Long, short, informative, sarcastic, boring, simple?
My posts are usually short and to the point, with a dash of sarcasm here and there. I do sometimes post essays, but only in EoEo (and when I'm really fed up).
And yourself?
Printable View
Long, short, informative, sarcastic, boring, simple?
My posts are usually short and to the point, with a dash of sarcasm here and there. I do sometimes post essays, but only in EoEo (and when I'm really fed up).
And yourself?
Short, simple, boring. I like pie though.
Long and boring. With a stupid, pointless sentence at the end.
Short...most of the time :p
Mine are either rather short, of ridiculously long. Usually not in between. And I tend to use overly formal language, with at least one....but never more than three smilies. :p
Look at my posts in the past, they'll answer your question.
If I'm starting a thread, my posts will be of a medium length, and full of complaints. If I'm replying, they'll be shorter, and often have no relevance to the topic. Normally, they're just an excuse for a cheap joke.
It depends. If I have a lot to say, they'll be long, if I don't, they'll be short.
I don't post alot but i think my posts are the essence of simplicity. READ: Boring
It depends on the thread. At GFF, my post tend to be long-winding, because a lot of threads there have complex topics. Here, the topics are mainly one-sided. As such, my posts tend to be quick, direct and to the point quite a bit of the time on here.
Quote:
Oh, San Diego!
It is and has been for decades the comics convention. It’s the gathering of the tribes: indie auteurs, fan favorites, corporate hacks and shills, visionary geniuses, that guy who did the make-up for the demons on that episode of Buffy, and of course tens of thousands of fans themselves, they all wash up in the great big barn of the San Diego Convention Center for four or five days toward the dog days of every summer. And you can crack jokes these days about how hard it is to even find comics at the Comic-Con these days: sure, the con’s expected to draw 80,000 people this year, as opposed to 40,000 back in 1998, but those 80,000 people are there for the movies and the video games and the toys and the anime and the manga.
And the comics. Yeah. Sure. But if you walk into the middle of the hall you’d be hard-pressed to figure that out at first.
Galhound.
Still: the hall’s a third of a mile long, and when all’s said and done, there’s a monstrous lot of comics in there. And when you walk out, head buzzing, feet aching, arms weary from carrying bags full of re-purposed wood pulp, there’s going to be two images lodged in your head, from most of the comics you’ve seen, and the way they’ve been hawked.
The first is of a woman, long and lean, young, her belly and thighs bared by a gaspingly, laughably fetishistic costume (take your pick: lingere’d angel; latexed demon; Catholic schoolgirl stripper; battle-thonged nun; tank-topped and hot-panted soldier of fortune; extreme-sports paramilitary cop; strategically splattered with creepy alien encrustations; dolled-up in crotch-floss and body paint). She usually carries a long slender sword, or a gun, or some kind of arcane Japanese farm-implement-turned-weapon, but not always. She sneers, she glares, she’s defiant, she’s angry; if she grins, it’s some kind of feral rictus; sometimes, occasionally, she’s serene, gazing expressionlessly off into nothing at all. She hangs there, on the covers, on the banners, in mid-air, mid-fall, mid-leap, mid-splash; she’s poised, her weapon of choice at the ready, up and back from the follow-through.
Cable.
The second? Lemme grab At Swim-Two-Birds:
Too great was he for standing. The neck to him was as the bole of a great oak, knotted and seized together with muscle-humps and carbuncles of tangled sinew, the better for good feasting and contending with bards. The chest to him was wider than the poles of a good chariot, coming now out, now in, and pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black man-hair and meated with layers of fine man-meat the better to hide his bones and fashion the semblance of his twin bubs. The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ball-swollen with their bunched-up brawnstrings and blood-veins, the better for harping and hunting and contending with the bards. Each thigh to him was to the thickness of a horse’s belly, narrowing to a green-veined calf to the thickness of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountain-pass.
We are so far beyond wearing the underwear outside our tights it’s not even funny.
So let’s sniff and dismiss: it’s simple enough. Comics (cartooning in general) is a perilous shorthand: it traffics in those filament-images of Bruno’s, drawing on them for inspiration, generating them in return, and feeds it with the raw and heady energy of demiurgic subcreation. You draw what you want to draw (if you’re lucky, or at the very least you draw what other people in their wisdom have decided the pop semi-conscious wants you to draw), and you’re making them do exactly what it is you want them to do (or ditto): and any time desire is involved, things get funky fast. We just need to note that mainstream comics (like action-adventure movies, like genre television) is still a heterosexual white man’s game to explain why the images of women are all things to be desired, and the images of men are all things to desire to be.
“The thing about superhero stories,” says John, “is that they make no sense whatsoever, not even a tiny little bit, and never will; but once—when you were small—this made so much sense that nothing else seemed to.” Indeed, except we bemoan the lack of comics for children these days: superhero stories don’t cater to the small as their audience of choice. They fell from grace into a seething pit of that other time when you’re overwhelmed by something that doesn’t make sense, and yet means so much that the rest of the whole wide world can go hang—adolescence. Love and sex; trouble and desire. Those pop-bright demiurgic subcreations are powerful tokens, imagos and eidolons for stuff we couldn’t bear to tackle directly: desire, sex, being desired, having sex, and the world-shaking power it seemed was the only way we could ever get anywhere near the stuff, and yet which required crippling responsibility to keep the rest of the world safe from our terrible might. (Whether this is why superheroes wear their underwear outside their tights, or wearing the underwear outside their tights is why superheroes came to take on this role, is one of those delicious chicken-and-egg questions.) —The battle-thonged Beauties and brawn-strung Beasts on the comics and posters and banners all around us are just those tokens run wild, unshackled from the schoolmarmish constraints of Marketing and Editorial, fastbred at hyperevolutionary speeds to monstrously logical extremes, like bizarre ocean-floor life fished up from a ruthlessly capitalist hotzone. We’re trapped in a straight boy’s daydream, and nothing makes any sense, and it won’t stop grabbing us by the collar and gibbering that attention must be paid, and the post-adolescent fans (and artists, and writers, and editors) all trafficking in this stuff? —Let’s pick up Delany again:
For one thing one learns in fifty years is that, though most of us eventually learn to ask, more or less, for what we want, it is always more or less impossible to ask for what we need. (If we could ask for it, by definition we wouldn’t need it.) That can only be given us. Finally, we are left to conspire, inarticulately and by our behavior alone, to make sure there is as much of it available in the landscape as is possible, in the hope that, eventually, we will be fortunate enough to receive some.
Oh, but that’s mean, that’s cruel, and unfair. Look away from the comics and the posters and the banners we’ve been talking about and watch the people go by. Ignore the costumes for a moment—we’ll get to them—and note how many people who aren’t male and who aren’t white are walking past. It doesn’t look like America—not yet—but it looks a hell of a lot more like America than it did five years ago. Much less ten. —And as for the costumes, well, no one can quite manage battle-thongs, though the occasional Vampirella will come close (with lots of spirit gum in uncomfortable places), and nobody’s brawn is strung quite like that. Still: there’s women dressed as the Beauty we’re all supposed to want, and men dressed as the Beast we’re all supposed to want to be. Dozens of Lara Crofts, a couple of Vampirellas, merry-widowed dominatrices with electrical tape over their nipples, a smattering of Shis, a Lady Death, fresh from her boudoir; Punishers by the score, and that guy from that vaguely western anime with the long red duster and the angular blond hair, Agent Smiths with their hands on their earpieces, and your more faceless Beasts: Imperial stormtroopers in hardcore hardshell, proletarian Ghostbusters toting unlicensed nuclear accelerators, Federation officers and redshirts from a variety of eras. Except—there’s women in those Ghostbuster coveralls, and Federation uniforms; there’s women under the hardshell, and that was a woman walking past in full-on conquistador plate. And if there aren’t any men in battle-thongs, well, there’s the guy in the amazing Las Vegas floorshow fire demon get-up, and the long-haired bare-chested dark wizard-priest guy, in the long black sarong, and—well, maybe we’ll skip over the guy in his boyhood Spider-Man Underoos. (To be wanted? Or wannabe? He doesn’t look like he’s mocking, which is good: one thin layer of parody or pastiche and this whole house of cards of mine collapses into a merry war.)
We’re outside of the simple maps of Beauty and Beast now, the banners and comics that are running lower than the commonest denominator after some ur-image that will make the passersby stop and stare and spend. These people are bodying forth their own filaments, those mysterious, contingent images around which so much that is vital and necessary crystalizes, and if none of them deal directly with sex, still, they’re all tokens of sex and power, trouble and desire, and desire is inherently anarchic, and yet—“The power involved in desire is so great that when caught in an actual rhetorical manifestation of desire—a particular sex act, say—it is sometimes all but impossible to untangle the complex webs of power that shoot through it from various directions, the power relations that are the act and that constitute it,” says Delany. (If the John Birchers up in the valleys knew what was going on down here, they’d be out in force with pitchforks and torches.) And then:
During such power analyses we find just how much the matrix of desire (the Discourse of Desire and the matrix of power it manifests here and masks there) favors the heterosexual male, even if there is no such actor involved. Whoever is doing what the heterosexual male would be doing usually comes out on top. Though his 1915 footnote makes perfectly clear that, by the use of the word “masculine” he simply meant “active,” this may nevertheless have been part of the thrust of Freud’s statement: “that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespective of whether its object is a man or a woman.”
Women taking on their own pop culture images of things to be; men toying with the idea of being wanted—oh, but this is desperately simplistic, a dreadfully reductionist reading of a small little piece of everything that’s going on around us. And to read it all as “sex” (/sex/; «sex»; you know, sex) is to miss the terrible, wonderful, obliterating utility of trouble and desire. (Still: to read it as sex is not to insult capecapaders and cosplayers as somehow stunted, deficient, maladapted: we all need something to get us past those terrible shoals, whether it’s football or ponies, and just because we’re on the other side doesn’t mean we don’t still have a use for boats.) —This is something of what Grant Morrison’s getting at when he talks about fiction suits and pop culture technologies, and it’s rich and strange and powerful.
It’s also enervating and headache-inducing and frankly boring, after a while. (I get it.) Which is when I want to get off the floor and find a dark corner somewhere with some friends I haven’t seen in a year to talk about, you know.
Comics.
-30-
filed under Paralitticisms at 19.24
link; comments (4); pings (2)
Together again for the first time.
I already told you the one about the guy who bought the most expensive copy of that Superman comic because, y’know, it had to be the most valuable. Well, here’s what we did the last time Liefeld and Nicieza and X-Force rode into town:
It was June of 1991, and I was clerking for New England Comics, splitting my time between the Allston and Brookline shops. Allston was the shop for the hardcore regulars, selling probably 60 – 70% of each week’s new books out of subscribers’ boxes rather than off the shelf to walk-ins; it had the most wallbooks (the valuable collector’s issues, kept safe in mylar sleeves, hung from hooks on every vertical square inch) and a whole room filled with grimy once-white cardboard longboxes on folding tables, crammed with comics going back decades. Brookline was more of a kids’ shop: the sort of friendly neighborhood brightly colored shop full of comics and toys that most people thought of when they thought of comics. It had its regulars, too (one of them a disreputable chap who subsisted on issues of Cherry Poptart and Dan DeCarlo reprints; Barb liked to slip him copies of Real Girl from time to time, but we’ll get to her in a minute).
Spider-Man #1.
The year before, Todd McFarlane had ushered in the era of the rockstar cartoonist with the blockbuster Spider-Man #1. McFarlane’s style was loopy, cartoony, idiosyncratic; it first got noticed on Amazing Spider-Man, and he became the Next New Thing, hot enough that Marvel decided to cash in by giving him his own title, with its own guaranteed cash cow #1 issue. And that #1 exceeded expectations to a wild, insane degree. It sparked the speculation wildfire that roared through the comics industry in the mid-’90s, but back in 1991 we didn’t know that was coming. We just knew people would pay up to $400 for an 11-month-old comicbook. (That was for one of the rare variant covers. It lists at $20 now if it’s still in its original plastic bag, and that means you could get $10 for it from any shop that would buy it. —We had a regular who came to the Allston shop once a week, like clockwork, buying as many of the non-variant #1s as we had at $20 – $30 each, putting $400 – $500 on his company’s AmEx at a pop. He was selling them on the small-time convention circuit at $35 or $40 each—easy money we were too busy to bother picking up.)
And Marvel had noticed, to be sure, and was wildly casting about for the next Next New Thing, and the next #1 to give him. They fingered Rob Liefeld, whose style—well, it was idiosyncratic, at least—had gotten noticed on New Mutants, and they decided to let him loose on X-Force.
What was it about? Who knew? Who cared? It was going to be big. Everybody knew it. So everybody ordered accordingly, and comics clerks all over the country sighed accordingly, and heavily. —I was scheduled to work the Brookline shop on the Wednesday X-Force would debut, which was fine with me. The Brookline shop was managed by Barb, who was as much about :love::love::love::love: tha superheroes as I was: Sandman was okay, and she could tell Hayao Miyazaki from Masamune Shirow, and she liked Zot!, but mostly she liked the underground and its descendents: Los Bros. Hernandez, Dave Sim, Dori Seda, Mary Fleener, Donna Barr. (She also lived in a Buddhist monastery where she rather seriously pursued the art of kendo. So I had a crush. So deal.)
X-Force #1.
Anyway. With all the extra comics and the attendant feeding frenzy we were expecting, we knew it was not going to be a pleasant day. So we got there an hour earlier than we usually did (already a couple of kids were waiting outside, gleams in their beady eyes) so we’d have plenty of time to count the swollen order, clear space on the shelves, and get the rest of that week’s new books racked around and about it. Which done, we found ourselves with another half-hour before we had to open up.
As per our plan.
We left the shop (opening the door, exciting the somewhat longer line of kids, dashing their hopes when we locked it up again) and headed across Beacon Street to an upscale supermarket (this being Brookline), where we picked up orange juice, a couple of pastries, a bottle of champagne, and some plastic cups. Back at the shop (open, excite, lock, dash), we mixed a couple of mimosas, toasted the coming day, and tossed ‘em back.
Then.
Barb ceremoniously pulled a buck-fifty out of her pocket and rang up a sale as I grabbed a copy of X-Force #1. We walked up to glass front door where the head of the (longer still) line had a good clear view of us. I held up that copy of X-Force #1 to general oohing and aahing and yaying. Then Barb pulled out her lighter and set it on fire.
And then we opened the shop.
Image was born out of a feeling that I had that [the days of] our positions at Marvel were numbered. We had become too big for the system. Marvel didn’t want a star system, but with Todd’s, Jim’s and my books selling millions of copies, that’s what we were becoming. They were trying to reproduce the success of our books. They were going to put out a Cage #1 with an acetate cover. Like, “We’ve got to prove it’s the gimmicks, not the creators.” But the truth of the matter was Spider-Man happened because Todd had heat on Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men happened because Jim Lee had heat. They were trying to replace us already, and we hadn’t even talked about leaving.
—Rob Liefeld, on why he decided
to take part in Image Comics
That was July of 1991. In December of 1991, Marvel’s hotshot Next New Things marched as one into the office of the president of the company and made him an offer they knew he’d refuse: give them—all of them—creative control of their own properties, or they’d walk. All of them. (They never joined the Wobblies, but they figured out what it is about a union: it’s a way of getting done together what you can’t get done alone.) —Marvel said, roughly, shyeah right, and so Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and Jim Valentino and Erik Larsen and Mark Silvestri and Whilce Portacio and Rob Liefeld walked and founded Image Comics. They nearly killed Marvel, and they came even closer to killing the direct market itself, and you should go read Michael Dean’s “The Image Story” to savor the rise and the fall. They put out hundreds of troutty comics and ran a handful of superhero æsthetic trends out past their logical extremes and over a cliff, and it’s as much their fault as anybody else’s that the big Comic-Con is all about movies and videogames now, and they changed the course of history and the flow of capital; nothing was ever the same after they did what they did.
I used to say that the punchline to the story above was that later that day, after we and everybody else in the country had just about sold out of the first printing of X-Force #1, this guy offered to pay five dollars for the ashes of the copy we’d burned, which we’d slipped into a mylar sleeve and hung from the counter by the cash register. (Hey. Five bucks.) I used to point out that a near-mint first print of X-Force #1, which once was bought at $50, $60, $100 a throw, by people who forgot to buy low and sell high, could now be had for the low, low price of, yup, five dollars. Whoa. That irony’s a bitch.
But I found out that isn’t the punchline. The punchline is reading this:
This fall, Rob Liefeld, Fabian Nicieza and X-Force return for a six to eight issue miniseries as announced at WizardWorld LA’s “Cup O’ Joe” panel with Marvel E-I-C Joe Quesada.
And hearing Liefeld say this:
Oh yeah, there was plenty of trepidation. In fact I turned it down twice before finally convincing myself to do it because I was really intimidated and let’s face it, it is a gigantic, daunting challenge to see if we can restore this book to anything resembling the glory days when this book was a top seller and the characters were extremely relevant to the Marvel Universe. It’s been quite some time since this franchise was a water cooler book and I’d be lying if I told you I have doubts about what we can accomplish. We’re giving it our best effort though, trying our hardest to make this as exciting as possible.
And this:
The situation is as follows: there is a terrorist group from the future that is hell bent on awakening a terrible menace from our past in the present. One really cool monster, ninjas, assassins, barbarians, time-travelers and plenty of intrigue. All the ingredients that set X-Force apart from the pack 13 years ago are front and center here. The sins of Cable’s past really come back to haunt him this time around...
The punchline is this:
Page 12, X-Force #1.
And you know what? Rob Liefeld is an ass. He’s a troutty cartoonist in every conceivable sense of the term who thinks ninjas and assassins and time travel are innovations. He isn’t unsubtle when it comes to slamming peers and burning bridges. His popularity then and now is an occulted mystery, even to his fans (perhaps especially to his fans). The comics he’s produced are without exception qlippothic works, darkly sucking away from superheroes whatever magic and wonder and naïve dignity they can muster. Him, and Marvel, and X-Force—they all deserve each other, and good riddance.
Still: that story isn’t nearly as funny as it used to be.
Your very blood screams indifference towards defining the need to fight versus the desire to fight. You have failed in your mission, Gaveedra-7. You must leave the Sacrarium.
-30-
filed under Sequentualities at 1.28
link; comments (9); pings (2)
------------
In conclusion, my posts are long and pointless. Or short and pointless. Or long and filled with meaning and wisdom... or short, and meaningful and stuff. Yeah.
EDIT BY BoB: Holy bajeebers. That was long and I was about to delete your post thinking it was off topic until I read the last bit. Quoted it so it was more obvious and made it size=1 because it was too long. :p
Who wouldn't? ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by ShlupQuack
Yeah, sarcastic sounds good usualy short too unless im starting a topic.. it looks bad if you make a short post when starting a topic.
They're usually medium length. A few sentances, not short or long. I try to make them somewhat funny.
It depends.
Medium to short. I post like I talk, actually.
Long.
Yeah...same here Giga. To me these forums are a chatroom with long delays and verry mean people that slap you if you go off topic.
I dunno. But I like to use a smiley to make them look... smiley. At the moment my favourite smileys are :elk: and :greenie: so...yeah.
Depends... sometimes they'r short, and other times they'r long.
Oh, I use smilies too, just because I'm pretty expressive too.
Sometimes short, and sometimes longer, but mostly always boring. :D
Short, and useless, when I bother to post at all.
Short with an attempt at wit.
Lacking extemporaneity.
That depends what I'm talking about. If it's in the gaming forums, chances are my posts will be fairly short-medium. But if it's here, or definitley EoEo, then it's going to be a lot longer, and much more meaningful. I also use use smilies a lot for some reason. Everything seems much more happier if you put smilies in your posts. Not so serious. I do also type the way I would talk to that person, or people. I dont change to much.
:D
Informative.
Short and sarcastic. Duh, you idiot.
Similar to this.
pfft. good luck finding one of my posts...
my posts are seldom and short with an :D at the end usually :D
1. Short and punchy.
2. Long and drawn-out.
Depends ... they have a ormal size not too short not too long ... :eep:
im not sure. cant decide on how they are, i feel they are all of those things from time to time. you decide for yourself.
I'm one of the (seemingly few?) people who post different lengths all the time. I can go on forever, I can be done with a few words, I can keep it to a paragraph or two... all depends on the subject, really, as well as how much time I have.
it all depends on the topic, really.
and what kind of mood i'm in.
fresh and crispy like veggies! more likely at a medium pace....and usually not pointless.....and with a lot of pauses like so..... and a few :D depending on the situation! :mog:
Short, simple, sarcastic. S's so super!
this is kinda hard to measure. I hardly post.
quipy
... = no
. . . = yes
and I usually attempt to spell things correctly and use proper grammar. I also use the little anime smilie thingies like - ^_^-, O_o;, -_-, and X_x.
short and to the point, or sometimes short but with a point at the end the stuff at the top is just a filler.
I attempt to be either informative or humorous. The length all depends on my mood and the position of the sun as is juxtaposes to the distance between Mercury and my third house, whilst that sum ratios with my level of hunger, compounded by whether I'm at work or not, divided by how long it's been since I last bit my fingernails, inputed into the inverse parabaloidal function of how cold I am at its maximum point, and all taken over the definite integral of how much I like the person I'm replying to over the boundaries of the area of the person's affection for me using a formula I usually need Stoke's Theorem to solve and the Reimann Sum of the how much I have liked this person's posts from the least recent in memory to the most recent. It's quite simple really.
If I am making the thread I just say what's relevant so no one gets bored of my topic and doesn't respond.
Depends on the thread or what mood I'm in.