Month: July 2014

Awesome female characters: an addendum

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

This was gonna get scheduled for later this afternoon, but the post I wanted to write this morning sort of fell apart in the writing, so I’ll do it now.  I totally forgot somebody yesterday:

Unknown11.  Helen Parr/Elastigirl (THE INCREDIBLES)

The Incredibles is one of my favorite movies, and the announcement that it’s finally, finally getting a sequel caused no end of glee around here.  I still can’t figure out how making it didn’t cause Marvel to sue the hell out of Pixar, who wasn’t owned by Disney yet in 2004, because it’s transparently a rip-off of the Fantastic Four, only they made the Human Torch a baby and brought in the Flash instead.  I mean, hell, their daughter combines invisibility and force fields as her powers.  Those two things do not naturally go together!  Give me a break, here!

Whatever; it’s the best Fantastic Four movie ever made, so I don’t care.  But this is supposed to be about Elastigirl.  She’s got the second-best moment in the movie.  For the first, oh, third to half of the film or so, she’s kind of portrayed as a wet rag, content to blend in and have a home life and just be quiet, and other than her desire to be rooted for once in their lives she’s kind of a naggy, boring sort of character.  She’s a soccer mom.  Soccer moms aren’t supposed to be interesting.

And then she discovers that Bob is off on an island somewhere, and she decides to go after him.  And her kids sneak on board the plane with her, and she finds them– just after deciding that maybe she needs to have that superhero costume on after all.

(Goes and looks)  Oh, hell, it’s on YouTube:

I love, love, love this moment.  She’s literally talking to her babysitter at the beginning of the clip.  Full Mom mode.  Then she notices the missiles, and bam.  The superhero in her takes over like it’s a goddamned second personality, and for the rest of the movie Helen Parr is a ninja.  You really have no idea what she’s all about until this point in the movie; you’ve seen her flirt with Bob for a few minutes at the very beginning of the movie and then next to nothing until now, when you suddenly figure out that not only is she really is the Mr. Fantastic of the family– she’s the smart one, too, and there is a ton of stuff that she’s better at than her husband.

I kinda wish the clip started about a minute earlier and ended about a minute later, after she’s explained to her kids exactly how they’re going to survive the mess they’ve found themselves in– because the integration of the “mom” personality into the “superhero” personality is really interesting– but god do I love this character.

And, yeah, second favorite moment.  The fifth through seventh seconds of this clip are my favorite moment in the movie:


(Also: I don’t remember who suggested Veronica Mars, but I totally should have included her, too.  I thought about Sarah Connor but I already had Ripley, and they struck me as real similar, so I just kept Ripley.  Also, Starbuck.)

Not quite a reblog

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading1 Comment

This article from IO9, 21 Books that Changed Science Fiction and Fantasy Forever, is well worth a read.  Well enough that I’m recommending it here and not on Twitter, where no one will notice.  I’m not sure I agree with every single pick, but that’s what makes these fun.

I own Dhalgren.  Sooner or later, I will read it.

10 awesome fictional females

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized23 Comments

I think I’ve stolen this idea from someone, but I’ve been kicking it around in my head for over a month now and have completely lost where it came from.  Despite thinking about it for a month, I’m still pretty sure I’ve forgotten about someone.

This list is in no particular order.

1.  Leia Organa, STAR WARS18lr3b0ga56o5jpg

This will surprise no one, and shouldn’t.  And no, not because of the slave bikini.  Okay, maybe a little because of the slave bikini.  Honestly, the Leia of the later Star Wars books has always been more interesting to me than the Leia of the movies, because they move away from “Princess” Leia and more into “uber-competent intergalactic diplomat, badass Jedi grandmother Leia” who is way more interesting.  Rhundi from The Benevolence Chronicles is at least a little bit based on this later Leia, although Rhundi is less of a politician than Leia is.

92.  Ellen Ripley, ALIEN franchise

Also from the “should surprise no one” category, and in fact the first name I came up with when writing this.  Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley should have killed the idea that women can’t carry action films stone cold goddamned dead after Aliens.  She was even good in the bad Alien franchise movies.

Honorable mention here goes to Dana Barrett from Ghostbusters, which is actually my favorite movie with Sigourney Weaver in it, and Gwen DiMarco from Galaxy Quest, which is probably Weaver’s most underrated role.  But Ripley is easily her most iconic and her best role, and certainly her best character.

willow06013.  Buffy Summers and Willow Rosenberg, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

Yes, both of them; my blog post and I get to set the rules.  Truth be told I think I prefer Willow slightly to Buffy; the character has a more interesting arc over the course of the show (and the episode pictured in the picture here was at least a minor part of the evolution of that character arc) but they both belong together.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite television series of all time, basically, right up there with M*A*S*H, and I miss the hell out of it.  I’ve never been able to get into the comics or the books, both of which are still coming out, at least partially because I hated Angel so much toward the end and I refuse to admit that anyone from that show is still alive.  But it wouldn’t take much to get me to read more about Buffy or Willow.

Zoe4.  Zoe Washburne, FIREFLY

Do you know what the definition of a hero is? Someone who gets other people killed. You can look it up later.

Why not, stick with the Whedonverse for number four.  I love all of the characters in Firefly, but Zoe was the glue that held the rest of the cast together, and I wish to hell she’d gotten her own TV series somehow.  Or a movie.  Or anything, really.  Where she brings Wash back from the dead with the sheer power of her own awesomeness, because I’m still pissed off that Wash is dead.  If I ever meet Joss Whedon I’m going to hug him and then punch him in the mouth and tell him that was for Wash, and then while his security guys are hauling me away and beating me up I’m going to try and kick him and tell him that was for Tara from Buffy.

Joss is a dick, is what I’m getting at here, but Zoe was an amazing character and I wish I’d had more chances to see more of her.

INVIRONMAN_29_CoverWoM5.  Pepper Potts, IRON MAN

Little-known fact: for most of the existence of the character, Pepper Potts and Tony Stark were not  an item.  In fact, over the 40-some-odd years since the character debuted (created by Stan Lee, by the way) she has spent almost all but the last seven or eight married to someone else.  Pepper was always interesting to me because she was immune to Tony’s bullshit; the womanizing aspects of the Stark character just bounced off of her.  Pepper was what kept Stark Industries moving when Tony was either off fighting bad guys or just being a drunken idiot, and when she finally got her own armor for a little while (I’m actually not sure if the Rescue persona is still a thing; I don’t think it really is) it felt like something the character had earned.  (Incidentally, random Iron Man note: they’re making a big deal about Thor becoming a woman and Captain America being a black guy; Iron Man has already been a woman and a black guy and he did both in the eighties.  So they’re making him an asshole instead.  Sigh.)

anzQONH6.  Monica Rambeau/Captain Marvel/Spectrum/Whatever (Marvel comics)

Monica Rambeau doesn’t get enough credit. Hell, Monica Rambeau can’t even keep a proper superhero name.  She’s been one of the umpteen Captains Marvel, she was… Photon, for a while, I think? and now she’s Spectrum.  Here’s what you need to know about her:  She has led the Avengers.  You know how they complain about there not being enough women and people of color in comic books and in comic book movies?  Monica Rambeau led the goddamn Avengers.  And not the cheap-ass West Coast or Great Lakes offshoot teams.  (I kid. I love the Whackos unreservedly.)  No, she was in charge of the honest-to-goodness Actual East Coast God Damn Avengers, and she should have had three movies by now.

Okay, choosing a panel from Nextwave was probably kinda disrespectful, but god I laughed like an asshole when I first read that comic.

VeGnt7.  Éowyn, THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

“I am no man.”

Understand something:  I have read The Lord of the Rings at least once a year since I was in second grade.  I have the inscription on the ring tattooed on my left leg.  I have bits of the book memorized.  And the one thing that the movies did not get to fuck up was Éowyn’s reveal in The Return of the King. I was terrified going in that they were going to give that scene to Arwen, since they’d made such a big deal of pumping up her role in the rest of the movies.  I would have burned down the goddamn theater.

Took down the Witch King.  By her damn self.  Badass.

Éowyn maybe should be higher on the list.

Arya_Stark_48.  Arya Stark, A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

I’ve been rreeeaallll vocal about my unhappiness with the later A Song of Ice and Fire books, right? And I’m not happy with them.  Not at all.  ASoIaF has degenerated more severely than any other mega-series I can remember reading, and as a lifelong science fiction and fantasy fan I have read a lot of them.

Finding out what happens with Arya– and maybe, maybe Tyrion, although absolutely nothing remotely interesting happened with him in the last book– is one of the very few things still keeping me invested in this series.  It is entirely possible that when The Winds of Winter finally comes out in 2028 that I will just read the Arya chapters and then give the book to my wife.

Maisie Williams is pretty fucking awesome, too.

lyra_and_pantalaimon_by_febreizh-d2036249.  Lyra Silvertongue, HIS DARK MATERIALS

This is fan art, I think; I decided that since the His Dark materials movie series so seriously screwed up the books (unavoidable, unfortunately, if they wanted it to sell any tickets– and they still didn’t sell any tickets) I needed to find a picture of Lyra that wasn’t from the movie.  The interesting thing is I’m not sure how to talk about her other than to say that you need to read the Dark Materials books right now so that you can learn about Lyra and how awesome she is.  I love these books unreservedly; a snippet from the third one was actually read at my wedding, and I keep trying to come up with a way to make a good tattoo out of a compass, a knife, and a spyglass.

hermione_granger_2_by_gaietta25-d56vh6f10.  Hermione Granger, HARRY POTTER

Hermione was the best thing about the Harry Potter books.  Everyone knows that, right?

Okay, good.

Honorable Mentions:  Scarlett O’Hara (GONE WITH THE WIND), Katniss Everdeen (THE HUNGER GAMES,) Lady Polgara (THE BELGARIAD), She-Hulk (Marvel Comics), Barbara Gordon (DC Comics), Mara Jade Skywalker (STAR WARS), and no doubt any number of others I’m forgetting.

THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES now available basically everywhere

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

bacover3dSmashwords has finally pushed the manuscript through to all the big online markets, so you can now download The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 to basically any device you want!  The price is currently 99 cents everywhere.

Hooray for choices!

 

Terrible Decisions: oh shut up

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

20140724-225655-82615592.jpg

Yes, these 12 tiles and one row of mosaic represent a day’s work. Mostly because my wife spent about ten hours carefully measuring and marking everything off with lines that I proceeded to mostly ignore or treat as vague suggestions while actually tiling. We discovered the hard way, but before doing actual damage, that you can’t put a full tile that size over mosaic until the mosaic is fully dry, which is why the area above the mosaic looks mopped down: it was.

More Saturday, I think.

Terrible Decisions: The Hard Part

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

Okay.

I’m tiling my bathtub surround today.

I can do this.

No one is going to die.

I am not going to fuck up.

I will still have two bathrooms at the end of the day.

I’m good enough, and I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Expect pictures and swearing as the day goes on.

More BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES musings, and an excerpt!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

Guys, this book is being weird.  This is the third novel I’ve written, right?  Which, I know, doesn’t make me anywhere near an expert on how these things generally go but I’m not exactly a complete novice.  But I’ve never written anything like this story before, where every four or five thousand words I get ahead means I need to double back and hit “reset” on most of the last ten.  I’m writing the book in circles, and every couple of big scenes in the “now” part of the book has resulted in me going back and either rewriting or adding stuff earlier in the book.  It’s growing from the *middle*.  My books don’t usually do that.

I’m not complaining, mind you; I’m just kind of fascinated at how the process is working on this one, and how damn stubborn the book is being in refusing to come out the way I initially intended it to.

For example, after the jump you’ll find the first little bit of the book, at least as it stands now.  Why “as it stands now”?  Because this is the third beginning of the book.  The other two beginnings have been shoved to other parts of the book.  🙂

Standard first-draft caveats and all that, but here’s your first little look at Benevolence Archives 8, also known as THE TITLELESS.

Continue reading “More BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES musings, and an excerpt!” →

On social media and kids’ shows

On By Luther M. SilerIn Television4 Comments

You may find this a useful post, or you may find it to be an excellent reminder of why thinking about, much less stressing out over, social media is an incredible waste of your time.  We’ll see.

Twitter has recently sort of upgraded its Analytics page.  They did it in a sort of annoying way, giving us a lot more granular data on how individual Tweets do, but removing the only feature I actually used Analytics for, which was to track day-by-day follows and unfollows.  They still haven’t put that back, which sorta pisses me off.

(Also: immaturity moment, because I need one: hurr durr he said anal.  That is all.)

Anyway.  I have, at this exact second, 1143 followers on the Twittermachine.  One of the things that the new Analytics page keeps track of is impressions for each Tweet.  An impression means that at some point your Tweet scrolled across the screen of somebody who was looking at Twitter.  It doesn’t mean that they read it, or clicked, or really did anything at all– it literally just means that it is at least theoretically possible that someone saw it.

With 1143 followers, after five or six hours most of my Tweets reliably have in between 60 and 80 impressions, assuming that they haven’t been retweeted by someone. This means that about six percent of my followers are going to see any given Tweet.  (Unknown: whether someone seeing a Tweet multiple times counts more than once.  I’m assuming that it does not.)

That is not very many.  You can increase the number of people who are going to see a Tweet with hashtags, which means that anyone who searches for that hashtag in the, oh, five minutes or so after you send it will see it, maybe.  In general, until yesterday, adding a hashtag or two would generally add thirty or forty impressions to a Tweet, and also seems to slightly elevate the chance that a Tweet will be favorited or retweeted.

This will seem like a change of subject; it’s not.  Bear with me.  I posited the following in the comments of my post about Curious George the other day:

Siler’s Law: as any discussion of children’s programming continues, the chance of someone making a disparaging comment about Caillou very rapidly approaches 1.

This genuinely is a law, guys.  It’s amazing how much people seem to hate Caillou, and you absolutely cannot talk about children’s programming without someone at some point mentioning what a terrible goddamn show it is.  It’s nearly impossible.

And my son has never displayed the slightest interest in watching it, so my wife and I have been spared this particular terror in our childrearing.  So, two nights ago, we decided that after we put him to bed we would deliberately expose ourselves to this terrible thing.  What the hell, I thought, maybe it’ll make for a blog post.

Heh.

Short version, because this isn’t actually the point: early Caillou is, indeed, completely unbearable.   Later seasons eliminate some of the stuff that makes the early episodes bad, but oh man are the early episodes bad.

While we were watching, I posted the following two Tweets:

As of this morning, with– and this is important– not a single retweet– these two posts have 1,707 and 1,714 views, respectively.

Not one retweet.

I posted this last night, when I discovered this phenomenon:

That Tweet currently has 1,039 impressions, with no retweets, and has only been online for about eleven and a half hours– most of which in the dead of night in the continental US.

What this implies is that there are an extraordinary number of people who, for some reason, are searching Twitter for the #caillou hashtag.

So I searched Twitter for the #caillou hashtag.  Something’s going on here, right?

Go ahead; try it yourself.  Long story short: shit still don’t make no sense.

And that’s why no one should waste time worrying about social media.