Christian

I guessed this might happen. To avoid facing criminal charges over an attempted coup, Trump has now admitted that Biden won the election and he will be stepping down at the end of his term.

I guess this was his last gasp. Try to use force to establish a dictatorship, and when that failed, he knew he had really backed himself against the wall.

-I know this might be a controversial opinion here, but I really respect Rand Paul. He’s been gaining my admiration for a few years now, and his repudiation today of certain Republicans wanting to suddenly (and with no precedent) place the power of Congress above the Constitution as regards democratic elections is laudable.

I agree with his views (not just on this issue) far more than any other Republican today and more than the majority of Democrats too. I wish he would have been elected to “shake up Washington DC” four years ago instead of Der Fuhrer.

Because it is American citizens attempting to overturn the results of the recent federal election in order to retain the current national sovereign in power.

It is insurrection (on the part of the protestors) and an attempted coup (on the part of Trump).

Great idea to release some fill-in comics for $7 (American) an issue.

Not that I put it past the comic corporations.

I wonder if maybe they were just trying to fill out their Black Label format lineup, since some of the initial announcements were delayed or canceled. Constantine is an easy character to slot in a Black Label book. Maybe Taylor’s proposal was the first one for a mini-series they received, or maybe DC was interested in working with Taylor again and this was his proposal. I’m guessing just to pad out their Black Label imprint while waiting for new titles to launch.

It’s a real tightrope walk, because it’s probably most politic to let Trump go and try to forget him. Legally going after Trump is just going to inflame these types even more.

Something, something about Hitler being in a jail cell....

The Republicans obviously failed to learn anything from the Conservatives-Monarchists in Germany thinking they could use the National Socialists for their own purposes.

Hopefully someone in a position of power is better versed in 20th century history.

God, Marx couldn’t have been more correct with his quote about history, “The first time as a tragedy, the second as farce.” He wasn’t kidding! This is the second-coming of Hitler? This is the best they could come up with for their American Hitler? Dear lord, talk about farce.

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I see George W. Bush speaking out against “reckless actions” now.
I’m sure it went, “I actually did steal an election once. No one really cared. How would you Republicans have felt if the Left did this back in 2001?”.

Man, the “mainstream” media is reporting that they expect the Republicans will be able to smooth this over and convince the protestors to give up. Yeah, like that’s all that’s going to appease these people.

The Republicans have no idea what they have unleashed, do they? They’ll get their throats torn out too.

It’s funny that Trump blundered out that the Venezuelan government rigged the election in his desperation. There you go, Republicans, look at America’s future. What’s going on currently in Venezuela. It was nice meddling in other nation’s elections and watching these nations fall apart. It won’t be so fun watching America go the way the American elite have sent countries like Venezuela.

Here’s the real way you destroy a precariously held together, rotting empire.

If you’re the Russian government, you pretend to back a tub of idiocy as president, building him up as the white Christ. In reality, you know he’s a complete buffoon and not the “great white hope” of anything except failure. You know he’s too damn stupid to realize he’s a pawn.

Trick the gullible and imperialistic corrupted Liberals in to believing that Trump is a sleeper agent for Putin. Stir the pot throughout the presidency, so that the divide between Democrats and Republicans keeps growing.

You use your dupes and cronies on the internet to build him up over four years, even though he’s a nothing president, who accomplished just about zero things, and ended up playing the puppet of the Republican establishment in reality.
So that the fascist masses who hang on every last shred of hope that they can win turn this egocentric blowhard in to their new saviour.

You know that there is pretty much no chance he’s going to get re-elected. Knowing that Trump’s ego will never allow him to admit that he lost. It must be a conspiracy, elections are all rigged! Which is perfect, because you can then whip in to a frenzy, through the internet, those masses who bought in to Trump’s cult of personality.

Watch the thin veneer of democracy crumble as the United States goes the way of the USSR. You have your revenge and achieve your strategic goals.

Don’t forget. There’s an occultist (a true believer in synarchism, see:Saint-Yves) in Russia with close ties to Putin who wrote books about how the New World Order can be defeated. It involves dividing the world up between Russia and China, leaving the “Middle East” to be shared between the two. There’s nothing about how China may feel about such a proposal. Regardless, what must happen first is that the United States must fall. He doesn’t outline how this will occur, but says that a war is completely out of the question.

Now, I’m not saying any of this is true. I have no idea. It makes the most sense for the idea of Putin to back Trump though. Russia didn’t seem to get anything out of such a deal. What was in it for Putin? Maybe a dupe who could be used to help bring about plans for the destruction of the United States.

Welcome to 2021.

I was pretty much expecting that things would continue to worsen, because hey, what else is new?

2021 couldn’t be worse than 2020? Maybe a new US civil war and later in the year a Third World War (after a total collapse of the global economy) could sweeten the pot.

People will probably be saying, “Hey, remember how peaceful 2020 was? Sure there was a horrible pandemic killing people, but we got to sit in our nice quiet homes. Sure was better than the nuclear battlefield we’re all living through in 2021!”.

All of the Karloff Mr. Wong films were included on those Mill Creek 50 DVD collections.

They were really out of place in the sets I owned because they were included in horror collections. They don’t exactly fit a horror theme.

By the way, I really liked those Karloff Mr. Wong films, even though they are terribly racially insensitive.

Do you know many oxen that are the enemies of rats?

Rat used the ox in the race version, but the ox is too friendly and kind-hearted to be angry with the rat. The ox is happy to be second because he knows he worked hard to earn his spot.

There are two versions of the myth. In one, it was a talent show for the first sign. The ox helped the rat, and the Jade Emperor rewarded the rat by making him the first sign, but also rewarded the ox for being selfless and loyal to rat by making him the second sign.

Both versions feature the rat screwing over the cat though.

No, it’s not a disreputable sign to be born in the year of the rat. It is considered that the person will be quick-witted and resourceful. It’s not seen as a negative.

Years of the rat are also seen as positive years for married people to try to conceive children.

I have no idea what actresses a Chinese person might find compelling! heh

No, there’s no tendency to see anything particularly inauspicious about the year of the rat. It’d be similar to saying with our zodiac that it’s a bad time because it’s November and we think that scorpions are frightening animals. The rat is a yang symbol, for one (which, I realize, is a bit simplistic, but still).

The rat is symbolic of cleverness and resiliency, basically. There’s a myth involving the creation of the zodiac involving the Jade Emperor and how the rat became the first sign of the zodiac, and the ox the second. It also tells why the cat will always hate the rat.

I’m not sure a Chinese person would agree with that idea.

Now I am starting Bestiary by K-Ming Chang. It’s a work of fabulism.

It tells the story of three generations of female immigrants from Taiwan, who bring the mythology of Taiwan (literally) with them to America.

The focus isn’t really on the fantastical elements though, as it blends with a story involving themes such as gay and gender fluid issues as well as racism.

Well, the main character may be transforming in to a folkloric tiger.

Was she the last member of the Gilligan’s Island cast who was still alive?

Oh wait, that was Dawn Wells. Apparently I have no idea what I’m talking about here. Dawn Wells died in the past week of Covid also.

Ah, Shelley was in Village of the Damned and Quartermass and the Pit. Both great films, indeed.

Yeah, people annoyed me with their hope shown in the ending of 2020 and the start of a new year, as if reality measured time in annual increments the same as humans. That it was just the calendar-year 2020 that was the problem with our world.

The pandemic was going to say, “Oh, it’s 2021 now, time to go away, I was only supposed to exist in 2020.”

As if negative times wouldn’t simply continue from one year to another.

The Nazi agenda continues.

Detained women at the ICE concentration camps have been reporting they were forced to undergo sterilization surgery.

https://socialism.com/fs-article/abuse-of-migrants-and-prisoners-recalls-ugly-eugenics-era/

I’m reading The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

It’s a travel book taking place in early-1970s Nepal; but also an example of nature writing, as the author hopes to search for the very rarely sighted snow leopard, and autobiographical as the author further develops his interest in Zen Buddhism.

Zing!

How many of them were able to carry their own series for Marvel?

I’ll grant you Deadpool, for some reason, has become a popular character.

Jubilee had one series, written by Robert Kirkman even, which was canceled within a year. She’s a pretty minor X-Men character now, and has been for most of the 2000s.

Gambit’s longest-running series was only 25 issues, even though it was a pretty damn good comic at the time. I’d say Gambit is similar to Cable, only a bit more interesting. His best days are long behind him. The last time he had his own book, in fact, the sales were so low that Marvel said that they weren’t going to feature in a solo comic again.

Danny Ketch was very popular in the early-1990s, but has failed to be able to maintain an ongoing series since the ‘90s.

Jessica Jones having her own series only lasted for twenty-five issues. She’s become more of a supporting character for Luke Cage now, and even he has a hard time carrying his own series in the 2010s. The last book he had (with Iron Fist) got canceled relatively quickly, even though it was well-written.

The others have never even carried their own series. Elsa Bloodstone and Marvel Boy were both only in mini-series. Elsa Bloodstone isn’t even being used by Marvel currently. Morrison’s Marvel Boy was almost forgotten really, until Al Ewing wanted to use him in Guardians of the Galaxy.

None of those, besides perhaps Deadpool, can be said to have the popularity and ability to carry long-running comics that sell, in the manner of characters created during the 1960s.

I gave it to my girlfriend to read, just for a second opinion.

I swear I did not bias her against it. I simply said, “Read this story.”

Her response to the story was, “If you like that sort of thing.”

She isn’t really a science fiction fan, but I’ve gotten her to read and she enjoyed works by Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, PKD, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler, Geoff Ryman (that one was literary fantasy)...some others. She said she wouldn’t be interested in reading any more fiction from James Corey, though she said she could see science fiction fans liking it.

I’m putting my English Lit hat on reviewing the story, by the way, because you presented it as a “literary masterpiece”. If you’d have said it was a really cool story, I would have said that, yeah, it’s pretty good.

Check out “The Robots of Eden” by Anil Menon, if you find it, for an example of new science fiction I adore.

It shows how as much as humans think they can use technology to change, that humanity will remain all-too-flawed humans.

Let me say that the Daniel Abraham story I read, “Flat Diane”, was excellent, but it’s “weird fiction” not sci-fi. It’s pretty disturbing and contains the elements that I thought were missing in “Rates of Change”.

One of the weaker stories in the anthology, to be honest, but that’s just because it’s one of the strongest anthologies ever published. When you have writers like Bruno Schultz, Jean Ray, and Michel Bernanos included it can be hard to compete.

“Rates of Change” is available online for free from Lightspeed Magazine. I’m reading it now.

I’m not impressed by it. It’s a very sci-fi type of story. It’s more about ideas than individual people’s everyday lives. That’s not really my thing.

The dialogue is pretty stiff. 

The story doesn’t have anything that makes it stand out, to make the writing unique. I feel like I could be reading a hundred different current-day sci-fi writers. What makes this author’s voice stand-out, or is he trying to read like a typical sci-fi author you’d find in a 2010s genre magazine?

The ending’s style is really overused in 2020, or whatever year this was published. It’s something that just about every literary fiction writer started using during the 1990s in the literary magazines. I’m not saying I disliked the ending, but it was like attempting to put a more literary spin on what is, at heart, a hard science fiction plot.

The story did nothing for me. It didn’t make me feel anything.

I seriously did not care if her son died. I seriously did not care about how she felt about her new body. Why was I supposed to care? They didn’t seem real enough to me within the fiction.

What is he saying about the world we live in, about the human condition? Anything of interest? If so, how is he telling us about it, in any way that is creatively or uniquely written? Because that is what makes truly great literature.

I’m not saying it’s a bad story or that he’s a bad writer, but it reads as pretty average to me. A story with some somewhat interesting ideas competently told.

It’s the type of fiction which makes me bored with the sci-fi genre, to be honest. It’s a worthy successor to 1940s-1950s sci-fi, showing how that style of science fiction has matured and grown in the past number of decades. It doesn’t compare at all to quality literary fiction.

That’s why someone like Aldiss was a great writer, because he was a great writer, not just a great science fiction writer.

I mean, some of Aldiss’ fiction just fucking wore me out while reading it. It left me feeling so depressed. You know, that’s a pretty universal feeling in the 20th/21st century. That sense of malaise with modern life.

That’s why Joyce or Camus or Ralph Ellison or Kafka or Louise Erdrich or Joyce Carol Oates are great writers, because they were great writers, not simply great genre writers.

I don’t agree about that idea.

Yes, representation was low, but at the same time, it is still a lot of white menfolk writing the fiction today too.

Greg Egan is a white, straight male; so, I’m not sure your point.

I love multi-cultural fiction, and it is certainly true that writers from different nations/cultures need to be equally considered in these conversations, which tend to revolve around American or English writers. I do not deny that.

However, just for one example, yes, Zelazny did use different cultures in his fiction. He was influenced by Joseph Campbell and world mythology. Just for example, The Eye of Cat features a Navajo man as the main character. 
Today, Zelazny would be attacked for “cultural appropriation” if he attempted to write that book. So...shrugs.

There’s also something to be said about originality and creativity. Writers who were amongst the first to do something or say something deserve a level of credit above later imitators. If someone writes a book like Joyce’s Ulysses today, it may be a very good read, but it’s still going to live in the shadow of the original...because it is no longer unique.

What writer writing today is as good a fiction writer as James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Dostoevsky, Umberto Eco, or Hermann Hesse? Because I believe they are the greatest names to ever write fiction.

I think it’s simply ludicrous to say that, for example, George Saunders is a better writer than James Joyce simply because Saunders was writing in the 2000s while Joyce died in 1941. I like Saunders, so this isn’t a knock on him. He’s just not as good a writer on a technical, stylistic, or creative level as James Joyce.

Joyce stands the test of time. If humanity is alive 100 years from now, people will still marvel at Finnegans Wake. I’m not sure how many people will care about George Saunders in 100 years.

There is universality to humanity. Just because Kafka was Jewish (or Czech, if you’d rather) doesn’t mean that he wasn’t writing about universal themes that humanity can understand.

Plus, style and techniques of writing have nothing to do with representation. Joyce did amazing things with language beyond what almost any other writer has accomplished, and it has nothing to do with being Irish or white or male or anything else. He was simply a genius, and that’s something that can be appreciated by any lover of literature around the world.

I wouldn’t exactly say that a book like Dhalgren could be read as a feminist text.

Also, Delaney had no problem being considered a New Wave writer, which was the entire argument. I know it’s not exactly equal, since New Wave stories often dealt with racism and the majority had no issues with homosexuality, but just boiling the issue down to the core.

Why bring race in to the equation? Russ was white. Besides which, Ellison, Malzberg, and Silverberg were certainly of Jewish background too, eh?

All three addressed Jewish influence in their fiction at some point and identified as Jewish people. Russ? Not so much, no.

Plus, Russ showed some gay male homophobia in her early work, even though she was progressive/transgressive with lesbianism.

She seemed to have that early-feminism “gay males are only gay because they hate women” attitude at first. I think that may be why Delaney initially reached out to her.

Anyway, even though she was just being a good critic and trying to make some changes (she did speak positively of the changes that the New Wave had been making with stodgy old outmoded sci-fi too), I never heard that Russ had a problem with any of the New Wave writers or that any of them had a problem with her (Ellison published her in Again DV), except Philip K. Dick. Apparently those two didn’t get along. She wrote a really hateful letter to PKD on his views about abortion, and the two got really argumentative. 
I’m sure modern-day “political correctness is fascism” Barry Malzberg, on the other hand, might have a different opinion. Let’s just think about New Left-supporting Barry Malzberg though.

Plus, I read some really snide remarks by Marion Zimmer Bradley about Russ too, about how she should be writing polemical political tracts and not fiction. That’s neither here nor there though.

I’m pretty sure that Hilary Bailey, Sonya Dorman, and Carol Emshwiller never had a problem being lumped in with the New Wave, even though both considered themselves feminists.

It was a style of writing, not a club. I’m sure that Keith Roberts didn’t personally get along with all the “dirty Commies” who were part of the New Wave, but he never had a problem being considered a New Wave science fiction writer.

Russ was also close friends with Delaney.

Russ was like those feminists who were part of the New Left and that decided to critique the sexism that they saw so much of with male New Left members. They still supported the goals of the New Left, but they wanted to expand those goals by pointing out some problems they experienced.

I forgot that Marvel Comics created all of those characters. The only one I remembered Marvel creating was Cable. Marvel is a lot more creative place than I even thought.

Also, almost every character you mentioned was created during the ‘80s, so I fail to see how most of them relate to a rebuttal that it’s been since during the 1980s since Marvel has created popular characters. You seemed to prove my point.

Us members of Generation X (not the comic book) were youngsters when most of those characters became popular. That’s two generations ago now. We’re a bunch of old fogies.

Punisher was still created in the 1970s, even if he didn’t become “hot” until later.

Cable was once popular, but hardly popular enough to take the place of a lot of other top Marvel characters. Cable was really popular in the early-1990s, when characters like him were very popular. He’s pretty one-dimensional outside of the truly great Darko Macan run, which sadly sold horribly. He hasn’t exactly been making any fans’ “favourite characters” lists since the mid-‘90s.

Besides which, naming one pertinent character hardly disproves a point, especially one with the qualifier of “mostly failed”.

The point is that Marvel is stuck falling back on keeping tired characters in print today, even when creators have nothing interesting to do with said characters, because they have failed to properly create enough truly popular new characters who can carry the line in place of “legacy” characters created by Stan Lee, Kirby, and Ditko generations ago.

Otherwise, they could put (say) Spider Man on the shelf for a number of years, until a creator comes along with an actual vision for that that character.

I’m sure one could make the same arguments about DC and their top-selling titles: Batman, Superman, Justice League; I don’t even want to think about DC anymore though.

I really enjoyed the second J.M. DeMatteis run on Spectacular during the late-‘90s and then the Paul Jenkins run on Peter Parker: Spider Man series.

Those were the last times that the Spider Man books felt fresh and worth reading to me.

It’s not unique to Peter Parker though. Hulk, Fantastic Four, Iron Man*, X-Men...those are all titles that have often felt in a rut for long periods of time, with flashes of resurgence occurring intermittently.

*It’s been decades since I felt Iron Man was truly relevant, during the Kurt Busiek run.

Marvel has managed to fix the problems with Hulk and X-Men currently. That’s pretty ambitious of modern-day Marvel. I don’t think they can manage to do this for more than a couple titles at a time though.

After Ewing leaves Hulk and Hickman leaves X-Men, Marvel will probably try to revitalize another character. Hopefully the dice will land on your favourite!

It’s the state of corporate comic publishing, which has mostly failed to create truly popular characters who can carry long-running titles since the 1980s, so characters who have been in continual publication since 1963 must be published solely for the sake of being published.