CSotD: Three you should read
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The headline tells the story: I came across three comics in the last 24 hours that seem to me particularly excellent, each for different reasons.
Jack Ohman — who moved from the Pacific Northwest to Sacramento a little over a year ago — uses a spare, economic style of storytelling that makes this piece extraordinarily touching, mostly because we fill in the parts he doesn't provide, drawing from our own emotions and experiences.
I think what I find most appealing about this cartoon is that it connects with a specific sense of loss, which is that of the small moment, that unremarkable conversation in which you would have simply said, "I saw something today you would have liked," or "What was that restaurant we used to go to when I was a kid that had …" or "You won't believe who I ran into."
Except that the person you would have said it to is no longer around.
The other thing that makes this work is how it came sailing out of left field. There are artists who try to do this kind of thing as their regular gig and it rarely works for very long, because you can't simply keep replicating those moments and maintain any freshness and impact.
You can't sit down and plan to do this: It doesn't cause the emotional harmonics when it's not as spontaneous as the moment it describes.
Walk a mile in her high-button shoes
Shaenon Garrity's take on women and the gaming culture (of which this is only the opening panels) has gone viral within that community. You should click on that link and go read the rest.
For those on the outside, a primer:
She's riffing on what women experience at the various conventions of video/computer/whatever game aficianados.
It's a very lively topic within the group, sparked by a number of women who have recently said "Enough!" and gone public with the insults, humiliations and worse that they encounter at these gatherings.
Garrity's fanciful parallels are amusing but that absurdity creates a distance that brings home the point of how stupid and unnecessary and unfair it all is. Including the one that can't simply be tossed off as insensitivity but rose to the level of genuine, jaw-dropping misogynistic dysfunction.
Now, given the predominance of perpetual male adolescence upon which the gaming culture has been built and to which it continues to cater, there is a certain level of "what did you expect?"
That is, however, a fairly straightforward case of blaming the victim: "Why would you even want to sit up in the front of the bus with those peckerwoods?"
However — to continue with the metaphor — not everyone in the front of the bus was deliberately racist. Some were simply going with the flow and either not noticing the problem or unwilling to speak out.
The real measure is not whether you recognize injustice from the start. The measure is what you do once it's been pointed out to you.
And how many times it has to be pointed out before you get it.
This is an admirable entry in that effort.
One more on this topic and that's it
Mike Lynch pointed out this Samuel Ferri commentary on the Woody/Mia/Dylan matter, and, sick as I am of the whole thing, it's very much worth checking out the rest of his cartoon.
In my anniversary blog entry the other day, I spoke of the infectious nature of snark and then, in the comments, opined that we'd probably be a great deal more civil if the Internet didn't provide a sense of distance and an impression that we aren't actually talking about real people.
It is unquestionably true that celebrities give up a certain amount of personal privacy in exchange for the adulation from which they prosper, not only in actual box-office receipts and product sales, but in gaining the power to choose projects and live apart from the wage-slave restrictions we more obscure folks must endure.
But that has meant that their adoring public projects all sorts of assumptions onto them, including the assumption that we can sit in judgment over their private lives.
This well pre-dates the Internet: People had well-formed opinions in 1921 of what Fatty Arbuckle did or didn't do with or to Virginia Rappe.
Which is why studios worked so hard to keep their stars out of the headlines: The court of public opinion is notably slack about Rules of Evidence.
What you have to bear in mind is that, while seemingly-guilty people do get to walk from time to time, there is a certain counterbalance to this matter of Trial by Media.
"Everybody" was also pretty sure what the Scottsboro Boys had been up to, after all.
Granted, Fatty Arbuckle could afford one hell of a spin machine while the Scottsboro boys couldn't even pay for basic counsel.
But when both sides of a public pissing match are able to access the best of advisors and spinmeisters, that disparity isn't in play.
This isn't a movie. It's real life.
I'm choosing (d).
It's not one of those tests where you can improve your score by guessing.
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