Category: Entertainment

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But over the past two years I’ve dropped half the series I was collecting, and the others (the ones I liked) have been canceled. I’m down to one DCU series. (Again)

The New 52 DC universe no longer feels like the same DC universe I used to follow. The tone is off (though to be fair, it had been shifting ever since Identity Crisis), and it’s now just different enough to feel unfamiliar and off-putting, but not different enough to feel like another fictional world that I can enjoy on its own terms.

A few years back I came to the realization that a shared universe I knew well, like DC at the time, was a hook that would encourage me to try more comics set in that world, while one that I didn’t know so well, like Marvel, actually discouraged me from reading it. The Marvel books I read tend to be those that are either not the Marvel universe, or set off in a corner of it. Since the New 52, the same has been true of DC.

Previously posted as a comment on Reddit

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WonderCon has officially announced that they’re returning to Anaheim in 2014 for a third year, from April 18-20. It’s turned out to be a good venue for the convention, especially if they can work the remaining kinks out of parking next year, and it means it’s easy for us to attend, since it’s close enough for us to commute. (That really takes some of the pressure off of trying to get tickets for San Diego, too.)

Still, I hope they find a way to move back to the Bay Area soon. I attended three years at the Moscone Center when it meant traveling (it probably helps that we have family and friends in the area to visit on the way up and back), and while the show still feels very much like part of the same family, it does feel like a slightly different show. I was in San Francisco on a business trip last week, and when I realized I was in the neighborhood, I just had to stop by Yerba Buena park and the Moscone Center for old time’s sake. Continue reading →

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Every time I listen to Vienna Teng’s song, “The Hymn of Acxiom,” it gets creepier. It’s beautiful, it’s haunting…and it’s all about how big data is keeping track of every trace we leave, piecing together a more and more detailed picture of each of us in order to feed us back the perfect, tailored life, and isn’t that what we wanted?

Tracking. Privacy. Social media. Filter bubbles.

And I always think, “I need to post something about this on Facebook…”

And that just creeps me out more.

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It’s looking more and more likely that WonderCon will be staying in Anaheim again for 2014. That makes it easier for me to attend, but I still feel like the show’s out of place. I’d like it to return to the Bay Area even though it means I’ll have to travel.

I’ve been in San Francisco this week for a training course. Tuesday night after dinner I wandered down Market St. until I recognized the pedestrian path that led toward the Yerba Buena Gardens, Metreon mall, and Moscone Convention Center. I had to look.

There was an art installation in the path, a set of benches including an open-air whisper gallery. The church nearby was covered with scaffolding. The nearby buildings were lit up, as was the Martin Luther King, Jr. waterfall at the south end of the park, and I decided to try taking some night photos with my phone. HDR mode surprised me by turning out astonishingly well for a phone.

MLK Waterfall at Night

Compare that view of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial waterfall to this daytime shot from 2010:

And here’s a look at the buildings on the east side of the park:

Yerba Buena Gardens at Night

Would I have liked to have a better camera with me? Sure. But the software did a great job of counteracting my jittery hand and the low light level. It probably handled the image stabilization better than my camera would have.

I walked on across the bridge to check in on the convention center itself, for nostalgia’s sake, and noticed for the first time the children’s museum and playground in the same block. If WonderCon ever does make it back to San Francisco, we’ll have somewhere to take our son in the middle of the day. Though the way things are going, by then he’ll be old enough to enjoy a full day at a comic con anyway!

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I had a long list of books I wanted to read this year, and now that it’s November, I’ve become acutely aware that I’ve only read a few of them.

I can’t feel too bad about it, though, because one of those books I’ve been reading is Les Misérables, complete and unabridged…all 1200+ pages of it…and I’m writing commentary on it. Even when I first read it as a high school student, back in 1992, it took me several months.

It is taking me a lot longer to read this time around. I started it back in January, and I’m about three-quarters of the way through now. At first I thought it was just a matter of time.

At first I thought it was a matter of reading time. Between having a family, a full-time job, time-consuming hobbies and of course the constant temptation to look at Facebook or Twitter or Feedly or something else, I’m down to reading during my weekday lunch hours and that’s about it.

On the other hand, back in high school, I was a student. I had homework, extracurricular activities, and lots of reading for school.

I don’t think the commentary slows down the process too much (except that it does take up time on the weekends when I could be reading), but the fact is…

I actually have made a sizable dent in that reading list. And some of those books have been immense themselves: A Memory of Light (The Wheel of Time conclusion by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson), A Turn of Light (Julie Czerneda), The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi, not terribly long, but incredibly dense), plus new books by Robert J Sawyer and Seanan Maguire, a bunch of non-fiction…

Looked at that way, I don’t feel quite so bad, either for not having Les Misérables finished or for not having finished all the other books I wanted to read.

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