So... Three years after being introduced with much fanfare, Batwoman finally gets her own feature (and cover) in this week's Detective Comics. For the character who is supposedly DC's most prominent gay character, her profile has been extremely low. Heck, Obsidian gets more panel time. Not to mention Renee Montoya, who has assumed the identity of The Question, is a much better-established lesbian character. Then again, she gets the back-up feature in Detective, which they might as well name Lesbian Comics. It is Pride week, after all.

I'd be thrilled with all of this, except that after years of Batwoman making cameos and being Montoya's damsel in distress more often than anything else, what do we get when Batwoman takes center stage? Do we see the strong character hinted at from time to time? I mean, really, it takes some guts to assume the Batman's symbol, even when he's MIA.

No, we don't. Apparently Kate Kane is from a military family, and her father, whom she addresses as "sir", is supplying her and monitoring her during her superhero adventures. And to top it off, what is driving her? Her feelings as a victim from that time when the followers of the Crime Bible ran a sword through her near the end of "52".

I was hoping to see a strong, self-made woman. An analogue to Batman. I did not want to see some girl running missions for her dad and freaking out over having been a victim two years ago.

What a disappointment.

Tags: batman, batwoman, comics, dc, reviews, women in comics
Current Mood: disappointed

Do they not get that the absolute *worst* thing that we could do is put our fingerprints all over the Iranian uprising? Right now it's a totally home-grown operation no matter how much the clerics point fingers at us and the U.K., and everyone knows it. Us jumping up and down about what's going on over there will do nothing to help the protesters (because seriously, we're not going to send in the army or anything). What it will do is undercut the legitimacy of what's going on over there.

Aren't republicans supposed to be the party of responsibility? Let the Iranians have their own revolution. They're doing a pretty damn good job so far, so unless there's a point where they're going to fail *and* we can somehow stop it, leave them to it! How much more powerful will it be if the Islamic Republic changes from within rather than having us go fuck it up like Afghanistan and Iraq?

Tags: republicans, stupidity, wtf

So I gave in and got a twitter account, in the wake of dwineman (an old college friend who now has hundreds of followers on twitter) visiting a few weeks ago. I find myself inexplicably fascinated by it, especially since concise statements are not my forté. Also, I've given up pretending to dissociate "ixat_totep" from my real identity since

1. I keep wanting to refer other random people on the internet to bits of comic book writing I've done here, and...
2. I make a point not to say anything all that horrible in public here anyway. Certainly nothing a dedicated person couldn't find out about me with only a small amount of effort anyway.

So go, look up "ixat_totep" on twitter. You can find out my real name! Aren't you excited?!

Tags: intarwebs 2.0

OK, so Safari 4 runs Yahoo mail so much drastically better than Firefox that I think I'll keep it for at least that. But there is no easy way to just add different search engines to the search bar. On Firefox this is trivial. I don't do plugins as a general rule. I get them for major things (like Firebug for debugging web apps). But I don't go for the "let's redo your whole UI in some crazy new way" ones. I like to fix small things, and only those things. Trying to find a way to add search engines led to a maze of plugins, some of which take over the whole known universe, and many of which aren't up to speed with 4 beta yet. And the one that looks best will only support 4 beta on Leopard, which I don't have and have no particular interest investing time and money in. Not until a lot more crap refuses to install than a lousy plugin.

How can Safari get this essential thing wrong? Google must be paying them to not allow anything else without hacks, I suppose. Idiots. Until they fix this or take the Google Chrome approach to the address bar I won't be adopting this in full.

But damn does Yahoo mail ever fly in this thing.

Tags: browser wars
Current Location: computer desk
Current Mood: annoyed

So... Apple has very wisely decided to take advantage of Google's absurdly slow progress on Chrome for Mac OS to put out the Safari 4 beta, which blatantly appropriates as much of Chrome's feature set as possible. It also implements

It's an obvious strategy and one I'm happy to reward. I've flirted off and on with Safari over the years- it looks very nice and loads much faster than Firefox, but I've had trouble getting it to work with Yahoo mail which is a dealbreaker for me- for a while Yahoo complained about it (not Safari's fault) and then more recently would load fine, but would balk when I tried to reply to a message (no, I have no idea why either- didn't bother to investigate, just went back to Firefox).

But Firefox 3 has had some problems on my machine at work (which is Windows, but still it makes me distrustful of upgrading) and it just sucks up ram and gradually slows to a crawl if I leave Yahoo Mail open on Firefox 2 on my Mac. However, so far Safari 4 seems to work much better with Yahoo Mail than Safari 3, and is far more responsive than Firefox of either version. We'll see how well that holds up after a couple of days of running, but I'm encouraged.

Plus it apparently implements the drag-a-tab-to-create-a-new-window feature I wanted a few posts ago. Yay!

Tags: browser wars

I have decided to start drinking absinthe. I purchased a bottle of Emile Pernot Vieux Pontarlier at my favorite local wine/liquor store (http://www.swirloncastro.com/ but watch out the site plays music- it also makes it look like they only have wine, but they have quite a bit else) and am currently enjoying my first glass (louched with chilled Evian water, because the stuff out of my tap tastes like metals that are almost certainly unhealthy, and unquestionably spoil the taste of anything- I've started brewing tea with it only post-Brita filter).

Anyway, it's quite nice. And a nice compliment to my other recently acquired pretentious beverage habit, Chartreuse. The Vieux Pontarlier is sufficiently good that it does not require a sugar cube, although I've heard it's quite good that way as well- I'll try it as soon as I get around to getting some sugar cubes. But without sugar its both bitter and sweet simultaneously, which I find intriguing. I'm not quite sure I'm ready to go all out and buy the proper glasses, spoons and a louching fountain (a squeeze-bottle of water works quite well). So perhaps it's only at +1 level for now.

But I've been looking for something to sip on in the evenings when it's too late for caffeinated tea and I'm not in the mood for herbal tea. Both absinthe and Chartreuse are interesting and complex enough to savor (really, gin should be as well, but I've gotten so used to it that I tend to knock it back too quickly- I'm not trying to get drunk here, or at least not very). For whatever reason, while I enjoy wine I've never really become enamoured with it. A friend who visited recently, upon noticing the absinthe display in the window Swirl on Castro with the fountain, glasses, slotted spoons, sugar cubes and elaborate bottles, declared absinthe a fetishist's drink. I can work with that ;-)

Tags: absinthe

http://hoodedutilitarian.blogspot.com/2009/03/stop-hating-on-laurie-juspeczyk-female.html

does an excellent job of explaining why Laurie is a strong and interesting character in the comic, and in the process demonstrates just how badly the movie treated her. This just adds to my feeling that the deep flaws in the movie had nothing to do with big changes, subplots cut, or even the use of exact dialog/narration/visual quotes. The flaws were all in the relentless omission or smoothing over of the fine details that linked things together and gave the book its true depth. And Moore's right- you really can't film that. Certainly not in a just under 3 hour movie.

OK, when you run an issue of people reacting to a major event, it's customary to do so *AFTER* the major event has been printed. ( Read more... )

Tags: comics, dc, justice league, reviews
Current Mood: WTF

OK, I have a longstanding browser feature request, but maybe someone out there knows a browser that already does this, or knows that Firefox does this and can tell me where the blasted option is since I certainly can't find it.

I frequently want to take a particular tab from a window where I've got a billion tabs open, and pull that one tab out into a new window. Usually for one of two reasons- either I want to compare it side-by-side to something in another tab, or I want to start a new bunch of tabs centered around the one I want to pull into a new window.

And yes, I frequently either forget to open things in new windows, or more often only want it in a new window later. And a lot of times, the tab in question would take a long time to reload, and might not come back at all (comics.org being my depressingly canonical example of this, although it's been better ever since we blocked cover image leeching).

Anyway, anyone know a browser that does this? And if it's Google Chrome I don't care because those jerks can't be bothered to support MacOS. So yes, Mac-friendly browsers only, please.

Tags: browser wars

"It seems to be that things that were meant satirically or critically
in Watchmen now seem to be simply accepted as kind of what they appear
to be on the surface."
-Alan Moore

(by way of a mailing list, so sadly I don't know where/when this first appeared)