Welcome, Cyborg Overlords!

Now they just need to make a robot that does my old job from McDonald's: stand in the drive through window and get yelled at for the order being wrong.  I guess they could have just replaced me with a cardboard cutout of a pimply faced teenager with a voice bubble that said "I'm very sorry, sir"

Review: The Long Halloween

Batman: The Long Halloween is a followup to the Haunted Knight stories I reviewed a couple weeks ago.  Where Haunted Knight was a collection of unrelated short stories, The Long Halloween was a monthly special that ran for one year, from October 1996 to October 1997.  It follows the same continuity as Haunted Knight, but it stands mostly alone as its own story.  The main story is that Batman, Gordon, and Dent are all working to find a serial killer in Gotham who kills on holidays.

The Long Halloween is often praised as one of the greatest Batman comics of all time, and with good reason.  The themes of the story (though not much of the plot itself) are very strongly felt in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies.  I wanted to link somebody else describing all the similarities, but shockingly, I can't find anyone who has gone through and done that.  Come on, internet, get your act together.  I may come back and do that one of these days.   But not today.  Today I'm just going to talk about what I liked, what I didn't like, and how the book fares overall.  I will avoid major spoilers for this story, but I will mention plot points that are common in the Batman universe (ie, Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face, etc)

I feel like the art is even better than in Haunted Knight, even though it is the same artist.  I guess a few years of practice makes a difference.  The uses of shadow and blocks of solid color that I liked so much in Haunted Knight are more pronounced here.

I love beleaguered, haggard Gordon in his dark office

And they are used well for foreshadowing.  For example, Harvey Dent's face is often shown in half-shadow, hinting at his later transformation into Two-Face.

The book has some very interesting themes, both for the good guys and the bad guys.  On the bad-guy side, it talks about the transformation of Gotham from a mob-run town to a super-villain-run town.  The old mobsters are shown trying to deal with the influx of "freaks" into Gotham, and trying to hold on to their power and influence in a changing world.

On the good-guy side, we see the unsteady alliance between Gotham's police force (Captain Jim Gordon), prosecutor (District Attorney Harvey Dent) and Batman (Batman).  Each of them suspects the other two of being the villain (for reasons that are believable and well written, I might add), but has to rely on them anyway.  This theme of unsteady, forced trust makes for a surprisingly thought provoking read.

Now, for some of the bad.  One problem stems from the way this story was told (13 "chapters" released as 13 separate comic books over the course of a year).  There is a single story running through the whole thing (an unknown serial killer in Gotham), but each chapter has its own story as well.  And each chapter's individual story is about a different villain from Batman's Rogues' Gallery.  The first time I read this, it didn't bother me, but this time through it felt a bit forced.  In January, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Joker.  In March, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Poison Ivy.  Every month could be summed up that way.

Though this does lead to some pretty cool cover art for the different months

This could be explained away as "Batman is crazy busy, and even when he is in a long, drawn-out investigation there are always other fires to put out," but it just didn't feel that way to me.  Like I said, not bad, but a little forced.  I don't like when I can see what's going on backstage in the author's head.

Another problem is with the story itself.  I enjoyed it right up to the end, when it felt like Jeph Loeb traveled 15 years into the future, watched the LOST finale, and said "man, what a great way to end things!"

What if the whole thing was just a dream the polar bear had?

The big surprise ending was kind of dumb.  Like the villain-of-the-month problem, it just felt forced, like the publisher really really wanted a surprise, but the writers hadn't planned on one.

The last criticism I have will be a bigger problem for some than others.  That is that this book is not as accessible as it might me.  There were a few times reading it when I thought "if I didn't know a lot of Batman mythos, I'd be lost here."  So, not a bad book by any means, but probably not the one I'd recommend as someone's first book to read.

All in all, a very satisfying read (even if the ending was marred with a dumb, dumb twist), with beautiful art and a good story.

I'll miss the Arb

*above the post note: I wrote this post last week before the move and just didn't get it posted. So it refers to the move in the future tense instead of the past. Going through and changing that was a hassle, so I left it. *   

I am pretty out of shape.  Not as bad as I could be, but I'm not where I'd like to be.  So, in the last year or two, I have taken up running.  There was a big break in the middle where it was too cold to run outside, or when Kate was super-pregnant, so I guess I haven't been terribly consistent.  But I have enjoyed it.

One thing that has made running less of a chore and more something I can enjoy is the Arb.  Nichols Arboretum.

Meh.  Close enough

The Arb is one thing I will really miss when we leave Ann Arbor.  It's just a few minutes' walk from my lab, so I try to go running there a couple times a week.  Some weeks are more successful than others, but I always try.  Last week, while I was on a run, I stopped for some pictures so I can remember how beautiful this place is.

I usually enter the Arb here, where I get to walk through cultivated gardens.

Once I'm in the Arb proper, there is a paved path that runs along the Huron River.

Right along that path there are a couple of places to stop and stretch or catch my breath

I love the Arb because there are big, paved paths...

...and little paths that branch off and go interesting places.

There are fields of wildflowers and scrub with paths just mowed through.

As you run, you see flowers and trees and hear the sound of the Huron.

And it's secluded enough that you often run into wildlife.

Most of all, I just love being outside, enjoying the view while I run.  It's so much better than running through a neighborhood or on a treadmill.  

I love the Arb.  I'll miss the Arb.  The only thing I don't like: since it's down in a river basin, you have to go down a big hill right at the beginning.  Which means going up a big hill at the end.

Bedtime songs

Every night around 7, we put little Hakon to bed.  While he eats, Kate and I sing a couple songs to him as part of the "now you seriously need to sleep for 12 hours" routine.  Here are a couple of our favorite songs to sing for him.








Any suggestions?  Must be easy to play on the guitar and easy to remember all the words.  Also fun.

3 things I would change about Divergent

In our effort to figure out how to tell good stories, Kate and I spend a fair amount of time pulling apart popular stories to see what makes them tick.  It's kind of how serial killers do with animals, but less likely to get us arrested.  We do this a lot to Harry Potter, but in the interest of fairness, I thought I should post some thoughts on another book that's gotten a lot of attention lately: Divergent.

Divergent has some major problems, but I think they can all be fixed by changing three small things.

1. The setting
2. The story
3. All of the characters

OK, so maybe those things aren't that small.  But the story is so fundamentally broken that this is the bare minimum set of things that has to change to make it work.  Before I jump into my criticism, I should disclose that I did not finish the series, which is rare for me.



But it was just too bad to keep reading.  I read the first book and maybe half of the second before I gave up.

In the interest of writing a post that has a reasonable chance of getting read, I'm going to limit myself to writing only about problems with the setting (by which I mean the world in which Divergent is set).  I'll tear apart the characters and story another day.

Divergent is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future.  Following some un-stated cataclysm, society began again in Chicago.  Lake Michigan has dried up, presumably as a result of whatever happened to break the world.  So, without the lake there, what makes this an attractive place to settle?  To feed a population the size of the one described in Divergent, you would have to have a pretty big farming operation, but Chicago is a huge city.  In order to farm there, they would have had to demolish streets and buildings, haul away all the concrete and rebar, and irrigate the land (assuming that they found themselves a source of water).  Or, they would have to build the farms outside the city and haul all their food 20 miles. But if they're farming outside the city, and the city itself has no water, it would make more sense to settle out nearer the farms.

So, why found your society in a place with no source of fresh water and no farmable land?  There is actually a good reason.

Turns out Veronica Roth wrote this book while attending Northwestern University on the outskirts of Chicago.  This is really the only good reason to set it in Chicago: because it was the big city she saw right in front of her, and she couldn't be bothered to think up a different setting.  I might have overstated how good of a reason there was.

So, for whatever reason, the society was founded in Chicago.  But the founders of this new society disagreed about what principles this society should be built upon.  This lead to population being split into five "factions," each based on a different character trait (honestly, bravery, selflessness, love, and intelligence).

This one got left out for some reason

The Faction system is extremely silly.  It is the way a 13 year old would view splitting up the world.  For one thing, the five traits are all objectively "good."  There is no faction founded on "bad" principles like "ruthless self interest" or "we are stronger, so we take whatever we need from the weak."  There is not even a faction based on the neutralish principles like "whatever has to be done to survive" or "practicality."  All of them are bumper-sticker soundbytes of a classic utopia.  Were other ideas ever presented?  Were other ideas ever tried?  We never find that out.

When kids turn 16 in this world, they get to pick whether to stay in the faction where they grew up or switch to a different one.  Part of this ritual is a test where the kid is told which faction they belong in.

Think "Sorting Hat Ripoff," only more sciency

But that test is not binding, and the results are kept secret.  What, then, is the point of the test?  Everybody in the story freaks out about how this test will decide their future, but then they can (and in many cases do) choose to completely ignore the results.  All the test does, according to the story, is look into your mind/soul/personality and tell you where you would be the best fit.  It seems to me like Veronica Roth wrote the original draft more like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, then in later revisions, she decided that this didn't work.  So she decided to make the test results just a friendly suggestion, but didn't bother to change anybody's feelings and anxieties about the test.  The only purpose I can see to the test is for the story.  Our heroine has an unusual, surprising result, which makes her all angsty.  This makes it seem more like a plot device and less like an element of an organic, real world.

So, after the test that doesn't matter, the teenagers go to live with the factions that make no sense.  Whatever.  But some of the kids don't end up fitting in their new faction.  These kids are kicked to the curb and have to live the rest of their lives as "factionless" hobos.  We see these people a few times in the book looking like stereotypical homeless folk.

"Spare some change?"

These factionless are a huge sticking point for me.  We have a large portion of the population (I think it was even said that there were more of them than in any one faction) who live in refrigerator boxes on the street and no one wants to take them in?  There's even a faction dedicated to charity and taking care of their fellow man, and they don't do more than set up soup kitchens for the factionless.  But the future is a harsh world, so I get no one going out of their way to help these folks.  What surprises me is that nobody takes advantage of them either.  They don't conscript them into an army, or slave labor, or anything.

There are lots of creative uses for the factionless

They are just part of the scenery.  I know they play some role in the later books, but that's just not enough for me.  They've been there for decades, and nobody in the world seems to have noticed.

While we're on the subject of the factionless, why do they stick around?  I get that you will always get some small percentage of any population that just gives up and doesn't have any initiative, but are there no factionless who just leave Chicago?  They could go set up their own civilization somewhere else.  Or why don't they revolt?  There are enough of them that they could take over the farms that feed everybody else.  Just because this society has chosen to cast them out doesn't mean they have to accept it.  This is post-apocalyptic fiction, for goodness sake.  There should be plenty of de-populated places to go and settle, plenty of outcasts to join, and plenty of weaker parties to conquer.  What is keeping them there, living on the streets?  I'll give you a hint: the plot.  These people exist because Roth needs them for the future books.

OK, this post is getting long and there's so much more to say about why the world of Divergent doesn't work.  For now I'll leave it with this.  The world centers around a society that inexplicably started up in a concrete jungle with no water.  The people are divided into five factions that seem like they were founded by a group of 13 year olds.  At a certain age, people take a meaningless test that is more like a high school aptitude test than a life changing event, but it is treated like the biggest day in anyone's life.  And there is a whole group of homeless people who nobody (least of all the factionless themselves) seems to notice.

This world just doesn't work.  I would much rather read a story in which the factions were realistic.  Or where the factionless were a part of the story instead of a part of the scenery.  These things feel like the cheap cardboard sets in the old Star Trek series - they're just there so that the main characters can say "wow, what a strange alien world!"

Coping with no air conditioner

Our AC has been broken for a very, very long time.  Since we are moving soon, we finally gave up on getting it fixed and bought a very powerful fan.  Which our dumb dog just loves.  So, for your viewing pleasure, here is Majzy hogging our fan.

Review: Haunted Knight

It surprises no one that the Payne family is in to Batman.  It might surprise some people to see how much we are in to Batman.  We go for the apparel

Full disclosure: this is not his only Batman onesie.  Or his only Batman socks.

The video games

The World's Greatest Detective doing...detective stuff...I guess

We own all the movies

Well, all the good movies

And for Kate's birthday, I got her a couple of my favorite Batman books (I'll avoid the term "Graphic Novel" because it makes me feel like an even bigger dork).

It's important to teach him Batman's origin story very young in case something happens to me and Kate

The point is, we love us some Batman.  Knowing this, and knowing that Kate has spent a lot of time stuck in bed lately because of her blood clots, Lance loaned us a couple of his favorite Batman books.  I read one of them yesterday (it was pretty short and I had some time on the bus) and I thought I'd review it here for anybody looking to get a taste of Batman comics.  I'll try to do the others as I get to them, but no promises.  Turns out the next few weeks are going to be busy.

Haunted Knight is actually a collection of three short stories, published as Halloween specials in 1993-1995.  The stories are relatively simple, which makes them nice for a new Batman reader.  In the first, for example, Scarecrow is terrorizing Gotham on Halloween, so Batman finds him and punches him really hard.  Fin.

Although the surface stories are simple, these stories have lots of flashbacks to formative events in Bruce Wayne's life.  Because the stories are Halloween-themed, the flashbacks go back to Bruce's fears, nightmares, and traumas.  His character gains a surprising amount of depth.  The second story shows us one of my favorite characters, Police Captain Jim Gordon, trying to keep his family together while doing his job protecting Gotham.  The story is actually very touching and I almost cried on the bus reading it.

What I really love about this book, in addition to the surprisingly touching story, is the art.  Tim Sale uses shadow, silhouette, and big blocks of color in very interesting way.  It's hard to describe, so I'll just include a couple pictures.

I love the use of just black, grey, white and red

I also like the way he depicts the vast emptyness that is Wayne Manor.  Such an empty, lonely place for Bruce to live.

My biggest worry before I read any comic books was that I would get lost trying to keep up with 75 years of backstory.  The nice thing about this book (and most of the ones I will review in the near future if I get around to that) is that it is pretty self contained.  You don't really need to know anything going in other than that Batman is a guy who fights villains and criminals in Gotham.  I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to try out reading a comic book without a lot of time commitment.  Easy to read, satisfying ending, beautiful art.  

In honor of the HP

Over on Kate's blog, she wrote a post about Harry Potter, in honor of his birthday yesterday.  Don't worry, this post won't be as nerdy as you think it will.  It will be much, much nerdier.  Since Kate enjoys writing Young Adult fiction, we often read and dissect YA books so that we can see how they are put together and how we could make them better.  And since Harry Potter is one of the best known (and most flawed) YA series, that is frequently the target of our ire.

So, in honor of the HP's birthday, and since I am such a giver, I wanted to share with you all one of my many problems with the Harry Potter universe: the names.  So many of the names in this universe are ridiculous descriptors of the person.  Which is OK in the first book, where it is all a whimsical Roald Dahl knockoff, but as the series gets more grown up, these silly names feel more and more out of place.  

When Harry first goes shopping for textbooks, we see our first patently ridiculous names.  He buys a transfiguration textbook by Emeric Switch and a book about magic fungi by Phyllida Spore.  But those could be cutesy pen-names, so let's not dwell on those.

Harry's herbology teacher is named Professor Sprout.  His severe, evil potions teacher is named Severe-us.  The flaxen haired wizard who makes all the women swoon is named Gilderoy (like gilded or golden).  The mean teacher who hurts Harry is named Dolores Umbrage.  It just goes on and on.

Remember that weird chick Luna Lovegood?  Well, if you thought that name was a bit too on the nose for a moonbat-crazy lunatic, you probably forgot about her father, Xenophilius.  Literally the lover of the foreign or strange.  That guy runs a crazy conspiracy newspaper full of way-out-there theories.

Sirius is the name of a star that is also called the Dog Star.  Sirius Black is a guy who turns into a black dog.  You just can't make this stuff up.

Finally, we come to Remus Lupin.  This is where the world broke for me.  Book 3, Remus Lupin.  This is where it stops being whimsical and just becomes nonsensical.  For anyone unfamiliar with the character, Remus was bitten by a werewolf when he was a boy, and turned into a werewolf himself.  This might have been a surprise if his name weren't already "Wolfy Wolfson."  Remus is the name of one of the founders of Rome who was also raised by a wolf, making him a wolf's son.  Lupin is the same as Lupine, which is the adjective to describe something having the quality of wolves.  Wolf-like.  So, the kid who would later become a wolf was named "Wolfy McWolf" at birth?  And it's some big secret as an adult that this shabby guy named Wolfy O'Wolf is a werewolf?  Seriously?  

Anyway, I could keep going, but I won't.  My point is that these silly names fit into silly children's books, but not into serious stories.  I get why JK used these names: they're whimsical and fun.  But they just don't fit in the world that is portrayed after the first few books that fans demand be taken seriously as adult literature.  

Hello, world

Hey and howdy to everybody out there.  I was thinking about my old blog recently, and realized that it had that two-years-without-a-single-post funk to it.  I wanted to start blogging again, since I now have an adorable baby...

...but I just couldn't shake the shame of having a two-year gap in posts.  So, rather than face that, I started fresh.  New URL, new name, and everything.  For anybody trying to understand the title, fire up Netflix, search for "Better Off Ted," and watch episode 9 of season 2.  For anybody who just took me up on that tip, you're welcome.

Kate is back to blogging as well, and I'm guessing her blog will be way more fun than mine.  But I guess that's just the way things are.  She's more fun.  So, here we go