Category: General

Why setting goals can backfire – The Boston Globe.

Intuitively, this rings very true to me.  What a wise person really wants in any situation is not likely to be something that can be easily summed up in any set of goals.

A few months ago I happened upon a torrent of the comic _Flex Mentallo_ by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It’s a mixed-up, trippy, postmodern superhero fable, twisted and kind of beautiful.  I enjoyed it.

Not until reading this essay did I consider that it is also a kind of rebuttal of Watchmen, the Dark Knight, and all such Dark, Gritty Superhero Comics.

As Comics for Serious quotes:

“Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.”

-The Hoaxer

I dig Watchmen, I do.  I’m gonna have to go see that movie, despite the fact that I virtually never see any movies.  But in the back of my mind is going to be Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery.

The thing about Flex Mentallo is that acknowledges all the cynicism, it faces it squarely — reading the endnotes in issues 2 and 4 gives as a history of the fictional Flex Mentallo comic as cynical and messed up as anyone could possibly come up with — and it walks straight through it with a smile on its face and hope in its heart, to the other side.

I’m actually not a huge comics dude.  I probably know multiple people who have literally read hundreds or thousands of times more comics than I have.  I haven’t ever written or drawn my own superhero comics, in the main, but I have come up with many superheroes, because one of the roleplaying games I played a lot as a kid was Villains and Vigilantes, one of the earliest superhero RPGs.  And reading Flex Mentallo, and watching it name-drop dozens and dozens of nonce superheroes, gave me that feeling of the excitement of coming up with characters and villains for V&V and Champions back in the day.  There’s something special there, some kind of magic creating them.

I’m thinking of the self-consciously cheesy/retro game Jim and I ran in college, my character Phantom Fighter with the ability to phase out like Kitty Pride, and his martial arts telescoping staff/nunchuks…  The Villainous Doctor Crime…  and back much earlier, when I was in high school, maybe even middle school, my brother’s streetwise martial artist, Archangel ….  I remember getting out How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way from the library, and drawing endless heroes, animal-powered, semi-robotic, flying, diving, armored, armed, magical, mutant, scientific, alien, interdimensional….  All that stuff came back to me reading Flex Mentallo.

Maybe it’s the traces of fever I think I still am running today.  Or maybe there’s really something there.

I had to sign up for google webmaster tools to figure out why they weren’t indexing goesping.org right now, at all. The tools said a bunch of drug spam had been found on the site; it took me a while to figure out where. It was all in cached pages designed to be served up with the “WP-Super-Cache” wordpress plugin. There must be some exploit that lets an attacker seed the cache with spam. Deleted it, turned off the plugin, and politely asked Google to re-index me via the form used for such purposes.

There’s something ominous about the sheer momentum of facebook. I’ve never seen an internet phenomenon affect this many people before, and, at least momentarily, really affect their lives. I’ve been on for just a few months and it seems if anything the rate at which I’m seeing people who I never thought I’d hear from again join up and find me is accelerating. When is this going to stop? Is there going to come a time a year or three hence when we’re all, “facebook, remember that? what happened to that thing?” or is it going to change things, like the Web before and after Google, or for that matter, the Internet before and after the Web? (Or more cynically, the Internet before and after the September That Never Ended?)

Will I soon get a facebook friending from Eddie Bresnahan, my best friend who lived next door to me in LaGrange, Illinois, and whom I last saw when I was five, sometime before my family moved to Michigan in 1975?  About whom the only clear thing I remember is that his family owned a Gnip Gnop?

How about Timmy Bolt, who acted up in Kindergarten at the Lutheran school I went to in LaGrange, because his mom was the teacher (and that’s the only thing I remember about him except a vague impression of his appearance)?

How about the little girl named Katie that my mom babysat when I was about four?  How about Becky, the daughter of my mom’s best friend in LaGrange, whom we lost touch with when we moved?

None of the above would surprise me at this point.  I’m expecting friend requests from previous incarnations soon.

Things are tough all over these days.  I thought it’d be worth at least checking to see if I can earn anything from adsense on the blog.  It looks like butt and has sleazy pharmaceutical ads, though.  I’m going to leave them there just in case they do any good, and recommend Adblock Plus to anyone they annoy.