Empowered

I recently had the opportunity to read Empowered, which was not only surprisingly good, but better than I thought (I had heard good things about it). What I expected was, as TvTropes puts it, a "graphic novel series starring a Damsel in Distress-prone heroine named 'Empowered.' Contains heavy deconstruction of the Super Hero genre, with healthy doses of bondage, Fanservice, and comedy."

What I found was... well pretty much what the above says. The fanservice was a bit too pronounced for my taste, and Emp getting trussed up a lot early on wasn't all that sexy because... well, onto the unexpected.

The characters are great. While they all run off of assorted superhero sterotypes, all of them have unique, interesting, strong personalities. Some of them I sympathize with, and root for (Empowered, Ninjette, etc.). Some of them I look up to in awe and admiration (Mindf**k, Maid Man, etc.). Some of them I want to club with a hammer... repeatedly (Captain Havok, most of the jerkass supers, and sometimes Sista Spooky). One of them is terrifying and wrong and scary (and doesn't play by the rules).

This is why Emp getting tied up isn't all that sexy. She might be an idealistically beautiful woman wearing (well-placed) tatters of a skin-adhering body-suit, but it's hard to enjoy the fanservicey nature of her predicament when you care for Emp so much. Thus stripperific bondage =/= sexy. Instead stripperific bondage = feeling sorry for Emp. She's far too sympathetic and complex a character to objectify. Well, I'd rather not objectify her, anyway.

Anyway, concerning the characters, it is important to note that they are not one-sided. Aside from Captain Havok, who enjoys my vehement and eternal contempt, most of the other nasty characters have their own internal problems, and are just expressing them worse than the nicer characters, with their own emotional problems flaws. I can only think of a few characters who are simple, but I would not complain about their purity of essence (Go Maid Man!). Even the minions are hard to objectify.

Which brings me to the next point - the story of the novels doesn't really pertain that much to the actual action. Instead, most of the story deals with characters' feelings. Think Neon Genesis Evangelion, but without the constantly feeling horrible bit. Often the battles are skipped, with Empowered assumably losing and getting captured, and instead there is the emotional abuse from other characters, interaction with and responses from friends, etc.

With that in mind, the story is really about Empowered's personal growth... and boy is there a lot of it. Empowered starts out with freshly shattered dreams to go with a shattered self-esteem, and from there she struggles upwards, with the help of her friends. This is all managed well, with an exception to be noted later.

Empowered also has heavy, heavy Cerebus Syndrome. The first three volumes are fairly comedic, but then the fourth one has heavy drama, and by the end of the fifth one I was outright crying. A well-done romance has something to do with that.

Empowered also gets better. If I had just read the first volume, I would have thought Empowered was pretty decent for what it does, and leave it at that. Fortunately, I had a healthy list of recommendation, and I pushed onward. By the second volume, I was starting to enjoy the tale, and by the third I approved heartily. But the fourth and fifth volumes are why I'm spieling about it. I don't go and write here about just any little comic, you know.

Other things to note:

Mindf**k and Maid Man are new role models for me. Mindf**k gets to hang out with Nausicaa and other characters who influenced my development. Maid Man is an all around good guy.

The setting is fairly interesting, in and of itself. There are Unwritten Rules to behavior, so nothing truly bad happens to Empowered (breaking the unwritten rules by, say, unnecessarily sexually molesting Emp would bring down the wrath of every superhero, which is a decent deterent same with killing her.). The whole way the world is adjusted to the existence of superheroes is rather interesting. A lot of characters, especially the unpowered ones and minions have interesting takes on the superheros and villains. There are a lot of little tidbits about how the world works, that are quite interesting. Emp finds out that all three superheros she is working with all became superheros after contracting super-natural STDs - she finds this coincidence weird, and then finds out that they first met at a super-natural STD support group. Some of the characters previously posed as Witless Minions, manipulating the system to steal their employer's valuables and blame it on the heroes.

Also interesting is the effect when certain characters break the Unwritten Rules. It's... impressive. And horrific.

I do have issue with a few things, though. Emp's boyfriend is perhaps not the best role model for building self-esteem. While he's a fine guy otherwise, in terms of boyfriendness... he deals with Emp's low self-esteem in a (fanservice-y) way I do not approve of (I'm much more part of the Mindf**k school of romance). Also related is his unrealistic sex with Emp - he apparently follows the hentai school of sex. I suppose part of this is that I gave up on the pornographic aspect of the series, and consequently find the carefully-placed speech bubbles more amusing.

Going on from there, I love the Caged Demonwolf's imagined rendition of Emp's sex with her boyfriend. Which one of the other characters uses for smut, apparently. Heck, the fact that Emp still reads yaoi superhero slash fanfiction (occasionally even starring her teammates) amuses me to no end.

Also, both Emp and her boyfriend are ridiculously/idealistically physically attractive. While the power of body-image issues are profound, I always find Emp's problems a bit strange. That said, they do live in a world where nearly everyone manages a ideal body-shape, with few exceptions, so I suppose it's not that strange? Dunno. I understand why Emp is a Hot Blonde, comercially speaking, and I can see Spookum's problem with her.

Anyway, it is a good series, assuming you are okay with everything-short-of-nudity and occasional objectifying shots. There's good content there. I recommend it.

Nil's Sinister Objectives

In no particular order:

1. Obliterate the subjective and the unknown.

2. Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

3. Create a synthetic life-form with conscious evolution to replace humanity.

The Shape of Things

So this evening I went out with Rachel to see a play. She needed to write a critical analysis of a play, and I thought it would be nice to go out with her to a play.

So. Play.

The play's name is "The Shape of Things." From here on out there are massive spoilers that pretty much ruin the play, so if you plan on seeing it, go see it. It's pretty good. And stop reading here.

The play starts out with a young lady stepping over the cord to get closer to a statue. The security guard asks there to step back over, and they have a conversation. She's apparently planning on spray-painting a penis on the statue, as the original penis was plastered over with fig leaves, due to complaints about the nudity. She's an art student.

He doesn't really try to stop her, and gets her phone number, and when his shift is up, he heads off and she presumably spraypaints on the statue.

They get together, and start dating. He starts losing weight for her, changes his hair. Two friends of his are introduced, another young lady and her fiancee, said fiancee being the guy's former roommate and best bud.

Over time, he changes more - stops biting his nails, starts wearing contact lenses instead of glasses, dresses differently, and has his nose modified. He keeps a diary of this all - the decreasing weight, and all various changes.

His best bud's fiancee has had a long-time crush on him, and with him getting cuter by the day, she winds up kissing him and going out to the woods (and then implied sex, apparently).

The young lady confesses kissing him to her fiancee, who talks with the guy's girlfriend, who kisses said fiancee to get back at the other two.

She brings up all of this when the young lady, herself, and the guy go get coffee at a Starbucks together. The young lady goes away almost in tears, and the guy is mad at her. He doesn't want to break up with her, and asks what she wants. She asks him to break all contact with them, giving them no explanation, if he wants to stay with her like he says. He agrees.

The next scene is them at the thesis presentation for the artist girl. The guy runs into his former best bud, and the other girl, who have broken up by this point. They all sit separately.

The Artist girl goes to present her thesis work, and it turns out her presentation, her "sculpture thingie" as she previously referred to it, is her boyfriend, who has proposed to her by this point. She has sculpted him from being pathetic and undesirable into being much "better" by society's standards, using the tools of persuasion and desire, though always leaving the choice up to him. She has improved him cosmetically, and modified all of his relationships. Her entire relationship with him over the semester was all a lie to sculpt him into a different person.

He is outraged, and comes to her after the presentation, and they have an argument over the morality of her actions. To her, everything he did was his own choice - he had chosen to lose weight, he had chosen to abandon his friends for her. To him, he thought that she was completely and horribly unethical, in the deceit of the relationship. But in her eyes, the relationship was real - for him. And the choices he had made, he had made honestly, though perhaps a bit misinformed.

He asks of anything was true, and she says that none of it was true. As she leaves, she tells him that one time, while they were sleeping together, one of the things she had said was true (they both know, though the audience doesn't). He goes to the videos of them in bed (part of the exhibition), and finds the part, playing it over and over, biting his nails and munching on the cookies provided at the exhibit, crying as the lights dim and the play ends.

A number of things concerning this. First, the lady considers what she is doing as amoral. Not moral, not immoral, but rather because she was doing art, the normal rules don't apply. Adam, the guy, when he finds out, finds it morally abhorrent.

Second, the question of subjectivity. It's mentioned quite a bit in the play, and comes up quite large in the conclusion, as the art lady and the guy have been living very different versions of life, and have very different views on things. Was his relationship true? - It certainly had effects on his life.

Third, there is a question of value - what is better, and what is worse, and how it matters. the art lady is apparently quite aware how subjective her changes for the "better" are. But, as she notes rather bitterly during the presentation, as he became better-looking and more self-confident, he also started having more questionable behavior. Getting it on with his best friend's fiancee being a major case in point here. Additionally, at the end of the play, the main character says that he liked who he was, even if he wasn't as "good" then as now. His friend, somewhat earlier in the play, remarks on how his friend is acting more like him, and how the ying-yang of the two doesn't work anymore - he liked the guy for being wildly different from himself.

This provoked interesting conversations after the play, of course, but that's for a different time.

I found it very good, provoking me both emotionally and intellectually.

The government probably isn't listening to your cellphone.

So I recently (in my informatics class) ran across the amount of data that was sent via cell-phones last year (2008). Roughly 15 exabytes.

What is an exabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) petabytes.

What is a petabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) terabytes.

What is a terabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) gigabytes... which is still a billion bytes, each of which is eight bits.

For scale: If they finally convert the library of congress scans into text, the entire Library of Congress (today) would fit on roughly 10 terabytes. Which puts the amount of information conveyed over cell-phones to be one hundred thousand Libraries of Congress.

So can the government go through all that? Sure. Can they go through it in any meaningful way?

Hell no.

NEEDS MORE PIG CANNON!

So I went and saw District 9. I recommend it for everyone. It is not perfect, but it is very, very good in several distinct areas.

Social commentary: One way to put District 9 is "Apartheid with Aliens." It doesn't stop here, though - what happens in the movie are a series of situations that happen in many parts of the world. As a Global Studies major, I recognized a lot of the interactions between slum dwellers and the government. Or them and the people exploiting them. Very much a universal message, though most people do their best to ignore slums and/or xenophobia. The whole first third of the movie is paradise for this. Some of the things that happens are truly horrific. I didn't see anything that humans haven't done to other humans.

Carnage/hilarity/crazy-cool: It's a very, very sobering movie, but sometimes... people explode. Or there is the pig cannon (that must become a meme). And there are so many Really Cool Things...

Characterization/character change: Wikus is, perhaps, one of the most interesting characters I have watched. Very interesting choice for a main character. Over the course of the story, there is much character change/rejection-of-change, and even if most of the character change (or lack of change) is Wikus based... it's still great. Not all the characters change, but some a very intense. A particular man who stays seated, for instance.

Paradigm-changing: Most aliens visiting earth have shiney technology, advanced intellect, and tend to generally have halos. District 9 aliens... not so much. You'll have to see it.

Suspenseful: In hindsight, the movie makes a lot of sense. But during the movie, there's a lot of mystery, and I really had no idea where it was going. Stuff goes down, and it puts people on the edge of their seats, straining to watch what happens next. So please avoid plot summaries, please avoid TvTropes - watch the movie first. Like as soon as you can.

So watch District 9. It's a good movie for people who are not children. If you live in the new BHC, talk to me about it - I plan on watching it again in theaters.

Self confidence and London.

I mentioned on the sad blog recently (amid the crushing of my self-esteem) that my self-confidence and self-esteem were at their highest by the end of the London trip.

I was going to elaborate that as a tie-in to a much longer post complaining about how my mother insults me nearly continuously, but I figured that while the majority of the post was negative, that this bit was positive, and shouldn't be on the sad blog.

So why was my self-confidence and self-esteem so high after London? Readers of my sad-blog know that half-way through the trip I was whining about how I felt distanced from both my fellow ASU students and from the general Londoner population (with the merry exceptions of Joefish and Slightfoxing, who were a pleasure to meet).

Well, first off, I proved that I could be successful. I survived and (with the exception of what probably was swine flu) stayed healthy. I got kind of down because of not being accepted at my original job placement, and then later being dismissed from my second job placement, but in the third one... things worked out. And that was the last one, too, so that left the strongest impression.

How did things work out? Well, the tasks were readily defined (as opposed to the school, where I had basically no instruction on what to do), and I could do them, so I did them. Turns out that I am a pretty hard worker - all I was doing was mostly mindless busywork, but... hmm...

Did I ever mention why I like fighting games (the Tekken, SSBM, Virtua Fighter sort)? It's not because I am particularly bloodthirsty, or have anywhere near the motor-memory or fine-motor control to be effective at them. Instead, it is a pursuit of perfection. Every time I play, I try to optimise my techniques, fiddle with the balance of what I do, and pursue a state of empty mind (mushin, if you will).

Doing rote tasks at work is much the same, particularly if they are repetitive. Each time I find a website to write down the contact info from, I try to improve on it, given the inefficiencies from last time. Finding out the most likely places to get the appropriate information, figuring out which sites are promising enough to search for other sites via their links... balancing detail and time spent hunting through the website with the benefits of simply going to the next website. With each iteration, I try to improve the rote algorithms of how to react to a website, doing it fast, doing it better.

Additionally, I hunt for other ways of doing things. Better ways. We have a database of email addresses to email out to people, and we would mail 60 at a time - as we selected them off of the worksheet, we looked them over for duplicates, which slowed the selecting. So I went online, as found a series of excel formulas that I could use to eliminate duplicates (shrinking the registry by over a thousand addresses), searching for common email address misspellings (yahooo.com is a common one, as is anything with a double letter, it seems), searching for two addresses put in the same entry, searching for non-email address characters, eliminating all spaces in front or behind words, standardizing everything to lowercase, and even searching for addresses which did not have an @ sign, which required some out-of-the-box usage of excel's tools. All of this was via search functions and excel formulas, meaning that I could apply them quickly on the several-thousand-entry data base.
Naturally, this task was not without the same sort of optimization as everything else. For emailing outwards, I found it was more efficient to open a dozen messages, then copy and paste the same subject line to each one, and correct the message for each one, etc, rather than doing all the changes to each message one message at a time.

This sort of stuff I could take pride in, and my bosses were apparently pleased with it all. Turns out that mindless drudgery is only mindless drudgery if you don't constantly hunt improvements. If I do wind up flipping burgers, I'm pretty sure I could seek to optimise a balance of speed and quality, and spend my mental energies improving my technique.

Not only that, but at work people did appreciate me, did compliment me on doing well, etc.

Onwards to reasons other than work, London was a pretty cool place to be, and I greatly enjoyed the museums and performances, and the sights.

Additionally, while I was in London, I had enough time outside of work to design my own creative stuff. I made at least two game-design blog-posts while I was there (viewable on earlier happy-blogs, specifically the one on designing a new fighting game, and designing a new space piloting game, both of which showcase my desire for horribly complex game design). I started designing a DnD campaign, though that eventually had to pause due to my lack of ability to test the game mechanics I was designing.

Also in London, I got to see Joefish and Slightfoxing, as awesome as previously mentioned.

On a more personal front, I managed to sort out things romanically, and the result was much better than I feared it would be. Down-right good, given the circumstances.

And then, after my internship ended, I went to France, and stated with Bubble B and her family. Turns out everyone likes me. Her family thinks that I am well-mannered, well-raised, kind, trustworthy, and perhaps other descriptions that I cannot think of off the top of my head. And going around Paris with Bubble B was a delightful pleasure, naturally.

And then, as I was coming home, I had a visit to Toshiko to look forward to, as well as Krystalangel coming to visit for a week. Plus DnD on Sundays with Alec, and being in the same timezone as most of my friends.

So I got off the plane pretty happy, pretty hopeful, and pretty confident in my abilities. In fact, while I normally sink into being miserable within the first few hours of interacting with my mother, this time I lasted all the way from getting back Tuesday night until breaking down and crying on the following Friday. (This is still the happy blog. That was a statement showing just how good I was feeling when I got back. The story of that all goes in the sad blog.)

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now. Time to go help mother with whatever she wants me to help her with.

Movies on a Plane

I watched three movies on the way over the Atlantic (Traveling from London to Calgary, as it were).

Watchmen was pretty good. My version was censored, so I didn't get to see the vaunted Big Blue Penis. Other than that, I thought it was well done, though I wish that the hero-types didn't occasionally kick people completely accross rooms with... strength they are not supposed to have. Ozymandias, I can see. He's supposed to be the absolute peak of physical conditioning, to the point of being unnatural - the other ones? Not so much. Also, the second Nite Hawk was too slim. C'Mon, he's supposed to be a bit overweight. I liked him like that.

Push was... meh. I have to say that it was a pretty decent movie. It has a complicated plot, the characters are okay, and the special effects are pretty cool. But the thing that really drives me up the wall is how much potencial the setting has. I wouldn't be surprised if there are fan-fics that are better than the movie. Hell, I'd write a fan-fic set in the same setting. Not because the movie was actually good--it's just decent--but because the setting is open to so many possiblities. It's like someone wrote a mediocre plot, with mediocre characters, and then handed the setting creation to someone like me. Someone who was given the needs of the plot, and went crazy with creating a flavorful and world-comprehensive setting.

Coraline was really good. I liked it a lot. Started out a bit slow, but after the first few minutes (I'd mark it as about when she meets the circus man, and then the two old ladies, a bit later) it starts going all kinds of cool. Reminds me of Psychonauts a lot. That's a good thing. You should see the movie.