* Jason Leivian of Floating World Comics interviews Benjamin Marra of Night Business and Gangsta Rap Posse infamy for The Comics Journal. Why is it that Ben’s broad-strokes dismissal of literary comics comes across as charming and sincere while every other “blah blah boring autobio artcomics blah blah blah” person comes across like a giant tool? (Via Traditional Comics.)
* I wish there were a way to subscribe to all of Vice‘s comics-related content in a separate RSS feed, rather than wade through god knows how many pictures of beheaded goats, blood- and feces-stained restrooms, and slatternly drunk people to get to it. As it stands I’ll just click over once and a while and power through to get to the comicsy stuff. For example:
* Here’s one of Nick Gazin’s review rampages, this one featuring photos of topless women for some reason. Featured books include Hot Potatoe, Night Business, City-Hunter, The High Soft Lisp, Almost Silent, The Unwritten, Young Liars and more. As usual it’s written in the voice of your friend’s older brother who wore a lot of denim and listened to Motorhead.
* Here are some jam comics by Gazin and Johnny Ryan. Sample quote: “Ha ha, your shit died of AIDS!”
* Best for last: A new Boy’s Club comic by Matt Furie! Nobody does it better.
* Still at Vice but not comics-related, Chris O’Neill talks to Internet/virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier about his Web 2.0 skepticism, as expressed in his book You Are Not a Gadget, which I keep going on about but still haven’t read. Here are a couple of passages that struck me:
As an example, right now there are a lot of software designs that have a tendency to put people in a situation where they happen to get mean. Because people act in an anonymous way, they are without consequences and so aggregate into mob-like tendencies very easily. One example of poor design which brings out the worst in people is the anonymous postings beneath YouTube videos. We’re seeing these specific designs — not the web as a whole — tending to create a profound split where people only talk to their kind, becoming ever more confrontational and ever more dysfunctional. I don’t think such designs are good, they promote meanness and they cause damage on a very significant scale.
I don’t know why I never thought of the Internet’s anonymity-based structure as a conscious choice with the negative repercussions I see every day in Robot 6 comment threads, but there you have it. Lanier also talks about how David Bowie would be impossible today, which is worth noting.
* Jeeeeeesus, has everyone been reading the serialization of What Am I Doing Here? by Abner Dean at What Things Do? Look at this! Please, someone put this back in print.
* Zak Smith’s journey through the Monster Manual has taken him up to G. Sample quote:
Frost giants are extraordinarily metal, and being metal is always good.Interestingly, slaying frost giants is also metal–even more metal than being a frost giant. And therein lies a great insight into the nature of metal.
* I’ll be discussing Todd VanDerWerff’s Lost review/recap at greater length in my own Lost thoughts comment thread, I think, but here it is for now.
I’m reading You Are Not a Gadget at the mo’. It’s a bit scattershot, and quite a few of the arguments need fleshing out, but as a direction of travel its interesting stuff.
Lanier doesn’t come out entirely against internet anonymity, and spends some time considering how it could be made to work better and with less detrimental effects (assuming of course that you believe that it has detrimental effects).
Personally that section brought up all sorts of conflicting feelings. I’ve been semi-anonymous* on the Internet for years now and while I can see definite benefits I can see the cons too. But the complexity of the arguments aside it’s just bloody hard to decloak on a comics blog when you know that your real identity could easily be traced back to things you might not want people tracing it back to. I revealed things on Barbelith that I don’t want associated with my name in the public sphere because they were the sort of thing I don’t want just anyone to know about me. My friends? Fine, a number of them were ‘lithers anyway – my employers, my acquaintances, internet weirdos, some members of my family? Not so fine.
My very own personal example of lock-in.
*I say semi because my screen name remained consistent on Barbelith for many years, which meant that I had a history against which I could be understood and judged and I wanted it that way
I totally agree with Zom above. In addition, I’m about to finish my degree soon enough and I discovered recently that employers regularly Google their applicants to see whether there’s anything unsavoury (for lack of a better word) about them. I think internet anonymity is really important that way.
Also, my family has googled me many times.