I can attest to the fact that this song predates the Aquaman movie by at least a dozen years, and this recording was at least a year before Jason Mamoa set hearts a-flutter.
All the “Jenny Is The Villain Of Forrest Gump” meme-ing from months ago, plus a Facebook post from the always-right Kris Wernowsky, got me to excavate an issue of The Goat, a local ‘zine I helped produce in the late 90s, and home to my earliest, most earnest (over-)writing.
Sometimes, hindsight is pretty terrific. Listening to tracks from this, knowing now that Greg Dulli and Company’s reach won’t exceed their grasp, that “Hated” will beget “My Curse” will beget “Summer’s Kiss” makes these wild early lunges even more touching. Almost a feel-good story because you know how it ends, as feel-good as “twist your head so I can witness/come and crawl inside my sickness” can be.
Here’s a link to a long-gone age, when I could do things, then write about them.
(It’s Old School Blogging, so if you read it, scroll to the bottom for best effect.)
1. If you’re going to write a smug thunk-piece about the “failure” of “diversity” in comics, maybe don’t use the cover image of a book that’s had 4 collections on the NYT graphic books bestseller list, won a Hugo and cleaned up at Angouleme. Just because you HOPE it’s on the chopping block, oh Riders of the Brohirrim, doesn’t mean it is.
2. I will tell you exactly why Ms Marvel works: it didn’t set out to be Ms Marvel. We were originally going to pitch it as a 10 issue limited series. I had a 3 issue exit strategy because I assumed we were going to get canned. There was no “diversity initiative” anywhere–getting that thing made at all was a struggle. It was a given that any character without AT LEAST a 20-year history would tank. Everybody, myself included, assumed this series was going to work out the same way.
3. That freed us–by “us” I mean the whole creative team–to tell exactly the story we wanted to tell. We had nothing to lose, nothing to overcome but low expectations. That gave us room to break a lot of rules.
STUFF THAT IS DIFFICULT TO REPLICATE AND IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN:
1. Unexpected audiences. We are at a point in history when the role of religion is at a tremendous inflection point. What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this. Nobody could have predicted or planned for that. That’s being in the right place at the right time with the right story burning a hole in your pocket. Plenty of other stuff I’ve written and liked has fallen with a huge thud. That’s the norm. Exceptions are great when they happen, but hard to plan.
2. The paradox of low expectations. The bar was set pretty low for Ms Marvel, but because of Ms Marvel’s success, that bar got set much higher for similar books that came later.
STUFF THAT IS ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE:
1. This is a personal opinion, but IMO launching a legacy character by killing off or humiliating the original character sets the legacy character up for failure. Who wants a legacy if the legacy is shitty?
2. Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is *the world.*
3. Never try to be the next whoever. Be the first and only you. People smell BS a mile away.
4. The direct market and the book market have diverged. Never the twain shall meet. We need to accept this and move on, and market accordingly.
5. Not for nothing, but there is a direct correlation between the quote unquote “diverse” Big 2 properties that have done well (Luke Cage, Black Panther, Ms Marvel, Batgirl) and properties that have A STRONG SENSE OF PLACE. It’s not “diversity” that draws those elusive untapped audiences, it’s *particularity.* This is a vital distinction nobody seems to make. This goes back to authenticity and realism.
AND FINALLY
On a practical level, this is not really a story about “diversity” at all. It’s a story about the rise of YA comics. If you look at it that way, the things that sell and don’t sell (AND THE MARKETS THEY SELL IN VS THE MARKETS THEY DON’T SELL IN) start to make a different kind of sense.
Hackers are building up robust systems to monitor changes to government websites. And they’re keeping track of data that's already been removed.
On Saturday morning, the white stone buildings on UC Berkeley’s campus radiated with unfiltered sunshine. The sky was blue, the campanile was chiming. But instead of enjoying the beautiful day, 200 adults had willingly sardined themselves into a fluorescent-lit room in the bowels of Doe Library to rescue federal climate data.
Like similar groups across the country — in more than 20 cities — they believe that the Trump administration might want to disappear this data down a memory hole. So these hackers, scientists, and students are collecting it to save outside government servers.
But now they’re going even further. Groups like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which organized the Berkeley hackathon to collect data from NASA’s earth sciences programs and the Department of Energy, are doing more than archiving. Diehard coders are building robust systems to monitor ongoing changes to government websites. And they’re keeping track of what’s already been removed — because yes, the pruning has already begun.
Tag It, Bag It
The data collection is methodical, mostly. About half the group immediately sets web crawlers on easily-copied government pages, sending their text to the Internet Archive, a digital library made up of hundreds of billions of snapshots of webpages. They tag more data-intensive projects — pages with lots of links, databases, and interactive graphics — for the other group. Called “baggers,” these coders write custom scripts to scrape complicated data sets from the sprawling, patched-together federal websites.
It’s not easy. “All these systems were written piecemeal over the course of 30 years. There’s no coherent philosophy to providing data on these websites,” says Daniel Roesler, chief technology officer at UtilityAPI and one of the volunteer guides for the Berkeley bagger group.
One coder who goes by Tek ran into a wall trying to download multi-satellite precipitation data from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Starting in August, access to Goddard Earth Science Data required a login. But with a bit of totally legal digging around the site (DataRefuge prohibits outright hacking), Tek found a buried link to the old FTP server. He clicked and started downloading. By the end of the day he had data for all of 2016 and some of 2015. It would take at least another 24 hours to finish.
The non-coders hit dead-ends too. Throughout the morning they racked up “404 Page not found” errors across NASA’s Earth Observing System website. And they more than once ran across databases that had already been emptied out, like the Global Change Data Center’s reports archive and one of NASA’s atmospheric CO2 datasets.
And this is where the real problem lies. They can’t be sure when this data disappeared (or if anyone backed it up first). Scientists who understand it better will have to go back and take a look. But meantime, DataRefuge and EDGI understand that they need to be monitoring those changes and deletions. That’s more work than a human could do.
So they’re building software that can do it automatically.
Future Farming
Later that afternoon, two dozen or so of the most advanced software builders gathered around whiteboards, sketching out tools they’ll need. They worked out filters to separate mundane updates from major shake-ups, and explored blockchain-like systems to build auditable ledgers of alterations. Basically it’s an issue of what engineers call version control — how do you know if something has changed? How do you know if you have the latest? How do you keep track of the old stuff?
There wasn’t enough time for anyone to start actually writing code, but a handful of volunteers signed on to build out tools. That’s where DataRefuge and EDGI organizers really envision their movement going — a vast decentralized network from all 50 states and Canada. Some volunteers can code tracking software from home. And others can simply archive a little bit every day.
By the end of the day, the group had collectively loaded 8,404 NASA and DOE webpages onto the Internet Archive, effectively covering the entirety of NASA’s earth science efforts. They’d also built backdoors in to download 25 gigabytes from 101 public datasets, and were expecting even more to come in as scripts on some of the larger datasets (like Tek’s) finished running. But even as they celebrated over pints of beer at a pub on Euclid Street, the mood was somber.
There was still so much work to do. “Climate change data is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Eric Kansa, an anthropologist who manages archaeological data archiving for the non-profit group Open Context. “There are a huge number of other datasets being threatened with cultural, historical, sociological information.” A panicked friend at the National Parks Service had tipped him off to a huge data portal that contains everything from park visitation stats to GIS boundaries to inventories of species. While he sat at the bar, his computer ran scripts to pull out a list of everything in the portal. When it’s done, he’ll start working his way through each quirky dataset.
I never close, news-publication’s-online-comment-moderators. I am here for you all.
(Say, where did those “Real Men Of Genius” Budweiser jingles go, anyway?)
I would say that times like these make me miss Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith’s Fell, but that’s not exactly true. I’ve missed Fell since I read the last page of its last installment, nine years ago.
(Panel from Fell #6, by Warren Ellis & Ben Templesmith)
baratheonpilled
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
dededos
romaincrisis
jbbartram-illu
izzy806
snowghoul
