Hmm, I’m going to have to re-think my “shake off hands before drying to save paper towels” plan.
At least now I know what sound white gold on tile makes.
Author: Kelson Vibber
It’s a mystery!
Sometime last week – after the “rehearsal” – I realized just what part of the wedding I was most anxious about:
A wedding is the Actor’s Nightmare.
I mean, think about it: You’re one of the two leads in a play that hasn’t been rehearsed (just a once-through of the blocking), it’s in front of all your friends and family, there’s only one performance so you have to get it just right … if you decide to recite your vows yourselves, like alenxa and I did, you have to worry about getting your lines right… all the elements are there.
And yet somehow, it all comes together.
Friday and Saturday were all preparation, down to the point where I was triaging things. “Well, if I wear padded socks, I don’t have to go back to the tux shop to exchange the shoes, so I have time to pick up wrapping paper for the groomsmen/bridesmaids’ gifts…” I was working my way through a checklist Saturday night, and I kept adding things to it. The worst part was the list of things I couldn’t do until morning, when the clock would start ticking. Confirming the seating chart with the location, getting the car washed (in case someone decided to tie shoes to it and it ended up in the photo album), picking up the cake. Due to car limitations I ended up playing surprise host to non_seqvitvr, who made the excellent suggestion that we go somewhere for breakfast. It took up time, but it helped steady my nerves a bit. (I’d been planning on cereal, but I was out of it enough to not notice that there was another carton of milk in the fridge.)
So while Katie and sekl went off to the salon, I worked my way through my checklist, occasionally tearing Jim away from the computer long enough to get in the car. There was a bit of a scare when I thought I’d left my allergy medication at Denny’s (hey, it was nearby), but it turned up, easily accessible, in the back of the car.
It’s funny how much the wedding itself blurs together. The opening-night jitters that just wouldn’t go away until Katie and I were both “on stage” (at which point I managed to stop just a little bit too far ahead, causing me to spend most of the minister’s speech wishing I could just move my feet back a few inches), the blanking on the vows we each thought we had memorized, the “where do we go now?” that pervaded the rest of the afternoon.
Even not knowing what we were doing next during the reception was a bit of a relief, once the ceremony was done. Somehow I made it to the end without realizing we hadn’t done a receiving line, though I suppose the table-hopping meet-and-greet fulfilled the same purpose. It was nice catching up with some friends, although others we barely had a chance to speak with. (Sorry, katyakoshka!)
There were snafus along the way, of course. You can read about some of them in sekl’s journal and in alenxa’s (which I’m not reading until I finish typing, but I know it’s there since she’s in the same room). We were planning to use Katie’s iPod instead of a DJ, but they couldn’t hook it up to the sound system. We had burned mix CDs just in case, but they got played out of order, and the first dance ended up being the full cut of “All I Want is You” instead of something a bit shorter (although that was probably our fault for not cutting the track down first). There were interesting events with cameras and credit cards, and we discovered when we came home tonight that the bakery had given us the wrong cake. But from what I can tell, everything seemed to go well on the face of it.
And really, there are only two things about a wedding that matter: The vows (and the actual meat of the ceremony surrounding them), and the show. The vows are for the couple. The show is for the community. All the backstage stuff can go completely wrong, but as long as the core of the ceremony happens, and as long as everything the guests see looks right – the cake cutting, the dance, and so on – it’s a success.
We were among the last to leave – no driving off in a haze of confetti and old shoes – and spent the night in a very nice hotel in Laguna Beach (the Surf and Sand, which I highly recommend to anyone who can get over the sticker shock) looking out at nothing but ocean and eating probably the most expensive dinner either of us has ever had (but worth it – the food was excellent). Today we checked out Disney’s California Adventure for the first time – a relaxed afternoon, since it’s both off-season and a weekday. Tomorrow we go back to work, and start figuring out where (and when) we’ll go on our real honeymoon.
(Good grief, why the heck am I still awake at this hour?)
Ack! 24 hours!
And still lots of last-minute stuff to do…
Whew!
Finally got the text of the ceremony from the minister! I’d been worrying that it might have gotten tossed in a spam filter or something.
As it turns out, it came close. SpamCop has listed at least one of Adelphia’s outgoing servers (fortunately I don’t block on that), and the message was sent using software that triggered the “suspicious characters” test in MIMEDefang. (I disabled blocking on that way back when I first set up MIMEDefang, because there are too many programs out there that don’t format things quite right.)
On top of all that, the message was attached with UUencode, which I haven’t seen in ages. I was able to extract the file, but it seems no one has bothered to build uudecode functionality into KMail on the grounds that “This type of encoding is deprecated since MIME was invented… [in] June 1992.”
More proof that old software never really dies….
Milking the jokes
Retreat!
For those of you who haven’t already seen them, I’ve posted some of the more amusing pictures from last weekend’s camping trip (well, mostly from the drive to and from Joshua Tree) over on K-Squared Ramblings.
Also, I found that the location of the last retreat alenxa and I made it to, Cuyamaca State Park, was indeed wiped out by the Cedar fire last October. There’s a picture on the park website right now of “what’s left of an ancient oak” – a collapsed, hollowed-out trunk with burning coals still visible inside. Right next to our campsite, there was a fenced-off oak tree labeled as one of the oldest oaks in the state. The page also has a picture of the picnic area where we stopped for lunch on Saturday, showing a half-collapsed picnic table.
What the heck: the Movie Poll
Stolen from andrea_wot:
Camping
Off to the annual CHP Retreat this weekend. We were determined to go since we missed last year, but with so much last-minute wedding preparation going on, it’s beginning to look less like a fantastic idea. Or rather more like a good idea with a high cost.
Still, the eve of such a trip is a perfect time to review quotes from campouts past.
I mean, who could forget such gems as “Hold it there, Tyler, we’re going to take a picture of your… pickle” and “She’s like a little snowman… from hell!” And of course, “We can’t have scones running around unzipped, can we?”
I wonder if anyone collected quotes on last year’s trip?
First Post!
I finally decided what to do with this account (other than commenting and tracking). I’ve got a fairly long-running group blog with alenxa at K-Squared Ramblings, and I didn’t want to move all my stuff off of that. At the same time, I didn’t want to leave this blank.
After tossing out several options, I’ve decided this is where I’ll post memes and at least some personal stuff (not in the way-too-personal sense, but in the I-don’t-think-anyone-who-doesn’t-already-know-me-will-be-interested sense).
Bart/Impulse/Kid Flash
Paul Ewert wrote:
What does the list think of Bart assuming the “mantle” of Kid Flash over in the TEEN TITANS book?
I’m actually kind of disappointed by it, although it makes sense under the circumstances – especially given that (a) Wally’s disappeared, and (b) Bart’s probably spent the entire issue trying to remember Wally’s name and face.
As Impulse, Bart had his own identity. Yes, he was yet-another-speedster – but he wasn’t a sidekick, he wasn’t the second or third Kid Flash – he was Impulse.
What’s bugging me is that they’ve taken someone who, despite his youth and naivete, really was his own hero, with an original name and costume, and turned him into a sidekick – and a sidekick with a hand-me-down name and costume.
BTW, has anyone else noticed that Geoff Johns now has control of *all* DC’s speedsters:
Jay – JSA
Wally – Flash
Bart – Teen Titans
Jesse – JSA
Max – possessed by the Rival, Jay’s enemy, and as such a JSA villain.
Mike Koehler wrote:
Didn’t bart remember Linda when everyone else forgot her, what keeps him from doing this here?
That’s why I said “probably” – at this moment, we don’t really know who *does* remember. In fact, I’d expect Bart and Iris remember at least Barry’s career, if not Wally’s.
I’m assuming the JLA, JSA, classic Titans, etc. are all affected, or someone would have showed up at Wally’s front door in the past 2 months and said “Hey, Keystone is falling apart – put that costume on and *do* something about it!”
If Bart’s forgotten, then the switch to Kid Flash makes even more sense, especially if the Flash has been out of action for two months.
On the other hand, it’s not clear how much time has passed since the “I’m not sure if I believe in him” scene (which IIRC took place after Wally defeated Zoom, but before Hal and Barry showed up). This whole storyline appears to take place over the course of a single weekend, which would place it 2 months *before* Ignition begins. In that case, it’s only been a couple of days, and might even take place before the mass-amnesia hit.
Re: HYPERIUM
Trying to explain the Chain Lightning finale in terms of Hypertime
here goes:
First, an explanation in line with the basic many-worlds approach to time: When Wally changed the past, he could only go forward again in the timeline he had just created. This makes perfect sense when Wally’s the one making the changes, but it doesn’t explain why Cobalt Blue killing Barry changed history around Wally. (Similar problems apply to stories like Bart Saves the Universe.)
So, a Hypertime-based explanation: The Kingdom #2 described Hypertime as branching off of a “central timeline” or “main timeline,” i.e. the mainstream DCU. Given that DC has a long, well, history of stories in which time travelers change history, perhaps what’s going on is a realignment of which timeline is the “main” timeline.
It’s not totally consistent, but then neither is any other explanation. Personally, I think the DCU is too big and too complicated to ever hope for 100% consistency. With 60 years of stories (some of which have been officially removed from canon), hundreds or thousands of writers, artists, and editors, it’s sometimes amazing it’s as consistent as it is.
Re: The latest Titans comic
I’ve almost dropped the current series three times, twice holding on because I’d heard a new writer was starting soon. Now the only reason I’m still getting it is that there may only be 4 issues left.
I hope I don’t sound too curmudgeonly over this, but I don’t think the team ever recovered from “Titans Hunt” – the Wolfman/Grummett one, not the Dan Jurgens one. A decade ago.
There was just enough good stuff in there (early Team Titans, for instance) to keep me going through the Dark Raven saga, the kick-the-crap-out-of-Cyborg saga, and the let’s-break-up-Nightwing-and-Starfire-because-we-want-to saga.
I didn’t even bother with the Dan Jurgens series, though I did pick up the 4-parter with (most of) the originals.
JLA/Titans showed promise, and I really liked the Arsenal mini, but once the series actually started, it was just kind of bland. It looked like it was going to pick up for a while when Jay Faerber started working with Devin Grayson, and they turned out some good stuff, but then once he started writing on his own, it turned to crap. The only good thing to come out of his time working the book solo was resolving the Donna Troy mess, and she’s been practically ignored since. (I’d include making Cyborg human again, but that was co-plotted with Grayson.) And then the stupid DEO kids, Epsilon, and that damn Jesse Quick story.
I was ready to drop it, when I heard Tom Peyer was going to take over. So I thought, he’s done some good stuff, and if Faerber shares some of the blame with his editor, Peyer has more clout and should be able to put up more of a fight against crappy ideas.
But the last few issues have just been boring. Last week, I was seriously thinking of just not picking it up when I went to the comic store. Even though it was in the middle of a story, I just didn’t care anymore.
I realize that I’m comparing it to a “golden age” than can never come back – the (surviving) characters have all changed too much since then – but is it too much to ask that the main story be more interesting than the one-page
Starfire guest spot?
Right now I’m only picking up the next few issues because they’re supposedly the *last* few issues – and I’m not sure I should even do that.
So no, I won’t “lay da smack down” on anyone for dissing Titans. Not when I’ve thought the same (and possibly worse) myself.
Re: Smallville vs. The Flash
I think it would be quite possible to keep the sense of history, and yet keep it simple enough that people can just tune in and understand what’s going on. Now, the example I’m going to give may have the advantage of working with a more well-known character than the Flash, but bear with me:
The Mask of Zorro.
In this movie, Antonio Banderas’ character becomes the new Zorro, taking over for Anthony Hopkins. By the end of the movie, Catherine Zeta-Jones is getting into the mask-and-sword act. Sure, people knew who Zorro was going into the film: a swordsman who wears a mask and fights injustice and oppression. The important details (his family and estates being taken from him, the vendetta against the man who took them, etc.) were (I believe) specific to this film, and were able to fit into a normal-length movie and still leave room for a plot.
So I can see a 2-hour pilot that sets up Barry Allen having been the Flash for however many years, and during the course of the story his nephew Wally West (in his late teens or early 20s), one of the few people to know his secret identity, is struck by lightning and gains similar powers. Barry starts training him, and by the end of the pilot he sacrifices his life to save the world (or at least some huge number of people) and Wally decides to carry on his mentor’s legacy.
If they wanted to, they could tie it into the previous series. It’s been about 10 years, they could get John Wesley Shipp to reprise his role as Barry for an episode, and state that Iris came back sometime after the end of the series. Or if they wanted to link Barry and Tina (there was some speculation), her original name could also have been West.
So it’s at least possible. Whether someone will be willing to try it remains to be seen.
Re: Issues of Continuity
Crisis wasn’t focused to much on fixing inconsistencies as it was on reducing complexity by reducing the myriad dimensions of the multiverse to a single universe. I suspect they planned to fix problems at the same time, but they’re still cleaning up the inconsistencies *created* by the Crisis.
Let’s look at the Titans (since I’ve been reading them since 1984). Since Wonder Woman hadn’t appeared yet in the post-Crisis universe, Wonder Girl couldn’t be her adopted sister, so she needed a new origin. A few months before the Crisis, they had finally revealed the origin of an early Titans character, Lilith, in a story involving the mythical Greek Titans. The new origin they came up with for Wonder Girl *contradicted* the origin they had just written for Lilith! Not only that, but the Lilith origin had introduced a group of villains called the Children of the Sun, so *they* needed a new origin too! And this is just one writer (Marv Wolfman co-wrote Crisis and wrote Titans from about 1980-1994).
Probably the most infamous contradictions were the result of erasing Superboy despite his key position in Legion of Superheroes history. They were trying to fix that one for years with one patch after another until they started over with Zero Hour.
Now Zero Hour, despite being (in my opinion) the far inferior story of the two, was definitely intended to clean up inconsistencies. It didn’t (at least, not much). Except for the Legion, I don’t think much of anything *really* changed as a result of Zero Hour.
I guess that’s part of why Waid and Morrison came up with the overlapping part of Hypertime: to acknowledge that inconsistencies exist.
And I hate to say this, because I really like the way Geoff Johns has been handling the Flash, but glaring inconsistencies keep popping up (Goldface shouldn’t be that old, and since he’s a cop killer he shouldn’t be out yet and the cops should hate his guts, Iris couldn’t have been around when Julie was pregnant unless she was time travelling more than we know, Chillblaine wasn’t “found” dead, Polaris flat-out killed him, etc. – although that last bit I need to check up on to see if I remember it correctly).
Anyway, there’s an interesting story on how long it took for the changes made in the Crisis to really stick in the introduction to “Legend of the Green Flame,” Neil Gaiman’s Superman/Green Lantern story which didn’t get printed for a decade. Apparently there was major disagreement among the editors as to just what had changed or was going to change. As whoever was writing the intro put it: (and I’m paraphrasing here) “on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Green Lantern knew Superman was Clark Kent. Neil’s story was written on a Wednesday, but turned in on a Thursday.” Since it hinged on there being a friendship between Supes and GL, they axed the story.
Re: JSA news/spoiler for Starman #72
To be blunt, as long as the Golden Age is tied to World War II, most of the original JSA members are guaranteed to die within the next couple of decades. In twenty years, it’ll be hard to accept a 100-year-old running around fighting crime. The only ways to keep them around are to make them immortal or to change continuity and given them a 60-year timeline the way the Silver Age has been given a 12-year timeline.
—
And we all know how popular *that* would be!
Re: Hawk and Dove
Captain Arsala of the Washington, DC Special Crimes Unit. Went after Dove, Dawn was trying to work out the whole secret identity thing and get him to date her as Dawn instead, eventually he figured out they were the same person. He and Dawn were camping when Monarch found them, blasted Sal into oblivion, and grabbed Dove.
Funny thing about Armageddon 2001 #2 is that you can see that they got halfway through the story before they decided to change Monarch’s identity. It’s supposed to look like a major red herring, but it’s way too choppy, plus if you take into account things like the following Justice League Europe issue in which Catherine Cobert has a nightmare about an evil Captain Atom, it strongly implies that CA was originally supposed to be Monarch.
Linda’s Race
Hector Guerra asks when Linda changed from being white with green eyes to Asian
Better question: Why did she ever have green eyes?
Linda’s been asian since her first appearance back in #28, when William Messner-Loebs was writing the series, identified as Korean within a few issues (either right after that appearance or during the Celestial Enlightenment storyline, either way before issue #40).
Somewhere during the time Wieringo was doing the art, the colorists seem to have forgotten that asians tend to have brown eyes, and they went green for a while (maybe spillover from constantly correcting Wally’s eye color?), though they do fairly consistently color Linda’s skin a shade darker than Wally’s. Looking back at Terminal Velocity, I can see a definite change when Salvador Larocca started (though at the time, since I knew she was asian, I just interpreted any differences as variations in style, like comparing Wieringo’s Wally to Jackson Guice’s or George Perez’ Wally – although it’s not really fair to compare anyone to George Perez (except perhaps for Phil Jimenez)).
As far as the shape of her face goes, I’d chalk it up to varying art styles, but once you throw in the eye color, it makes me wonder if some bonehead editor wanted to downplay the interracial aspect of their relationship.
Re: Naming Impulse
Somehow I have a hard time imagining Batman (or even Bruce Wayne) relaxing enough to have a beer. Frankly, I have a hard time imagining him *relaxing.*
Re: Flash Paradox
Actually, it’s not a paradox *yet,* just a loop. Confusing, but internally consistent. The main thing about a paradox is that it *isn’t* consistent – the old thing about going back in time to kill your grandfather, so you’d never be born to go back in time and kill him, so he’d still be alive, and so would you, and you’d go back in time…
Now a *real* paradox would be if, for some reason, John Fox *hadn’t* saved Iris… then Wally never would have gone to Central City and met the Flash, and you have either the Flash line ending with Barry or being picked up by someone else… who might have found a different solution to Mota (50th Anniversary Special) that wouldn’t have left him slowly turning into Radioactive Man over 700 years to reappear in John Fox’s time and lead to his gaining super-speed.
Hmmm… if that happened, then he wouldn’t even have the *chance* to help rescue Iris, and that future would remain intact. So I guess it technically wouldn’t be a paradox either. Aargh!
No wonder Wally gets a headache whenever he deals with time travel!
Re: Flash#164 jay garrick
In my opinion, to be considered a “Hypertime story,” it would have to make use of some facet of Hypertime that cannot already be explained by traditional understanding of time travel. Even if what’s really going when you change the past is the splitting off of a new hypertimeline, you can still interpret it as an alteration of a single timeline. After all, under most circumstances the time traveler has no way of breaking out of the timeline he creates – as far as he can tell, there *is* only one timeline.
One of my favorite quotes about scientific paradigms is “You can’t build a bridge with Relativity.” Gravity is a relativistic effect (or a quantum effect), but if you try to use relativity or quantum mechanical equations to design a bridge, you’ll never accomplish anything. You build a bridge with Newtonian physics, even though the underlying causes of the stresses that you’re trying to distribute are relativistic or quantum in origin. You can argue that a bridge is not a quantum object, because it doesn’t matter whether the electrons in its molecules are in clouds, orbitals, or tiny cardboard boxes.
So if a story confines itself to the main DCU timeline and could be told without knowledge or existence of Hypertime (just as we’ve been building bridges for centuries without knowledge of relativity, quantum physics, or whatever the next paradigm is that will come along), I think it can safely be considered “not a Hypertime story” in the same way that a bridge doesn’t involve relativity.
It’s possible to interpret any time travel story within the realm of Hypertime – I went to a great deal of trouble to figure out how Chronos, Team Titans, Armageddon 2001, Zero Hour, Bart Saves the Universe, Crisis and other stories could fit within Hypertime – but I would argue that none of these stories were Hypertime stories, because they could all be told within a traditional time-travel or multiverse framework. (I even had someone complain of this when I originally posted the Hypertime article on my site, which was why it was quickly retitled “Time and Hypertime.”).
If “Wonderland” turns out to use classical time travel without
branching, crossing, or mingling timelines, then it doesn’t use anything that is uniquely Hypertime. If it does, we can call the writer on it. Otherwise, it’s like calling “The Fugitive” a story about DNA. Yes, both pursuer and pursued have it, but it’s irrelevant to the actual story, which could just as easily be told about humanoid silicon-based lifeforms or sentient robots with only a few changes in dialog and none to the plot or setting.
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That’s the whole point. As an engineer, you don’t need to know all the hardcore physics details. When you build a bridge, it’s an engineering process, and all you need to deal with are things like gravity, wind, strength and elasticity of the material, etc. All that other stuff, even though it’s going on at subatomic level, is irrelevant to the bridge. In the same way, I see the underlying structure of Hypertime as being irrelevant to a plain time travel story, unless it involves something that can only be explained with Hypertime.