gave me the see/meer/zee, too, but then it’s back to nonsense like “false friends”, which is the opposite of what I’m looking for.
(And besides, see/meer is less amusing than rug/rye because the two words mean almost the same already — that feels like more of a misunderstanding, like… “you call that cabbage rutabaga?! Well I call that rutabaga a cabbage!”)
OH NOES! I”VE POISONED CLAUDE
I prodded it some more, and it wrote some Python scripts and then ran for fifteen minutes, and nope.
It may be that rug/rye vs. rye/rug is the only pair that exists. I guess I’ll ask an LLM again in a couple of years.