nixsight

In #MOMBcast 19, we talked about the following comics:

@JamesMOMB
15:40 Captain America Reborn #6 (Ed Brubaker/Bryan Hitck/Butch Guice)
22:00 Robocop #1 (Rob Williams/Fabiano Neves)

@JaneMOMB
32:00 Madame Xanadu #19 (Matt Wagner/Joëlle Jones)
37:00 Demonic #1 (Robert Kirkman/Marc Silvestri)
47:00 Tracker #1 (Jonathan Lincoln/Francis Tsai)
55:00 45 (Andi Ewington/Various)

@Nixsight
59:00 Detective Comics #861 (Greg Rucka/Jock)
01:03:05 Batman & Robin #7 (Grant Morrison/Cameron Stewart)
01:06:30 Thor #606 (Kieron Gillen/Billy Tan)
01:08:30 Kick-Ass #8 (Mark Millar/John Romita Jr)

01:19:00 Nocturne Hotel (Eddie Robson/Simon van Alphen)
01:20:30 PJANG (Rol Hirst/Various)

01:24:30 Tintin – Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham’s Treasure (Hergé)

Nocturne Hotel: Purchase at Lulu.com
Rol Hirst & PJANG: http://rolhirst.co.uk/

In #MOMBcast 18, we talked about the following comics:

@nixsight
12:00 Joe The Barbarian #1
20:00 Spider-Woman #5

@Chris_TOMP
30:00 Spider-Woman #5
37:00 Thunderbolts #140

@JaneMOMB
54:00 Joe The Barbarian #1
56:00 Neonomicon Preview

@JamesMOMB
01:05:00 The Outsiders
01:07:30 Dark Avengers #13

01:18:00 S.W.O.R.D cancellation whinge
01:29:00 Daredevil by @Chris_TOMP

In #MOMBcast 17, we talked about the following comics:
@RichMOMB
18:00 Die Hard Year One #4
23:10 Daytripper #2

@JaneMOMB
30:30 Talisman #3
33:00 Dingo #1 & #2

@nixsight
44:00 Invincible Iron Man #22
51:00 S.W.O.R.D #3

@JamesMOMB
01:02:00 Weekly World News #1
01:12:00 Punisher@ Get Castle

01:35:00 45 Blue Spear one-shot chat.
01:40:00 The Siege#1 & Siege Embedded #1

MOMBcast 17 and all other episodes are available here: http://dimitrimomb.libsyn.com/

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The post I sent out yesterday, about my problems with the way articles about gang-rape and prostitution were being written at both the BBC and The Guardian, was more controversial than I had intended, garnering a comment from a gentleman I hadn’t heard of before, Julian Real, which sought to come down quite heavily on me over some perceived issues with my argument.

Though I was initially quite shaken by the comment – aggressively worded criticism always gets the adrenaline flowing in uncomfortable ways, after all, especially when you’re too responsive to verbal bullying like I am – and people told me not “to feed the troll”, in Real’s arguments I actually saw some places where I could make my points more clearly, and also gained a little more confidence in the points I was initially hoping to make, as well.

I know I sometimes appear quite opinionated, but personally at least, I’ve always seen an initial statement as a jumping off point, from which all the people in a discussion can inform, correct and self-correct, and my opinions, though idealistically quite consistent, are always fluid where details, clarification and validation are concerned.

So Mr Real’s comment gave me the opportunity to look over what I’d written, and explain what I meant on the bits he disagreed with, and that’s been a fun exercise. I don’t think I will have changed his mind, but then, that’s not really what I hope to do to people. I barely know my own mind – it’d be a bad idea to try and change anyone else’s.

Anyway, I was quite happy with my response to his comment here, but then I realised that I didn’t know what he’d said over at his site. If he’d pointed his readers at my post, and his comment, I didn’t want my clarifications to pass them by. So over I went.

The first paragraph said this:

I found this silly blogpost today. And I responded. The the post by nixsight follows, and where I found it can be seen by clicking on the link in this sentence. On his own blog, his words are not so rudely interrupted by mine. But that was then, and this is here.

Things kind of went downhill from there.

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I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.
Why men use prostitutes

There’s a lot wrong with that sentence. For a start, the fact that there’s no “just” in between “not” and “feminists” is telling.

It’s a peculiar sort of person who will take the words of obviously confused or disturbed individuals, and draw conclusions that pull in a whole gender. Or even a whole subset of a gender.

One can’t conclude from the words of a suicidal female office worker that all office workers are suicidal, let alone that all women are.

I’m getting a little bit tired of sex-negative writing at the moment. For sure, there is trafficking and abuse in the sex industry, and something should be done about it, but we – and certainly, The Guardian – should be at the point where the discussion is more insightful and specific, and less blunt and general.

Certainly, it may say something about how objective a writer wants to be when they are using data from a very limited survey, and not giving much away about how they came across the responders.

There are many erudite and pragmatic ex and current sex-workers writing on and off the internet. There’s really no excuse any more to use the word “prostitute” as short-hand for “trafficked” or “exploited”. Even if it’s the case that the majority of people in the industry are either one of those things, applying that sort of binary thinking to the issue isn’t moving discussion of it along at all.

I’ve realised today that my relationship with The Guardian is similar to the one I had with the NME – in that I started reading both at around the same point in my life, and allowed myself to identify with them a little – but for some reason I never grew out of the former the way I did the latter. Helpfully, the paper’s online provision is sorting that out.

(Cross-Posted from Tumblr)

Maybe it’s rash to read the suggestion that all men are potential rapists as a negative? It suggests that the word “potential” carries destiny within it, when actually it contains choice.

At roughly the point historically that we started telling young women that they had the potential to be anything, we started telling young men that they had the potential to be rapists.

Is it possible that culturally we were just aiming low for our boys? The word “potential” doesn’t speak to any real likelihood – a child may have the potential to be president of the USA, or an astronaut, but it doesn’t mean they will be.

Still, it does seem to be a little sad that women had their notional horizons broadened for them, while men had theirs cut right down.

Two minor TV obsessions this week. I promised someone that I’d watch “Stargate: Universe” so that they didn’t have to, and we’ve been sitting on the first season of Canadian drama “Durham County” for months, and finally got round to that this week, too.

Durham County Season 1

We picked up “Durham County” largely because it stars Hugh Dillon, who impressed the hell out of us with a nuanced and oddly sweet portrayal of the head muscle in SWAT show “Flashpoint”. As it stands, we got into “Flashpoint” largely because it had Veronica Mars’ dad in it. So you start to get a sense of how this works.

The show is notionally a murder mystery. Hugh Dillon is homicide detective Mike Sweeney, who moves his family – including eccentric young daughter in a mask Maddie, morbid teen daughter who wants to follow in her father’s footsteps Sadie, and his wife Audrey, who is trying to come to terms with having barely survived breast cancer – away from the city, and back to the place where he grew up, the titular Durham County. The place itself is billed as a small town, but it presents more like a suburb of the oft mentioned “downtown”, albeit an insular one.

The family move into the area amid a search for two schoolgirls, and Sweeney is eager to start working the case, but then the body of locally beloved English teacher Nathalie Lacroix is found, and when Sweeney sees the body he becomes obsessed, because he has a hidden connection to this new victim.

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… as I was writing an earlier post about “Stargate Universe”, I got major league sidetracked into discussing the notion that it is somehow similar to “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica”.

It basically muddied the issue on what I thought about the show, so I’m copy/pasting my points right here into a brand-new post. As if this shit wasn’t confusing enough already.

…The comparisons with “Lost” seem to come from the fact that some of the characters have secrets, or at least things about them that we don’t know at the beginning of the pilot, and occasionally, in a sort of non-committal, unstructured way, bits of their past are played out in flashback – though mainly in that first episode. The techniques, very similar to the way most characters in most shows are written, and flashbacks are traditionally used, actually serves to distance the show from “Lost”, which is always rigid about the way it uses the flashbacks – and later flashforwards – within a particular episode, and also goes to great lengths to subvert traditional narratives with them.

(Actually, one of the few things that distract from the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of the pilot episode was the lack of an audio or visual cue when the show was shifting into flashback. It was a little disorienting, and not in an obviously deliberate way.)

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So championship communicator Jeremy Nicholas apparently had a problem getting into a Cineworld cinema with his laptop.

Now, this sort of story always gets people frothy. For a start, we don’t like being told what to do by someone operating as an automaton on the part of a faceless organisation, not least because the things they end up telling us to do are generally a little bit stupid.

When piracy is invoked, it gets our blood up that little bit more. Those of us who don’t drink at the furry cup of illicit movie file-sharing see it as an attack on our civil liberties, and that we are innocents being treated as criminals. Those of us who are evil, reprehensible, filthy pirate file-sharing pirate-pirates have normally worked out our own tissue-thin rationalisations of why it isn’t a proper crime anyway, and proclaim that if the entertainment industry deserved our money, we’d be happy to spend it.

The entertainment industry holds no truck with the second point of view, and in dealing with the first uses child-protection logic – that it doesn’t matter how many innocent people are inconvenienced or abused, if it means that just one single movie goes unmolested.

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Breaking blog silence for a few moments because I actually can’t stop listening to this bad boy, and think those of you not already part of the Twitter wave might get a kick out of it:

Nixsight does still exist, I promise. Just got a lot going on, and not got a smart enough work-flow to keep you up to speed on it all at the moment!

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