Peiratikos

Update: Although the posts have been deleted, the comments threads still exist. I’ve saved copies of them in case they disappear as well, though. I’ve added links to the comments threads.

Michael E, Fanboy Rampage guestblogger extraordinaire, has taken to deleting his own guestblogging posts—which, at the very least, leaves Chris Butcher’s followup post stranded in a context-free void. Alas, I was unable to rescue Michael’s second post from oblivion, but I captured his first before it disappeared. I reproduce it here:

Judd Winick doesn’t know what to do with that pesky Mia character in Green Arrow, so he’s going to have the former prostitute die of HIV, and get some MTV coverage too. It’s like a broken record. Jimmy Palmiotti did the same thing in The Monolith but got no MTV.

# posted by Michael @ 1:33 PM Comments (30)

Oh, I just noticed another deleted post I saved from oblivion:

Ande Parks, inker of Green Arrow, on the Oni Press boards:

“Aside from the obviously close-minded mentality that no doubt enables a lot of this “outrage”, what annoys me is the notion that authors ought to keep their personal agendas out of their work.

I have a word for those who keep their personal agendas out of their work… hacks. Even in a situation like Green Arrow, where the author is working with someone else’s property, what is the fucking point of it if the writer doesn’t come in with something to say? If they think Grell didn’t have an agenda, they weren’t paying attention. This is what Judd is passionate about, and passion is required to produce worthwhile art.”

# posted by Michael @ 5:53 AM Comments (14)

For some reason, about half of the search keyphrases by which people have stumbled upon Peiratikos lately are Kill Bill-related. About half of those are postmodernism in kill bill or similar, which makes me happy because I thought Kill Bill was one of the most aggressively postmodernist films I’ve ever seen (I think Quentin Tarantino probably disagrees, though).

annefranksdiary

Tragically, Anne Frank’s livejournal has been “suspended.”

tim o neil

I think you must be looking for The Hurting.

captain america mark gruenwald

I think you must be looking for Motime Like the Present.

what does the acronym marvel stand for

Machine Assisted Realization of the Virtual Electronic Library

why kids worship superheroes

Lack of prayer in the schools is my guess.

shrimp fins and scales

Remember, children, God Hates Shrimp.

bryan lee o malley

Try Radiomaru.com or Scott Pilgrim Dot Com. Then buy Scott Pilgrim and Lost at Sea. And read them.

pages are numbered

I wish.

what does the plank of a ship look like

Here’s a plank from the quarter deck of the USS Arizona.

does god care for animals?

Frankly, no.

Christopher Reeve, perhaps best known for his role in the classic Earthday Birthday, has died.

In Peter David’s new Madrox miniseries, the characters, including Jamie Madrox, talk like there’s a Jamie, and then there are a bunch of duplicate Jamies. Like at one point, Jamie says, “…last night I waffled on staying in or going out. So I sent a dupe out to have a good time for me,” as if the Jamie who stayed home last night had more claim to Madroxness than a mere “dupe.” How does this work? Are dupes mere copies who are somehow imperfect, so that it’s obvious which one is the real Jamie? Does the real Jamie have a special, intangible quality of Madroxness that the dupes lack? Or do they simply agree to arbitrarily select one of the Jamies to act as the “real” Jamie for convenience? I can see how it would get confusing if you had several separate physical bodies, with no psyhic connection between them, and every body thought of and talked about himself as “I,” and also talked about every other body as “I.” Or “we”? It’d certainly be confusing for people who had to talk to or about more than one of you at once, but it would also have to fuck with your own sense of self. Most superheroes have a dual identity, but Madrox the Multiple Man may embody the identity-based conflicts of superheroes more than any other character.

I also wonder where the X-Men get the cool t-shirts with their logos on them. Jean Grey-Summers wore a Phoenix shirt for a while in New X-Men, and now Jamie has one in Madrox. Do the X-Men have these shirts custom-made for them, or can you buy Phoenix and Multiple Man shirts at Hot Topic in the Marvel universe?

(Speaking of Hot Topic, they have a back-to-school sale on school supplies at their store right now. Hot Topic having a back-to-school sale on school supplies has got to win a Hilarity Prize.)

• “X does not a Y make” or “X a Y does not make”

  Why not? Because you sound like a pretentious asshole. Also because you probably sound stupid, because it’s very hard to get the meter of the sentence right. “Illiteracy does not make a good electorate” sounds fine, “Illiteracy does not a good electorate make” is clunky and clumsy.

  Exception: You’re Richard Lovelace.

• “Methinks”

  Why not? Because you sound like a pretentious asshole. Alternately, because maybe you think it’s funny to talk like a pirate for no good reason, but it’s actually not.

  Exception: You’re really a pirate.

• “Pot, meet kettle” and other glib rephrasings of cliches

  Why not? Because you sound like you’re try way too hard to be clever, but everybody can tell you’re not really clever.

  Exception: The Black Adder theme song.

Discovered in our comments queue, awaiting approval to be posted on the blog:

Brief History Of Linux (#13)
Wanted: Eunuchs programmers

Everything you know about the creation of the Unix operating system is wrong. We have uncovered the truth: Unix was a conspiracy hatched by Ritchie and Thompson to thwart the AT&T monopoly that they worked for. The system, code-named EUNUCHS (Electronic UNtrustworthy User-Condemning Horrible System), was horribly conceived, just as they had planned.

The OS, quickly renamed to a more respectable “Unix,” was adopted first by Ma Bell????????s Patent Department and then by the rest of the monopoly. AT&T saw an inexpensive, multi-user, portable operating system that it had all rights to; the authors, however, saw a horrible, multi-crashing system that the Evil Ma Bell Empire would become hopelessly dependent on. AT&T would go bankrupt trying to maintain the system and eventually collapse.

That didn????????t happen. Ritchie and Thompson were too talented to create a crappy operating system; no matter how hard they tried the system was too good. Their last ditch effort to sabotage the system by recoding it obfuscated C was unsuccessful. Before long Unix spread outside of Bell Labs and their conspiracy collapsed.

Rose and I are moving tomorrow, and we won’t have Internet access in our new apartment until Monday at the earliest, so the posting forecast for this weekend and next week is light to nonexistent. Stay tuned for a series of posts about Minicomics You Should Be Reading, though.

New and Improved URL Structure

We’ve cleaned up the URLs a little.

• /archive/ is now /archives/
• /archive/category/ is now /categories/
• /archive/citation/ is now /citations/

Old URLs will redirect to new URLs, so old links won’t be broken. (By the way, there is now an archive of recent comments as well..)

Site Feeds

All of our RSS feeds are being discontinued. All site feeds now use Atom.

The new feeds are:

• Blog: Recent posts except for linkblog posts
• Linkblog (Goto): Recent linkblog posts
• Recent Comments

The RSS feed URLs still work, but the feeds are frozen.

We were having database problems this morning, but apparently they’ved cleared up. I haven’t heard from our hosting service at all, but I think the problem was insufficient disk space for database storage. Be prepared for more downtime!

Occasionally I take a look at the search engine keyphrases that bring people to Peiratikos and find some that I just have to share!

• you and i have unfinished business
• spreewald pickles
• neilalien nick cave
• freudian comics
• ethics for kids
• herodotus goes to hollywood
• righteous indignation in literature
• is the snake in the garden the link between man and animal
• marquis de sade blog
• fantasy art gorilla
• comics with metaphors in them
• a ballpoint banana batman
• what does the acronym marvel stand for?
• i hate work
• become a real life batman

It just goes on and on! I hope you all found what you were looking for, folks.