today’s Coronavirus post

OK, I know I’ve been posting too much about this lately. I promise that this post will only be Coronavirus-adjacent, and not Coronavirus-centered.

First: one silver lining in this grey cloud is that I probably don’t have to worry about Real ID this year, since it’s now highly unlikely I’ll be traveling by plane any time soon. The Somerville DMV has been clogged lately, presumably due to demand for Real ID licenses, and they’ve been thinking about shutting it down on Saturdays, just because the parking situation has gotten so bad. (It seems to me like maybe having it open more often would be a better solution, but what do I know…) Also, NJMVC is granting automatic two-month extensions on all driver’s licenses expiring over the next few months, so if you’re worried about going to the DMV right now, you can put it off for a month or two, at least. (I’m only really posting about this to have an excuse to point out that someone either at Patch or NJMVC has created a dummy NJ license for “Renee Montoya,” living at “321 Gotham Avenue” in Trenton. As a big Renee Montoya fan [preferably, the original B:TAS version], I approve.)

Second item: I’ve been wondering what’s appropriate to do to help other people through this. Is it better to patronize small (or large) businesses right now, or should I just stay home? I got an eggplant parm from my local pizzeria last night, and it was pretty empty in there when I went to pick it up. I usually just buy two slices when I go in there, and I’ve definitely decided to put a moratorium on buying slices for now. Those things can sit out there on the counter for hours, and god only knows what gets on them. Right now, I’m trying to decide if I should go out and get a sub for lunch, or just stay in and make myself a sandwich. I like the guy who runs the local sub shop that I go to, and I don’t want him to suffer, but I also don’t know how clean he’s keeping things in there. I know that the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s parade is going to hurt some downtown bars and restaurants. And I see that they’re allowing free parking in the town lots for the next month, so maybe that’ll help.

And I worry about how much this thing is going to hurt independent musicians, artists, and cultural institutions. I’m not worried about the “big boys.” Apple and Disney will be fine. But I am a little worried about small-time musicians who make most of their money touring (since they get so little from streaming music), and maybe some independent comics creators who rely on convention sales to make some money and find new fans. So maybe I should pick up a couple of things from Bandcamp this weekend (maybe this, for instance), and maybe look into the #ECCCOnline thing (see here and here) and buy some comics.

Third item: I swear I’m not panic-buying anything, but I did pick up an eight-pack of bamboo toilet paper today, since it was the only kind of toilet paper they had left, and, OK, I guess maybe I panicked a little about the possibility that the whole “paper products situation” might not return to normal until after I’d exhausted the eight rolls I have in my pantry. So now I get to find out what bamboo toilet paper feels like.

one more Coronavirus post

OK, I should stop now, but here’s one more Coronavirus-related post. I took the day off from work today. I had a doctor’s appointment in the morning, and had originally planned on maybe doing something fun with the rest of the day. Well, obviously, that plan got scuttled.

For the record, the doctor was an ENT guy, and I was just getting my hearing checked out. Nothing surprising came out of that: I’ve got some hearing loss in my left ear, but not enough to warrant a hearing aid. He told me to stay away from loud heavy metal concerts and get my hearing checked every year from now on.

After the doctor’s appointment, I went to ShopRite to see if I could get some grocery shopping done. It was, shall we say, a madhouse. It was very busy, and people were buying a lot of stuff, but I managed to get pretty much everything I needed. They’re still out of hand sanitizer, and now also nearly out of liquid soap. There was plenty of regular bar soap. The shelves where they keep the toilet paper were empty, but they had a pallet of 20-packs of Scott TP out. Luckily, I don’t actually need toilet paper or hand sanitizer right now. If they’d had six-packs of TP, I would have bought one, just to be safe, but I really don’t need a 20-pack.

My employer issued some more Coronavirus guidance, but they’re still not requiring or encouraging anyone to work from home. So I guess I’m going in to the office on Monday. We’ll see how that plays out.

Meanwhile, I see that both WonderCon and Tribeca Film Festival are canceled. (Technically, they’re both postponed, but  rescheduling either of them would be difficult, if not impossible.) I went to WonderCon last year, and was seriously considering going to it this year. Then, when that started looking like a possibly bad idea, I started looking into going to a few movies during TFF as a lower-risk mini-vacation. But I guess they’re both off the table.

Once I got the doctor’s appointment and the shopping done today, I spent most of the day reading Batman comics and listening to WQXR. That was a good break from both work and my Coronavirus anxiety. I even worked in a nap and a walk. So I guess the day wasn’t a total loss.

[EDIT: Ten minutes after I posted this, I got a memo saying that we’re allowed to work from home next week. Yay!]

More Coronavirus News

OK, this is my third post on Coronavirus and related topics. The last one was a full week ago though, so I’m not overdoing it. Lots of stuff has been going on this week. Lots of stuff has been canceled, people are hoarding toilet paper, and the stock market has tanked. You don’t need me to tell you any of these things, so feel free to skip this post if you’re tired of reading about Coronavirus. This post is more for my own sake than anyone else’s. I think that, maybe, if I write up my thoughts, it’ll help me process the barrage of news.

So, let’s see, where to start… Maybe with the “barrage of news” issue. Here’s an SMBC comic from today that addresses the issue of driving yourself nuts by spending too much time checking the news on your phone, instead of just getting on with your life. I am very guilty of this. I’ve had trouble concentrating at work the last few days, to be honest. And I’ve been having trouble sleeping this week. The sleep trouble isn’t all Coronavirus. It’s maybe equal parts Coronavirus, the DST change, and the recent change in weather. I’ve taken melatonin a few times this week, in the hopes that it would help with the time shift, and I think it does help me fall asleep, but it doesn’t help me stay asleep. I’m hoping I can get a bit more stable next week.

I’ve been keeping an eye on what’s canceled or closed, and what’s not. At this point, it looks like pretty much everything that involves 200+ people gathering together in the same place is going to be canceled/closed. Classes have been canceled at most NJ colleges, including Rutgers and NJIT. My old college, RPI, has canceled classes. Most stuff in NYC is going to be shut down, since they just banned gatherings of more than 500 people.

Locally, the Somerville St. Patrick’s Day Parade has been canceled. (I’m surprised at how long it took them to decide to cancel it.) Somerset County has a page set up with local information on Coronavirus. NJ.com has had some useful coverage; here’s today’s update. I see that there’s a case in Bridgewater.

For general information, FlattenTheCurve.com is kind of useful, though a little scary. The Ars Technica guide is pretty good. There’s plenty of other good resources out there too. (But it’s easy to fall down a hole reading too many of them…)

A lot of tech companies have pretty much told everyone to work from home, if possible. My company still hasn’t closed any offices or warehouses, though, and they’re generally encouraging people to come into the office as usual. (They did just announce today that, if you have kids and their school is closed, and you need to take care of them, you can work from home.)  I have a feeling things may evolve next week, and a large portion of our staff may be working from home. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, people are panic-buying toilet paper and hand sanitizer. I guess I should hold off on any visits to Costco any time soon. I’m actually a little worried about how far the panic buying has gone. I think I have enough of everything to get through a couple of weeks of being holed up in my apartment, but it might be a little rough. I’m in a small apartment, and I don’t generally don’t buy stuff in bulk. I’m hoping I can do my usual shopping this weekend without too much hassle, and maybe pick up a few extra items to help me get through, if I can’t shop next weekend. Just in case. (But I’m not going to buy 100 rolls of toilet paper. Even if I could.)

And, finally, there’s this week’s stock market meltdown. Today was the worst day for the market since 1987. I’ve been keeping an eye on my accounts, and… wow. Things are looking bad. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not retiring any time soon, so there’s plenty of time for the market to bounce back.

Well, I’d hoped that getting all of this stuff out onto the blog might help me clear my head. But nope. I’m still pretty stressed. Maybe I can decompress with some comics or a funny podcast or something.

Coronavirus News

I have to admit that I’ve been following the coronavirus news a bit more closely than is probably good for me. Some of it is amusing though. And I’ve got a condition that makes me more likely to catch something like this than most people, so I need to be careful. There haven’t been too many cases here in NJ yet, but it looks like NYC is starting to see more. I’d like to get into NYC and do some stuff this month, now that the weather is getting a little nicer, but I’m not sure it’s worth the risk right now.

On the lighter side, this article about how the rich are preparing for and dealing with coronavirus is amusing. (And a little annoying, of course, though at this point my capacity for outrage about the excesses of the 1% is pretty much exhausted.)

In the “news you can use” category, here’s an article about how to stop touching your face. I will admit that I cannot stop touching my face. I think I may have to start wearing a cone of shame to work. Or maybe a nice welding helmet?

And looking at this from a higher level, here’s something from Bill Gates, and something from Think Global Health. I don’t have much to say about either of these articles, but they’re interesting.

Comics, Cons, and COVID-19

OK, I know this is my third post today, but it’s Leap Day, so I need to get in four year’s worth of posts today. And this one isn’t another obituary-related post. (Well, maybe not. It might turn south at some point.)

I’ve been thinking about going to WonderCon this year, like I did last year. But then I started noticing how Facebook canceled their F8 developer conference, and Microsoft (and other companies) were pulling out of GDC, and how the whole event has now been postponed, and I started getting a little concerned about traveling. And about whether or not WonderCon will still even be taking place this year. So maybe I should just stay home, and hope that this whole coronavirus thing is wrapped up by October so I can go to NYCC without worrying about COVID-19. The Beat has an article about how coronavirus fears are starting to affect comic cons, though it doesn’t say anything specific about WonderCon.

Speaking of cons, C2E2 in Chicago is happening this weekend. I was kind of curious about what kind of news might be coming out of the con from DC, given the recent Dan DiDio brouhaha. The “Meet The Publishers” panel was canceled, not surprisingly. I thought maybe there would be some interesting news from the DC Universe panel, but it looks like that was just about the DC Universe subscription service, and not specifically about actual DC comics. Jim Lee made a few statements about the future of DC comics at his spotlight panel, but he didn’t really say much.

Meanwhile, The Beat has a good postmortem (for lack of a better word) on Dan DiDio’s run, by Heidi MacDonald, and a round table retrospective on him by a few other contributors. Both pieces are good reading, if you’re interested in this kind of thing.

I’m still on the fence about what I want to do about my monthly Westfield subscription orders. I’m still buying Batman and Detective, but I’m not too enthusiastic about the Joker War crossover, both because I’m a little tired of the Joker, and I’m also a little tired of crossovers. I’m still kind of enthusiastic about Bendis’ Legion and Young Justice books, but honestly I haven’t read either yet. Young Justice has more than 12 issues out and Legion has 4, I think, so I do need to catch up. I’m looking at my March order now, and I’ll probably keep it as-is, not adding or dropping anything.

Andrew Weatherall

OK, one more obituary post. This one about Andrew Weatherall, who passed away recently. I’ve been listening to his show on NTS, Music’s Not For Everyone, on and off for the last couple of years. I can’t say that I liked everything he played, but it was always at least interesting. The Guardian has an obituary and an article listing ten of his greatest tracks. And the NY Times has a short obituary too.

Mixmag has an article abut the “Weatherdrive”, a repository of about 900 hours of Weatherall mixes. I might have to poke around in there at some point. You can find a fair amount of his stuff on Mixclould too.

I don’t have much else to say about him; I mostly just wanted to link to a few resources that look interesting to me. I’m generally more interested in ambient music than dance music, so a lot of stuff that he’s done over the years isn’t really my thing, but I did like his NTS show and some of his remixes are really great.

Freeman Dyson

I don’t want to turn this blog into an “obituary blog”, but I want to put up a post about Freeman Dyson’s passing. Not because I know that much about him, but because I’ve stumbled across a bunch of interesting stuff about him, after reading a few obituaries. So I guess I’m going to have two obituary posts in a row. (And maybe three, since there’s one more person I want to blog about.)

First: here are links to the obits from the NY Times, Washington Post and NPR. From the Times obit, I like this quote: “Life begins at 55, the age at which I published my first book.” (I’m not quite 55 yet, so there’s still hope for me!)

The Post obit has some interesting stuff about his experiences in World War Two:

Mr. Dyson witnessed how technology had “made evil anonymous,” as the bombers dropped incendiary explosives that ignited firestorms, destroying whole cities. He wondered later “how it happened that I let myself become involved in this crazy game of murder.”

And observations on religion:

“I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension,” he wrote.

And the Hacker News thread about his death led me to some interesting YouTube videos:

You could really fall into a deep rabbit hole, just watching Freeman Dyson videos on YouTube.

Of course, his views on some subjects, including climate change, were probably wrong, but it’s not a bad thing to have an educated, civil, contrarian expressing his opinions. There was a profile of him in the NY Times Magazine, back in 2009, titled “The Civil Heretic,” which seems like a pretty good description for him.

He lived in Princeton for many years, and died there. I’m really not far from Princeton, but it generally doesn’t occur to me to seek out interesting people and events that might be happening there. I’m sure he must have had a number of public speaking engagements at Princeton over the last 20 years, and I could probably have made it to one or two. So I guess that’s a missed opportunity. (But hey, I can still watch all of those YouTube videos, so that’s something.)

Larry Tesler

I have to admit that I didn’t know that much about Larry Tesler prior to his passing last week. I was generally aware of Xerox PARC, and their place in the history of personal computing. And I probably had heard at some point that Tesler was essentially the inventor of “copy and paste.” And I think I was vaguely aware that he’d worked on the Newton, maybe? But I don’t think I’d ever put that all together in my mind, and realized that this was all the same guy. Over the years, it looks like he’s worked on a number of really cool things, from Smalltalk to Object Pascal to the Newton.

I first saw the news of his death on Hacker News, which linked to an obituary on Gizmodo. The Hacker News thread has some pretty interesting anecdotes and conversation, including a number of comments from Alan Kay. There’s also an obituary in the NY Times, written by John Markoff. And there’s a nice remembrance from Adam Engst at the TidBITS site.

I don’t have anything useful or pithy to say. I’m just here marveling at how much this guy did, and what a good guy he apparently was.

The last 20 years of comics follow-up

This post is just a follow-up to my last post, where I was ruminating a bit on comics, based on an article from Polygon. After I posted that, a friend mentioned that Dan DiDio had just left DC Comics. Dan was definitely a big part of the last 20 years of comics, having started at DC in 2002 and becoming co-publisher, with Jim Lee, in 2010. I’ve seen him at a bunch of con panels over the years. He’s really been the main public face for DC over the last two decades, at least in terms of communicating with the fans. He’s always been a high-energy guy at his con panels, and I generally look forward to them and enjoy them. He and Jim Lee made a good pair at their “Meet the Publishers” panels, with DiDio playing the “carnival barker” and Lee being more laid-back and understated.

DC hasn’t officially said much about DiDio’s exit, but it sounds like he was fired, according to Bleeding Cool. BC also has a couple of articles (here and here) rounding up social media reaction to his departure. Most folks have had only good things to say about him, though of course there’s some negative stuff in there too.

Mark Evanier has a blog post about DiDio’s exit that is really more about how large media companies work these days than it is specifically about DiDio. It does put things in perspective. This may lead to a bunch of changes at DC, or… it might not. This article from the LA Times gets into the business side of things. I occasionally forget that DC is now just a part of AT&T. If you told me 20 or 30 years ago that, some day, my long-distance phone company would own Batman, I’d have laughed at you. But, yeah, AT&T owns Batman now. And there’s probably no one there, above a certain level, that really cares about the comic books. They care about the “intellectual property” and whatever value they can wring from it, and they might see the comics as a key part of that, or they might see them as outdated and unprofitable.

I’m looking at the March Westfield catalog now, and I’m seeing at least one new thing from DC that I’m interested in: a new Batman Adventures mini-series, written by Paul Dini and Alan Burnett! So that’s cool. But, looking at the fine print, I see that it’s a “digital first” series, and also that the main purpose of the series is as a tie-in to a new action figure line. So this does back up my feeling that the comics are, more and more, seen as an addendum to the other stuff being done with the property, rather than the source that makes the other stuff possible. And that they’re continuing to move away from the traditional 32-page physical comic books. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with DC, and the industry as a whole, over the next year.

The last 20 years of comics

I just read an interesting article on Polygon about the last 20 years of comics. They interviewed a bunch of creators about the last two decades, looking at the 2000s and 2010s separately, and then summarized it all. The summary version is here, and a version with the full responses from the creators is here.

There were a lot of different perspectives, though they mostly talked to mainstream creators, so there’s a bit of a mainstream bias and not as much mention of stuff outside the usual Marvel/DC bubble. But a lot of it got me thinking. I thought I’d share some quotes here and add my own thoughts.

  • Amanda Conner, Coleen Doran, and Gail Simone all mentioned the positive changes with regard to women, among both creators and fans.
    • Conner: “Now girls read comics across the table and it’s great. It’s really good. There’s more female creators, there’s more female readers. I feel like this decade has been a very, very girl power decade, which is great.”
    • Doran: “Now, women and girls in comics are not just becoming the norm, but a major creative and financial force.”
    • Simone: “So, yeah, it’s been a couple decades of great superhero comics, but also, the rise of people like Kelly Sue DeConnick and Marjorie Liu and G. Willow Wilson.”
    • I remember how weird it was, early in the 00’s, to start seeing so much more diversity at comic book conventions. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, you’d mostly just see guys like me at cons: white, male, nerdy. Now, you see… everybody. The wide popularity of manga and anime had a lot to do with that initially, I think. At this point, it’s broadened out to include a lot of related stuff that all gets lumped into the “pop culture” category. So comics are just a part of that, but they’re an important part.
  • A number of people mentioned or alluded to 9/11, including Bryan Hill and Tom Brevoort.
    • Hill: “I think the early ’00s were about reconciling with loss, and we needed fiction to recognize it with us. You start thinking about Ultimates, and all that stuff. We needed the fiction to do that.”
    • Brevoort: “This all really started in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, when comics were among the first entertainment media (due to our speed of production) to be able to effectively and emotionally deal with the aftermath of those attacks and the psychic scars that everybody was feeling.”
    • I tend to think of J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man 36 as being a key book early in the 2000’s, dealing with 9/11 in a way that could have been a really awkward failure, but was instead a really uplifting story.
  • Jim Starlin was the only guy to mention something that’s been on my mind: “I think you’re gonna see the pamphlets slowly disappearing; the little 22-page or 20-page books. There’s just not a system anymore where those are profitable. Most of those books are losing money.” I’ve been wondering about that a lot. The comic book store here in town still seems to be doing OK, but I’m starting to wonder how much life the current system of monthly 32-page books has left in it.
  • Kieron Gillen mentions Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority as being a defining comic for the 00’s. I’d agree with that, to some extent. The Ultimates was definitely influenced by The Authority, and that comic became a major influence on how Marvel’s characters were portrayed in the movies. And of course the success of the MCU is a major factor in the place that superhero comics have in pop culture right now.
  • Scott McCloud mentions Chris Ware and Raina Telgemeier, so he was one of the few folks to mention anything outside of the Marvel/DC bubble. I have to admit that, while I’m certainly familiar with Ware and Telgemeier, I still haven’t gotten around to reading anything by either of them. I’ve probably read a few short pieces by Ware somewhere along the line, but I’ve never read any of his longer works. I need to rectify that at some point.
  • Steve Orlando mentions Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, which is a series I still haven’t read, despite owning all of the TPBs. I think that may have been (arguably) his first major mainstream US superhero work. (I’m not counting his 90’s DC/Vertigo work as “mainstream.”)
  • I just read a few Fables TPBs over this past weekend. Fables ran from 2002 to 2015, so it’s solidly in the 2000-2019 time frame. I’m not too sure if I’d point to it as a hugely influential series, in the way that Sandman was in the 80s/90s, but it was a popular book that lasted for 150 issues, so that counts for something. (I’ve now read all the trades through to issue 100, so I have a few more trades to go.)
  • Hellboy has been pretty influential and popular, though it started back in the 90s. The two Guillermo del Toro movies came out in 2004 and 2008, so the peak of Hellboy’s popularity was definitely in the 2000s. I think Hellboy’s success as a creator-owned comic that went on to spawn a couple of relatively popular movies may have helped later properties like The Walking Dead. Speaking of which, TWD ran from 2003 to 2019, so that’s solidly in the 2000s also, and has been wildly successful. (I have digital copies of a few of the Walking Dead collections, but haven’t read them yet.)
  • For myself, I stopped buying monthly comics in 2009, then started up again in 2016. I’m thinking about stopping again, just due to the backlog that I’m building up. The stuff I’ve been gravitating to most over the last 20 years has been pretty diverse, though there are certain characters, and writers and artists, who I keep coming back to. For characters: Batman. I can’t seem to quit Batman. And I still love stuff like Hellboy and Usagi Yojimbo. For writers: Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Christopher Priest. (And Neil Gaiman, though he doesn’t do much comics work these days.)