Here I Go A-Gathering Links...

My friend Lou Anders has had a short story published in Boys Life. I used to steal my brother's Boys Life magazines and read all the fiction and cartoons before he even got a chance to glance at them. I still want to read the entire comic adaptation of the Tripods trilogy... I never saw the whole thing.

Ancient footprints are already pretty cool artifacts, but now they are even cooler since professional trackers have been brought in to make sense of them. I love this type of history story... looking at a problem from a different, yet totally obvious, direction.

How about a tale of a very long-running experiment? I've heard of some experiments that have been going for many years, but this is a bit of a surprise. Seeds in bottles, buried in an effort to see how long the seeds would last.

So, Free Comic Book Day is coming. Here's some sneak peeks of Doctor Who comics. I need to figure out what comics we already ordered from DCBS so I know which ones to get when Eric and I go to the store next week.

I stayed up until 2 a.m. reading a book the other night/morning. I haven't done that for ages because I've been too responsible to risk being dead at work, for all the good it did me. But I really enjoyed the book and will be writing about it soon, probably not for tomorrow's reviews, but maybe next Sunday. It was Castle Hangnail by Ursula Vernon, and I strongly recommend it for any young woman, ages 8-18, who isn't very princess-y or girly and likes snakes and slugs and dirt and work. It's very good.

David Gerrold has a post about Hugo asterisks. I just want to say, the asterisks were there the instant the puppies gamed the Hugos. Putting them into physical form didn't make it any worse, since the damage was already done. On the contrary, the asterisks let some of us have a physical memento of their first time voting in the Hugos (me!) and raised money for a worthy cause. The people who were hurt by the asterisks deserved to be hurt because they are the ones who put the asterisk there in the first place by gaming the Hugo nominations. The fact that they still don't get it only proves the point. And it still amazes me that they are stupid enough to think that people gamed the Hugos before they did. The utter willful ignorance of the puppies is astounding.

Below the fold, depressing stories...

Women...and everything

More hostility to women in comic book fandom. And other areas. Which leads us to other issues surrounding women and ... well, everything.

I'm not a big fan of Upworthy, because I prefer reading to videos and Upworthy generally doesn't have any transcripts for its videos. But this video is worth watching.

And, if you would prefer to read it instead:

Audience question:

What's up with chicks and science?

Moderator:

Slightly off topic, nonetheless interesting. It's science education. Does anyone want to field... maybe if there are genetic differences between men and women that explain why more men are in science? Does anyone want to touch that?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

I've never been female.

But I have been black my whole life, and, so, let me perhaps offer some insight from that perspective, because there are many similar social issues related to access to equal opportunity that we find in the black community as well as in the community of women, in a white male dominated society, and I'll be brief, 'cause I want to try to get more questions.

When I look at, throughout my life, I've noticed that I've wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, my first visit to the Hayden Planetarium. I was a little younger than Victor at the time, although he did it before I did. And so I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions, and all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance through the forces of nature, the forces of society.

Any time I expressed this interest, teachers would say, 'Oh, don't you want to be an athlete? Oh, don't you want to-' I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. And so, fortunately my depth of interest was so deep, and so fueled, enriched, that every one of these curveballs that I was thrown, and fences built in front of me, and hills that I had to climb, I just leaped for more fuel and I kept going.

Now here I am, one, I think, one of the most visible scientists in the land, and I want to look behind, and say 'where are the others who might have been this?' and they're not there, and I wonder, how, who, what is the blood on the tracks that I happened to survive that others did not, simply because of the forces of society that prevented, at every turn, at every turn, to the point where I have security guards following me as I go through department stores, presuming that I'm a thief.

I walked out of a store one time, and the alarm went off, and, so they came running to me. I walked through the gate at the same time a white male walked through the gate, and that guy just walked off with the stolen goods, knowing that they would stop me and not him. That's an interesting exploitation of this, what a scam that was! I think people should do that more often.

So my life experience tells me that when you don't find blacks in the sciences, you don't find women in the sciences, I know that these forces are real, and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we talk about genetic differences, you've got to come up with a system where there's equal opportunity, then we can have that conversation.

Photograph by Cutty McGill, Penworld Magazine

The emphasis is mine. Any time the playing field is leveled, the "inferior" people always catch up. Always. There is no genetic inferiority between genders or ethnicities in broad categories like this. Individuals vary, but populations... when there is a completely level playing field... generally show far more equality in talents and skills than is assumed by people who are comfortably sitting at the top of the heap.

That moderator ought to be utterly ashamed to have even suggested that a genetic difference accounts for the lack of women in science when all a person has to do is look at how women are treated when they attempt to go into scientific fields to see why that gap exists.

Linking on a Friday night...

Texts from Superheroes. Superman's pediatrician...

How to build your own pug.

The most surprising banned books. It's always amazing what people find so offensive that they insist on trying to protect other people from it... even when those other people don't want to be protected.

More on the misogynist comic boys. And, just in case you want another view, check out this Shortpacked comic that shows the false equivalence men often bring up when they talk about the portrayal of men in comics. Today's Shortpacked also mentions the current uproar.

Click for full comic

Linkity-link!

As a reporter, I sometimes need to be out where it's slightly dangerous. A neat safety vest is something I ought to get sometime. I just would want to put my company's logo on it.

The Cliff Mass Weather Blog reports on strange cloud lines. SCIENCE!

I wanna make some notebooks.

The BBC has posted some totally wonderful pictures of a 13-year-old girl using a golden eagle to hunt in Mongolia.

How the Muppets created Generation X. I still firmly believe that a person who has never worked with the Muppets is not a real star. Any so-called TV, movie or music stars that came along since the Muppet Show first aired but haven't worked with the Muppets? Not stars. They are all wannabes. Please note: working with the Muppets does not automatically make you a real star, but you cannot be a real star unless you have worked with the Muppets.

And now an unpleasant topic... women are being harassed for being comic book fans with opinions again. This is, sadly, nothing new. Fanboys of all types of things: comics, sports, science... whatever it is... often feel threatened when women start to intrude on the boys' clubs with a different perspective and new attitudes. While I tend to believe that the boys who are actually actively hostile are a vast minority, they tend to be vocal and nasty. A bigger problem is that many men have utterly no clue that the abuse is happening, even when they witness it. The result is that the stupid boys feel justified, or at least comfortable, in continuing to be aggressively horrible. Andy Khouri talks about the latest demonstration of idiocy, as does Brett White.

Look, I don't know the solution, if there is one, but I sure hope that the men out there will pay enough attention to recognize when the boys are acting up and call them on it.

Sexual harassment at the San Diego Comic Con

As regular readers will know, I'm a big fan of Bully the Little Stuffed Bull. His blog is all about how Comics Oughta Be Fun, a philosophy I heartily agree with! I'm also a friend to Bully's human, John. When John posted a more serious post on Bully's blog about San Diego, I asked permission to repost it here, in the hopes that I can spread it a little further and get more fans to recognize this problem and work toward defeating it in the future.

---

Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: "These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, 'cause I wanted to see what her reaction was." This was only one example of several instances of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.

1. One of my friends was working at a con booth selling books. She was stalked by a man who came to her booth several times, pestering her to get together for a date that night. One of her co-workers chased him off the final time.

2. On Friday, just before the show closed, this same woman was closing up her tables when a group of four men came to her booth, started taking photographs of her, telling her she was the "prettiest girl at the con." They they entered the booth, started hugging and kissing her and taking photographs of themselves doing so. She was confused and scared, but they left quickly after doing that.

3. Another friend of mine, a woman running her own booth: on Friday a man came to her booth and openly criticized her drawing ability and sense of design. Reports from others in the same section of the floor confirmed he'd targeted several women with the same sort of abuse and criticism.

Quite simply, this behavior has got to stop at Comic-Con. It should never be a sort of place where anyone, man or woman, feels unsafe or attacked either verbally or physically in any shape or form. There are those, sadly, who get off on this sort of behavior and assault, whether it's to professional booth models, cosplayers or costumed women, or women who are just there to work. This is not acceptable behavior under any circumstance, no matter what you look like or how you're dressed, whether you are in a Princess Leia slave girl outfit or business casual for running your booth.

On Saturday, the day after the second event I described above, I pulled out my convention book to investigate what you can do and who you can speak to after such an occurrence. On page two of the book there is a large grey box outlining "Convention Policies," which contain rules against smoking, live animals, wheeled handcarts, recording at video presentations, drawing or aiming your replica weapon, and giving your badge to others. There is nothing about attendee-to-attendee personal behavior.

Page three of the book contains a "Where Is It?" guide to specific Comic-Con events and services. There's no general information room or desk listed, nor is there a contact location for security, so I go to the Guest Relations Desk. I speak to a volunteer manning the desk; she's sympathetic to the situation but who doesn't have a clear answer to my question: "What's Comic-Con's policy and method of dealing with complaints about harassment?" She directs me to the nearest security guard, who is also sympathetic listening to my reports, but short of the women wanting to report the incidents with the names of their harassers, there's little that can be done.

"I understand that," I tell them both, "but what I'm asking is more hypothetical and informational: if there is a set Comic-Con policy on harassment and physical and verbal abuse on Con attendees and exhibitors, and if so, what's the specific procedure by which someone should report it, and specifically where should they go?" But this wasn't a question either could answer.

So, according to published con policy, there is no tolerance for smoking, drawn weapons, personal pages or selling bootleg videos on the floor, and these rules are written down in black and white in the con booklet. There is not a word in the written rules about harassment or the like. I would like to see something like "Comic-Con has zero tolerance for harassment or violence against any of our attendees or exhibitors. Please report instances to a security guard or the Con Office in room XXX."

The first step to preventing such harassment is giving its victims the knowledge that they can safely and swiftly report such instances to someone in authority. Having no published guideline, and indeed being unable to give a clear answer to questions about it, gives harassment and violence one more rep-tape loophole to hide behind.

I enjoyed Comic-Con. I'm looking forward to coming back next year. So, in fact, are the two women whose experiences I've retold above. Aside from those instances, they had a good time at the show. But those instances of harassment shouldn't have happened at all, and that they did under no clear-cut instructions about what to do sadly invites the continuation of such behavior, or even worse.

I don't understand why there's no such written policy about what is not tolerated and what to do when this happens. Is there anyone at Comic-Con able to explain this? Does a similar written policy exist in the booklets for other conventions (SF, comics or otherwise) that could be used as a model? Can it be adapted or adapted, and enforced, for Comic-Con? As the leading event of the comics and pop culture world, Comic-Con should work to make everyone who attends feel comfortable and safe.

---

To finish, I'll quote a little more from John: "Comics oughta be fun. Comic book conventions ought to, as well. But as long as harassment goes on and there is no clear-cut official written rules on convention behavior and what to do in circumstances or physical or mental assault, our hobby runs the risk of alienating and endangering those within it." Amen, John.

Distracted Links

Buy Aquaman. It's a fun book. Tad Williams has put the fun into the book in spades. And I want to see how the story ends. So buy Aquaman. This is your ad of the day.

Oh, ick. Lea writes to Marvel about the cover of Heroes for Hire #13. WARNING: the cover is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. And yet it's supposedly a mainstream comic book. Yuck.

Joss Whedon Rants, and rants well.

Stupid scumbags rip off Stan Sakai by getting free sketches, then flipping them onto eBay, often damaging the original artwork in the process. As a sketch collector, I cannot tell you how much these people anger me with their actions. They make it just that much less likely that I'll get a sketch from some future artist who is afraid I'll turn around and sell it (which I would never do).

365 Reasons to Love Comics #142: Bob Haney.

The Gasoline Alley Autumn Walk.

The Millennium Bridge and its problems, with a link to good ol' Galloping Gertie.

A picture of Sea Tac Airport... sort of. One of the terminals with Mt Rainier in the background, back when it was actually possible to park at the airport without taking out a mortgage.

Ghost Hunters Hunting For New Ghost Hunter. I'm looking forward to the new season, but I wish they'd lay off the gimmicks.

Dog Breeders Issue Massive Recall Of '07 Pugs. Humor-impaired must not visit this link.

Catching Up Lunkdimp

Scipio gives 50 Reasons to Buy Aquaman #50.

If you want to hear that song mentioned in Girl Genius yesterday, it's here.

More on the ridiculous JLA #10 cover.

Someone else has started a meme for drawing Power Girl, and all the ones I checked were better than the JLA cover.

Marital help ads in comics. Heh.

Life, it is a Travesty... has a couple of really good links for us, like A 10 day survival pack for your car and How I Became A Music Pirate, written by a music fan disgusted by DRM.

Speaking of pirates, Dan Slott wants comic pirates to stop downloading his comics. Tom Spurgeon makes a point I disagree with. He says that he'd rather get his comics downloaded free than have a paper copy. Sorry, I would hate to read my comics on-line entirely. One to five pages, no problem. Much more than that and you're talking about eyestrain. I'd much rather read a paper copy than an on-line copy, even if the on-line copy is free. That's why I recently previewed Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil on-line, then bought the book with what little was left of my Amazon credit. I couldn't read more than five pages in a row without my head hurting. Luckily for Colleen, that was all it took (combined with her smaller doses of Seasons of Spring) to get me hooked.

Wired reports on You Don't Know Jack! which is now available to play on-line.

Yay! Ghost Hunters is renewed! Yay!

The Librarians' Index to the Internet directs us to this summary of the Battle of Thermopylae that tells the real tale of 300 Spartans.

Scott Adams attempts to improve your sex life.

Ichiro has a TV show, and it's not about baseball.

Slashdot reports that the RIAA is caught up in a web of their own legal lies. Good.

The paradigm has shifted: bloggers go through thousands of pages of dumped documents within hours to find the nice juicy bits. You can't hide behind document dumps any more, not when people are willing to check everything you show them.

Million Dollar Homes being rented for $150 a month to low-income families.

I'm never donating to the Salvation Army again, after reading this tale.

Sad news: Seattle Hostel Closing Down. Well, it was in a prime location, with the ability to show off Seattle's best and worst within just a few blocks.

This story will make your blood boil. Sending a guy to jail because he's a victim of identity theft? ARGH! Our system is broken, and needs some fixing.

Just in case it wasn't already obvious: DON'T BUY PILLS FROM ON-LINE PHARMACIES.

And a bit of cute to end on: IKEA Cat.

Massive Lunkdimp

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #94. I think they'll announce a book with #100, what you do think?

Occasional Superheroine gives Justice League #10's awful cover the respect it deserves.

Lost Bloom County Strips, quick, read 'em before the link gets popular and it's removed.

I need to put this on the "buy" list.

Another Bully's Ten of a Kind.

Mike Manley's Blog has art from Superman #660 for us to enjoy.

Disney's New Princess. She looks good!

The word "wiki" makes the OED.

Random Kitten Generator. Awww, cute! Via Elayne.

Pal Dorian has cool Doctor Who related video. Heh. Meanwhile, Dave points out a Doctor Who gaming fan who combined his passions. Eek.

Brian Wood Supports The Troops, and explains his position carefully.

How ironic: P2P is killing piracy.

If we want dollar coins to work, we need to get rid of dollar bills. I'm totally for it.

Snow Donuts. With pictures.

Pi Gang Symbol. Yo.

Customers hate DRM, and DRM problems cause 75 percent of support calls.

This article suddenly makes me nervous about riding the ferries this last weekend. Just for the record, we rode on the Tillikum and the Kitsap.

The Business Case for using Open Source Software. It's actually pretty convincing, to me.

Ooooh, I want. Seriously, if I were rich I would already be setting up a system like this.

Speaking of, fridge gadget could slash greenhouse emissions and save lots of money.

Diane Duane on St Patrick's Day. I had a teacher in elementary school who told us that St Patrick borrowed his dad's pick-up truck to drive the snakes out of Ireland.

Ack. Local sales tax going up, and postage rates going up, too.

Thank you to everyone who chimed in. Ripples Through Time will hopefully resume tomorrow, after I've had a good night's sleep. Hopefully.

I Get Letters

Wow. I just received a rather irate e-mail from someone who claims to be a "loyal reader" of my blog. With permission, as given in the note itself, I'm going to post some excerpts from it and answer them publicly. What I don't answer here I've answered privately.

First up:

You claim to be a comics blog and you post about all kinds of other stupid stuff and you don't post about the big comic book stories.

Whew. There's a powerful little rant. I'll try to answer all the bits there.

One: I've never claimed this is a comics blog, at least not exclusively. I've accepted the title when it's been given to my blog. But I blog about a bunch of stuff, from Flying Spaghetti Monsters to Politics. It's just that my main interest in life is comic books, so that's where most of my writing attention is. And it's true, I've moved most of my political rants to another blog, where I could shout more freely, but I honestly don't feel compelled to hold back if I don't want to. This blog is about me, a truly egotistical creation, so it will reflect my interests.

Two: I admit to blogging about some stupid things. I like some really stupid things. Like certain comic books. But, again, that's all part of my interests.

Three: "Big comic book stories"? Like what? Again, I post about my own interests. If some story in the comic book world doesn't interest me, why should I force myself to post something about it, especially when dozens of other fans are already filling that need? I don't read every comic book (I probably would if someone sent them all to me, but they don't and therefore I don't). I didn't read Civil War, so I hardly feel right in commenting about it.

And if you are talking about stories about comic book professionals... again, I cover the ones that interest me. I've been interested in, say, the Unscrewed Saga, and reported on it. But just because I don't report on, say, the Friends of Lulu Empowerment Fund fiasco doesn't mean I'm not paying attention. It just means I felt I had nothing to add on the subject.

Moving on:

You are a girl blogger why don't you report about girls in comics?

Excuse me? Just what is that supposed to mean? Because of my gender, I'm supposed to focus on females? Or are you upset that I'm not a feminist blogger who complains constantly about the portrayal of women in comics? I really don't understand this complaint.

Look, this is a touchy subject with me. I care about the portrayal of women in comic books. I care deeply about the treatment of women in the comic book field. But I don't feel I need to spend all my time crusading about it. It often feels like I'm beating a dying horse when I join the chorus of cries about women in comics. It feels, to me, like the right path should be obvious. It pains me to point out the obvious. I know I shouldn't shirk the burden, but I can't help but feel it's sexist for people to expect me to fight that fight just because I'm a woman.

And, frankly, I don't feel like I'm a terribly eloquent person, so I'd rather link to those that are and give a little "me too" than put up inadequate words. I like to think that if there weren't already so many excellent female bloggers arguing those points that I would step into the void. I like to think that if there was no one else, I would take up the torch. I don't know if I would, but thank goodness there are a lot of great feminist bloggers out there in the comic book world already and the point is moot. So, just because I'm a "girl" doesn't mean I'm going to be girly. I'm going to be myself.

I'm going to skip a couple of other somewhat legit complaints to focus on one last part of the note:

Why are you posting Aquaman reviews on the Aquaman site and on your blog?

I consider this a completely legitimate complaint for the handful of unfortunate people who check both this blog and my Aquaman site daily. There are a few solutions to this, and I'm going to ask anyone who has bothered to read this far for your opinions. I'll abide by the majority opinion as posted in comments to this blog entry (in other words, no e-mail on this one).

Should I:

• (Option 1) Continue to post my Ripples Through Time on both my Aquaman site and here, as I've been doing for the last few months.
• (Option 2) Post my Ripples Through Time posts ONLY on my Aquaman site, and post a daily link to that post here on this blog.
• (Option 3) Post my Ripples Through Time posts ONLY on my Aquaman site, and nothing about them here on this blog.

Vote now! Option 1, 2, or 3. After a few days, I'll look at the tally and make a decision based on the votes.

A Fifth of Lunkdimp

Butt-Shots in Comics. I particularly like the Vixen/Amazo contrast, because I didn't notice it when I read the book, but it's totally obvious when taken in this context.

Boing Boing on tormenting squirrels. Spinning Bird Feeder. Squirrel Obstacles Courses.

It's the Dursley Syndrome! Parents don't recognize obesity in their kids.

More Wil Wheaton, who is vastly more interesting as a nerd than he ever was as Wesley: tapestry. Two stories of Wil dealing with fans.

TangognaT passes along some cool library links: What Is A Librarian? and The Joy of Interlibrary Loan are great reads.

And don't forget to enter TangognaT's Manga Giveaway!

A whine about e-mail sigs. Way back in the early days of the 'net, when we had to power our computers with hamsters, I was told that a sig should never exceed four lines of text, which I have stuck to all these years. Reports of PHOTOs in sigs admittedly bothers me, especially if you are sending mail to someone who has to pay for download time. I don't mind sigs, but be reasonable about them, folks!

Jeopardy is teasing about Friday March 16th's show: "for the first time in 23 years, 'Jeopardy!' history will be made." Well, hey, since we got the TiVo entirely to record Jeopardy so hubby-Eric never will have to miss it again, yeah, we'll watch it. Via Various and Sundry.

Which microlender is best? Surprise, it's Kiva, the one that I have a little bit of money in. I meant to put $50 a year into it, but haven't put any money in this year yet, due to our financial difficulties.