Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
In Final Crisis, the Anti-Life Equation is able to compel the surrender of free will. Those who have submitted spout slogans about how it justifies anything, how it’s so much easier than the struggles of life and love.
It’s insidious, because in some ways it *is* easier to offload tough decisions to a schedule, a policy, a leader, etc. The brain likes taking shortcuts around cognitive load. But people want to be *able* to make choices when they want to.
#amreading #comics #psychology
Another interesting thing about Final Crisis is how much damage Darkseid does just by existing. He doesn’t do any traditional super villain things in the entire story. No battles, no plotting. He just sits on his throne, yaking advantage of a battle he already won, imposing his will on an entire planet. He spends most of the story sitting on an underground bunker, but his presence presses down on the whole world.
#amreading #comics
I’m also listening to the #audiobook of Final Crisis, which is adapted from the novelization rather than directly from the #comicbook. It fixes a lot of the choppiness and sparseness that made the original hard to follow at times. Narrative fills in which details you need to glean from the artwork.
And of course having it all together avoids the problem of delays between chapters that plagued the original release, though that’s true of the collected edition too.
But wow, I’m really seeing the parallels with Dark Knights: Metal even more strongly than when I was just comparing to memory.
Barbatos, like Darkseid, takes over the world between issues, and we jump to a handful of heroes mounting a desperate resistance. The lynchpin of the multiverse – conveniently the main DC Earth – is in danger of being pulled “downward” into an unending hell.
They’re a lot more alike than any of the Crisis events are to each other or to Metal.
Oh, can’t forget fighting twisted versions of the heroes. Except in Final Crisis, it was the actual heroes having been brainwashed, not expendable alternates.
Three-Body Problem ch5-7:
The mystery, the questions about the nature of fundamental laws of physics (i.e. are they actually fundamental?), and the countdown have all been fascinating.
I’m up to the introduction of the VR game that lends its name to the title, and for the first time I feel like the story is getting bogged down.
I know it’s symbolic. I figure it’s a way to get ideas across to the players without discussing them openly. But it’s still dragging.
@vector It’s a weird mindset to imagine, and it’s interesting to compare to the more familiar present-day culture in the next few chapters.
I did a double take on the idea of banning teaching relativity for ideology…but then I remembered we’ve got the same problem with people trying to block teaching evolution here in the US.
Three-Body problem ch1-2, Silent Spring:
I find it bizarre that a book that criticized excesses of capitalism would have been characterized as counter-revolutionary, capitalist propaganda.
But of course both capitalism and communism are quite capable of environmental destruction. Rapacious state, corporation, or individual, it’s a universal human failing, like the image of an iceberg in the ocean that Wenjie imagines, independent of ideology.
#sffbookclub #environment #amreading #books
To clarify: I don’t disbelieve it. I would not at all be surprised if it had actually been portrayed this way, particularly knowing China’s environmental record.
I’m just saying it’s a weird contradiction. One more thing I have to wrap my mind around to read a story set during the cultural revolution.
My original plan was to move on straight to the sequel, which came out earlier this summer, but I’m really intrigued by The Three Body Problem, so I’m probably going to pick that up so that I’m not *too* far behind all the other #sffbookclub discussion!
Finished re-reading Sparrow Hill Road, by Seanan McGuire. Imagine all the hitchiking ghost stories you’ve heard are true, and they travel the ghosts of long-dead highways.
It’s told episodically as a collection of stories about the same ghost, what she does, how she died, and her quest to stop her killer.
It made me think about the difference between a horror story and a ghost story. I don’t like horror much, but I do usually enjoy ghost stories quite a bit.
#amreading #books
@zephasaurus_hex @lapis Yeah, moving with a big library is such a pain. I have both books and comics to deal with. Last time I moved I decided to stop buying long boxes and start moving the comics to short boxes because they’re easier to carry. But then you do have to carry more of them…
I realized why Sparrow Hill Road is taking longer than I expected to read, even though it feels like it’s going quickly: because it’s structured as a series of related, but complete ghost stories, I hit a breaking point part way through my lunch hour instead of continuing to read as much as I can until I need to get back to work. I’m probably reading 2/3 as much each session as I would otherwise.
#books #amreading
I don’t remember where I saw the link (might have been here, but I thought I’d share it in case it was somewhere else), but this is an interesting article on China’s SETI efforts and historical clash of civilizations through the lens of Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem and its sequels.
#sffbookclub #seti #astronomy #china #books #scifi
Listened to the latest episode of the #LesMiserables Reading Companion. Up to the introduction of Patron-Minette & the “Jondrette” family.
1. Wow, the callback to the miner’s candlestick from back in Digne (lost in the Denny translation).
2. I hadn’t made the connection between Éponine’s 1st & Fantine’s last appearances.
3. Three times through the book & I never caught on to the implications of just how far Thénardier goes in exploiting his daughters. Ugh.
https://readlesmis.libsyn.com/ep30-iii7i-iii8iv-miners-tools
I caught up on Flash War and its aftermath. I feel like it could have been epic, but ultimately was just a way to break up #TheFlash family and set up the new Forces.
That’s a problem I’m having with DC #comics lately: Stories don’t feel like they start from the characters and new threats picking up where the previous story left off, they feel like they’re working backward from where everything needs to be to set up the next story and finding a way to get there.
It’s been like that for a while. It was a problem with Flash: Rebirth, with Countdown, with Full Throttle. I sort of feel like the early New 52 escaped the problem and built more organically, at least some of the books I was reading. But those kept getting cancelled.
If you compare Final Crisis to Metal, they’re both similar in structure: cosmic threat turns earth into a nightmare between panels, the heroes seek help from the multiverse to restore the world. But Final Crisis *finishes.* Metal sets up the alloys, the Challengers & Hawks, the crack in the Source Wall. It’s more like COIE in the way it works hard to set things up for the coming year(s) of stories.
So, I was following a link trail through Cracked.com (dangerous, if not as dangerous as TVTropes), and stumbled on this article: 6 Times Mankind Tackled Problems Like Insane Supervillains
The first item will be familiar to readers of #sffbookclub, and has links to several more serious articles with more background on the scheme that never materialized in our reality.
http://www.cracked.com/article_25079_6-times-mankind-tackled-problems-like-insane-supervillains.html
Found this tweet from the previous time I read Les Miserables, back in 2013. I took several breaks to read other books, including the environmental dystopia The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi:
I’ve been reading The Windup Girl. It’s very good, but I’m ready to go back to Les Miserables for something more cheerful.
— Reading Les Mis (@ReadingLesMis) September 29, 2013
The thickness of the pages before and after your current place in a printed book is more intuitively grasped than an exact percentage or a progress bar on an ebook screen.
But I do like full text search!
While I finished reading #LesMiserables last month, I’m still listening to a podcast about the book. The podcaster is a French professor who uses the book in her class, and each week she discusses a few chapters of the book. She’s a little way into Part Three at this point, up to the introduction of the ABC society.
Its been fascinating to listen to, and I’d recommend it to anyone else who’s a fan of the book or is interested in reading it and wants more context.
@lapis @zephasaurus_hex I also read the first Dune novel, and never felt the need to read further. The most I did was look at the prologue for book 2.
@zephasaurus_hex IMO Watchmen is more notable for the craft than the story. The way it uses the nature of comic books as a medium, nonlinear time, the thematic connections with the pirate comics, etc.
@zephasaurus_hex …which makes it really weird that DC approved a movie to begin with, never mind handed the keys to their own superhero universe over to the director.
Ok, this isn’t the kind of thing I usually read (but when it comes to killer hippo westerns, that probably goes w/o saying), but it’s oddly compelling.
I do wonder just how many niches hippos fill in this world: cattle AND horses AND Bond-villain alligators? What else?