Geekery: Infinite Crisis #3 Questions

Ignore this post if you don't read comics or don't want spoilers.


Some questions to think on:
1. How does the Spectre and Day of Vengeance relate to the overall story? Is the Spectre under some spell, as Nightshade suggests? If so, whose?

2. What's going to break out of the Anomoly? The Anti-Monitor? Krona? Something else? And who will it kill when it does? [Dramatically speaking, there's no possible other reason behind gathering such a large assortment of high-powered characters into one place like that other than to have them get wiped out, with high casualties, in about 10 panels the next issue. Animal Man is a strong candidate for first blood, as is Alan Scott, who seems to die in just about every major crossover these days...]

3. Why is Lex Luthor suffering from the 'proximity to alternate version effect from Alex? Alex isn't an analog of Lex; he's the son of such an analog. While on the topic of Alternate Version Proximity Sickness (henceforth AVPS), Mxyzptlk's problems in Adventures of Sueprman 646 could well be AVPS rather than magic fritz-y-ness. One of my pet theories is that in the end we'll find out that the main villian of the whole thing as the Earth-1 Mxy, turned dark as in 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow'.

4. 3 empty slots in the Dimensional tuner. [Note, need to check original crisis to see if R2D2's head was in the original tower, too.]. Filled slots for Breach [Post-Crisis earth], Martian Manhunter [Earth-1], Black Adam [Earth-S], Lady Quark [Earth-6], and the Ray [Earth-X]. One of the empties is for Power Girl [Earth-2], another for Nightshade [Earth-4] What about the last?
Either Superboy [Earth-Prime] or Alex [Earth-3] should be able to fill it, but if one, why not both? Either they can contribute their own dimensionality from outside or the device will damage the people in it and neither wants to volunteer, I'd imagine. So that leaves another slot. Who?
Earth-7 is for the comedy superheroes. Angel and/or Ape might work. Pariah would be been a fine choice if Luthor hadn't killed him. The rest of the Crime Syndicate are out there, for Earth-3 representation. Captain Atom might pick up enough Wildstorm-ness from his current crossover...For that matter, Majestic has visited the DCU before, he might be brought in in a long-shot.
The implication from The Return of Donna Troy is that Donna by herself could probably represent all those worlds and more, which might be part of the second attempt.

5. What is the tuner actually going to do? Restore the multiverse? Re-tune the universe to be Earth-2-centric, like Kal-L thinks? Re-tune it to Earth-3? [What it is designed for and what it actually does may well be entirely different things, of course.]

Static Content Link

The Life of Reilly. 35-detailed pages on how one of the most convoluted and ill-executed comic storyline ever came to be. The story: the Spider-man Clone Saga.

(One wishes that there were an equivalent document somewhere on DC's closest equivalent cluster#$@!, the Titans Hunt. But alas...)

Blogroll: Matthew Yglesias's other blog

Going to the roll because I often end up forgetting about it for long periods of time: Matthew Yglesias. Not his TPM blog. And not Tapped, neither.

This 'roll is going to end up way to my left, just because not many of my main right-ish blogs are at all obscure or difficult to find otherwise...

Today:The Zeitgeist

Today's link is the 2005 Google Zeitgeist.

See something interesting that's not mentioned in the captions: There's something strange about right around April 2. (That would be the day the Pope died). Most of the other charts drop to zero on that day in a way they didn't on other big events...[The effect can be seen most clearly on the 'phenomena' page: 'surfing' and 'wikipedia' both zero out that day...]

Odd.

Blogrollery: Girl Genius

Today's blogroll addition is Phil and Kaga Foglio's brilliant MWF-updating webcomic (nee regular comic) Girl Genius. Link here takes you to the beginning of the webcomic adventures; blogroll link to the current episode (which is having a guest artist thing over the holiday area.)

Lois Bujold's The Curse of Chalion

Just finished this one, in audiobook format narrated by Lloyd James, who immediately goes onto the list of narrators who genuinely know what they're doing. Looks like he's done several Heinleins, including some I've never gotten around to reading, so I might well go there soon.

Anyhow, Bujold has achieved an excellent fantasy story here, creating a secondary world with intriguing enough politics, metaphysics, and characters, and then putting a quintessential fantasy story into it. Tolkein talks about eucatastrophy-the sudden turn from certain defeat to rescue and victory-as the main unique quality of fantastic literature, and the modern fantasy authors do tend to put excellent eucatastrophic moments into their works, but Bujold has understood the point behind this idea in a way few others do, and presents us with a Comedy disguised as a Tragedy up until the very last moment.

(The 'cameo appearance' at the end by the Canterbury Tales is quite odd, though; something that deliberately sticks out near the book's finish. There may be a point to it, of course, I'll consider after reading or listening to the other books in the 'series'.)

Revert! Back to the Trees!

Damn, that Zot! was one fine comic.

Rgh. Cold today.

I've got a mean little head cold going on today, so here's a tiny dose of political miniblogging as the daily contribution:

Identity Politics is the devil's own satanic brew, obliterating any claim to decency on the part of any who partake of it or consort with those who do.

Thank you.

Showcase Presents: Justice League of America

"I'm gaining-because the robot is made of metal and metals get tired*"

*: Editor's Note: Metal, when overworked, grows fatigued just as does the human body (except Superman's!). The crystalline grains of metal are elongated in the direction of the strain!

From JLA #13, The Riddle of the Robot Justice League, just one of 20 silver age Justice League comics reprinted in the $16.99 volume. Heartily recommended to anyone who fondly remembers comic book science...

Lazy Television 101

Ostensibly, this post is about Stargate Season 6. But more than that, it is about the scourge of episodic television, the Clip Show. Surely whatever executive or producer or writer first invented this will be condemned to eternities of watching family ties reruns. While tiny diseased rats nibble on their extremities with habenero-dipped teeth. But I digress.

The only thing worse than the Clip Show itself is the dreaded first-season clip show. (Hint: with only one season, you haven't earned the right to even think about this degree of laziness. If your season is a short, pay-cable 13-episodes long, may you be struck dead if it even begins to cross your minds. And yes, this means you, Dead Like Me.

Anyhow, Stargate went to the Clip Show well in this otherwise good season, and actually did a decent job at it, as the new content outweighed the clips by a large amount and it managed to advance not one but three seperate plot threads between the clips. Not quite as good as a good Fake Clip Show (see South Park or Fraiser), but head and shoulders over the one they did on Star Trek (The Next Generation).

Another Double Blogroll Day

Two content-heavy sites with approximately daily updates: The Daily WTF and Dave's Long Box. Humorous content for programmers or once and/or future comic book fans, respectively. Enjoy. Possibly some more content-like content here next week.

Double Blogroll Day

Two sites that fall into the same category: ones that I tend to forget about until reminded by someone posting a link there, then go to and catch up on a bunch of posts on the go. Today's additions: Waiter Rant and The Mystery Pollster.

Blogroll Week Continues:Irregular Webcomic

Well, three days in I'll officially call this a Blogroll week and add one of my favorite Webcomics to the blogroll, the Irregular Webcomic by David Morgan-Mar. A testament* to the expressive powers of Lego.


*Not to be confused with the Brick Testament, of course.

More Blogroll:Dilbert Blog

Just discovered the Dilbert Blog; straight to the blogroll and easy post for today...

Building the Blogroll: Rhetorica

First blog on the blogroll today: Rhetorica. I honestly have no idea how I originally came across this one, but check it out if you're interesting in political rhetoric and/or journalism...

Music Recommendation: The Last Hero on Earth

Tom Smith has put The Last Hero For Earth up for pre-order on his site.
Pre-order comes with mp3 download of the tracks of the album.
It's the result of a comic musical improvisational fury by a master of the art, as it were. Destined to be highly regarded among people who care for that sort of thing.

Television Recommendation: Stargate (Seasion 5, sort of)

So, for the first recommendation, I've got the television series stargate. Just finished up watching season 5 and moving on to 6 on the dvds now, which can be found at your local store, online retailer, or, if you're lucky like me, library.

The two rules of Stargate: 1, any human colony with sufficiently advanced technology will inevitably be a bunch of utter dicks, and 2, as a general rule, how good an individual episode of the show (from season 3 onward, at least) is directly proportional to the number of unrelated prior episodes referenced by characters in the teaser+ the first act. (That would be the first 'chapter' on the DVD format; the evil producers of the Stargate DVDs having chosen to break the fundamental rule of TV on DVD by not providing a chapter break immediately after the opening credits. Especially after the switch to the extremely boring Sci-FI channel credits in the later seasons.)

Charter

It's a fairly simple charter, really. Every weekday (barring holidays, sometimes) I plan to stop by here and post a recommendation of something.

That's a recommendation, not a review or critique or summary or anything else. Sometimes it might be just as simple as "This is good". Sometimes I might explain more. Sometimes I might say something utterly Gnomic, in fact.

And by something, I mean, well, pretty much anything is fair game. Books, Comics, Movies, Television Shows, Blogs. Anything, really.

Blogs, yes, that's quite possible. Which brings us to the blogroll. It's empty right now. Because, well, anything that I'd want to put on the blogroll is something I'd want to recommend, in general. So I'll be building the blogroll, week by week, out of posts that happen to recommend blogs.

(And since I already use certain other highly popular sites as a primary blogroll, It's pretty likely that no site that already is linked to (correctly) by one of them will go onto the 'roll. At least a little more obscure than that, please.)

First 'real' post coming later tonight.