My favorite bit of commentary regarding same-sex relationships in videogames of all time comes from a Bethesda developer who was part of the Skyrim team. 

In case you're not familiar, Skyrim is a little game in the Elder Scrolls series that won every 2011 Game of the Year award in existence. 

In Skyrim, you can develop romantic relationships with characters that are the same sex as your player character and even marry them.  This isn't an entirely new thing - Sims 2 alloyed same-sex characters to be "joined" which meant married, and Sims 3 had full marriage for couples regardless of sex.  Fable 2 and 3 had same-sex marriage for the main character as well, and Bioware has a history of including same-sex romance options in their fantasy games going back to Jade Empire, though a marriage option has always been curiously absent.  I say curiously because, these being magical fantasy games that occur on fictional worlds, worlds on which Abrahamic religions don't exist, there would be no reason why the social customs of these places couldn't include same-sex marriage.

Last year a small brouhaha erupted when a gamer complained that Bioware had abandoned their core demographic (young, straight male players) in Dragon Age 2, not because there weren't female characters a male player character could romance and have sex with (there were two, as I discussed in a previous entry) but because male characters would flirt with a male player character, and that made him feel icky.  I may be inferring that last part.  The reaction from Bioware was that there games were for everyone regardless of sexuality.  The majority generally has the power and are catered to for this reason, and when they're no longer catered to, they perceive this as discrimination. 

In short, to those who are used to privilege, being treated equally is seen as being discriminated against. 

This, by the way, is pretty much the only real reason behind opposition to full marriage equality, opposition to gay rights, women's rights, civil rights regardless of ethnicity, and every other instance in our country's history in which white males have lost some of their privilege to the cause of treating others fairly.

As much as I love this, I love Bethesda's reaction even more.

When asked on Twitter, if Bethesda was playing "hush hush" with the same sex marriage thing, the reply, from Peter Hines, was "Not hush hush, just not making a huge deal out of it. You can marry anyone."

This is how you do it.  If you're going to put romance in a game that allows custom characters, let the player play the game as they want to. 

Where it comes to a specific, well-known character, I don't expect sexuality to be changed or even opened up in a way that contrasts with established character traits.  If Batman flirts with Catwoman, Vicki Vale, or Talia al Ghul, that's entirely within character for him.  Having him hook up with a male character or even allowing a player controlling him to do so would be jarring because it conflicts with how the character has been portrayed for the last 70-years.  On the other hand, if you're going to stick Leonardo da Vinci into a game (the Assasin's Creed series) and depict him in a romantic relationship with anyone other than Salai, (Leonardo's apprentice and life mate), that would be just as jarring. 

So I'm not talking about games in which you're playing a character written to have a specific character arc, I mean games that allow for character customization, games in which the player creates their character.  If you don't include same-sex romance as an option, that's catering to the narrow-minded bigot demographic, which is, despite what the guy referred to above, is not one that fully overlaps with straight young males.

I was in the dialysis waiting room Monday, and I went into the restroom to grab a paper towel.  The restroom is located down a side hall that is out of view of the seating area, and as I leave I hear a couple of the other people talking about me.  One says that I'm "a strange one" and another says that I frequently just ignore people trying to talk to me.  The other day, she says, the social worker who works there (I'm not sure why a social worker would work at a dialysis center, but that's how one employee there identifies herself) came out and sat across from me and tried to talk to me and I just sat there as if she didn't exist.  Another says that I do that all the time.

It probably goes without saying that I lingered a bit there in the hallway when I realized they were talking about me.  This was probably a mistake.

I am well aware that I'm a little strange.  I always have been.  I am not, however, deliberately inconsiderate or rude, and I reply when any of the other regulars - most of them pretty nice people, friendly and supportive of my mom and one another - when any of them speaks directly to me.  

None of what they were saying was the truth.  The incident with the social worker simply did not happen.   Neither have I ever pointedly ignored a person who was attempting to talk to me.  I don't know why they would invent these things.

I am by nature an asocial person.  I don't initiate conversations with others in the waiting room, and don't join group discussions on general topics.  For the most part, I don't do the latter because I don't know how.  That may sound stupid, but I've never been sure what the proper etiquette is regarding joining a group conversation.  How long of a pause is required before it's polite to say something?  How do you tell the difference between an "anyone can chime in" conversation and a "I was just talking to my friend" one?
 
My favorite spot to sit after mom goes in for treatment is off in a far corner away from the main seating area, as far away from the TV as I can get.  I'll generally listen to music, listen to an audiobook, watch a video, or read.  All but the last have the advantage of my being able to drown out the drone of the TV with my earbuds.

So I'm not actively seeking to join conversations or social activities in a waiting room.

But I'm not antisocial - I don't seek to disrupt social activities of others, nor am I rude or disruptive when others speak directly to me.  And, I repeat, I have never, not a single time, ignored a person sitting down across from me and trying to talk to me, something this group seems to perceive as a several times a day occurrence (specifically, something I do "all the time").  For one thing, this would be nearly impossible, as the seating area isn't laid out in such a way that one can sit directly across from other people, and for another I have always directly responded to any questions a person directed at me.  Maybe not in a particularly verbose manner, but I do answer direct questions.

So either they were making it up, or have somehow (I have no idea how) come to the conclusion that this is something I do on a day to day basis, something at least two of them claim to have witnessed.

I don't think the social worker has ever directly talked to me, so I'm not sure how I could have ignored something that didn't happen.

The topic changed abruptly when I walked out of the hallway.  I sat down and put on some music. 

It's incidents like this that make me glad I'm so bad at reading facial expressions, body language, and reading between the lines of a casual conversation.  If this is what these people really think of me, I'd rather not know it.

This is a listing on the front page.

My first reaction to this was to think, "Have these people ever seen a superhero comic book?"  Violence and sex are the two main selling points for superhero comics.  The basic formula is simple:  Muscular men beat up other muscular men and date women built, dressed, and coifed like fashion models.  If the hero is female, she's generally scantily clad, at least the DC ones.  Marvel heroines are much more likely to be wearing full body suits, though that's hardly less sexualized than those that show a lot of skin, sort of like a catsuit can often show off more than a short skirt.

And this is hardly new.  Wonder Woman was created by a psychologist with a bondage fetish who used the comics as a means of promoting bondage as a way of freeing oneself to be truly happy.  In the early days, Wonder Woman's mother was fond of saying "True freedom can only come from submission to a loving authority". 

Superheroes have a built in weakness, right?  Superman has kryptonite.  Silver age Green Lantern's ring didn't work against the color yellow.  Aquaman and the Submariner became weak if they were out of the water too long.  Wonder Woman's original weakness?  She lost her powers if her hands were bound by a man.  Those magic bracelets she wears?  Amazons wear these as a reminder that they were once slaves - they're literally manacles without the chains.  Her main weapon?  A magic lasso with which she can tie people up and make them tell the truth.

And people, usually young, attractive Amazons - especially Wonder Woman herself - got tied up a lot in those early comics. 

It's not the slightest exaggeration to call Marson's Wonder Woman G-rated bondage porn.

Of course if you've seen the new DC comics - DC has recently rebooted their entire universe with an event called "New 52", with most characters being restarted with new histories and backgrounds and new #1 issues, and the level of violence and overt sexuality has been turned way up, so there is some merit to the claim that it's more explicit than in past times.

The strangest part of the video is when the reporter states that the new comics are rated Teen and Teen+, in other words, definitely not for young kids, and then they cut to the reporters showing kids and parents at a middle school the comics and asking for comments.  In other words, deliberately exposing kids younger than the intended audience the comics as a means of proving that the new direction is inappropriate for kids.

To which I can only say, "Well, duh."

Which isn't to say that I'm defending this move.  I prefer my fantasy stories about muscular, colorfully-clad superbeings beating each other up to have a bit of a lighter tone to them.  For the most part, superheroes work best when they have a somewhat lighter tone than what you'll see in today's comics, which is a part of why I don't read many new comics any longer.  The other is a personal dislike of big, universe-spanning events that don't actually change anything and don't allow individual comics to tell their own separate stories.  Everything has to tie together into one big, universe-spanning interconnected story.

There's nothing wrong with a shared universe, but that shared universe should serve the story, not the other way around.  For about the past decade, it's been the latter, with characters and titles being shoehorned into the big event story being told.  A lot of people like this.  I'm not one of them.  I'm definitely getting middle-aged.

Part of the problem is that, as hard-core comics fans aged, they stayed with comics and continued reading them well into adulthood, rather than abandoning them for more adult forms of entertainment as they grew up.  And as they grew up, they expected their favored art form to grow up with them.  Some of them entered the industry and began writing the stories they wanted to see being told.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing - some of the best writers in the industry grew up as big fans of classic comics, Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek, for example.

On the other hand, it also created a system in which superhero comics became more and more insular.  Comics with long-running storylines became impenetrable to anyone other than the aging, long-term fanbase who knew everything about their favorite characters and expected to be catered to, and the big two, afraid to lose their base, began catering to this shrinking core rather than aiming at a mainstream audience.  A positive feedback loop or two later, and the fan base shrank and became even harder for new fans to enter, and we have the current situation of comics, which used to be a diverse, mainstream industry, as a narrow, niche industry dominated by two giants.

So no, new DC comics aren't for kids.  The mainstream comics from the big two haven't been for kids for a couple of decades now, at least.  As the audience grew up, the content grew up with it.  Mainstream comics have been aimed at adults since the late '80s and early '90s. 

I did find it interesting that homosexuality and explicit sexuality were mentioned together, as if characters being gay was the same as characters sexuality being overtly portrayed.  Spider-Girl, a decidedly old-school style comic from the '90s and early 2000s, in that it had the feel of a '60s Spider-Man comic and was perfectly suitable for all ages, featured storylines typical of the silver age - hero battles mixed with soap opera elements, the soap opera elements of the sort in which romance and dating is about as overt as sex is depicted in those books.  And it featured an openly lesbian couple, the original Black Cat (an old Spider-Man foe) and her partner raising a teenaged daughter together.  The nice part about this was that the issue the non-biological partner had with the girl she was helping to parent had more to do with her being a step-parent than with her being a woman.  And it was all perfectly innocent in that it was about romance, not sex.

The idea that homosexuality is automatically about sex, and automatically means explicit sex is ridiculous and offensive.  This came up with the Mass Effect games.  The first Mass Effect game had romance options, two for a lead character of each sex, which, after a lot of setup, ended in a soft-focus, PG13 sex scene.  Fox News hosted a segment on this which featured their typical outrage over something they did not understand and were clearly and obviously factually wrong about, and Mass Effect 2 had distinctly differently portrayed romance storylines.  I'm not saying that the latter was caused by the former, but one has to wonder. 

The setup takes a lot longer in Mass Effect 2, in that the player has to complete a side mission for the desired romance partner, and then have a series of conversions - three of them - over the process of several more game missions in which the player as Commander Shepard overtly makes his or her romantic attraction known to the other character.  A fully half the characters will actively resist the idea at first, and have to be convinced by repeated, active flirting on the part of the player.  Even once this has occurred, a fourth conversation takes place in the Commander's cabin, allowing for consummation of or termination of the romance.  Or the player can opt to have no romance at all or remain faithful to a partner from the first game.

The sex scenes themselves are seriously toned down.  No soft-focus PG sex this time.  It's more like Hays code sex - the characters talk, it becomes clear that they're about to get down to business, then the scene fades to black.  Here's an example:



Not exactly explicit, is it?  The alien there, Tali, will flirt with both a male Shepard and a female one but just abruptly stops with the third conversation if the player is playing as a female Shepard.  Bioware's official reasoning for this is that they wanted a "PG13 feel" for their game, which makes zero sense.  Imagine if Shepard had been a woman in that scene.  Would it have been any less "PG13"?

And as for a PG13 feel to things, this is a game in which you mow down thousands of aliens and human mercenaries, can occasionally kill in cold blood, and in which one supporting character's first line, literally the first thing she says in the game is, "Shit, you sound like a pussy."  After that, talking to her elicits a backstory that involves being tortured and experimented on as a young child, gang raped when she escaped the prison in which was being raised, and life full of murder, piracy, and every crime imaginable.  Her stories are liberally laced with obscenities, enough that, by itself, her dialog would have earned Mass Effect 2 an R rating had it been a movie.

The only explanation I can come up with is that they intended to have some same-sex romances available - Tali's earlier dialog seems to strongly imply she's attracted to a female Shepard, and Jack outright states that she's had lovers of both sexes - but had it stripped out for fear of bad publicity of the sort the sex scene from Mass Effect got from one highly biased source that got everything about it wrong.

This is the same company that had every romance prospect (two of each sex, not counting DLC) in Dragon Age 2 able to be seduced by a player character of either sex, and had an official spokesman respond to a player who found this objectionable (his complaint was that Bioware had abandoned the heterosexual male demographic, despite there being two female characters a heterosexual male player character could seduce) by basically saying that Bioware has fans of both sexes and various orientations and wanted to make their games accessible to the widest possible audience.

These are the two romance prospects for heterosexual male characters:

 

I can understand not finding Merrill (the elf girl) to one's taste, though personally I found her personality to be quite charming, but I seriously have to wonder about the sexuality of a man who looks at Isabela up there, who will overtly flirt with your character in her first scene, and come to the conclusion that Bioware has abandoned heterosexual male players.  His complaint seemed to be rooted in the idea that another male character, Anders, will flirt with a male player character early on.  Anders stops this if the PC says "not interested" the first time it happens.

In any case, Mass Effect 3 (now only six weeks away!) has put same-sex romance back in as an option which is, I think, a nice way of evolving with the times and ignoring homophobes and Fox News idiots.

I'm taking mom to dialysis this morning.  Our route involves a left turn onto a two-lane highway from a side road.  As we approached, I checked both ways and see it clear to the left and a car coming on the right but with plenty of room for me to get up to cruising speed, so I pull out, and as I anticipated, I'm doing about 50 by the time the car to my right reaches my rear.  It's doing maybe 70, 75, and without slowing, pops over into the acceleration lane for people entering or exiting the highway using the side road opposite where we entered, and zooms on past.  This scared mom, but I saw it coming and there was a paved acceleration lane there, so while somewhat risky and rude, it wasn't really dangerous.

Perhaps ten seconds later, a second car comes up behind us.  We're doing about 60 by this time (in a 65 zone) and this one proceeds to pull the same maneuver.  The problem this time is that the acceleration lane ended a couple hundred feet back, and the shoulder has about three feet of pavement and another eight or ten of gravel on a slope.  This was definitely not anything approaching a safe maneuver.  The car skidded a little as its right wheels hit the gravel, and then again when it came back onto the pavement, kicking up a spray of gravel the entire time, which fortunately only dinged the metal parts of my car and left the windshield untouched.

My car is a 20-year-old Lincoln I bought from a business that had acquired it for scrap, so I'm not concerned with the paint or finish which is in lousy condition anyway.

This second pass, by the way, occurred a couple hundred yards behind a trio of cars going about the same speed I was going, meaning at best the woman who passed us on the gravel shoulder might have saved 20 seconds or so.  Even if those cars hadn't been there, the two-lane section ends in a traffic light and then expands to a divided four lane about half a mile down the road from where we were passed, so even with an empty highway, it's possible she would have saved no time, and at best less than minute.

I don't speed, but I'm not a "lesson teacher".  I stay in the right lane when I'm at cruising speed, get into the passing lane only to pass, and get out of the way of those in a hurry when I'm on a four lane.  I don't "brake check" tailgaters, as that just makes the situation a worse danger than it already is.

But I do find it strange that people take such foolish chances with their own lives for so little gain, and annoying that they take chances with those of my life and my mother's.  There was a very real chance of the woman losing control when dropping one set of wheels onto the gravel shoulder, and then again when moving back up, and had that happened when she was beside or in front of us, her accident could very well have become ours.

I slowed a bit as she went past to give her some room and to give myself some stopping/avoidance room just in case, but after a bit of fishtailing, her car was back on the pavement and zooming off.  As I sped back up, I see a third car coming up from behind very rapidly, but this one had red and blue flashing lights.  I slowed and moved as far right as possible, and the car, a highway patrol vehicle, zoomed past and stopped the woman who passed us on the shoulder.  We passed her and she was still sitting still at the side of the road when the lights disappeared from view behind us.

I generally treat aggressive or just plain bad drivers like bad weather - they're a fact of life you have to deal with when you drive, and getting angry at them isn't going to fix anything, so I do what I can to minimize whatever danger they present, and then go on my way. 

Still, there was a nice little bit of schadenfreude (I can't believe I actually spelled that right the first time) at seeing the woman getting nailed by the highway patrol moments after pulling a maneuver that endangered my and my mother's health and lives.

For the record, in about 30 years of driving, I've been stopped five times by police or highway patrol.  Twice for speeding - I was let off with a verbal warning both times - twice for an expired tag - ticked once, and given a fix-it ticket the other time.  I had to pay the fine for one of those two.  And once for running a stop sign.  In each case, I was guilty of the offense for which I was stopped (I was speeding, had neglected to renew my tag, and did run the stop sign), and was grateful for the three times I was let off without a fine.  The two times I did have to pay, I was upset about the situation, and upset with myself for getting caught doing something I knew I shouldn't have been.

Just thinking back to the moment I cruised past the shoulder-passer gives me another smile.  Sometimes the universe works out just as it should.

Also, as you may have noticed on the front page, it's important to do what you can to oppose SOPA and PIPA.  Why?  Look about three entries down from this one, at my Youtube playlist.  Based on the wording of the SOPA and PIPA legislation, the presence of those songs on Youtube and embedded here on Livejournal would empower Pasek and Paul, Alan Menken, and John Stewart to shut down both sites in their entirety without having to prove any wrongdoing on the part of either site.  That they contain copyrighted material means that the copyright owners can have an order issued shutting down the site and it then becomes the site's responsibility to prove themselves innocent of wrongdoing.

Look at the wording - it applies to virtually every site anywhere on the internet, and would do little to nothing to actually prevent pirates from sharing and downloading music and movies.  It's overbroad, unenforceable, would do nothing to address the problem it's supposed to fix, and would cause all sorts of problems for others who've done nothing wrong based on the behavior of site users.

Wondering who would write such wrong-headed legislation?  The US entertainment industry and a bunch of elderly men who don't understand how the internet works.

Also, Woo-Hoo!  Big price drop on Assassin's Creed:  Revelations and Batman: Arkham City at Gamestop today.   My gaming time until Mass Effect 3 is released has now been filled.

So I've decide to reread my Legion of Superheroes comics.  For me, the Legion of Superheroes begins with the appearances as backup stories in various Superman-related comics (Superboy, Action, Adventure), continuing through Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes, which morphed into just Legion of Superheroes.  This version is technically volume 2, with volume 1 being a six issue series that reprinted some of the early appearances in other books. 

Volume 3 was a direct continuation of the same characters and storylines, and started anew primarily because DC was trying an experiment in which certain books (Legion, Teen Titans) would be printed on high-quality paper at a premium price.  Otherwise, it's basically the same Legion with new numbering and better paper.

Volume 4 saw a departure in both tone and format.  Volume 3 ends with galactic bad guys taking over the civilized portions of the galaxy and the Legion suffering a disastrous defeat, with survivors scattered across the galaxy.  Volume 4 picks up 5 years later (literally, the first words of Vol. 4, issue 1 are "five years later . . ." with the idealistic teens of the classic era now disillusioned adults.  It was a typical grim and gritty 90's reboot.  There are good things and bad things about it.  The darker tone works well for the universe they created, and it was one of the first mainstream comics (though not the first) to deal with gay themes, though as with other things, it was hit or miss how well this worked.   You also have more positive portrayals of strong female characters - the most powerful Legionaire of this era is Andromeda, who basically has Superman's powers without the kryptonite weakness.

The gay characters and relationships were hit or miss.  On one hand, you had the first stable lesbian couple in superhero comics (Shrinking Violet and Light Lass), and it was handled well in that they were treated like any other romantic couple in a superhero comic - there wasn't a big revelation, and no issue was made of the fact that they were gay, it was just one part of who they were.  There were no stories about their being gay - their being a couple was just part of the background.

On the other hand, there was the clunky manner in which the gay male couple, Shvaughn Erin and Element Lad, were handled. 

I can hear you thinking, "Wait a minute, isn't Shvaughn a woman's name?"  Yes, yes it is.  Shvaughn was the Science Police liason to the Legion of Superheroes for much of the classic era, and eventually became Element Lad's girlfriend.  In Volume 4, issue #33, it's revealed that Shvaughn wasn't always a woman.  She had fallen in love with Element Lad, and assuming he'd want to be with a woman, had been taking a drug (Profem) that changed her sex so they could be together.  No longer having access to the drug, she reverted to her natural form, a young man named Sean.  Element Lad accepts Sean and still loves him and the two remain together as a couple.

There are numerous problems with this.  First, apparently Shvaughn had fallen in love with EL years before having met him, and had been taking the Pro-fem her entire time in Police Academy in the hope that she'd be assigned the duty of liaison officer to the Legion and would get to meet the man she already loved, despite never having met him.  Apparently the decision to make EL the gay Legionnaire came out of a number of fans deciding he was gay (despite having a long-time girlfriend), though they did have some pretty good evidence for this.  First, his uniform was originally pink and white.  Also . . . well, actually, that's pretty much it.  Wait, his name is Jann, and that's a pretty gay name for a boy.  If you're not Scandinavian.  Which Jann's physical features seem to imply that he is.  Also, he had long, wavy, blonde hair.  So some readers decided he was gay, and Giffen and the Beirbaums decided to just go with that.

And actually, I have no problem with that part of things.  Some people sometimes come to terms with elements of their sexuality later than others, and given that these characters weer in their late teens prior to the 5-years later era, coming to terms with being gay in that time period, at that age isn't implausible.  Violet and Light Lass had shown romantic interest in male Legionaires in the past, but there was never a "hey, we're actually gay" moment afterwards.  It's the clumsy way in which EL/Erin was handled that bugs me.

But beyond the continuity part, there are other problems.  Shvaughn/Sean is reduced from a minor supporting character to a type - he exists to be Element Lad's boyfriend, and little else; in other words, being gay is his primary character trait.  The relationship itself, though ostensibly being there to show how a gay couple is just like any other might work better if you didn't have the Violent/Light Lass relationship showing how to do it right.  There was never a "Violet and Light Lass are a lesbian couple, see how progressive we are" story - it was just there, one part of who they were.

And in case you think I'm harping on this a bit too much, consider how heterosexual relationships are generally handled.  Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl's relationship was about how they were in love, not about their being straight.  Traditional romances are never about the couple being straight because, well, that would be a silly thing to make the focus of a story.  Gay romances are routinely about the orientation as much as the relationship.  This is why the Light Lass/Shrinking Violet relationship was so much better - we were shown a functional, loving couple, not told - and by "told" I mean preached to in a ham-fisted manner. 

There are other problems. Element Lad's reaction.  He's completely nonplussed by this, which is supposed to be an indication that he was already gay, or maybe bisexual, or just so much in love with Erin that it didn't matter whether Erin was Shvaughn or Sean.  So he's a gay man who can love a woman if it's the right woman?  Or a man physically altered to have the body of a woman?  Which raises the question of Erin's sexuality.  Rather than approach EL as a gay man, Erin changes sex to win her man, and is emotionally devastated at the thought of getting cut off from her Profem and having to revert to her previous male form.  So either she really was a woman in her base gender identity, or has been lying to everyone, including EL and herself, all the time she's been Shvaughn and this is perfectly OK with EL.  And not the least of these problems is the way it implicitly equates being a straight transsexual woman with being a gay man.

It's such a clumsy attempt to shoehorn things in where they don't fit that both characters were erased from reality with the Zero Hour reboot shortly afterwards. 

The Legion rebooted (meaning their history was wiped out and replaced with a new history with new characters) and a second Legion was added about halfway through volume 4, with another experiment taking place.  At the time, Superman was appearing in four different titles, and instead of, say, Superman having one storyline and Action Comics another, all four titles shared a single storyline, with the titles each numbered by their part in the story, meaning Superman might have part 1, then Adventures of Superman 2, Action 3, and Man of Steel 4, then Superman 5, and so on.  It was a top down business decision, the idea being that it would force Superman fans to buy all four Superman titles if they wanted to follow the stories rather than just one or two.  DC tried the same thing with the Legion of Superheroes.  The main book, Legion of Superheroes, alternated with a spinoff Legionnaires, which featured younger clones of the originals.  It didn't work nearly as well in part because unlike Superman, the Legion of Superheroes isn't the most valuable and famous fictional character created in the 20th century (or probably in history).  It worked with Superman because it was Superman.

So, back to my main point - How much of a great big nerd I am.  In the Superboy era, the Legion of Super-Heroes stories were often just Superboy stories with a random LOSH element thrown in.  For example, one early "Legion" story has Pa Kent pointing out what a weird coincidence it is that Clark's girlfriend and greatest enemy (Lana Lang and Lex Luthor) both have the initial's LL.  Clark adds that one of his friends from the 30th century is Lightning Lad, another LL.  Isn't that bizarre?  And by bizarre, I mean "a mundane coincidence".  That's also the entire involvement of the Legion in that story.  Another early appearance has an older brother of Superboy with similar powers arriving on Earth in a rocketship.  This boy, Mon-El, turns out to be from a different planet and has a weakness to lead, leading Superboy to send him into the Phantom Zone until a cure for the lead-poisoning can be found.  It takes a thousand years, when Mon-El is released to become a member of the LOSH. 

Frequently these Superboy stories involve strange things occurring in Smallville that are later revealed to be a practical joke the Legion decided to play on Superboy, and thus Legion involvement isn't revealed until near the end.  During this era, comics were  much longer and stories shorter, with several stories appearing in a single issue, and each story being self-contained.  As opposed to, oh say, Marvel's recent Civil War event, which was one story spread across over a hundred issues of two-dozen different titles.  Even in non-crossover-event stories, a typical story arc will take 3-6 issues to play out.

So I'm reading an early Superboy issue that has four stories in it looking for the Legion story, and I get distracted.  One of the stories involves Superboy applying to an exclusive private school being run by mobsters in an attempt to uncover what the mobsters are up to.  Not Clark pretending to be a new student - that would make more sense - Superboy applying to attend as Superboy.  This being '60s DC, you just have to go with it.  It's 10-year-old logic, and the silliness either works for you (it does for me) or it doesn't.  The mobsters, recognizing that having a Superhero in their school might be a bad thing, try to come up with an entrance exam even he can't pass.  The bulk of the story involves the entrance exam, with maybe two pages having to deal with the mobsters actual scam. 

First there's a physical exam.  The headmaster has a chunk of kryptonite he hides in an old cannon, and then has Superboy do pushups next to it, expecting he'll get sick and fail the test.  Superboy spends hours doing pushups, at one point getting bored with regular ones and switching to using his superbreath to raise and lower himself.  He had seen the kryptonite inside and secretly stuffed in a lead cannonball to protect himself.  The sheer silliness of using his superbreath to do the pushups gave me a big goofy smile.  The next part of the entrance exam is an essay on summer vacation.  Realizing that it's a trap - as soon as he finishes, regardless of the quality, the headmaster will fail him - Superboy devises a simple way to escape this trap.  He doesn't stop writing.  Soon the room and hallways are filled with pages of his exploits, and they're running out of room in that building.  The exasperated headmaster, who can't fail Superboy until he stops (why exactly isn't explained, but that's part of the charm) tells him he's passed, and they go on to the next test - math.  They give him an impossible math problem - write down the exact value of pi to the last digit.  Since pi is an irrational number, it has an infinite number of digits, and thus, the problem is insolvable.  This, by the way, is a method used to outwit a supercomputer on Star Trek at least once, possibly twice.  Undaunted, Superboy fills up every blackboard in the school, doing the math in his head on the fly, then proceeds to the halls and the road outside leading to the school, and eventually billboards next to the road, which the billboard owners are happy to paint over, figuring the publicity they'll get from Superboy writing on them is worth more than the ads that were there.  The mobsters realize publicity is something they want to avoid, so they pass him on this one as well. 

He's given one last test - drama.  He's asked to recite an entire Shakespeare play from memory.  He attempts to use his x-ray vision to read one from the library, but finds that the room has been painted with lead paint, and he can't see through lead.  Nonetheless, he comes up with a plan - they said he had to recite Shakespeare, but didn't say how loudly, so he starts a Julius Caesar speech using his super-voice so loudly it threatens to deafen the men in the room.  They again give in and pass him to save their hearing.

The big scam, by the way, was that the teachers would once a month honor a student's achievements, prompting the parents to attend, and would use the knowledge of when their house would be empty to rob them.  Think about it for a second.  They start an exclusive private school, build up its reputation at a national level high enough to attract the children of the rich and famous, and do this as a front for burglary.  It's stupid, but it's stupid in a fun way, the same way buying a movie studio and hiring your archenemies to work for you as stunt performers in your movie so you can kill them with staged accidents is stupid, but fun.  That's the actual plot of an early Fantastic Four issue, by the way.

The silliness here is part of the charm.

So what was the point of all this?  Well, I opened that particular issue to look for the Legion story, and just got caught up in the entrance exam one to the point that I had to know what the next part would be and how Superboy would outwit the mobsters, and forgot to look for the story I had explicitly gotten the issue out to read.  And it doesn't matter that none of the story holds up to even a little critical analysis because it's just so much fun that I don't care.

There's just a kind of charm to Superboy filling blackboards and hallways and billboards with millions of digits of pi just to prove how awesome he is, or mobsters creating an exclusive private prep school that probably made them many times what they could from crime as a front for a burglary scam.

It delights the 10-year-old in me, and I think that's why it works.  It appeals to a part of me that can, if only for the space of the few minutes it takes to read the story, believe in the impossible.

I've seen it in too many movies and TV shows to count.  Character A, usually an authority figure of some sort, often a parent looks at character B, forks his or her fingers and points at him or herself, then at the other person. 

What does that mean?  I don't think I've ever seen it explicitly explained, so it must be assumed that this is a commonly known and understood gesture.

And while I'm on the subject of things that are common on TV and in movies that aren't part of my real life experience, how about families routinely sitting down for dinner in the kitchen or dining room at a predetermined time each evening, say five o'clock?  I don't mean to say just the act of sitting down for a shared meal, obviously that's something I've done before, but the "Dinner is at 5 o'clock each night and you're expected to be there ready to eat" and, it's usually implied, not being there at that time prepared to eat and have a conversation regarding what you did that day or learned at school is considered to be rude because you're not . . . uh, being loyal to your family?  Following dad's arbitrary rules? 

Also, there are generally rules that go along with this, like no TV, or no phones, and one must ask before being dismissed, and so forth.  It's as much a formal ceremony (at least in movies and on TV) as it is a means of feeding oneself.

Look at a movie set in the 50s or 60s or any sitcom from the last century, and having dinner together while talking about your day is commonplace and not being there is a sign of rudeness or teenage rebellion or whatever. 

Most of my life, dinner has been mom or grandma or me or whoever is cooking that night making the food, announcing that it's ready, and then everyone shows up (or not) when they're ready to eat, fixes a plate, and then heads off to wherever they feel like eating.  Yesterday, mom announced food was ready, and I told her I'd already eaten.  It's pretty much hit or miss as to whether an evening meal will be fixed for the family or dinner will be a "fend for yourself when you get hungry" type of thing, and I didn't know she was fixing food, so I'd gone out to a nearby convenience store/fast food place (we live in a very rural area where most convenience stores also double as take-out pizza and various finger food places). 

This isn't to say that my family has never sat down to dinner and done the family meal thing, but it's been rare, and has never been an everyday thing occurring at a set time with specific rules governing it, and it sometimes occurs to me that maybe what I'm seeing in sitcoms and family movies from roughly the 40s-80s might be some kind of reflection of how middle America does things, or it might be one of those things (like never saying goodbye when hanging up the phone or revolvers that fire 20 times without reloading) that were made up for movies and TV.

So, was it ever commonplace for families to gather at the dinner table at a set time each evening to discuss one's day, so commonplace that if one were not going to attend or was going to be late, not notifying others of this advance was rude, possibly borderline disrespectful?  Or is this just a movie/TV thing that came out of, say '50s sitcoms that presented an idealized version of America that only superficially resembled the real thing?

Pardon me for a moment while I gay the place up a bit.  There are a whole lot of showtunes to come.

1. "The Life I Never Led" by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, performed by Beth Malone.  Katie Rowland Jones does a very nice version of this song on the Sister Act OCR, and takes a different tack with it, but I prefer this one:



She doesn't just sing the song, she performs it in character.  Notice all the little things, like how her arms stay crossed in front of her during the early portions - body language for "stay away" - then once she decides to let go, she literally opens up.  The sudden rush of excitement on the words "been kissed".  In the space of four minutes we see a character transformed.  And holding that last note for 15 seconds without wavering or breaking is a joy to behold.

2. "Pretty Funny" by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, performed by Leslie Kritzer

A little context here:  This is a song from Dogfight, based on the movie of the same name.  Kritzer's character, a shy, ordinary-looking young woman has been invited by a fighter jock about to be deployed to a war zone to a fancy dance, only to discover after she gets there that it's an ugly girl party, a contest in which a group of cool guys (and by cool guys, I mean cruel douchebags) have a contest to find the least attractive date, convince her he finds her attractive, and take her to a party where the whole thing is revealed to the amusement of the guys involved.  Not having seen the play, I can only assume it follows the same basic storyline as the movie and that "Pretty Funny" occurs just after Kritzer's character returns home.



As with Beth Malone above, Kritzer doesn't just sing the song, she performs the character singing it.  The play of emotions across her face as she tries to find a bright side, and fails, is heartbreaking.  It's like Sister Mary Robert in #1 has gone out into the real world to live life to the fullest and nearly been crushed the first time she takes a big risk.

3. "Be My Friend" (Facebook) by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, from Edges.



I love the choreography there.  I like the way the song simultaneously makes fun of and celebrates the ways in which computers allow people to connect with others.

4. "Man of Lamancha" by Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh, performed by Linda Eder

Easily the best vocal perfromance of this song I've ever heard.  Look up any version of the song on Youtube and read a few of the comments, and what you'll find are arguments regarding whether that particular version is better than Eder's.  This is how you know that this is the standard by which other versions are measured.









5. "Daydream Believer" by John Stewart (not the Daily Show guy), performed by Shonen Knife


 

I know, it's not a showtune, but this definitely fits in with the idea of "gay the place up a bit".   My favorite bit - the girls are heading into the airport with their cat, when they discover a "no cats" sign posted.  So they basically say screw this crap, and summon a magical rainbow to take them.  This does, however, raise a question - if you have magical rainbow transportation summoning powers, why bother with airplanes at all?  Why not just go everywhere by magical rainbow?

Also, one has to wonder why nobody ever thought of doing a Japanese all-girl punk rock version of Daydream Believer before.  It's one of those things that seems so obvious after the fact that it's amazing everyone isn't doing it. 

I'm playing Blade Kitten, a side-scrolling platform game I downloaded during a half off sale a few months back.  The main character is a catgirl with pink hair/fur with the clever and subtle name "Kat".  She's a "breaker" which means she runs around with a floating sword jumping and climbing and killing generic armored bad guys with the sword.  It's a pretty good game so far and the levels, if the first level is typical, are huge.  It took me about an hour to go through that one level. 

For comparison, the game that made "platformer" into a genre of its own, Super Mario Brothers, can be finished in less than half that time.  Not the first level, the whole game, and that's playing every single level, 32 in total. 

So I'm exploring and the enemies are shouting warnings to each other, boring generic stuff like "This one has a blade!", when I noticed that one seemed a bit . . . off.  As Kat climbed a wall (apparently being a catgirl enables one to climb walls much like Spider-Man), she was spotted by an enemy who shouted into his radio, "Situation oscar, mama, goldfish".  I may not be remembering the last word correctly, but it was definitely not the standard radio code for the letter "G". 

So look at that phrase.  See it yet?  Radio communication uses words to identify letters when spelling something to prevent confusion regarding similar sounding letters.  "D" and "P" might sound alike, but delta and papa would be hard to confuse with one another.

So the soldier there isn't saying a nonsense set of code words, he's spelling out an emergency code, which translates to OMG!. 

It's what I like to call a stealth joke.  You hear it, or see it, but it doesn't quite register at first until you think about it for a bit.  For example, there's a Simpson's episode in which Homer inherits a farm and starts growing a tomato/tobacco hybrid he calls tomacco, which is like tomatoes, only as addictive as smoking.  At one point he visits a feed store.  The setup shot of the exterior of the store shows a sign identifying it as "Sneed's Feed and Seed (Formerly Chuck's)." 

This one is stealth in that the writers likely had to sneak it past the censors.  If you're not seeing it, notice that the current name rhymes all the words.   Now substitute Chuck's for Sneed's, and alter the rest of the name to rhyme appropriately. 

Another is the season two finale of Glee.  After the prelims, Mr. Shue looks at the list of posted finalists, with the list being shown on screen for about two seconds, and most of the shot being a reaction shot of Mr. Shue's face.  Most of the names of the rival teams are bad puns, but you only get the chance to see them if you're watching a video and pause at exactly the right moment.  My favorite:  Jefferson City Airplane.

And finally, for one that's practically a puzzle, there's Mass Effect 2.  At one point you're trying to help a quarian teammate, Tali'Zorah vas Neema nar Rayya.  Quarians are a race that lives entirely on a fleet of space ships, and has for centuries.  Their naming convention is [given name - family name vas adult ship name nar birth ship name].  The ship on which you were born and on which you live as an adult are part of your name, sort of like Leonardo da Vinci means Loonardo of Venice.

During the mission you can talk to various fleet admirals, including one whose name is vas Quib-Quib.  If you ask him about his name, he'll get huff and explain how it's difficult to change electronic registry information, and he's proud of his ship, though he sometimes considers transferring to one with a more dignified name like the Defrenz or the Ictomy.

I didn't catch this one until the second time I played the game.  Remember, the adult ship name prefix is "vas", thus the Admiral would be named, in effect vas deferens or vasectomy.  Yep, the writers were making dick joke at the admirals expense, which is somewhat appropriate for this character, as he is a pretty big jerk.  In true Bioware fashion, however, he's also promoting the more admirable idea regarding the future of his race, while another admiral that is a nice guy and treats Shepard and Tali with respect and admiration has plans that will produce horrific consequences.  It's nice to see characters that aren't written with the simplistic "nice = good" formula that a lot of heroic fiction uses.

Our cable box, which is about six or seven years old, is going out.  It's transmitting a hum through all of the channels.  And when I say a "hum" I mean a noise so irritating I'm pretty sure prolonged exposure to it will make your ears bleed, cause brain damage, and make you want to hit yourself in the head with a hammer repeatedly until you lose consciousness just to make the noise stop. 

It's loud enough right now to drown out the noise from the space heater in the kitchen. 

SF3 got up, had a Coke and a smoked about four packs of cigarettes, and turned on the TV.  Mom just got up and commented that she can't understand how he can stand it.  I'm nearly incapable of taking a hint and even I got that one - it's mom's way of saying "turn the damn thing off because the noise is driving me insane".  He missed this completely.  Or doesn't care because he wants the TV on all the time when he's home.  He literally has the TV one all the time when he's awake and home.  Even when talking on the phone, or, right now, talking with mom.

I think he's afraid there might be something on interesting that he might miss and it's vitally important that he not miss it, not even to say, have a

We'll have to call Tuesday to have someone come out to get it fixed.  Mom and I are doing other things with our time until then.  SF3 literally does nothing else when home - take care of bodily functions and watch TV. 

It will be Tuesday because the cable company is closed Monday.  I'm not sure why - the first is the holiday, and that's on Sunday, a day they already have off.  Not that it matters, as we'll be at dialysis most of the day Monday anyway, and I've been setting up Mom's shows on the computer for her to watch here.

His answer, by the way, was that he was trying to get used to it.  The TV is making a loud, irritating buzzing noise on every channel, and you don't turn it off or mute it and use captioning, nope you keep it on and try to get used to it.

Ah it's off now.  Mom turned it off, using the excuse that she'd rather not  have a conversation over the TV.  I don't know why she doesn't directly ask for what she wants - it isn't just me, it's everyone, and has been all her life - but she doesn't.  She hints and expects people to pick up on the hint.

Happy New Year!

SF3 was home for a couple of days over Christmas.  He passed through the living room as I was playing Dragon Age II.  The scene involved the player character, in this case a female Hawke, talking to an elf girl.  The Dragon Age games takes place on Thedas, where the fictional countries are loosely based on middle-ages Europe.  The central country in the first game, and country of origin for Hawke in the second, is Ferelden, the DA equivalent of England in the real world.

SF3 stops for a moment and abrubtly declares both voice actresses to have "bad English Accents".  I normally just ignore his comments, especially after hearing him dismiss Saffron Burrows, who played an American detective on the show Law and Order: Criminal Intent for a season as also having a "bad English accent".  In one early scene, she goes undercover at an upscale bar dressing in high fashion and speaking in an English accent.  The joke here is that Burrows, who played a somewhat somberly dressed American on the show, is English and a former fashion model, so her "disguise" was basically playing her real-life self using her real accent. 

If you've ever seen Deep Blue Sea, the killer shark movie with Samuel L. Jackson, Burrows is the scientist who's been experimenting on the sharks.

So I probably should have ignored it, but it was just too stupid a thing for me to pass on.  Female Hawke in Dragon Age II is played by Jo Wyatt, an English actress who was basically using her real voice.  I said as much to SF3.  He shrugged this off and continued on to the Elf girl, Merrill, saying that her "English accent" was really bad. 

"That's because it's Welsh," I told him, "not English."  The actress who plays Merrill is Eve Myles, who is Welsh and was using her natural accent. 

"Same difference," said SF3.  "It's a part of England."  I assumed by "it" he meant Wales.

I think declaring a given English accent to be bad one is a way he has of feeling smart, and my disagreeing with him undercut that.  He sometimes gets angry when told he's wrong about something, and when presented with reason or evidence of his being wrong, he gets angry.  I don't get this.  I understand defending a point of view, but getting angry because someone has demonstrated that one is factually wrong makes no sense to me.

Earlier this year he declared Miranda Lawson in Mass Effect 2 to have a bad English accent.  Miranda is played by Yvonne Strahovski, an Australian actress again using her natural accent for the part.  I ignored it then.  I should have ignored it this time as well.  Then again, maybe Australia is part of England, too.