GARDNR

What Am I Reading? #1 of whatever

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:05:24 -0800

Me and Dave Lentz, aka half of the Registered Weapon brain trust, were the special guests at Robot 6’s What Are You Reading? over the weekend. I hadn’t read any comics in forever and so, when faced with a few days in which to read something and then talk about it in such a way as to entice curious/bored readers over to my webcomic, I decided to go with some random Spider-Man trade from six months ago instead of literally anything else on my bookshelves. But hey! I have read some stuff I forgot to mention in that column!

Like, did you know that I have somehow made it to the age of 33 1/3 without once having read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery?” I MEAN EXCEPT FOR WHEN I READ THE BOOK AND SAW THE MOVIE WHEN IT WAS CALLED THE HUNGER GAMES. Okay I do have a persistent mental association of the story with this summer writing class I took when I was 15, but if I actually read the story then I flat-out don’t remember it. But anyway the point is I finally read the thing a couple of weeks ago, and uh everything you’ve heard is true. It’s good! Shocker!

“The Lottery” has been talked about to death so here’s the thing I really liked about it that I’m going to mention. I think the story’s power comes from the tension between the ambiguous and the specific, between what we’re told and how we’re told. Jackson’s writing has a reportorial matter-of-factness: it could almost be a news story, except that of the 5 Ws (and 1 H), all but the What is maddeningly incomplete. The scene is painted with such care and clarity that we feel like we’re there, that we actually know these people who have gathered in the town square for their odd ritual; but any attempt to nail down When or Where this is taking place, Who these people are (in a larger sense; we know their names and faces), and How or Why this practice started, only leads us into dark places. It is news from which all context has been leached; all we have to go on are the facts on the ground, and the unshakeable sense that something sacred has been irrevocably broken.

It’s no wonder, then, that the story had such a profound effect on The New Yorker’s readers when it first appeared in the magazine in 1948. In addition to “The Lottery,” the Library of America’s edition of Jackson’s Novels and Stories contains the 1960 essay “Biography of a Story,” in which Jackson recounts the volcanic reaction to her story. Reading the always amusing, mostly desperate letters from readers begging to know those omitted Ws, is like getting a glimpse at a pre-Internet version of Literally Unbelievable, the blog that collects incredulous Facebook reactions to stories from The Onion. Both afford us the spectacle of people laying bare their darkest fears: presented with fiction, they refuse to accept it as such, because it is simply too horrible not to believe.

Eat a peach, Stannis

Wed, 16 May 2012 05:03:05 -0700

Eat a peach, Stannis

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Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:02:28 -0700

Anthony Is Right: The Game Is "Rubber Soul/Revolver/Sgt. Pepper"

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:27:43 -0700

Anthony Is Right: The Game Is "Rubber Soul/Revolver/Sgt. Pepper":

anthonyisright:

Best played in bars, dinner parties and other social gatherings of nerds. Take a legendary popular director, actor, band or whatever, and see if you can map out these three artifacts.

A) The early popular work that a large number of fans consider the artists’ peak, often in opposition to

B) The…

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Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:39:59 -0700

Spotify, Rdio and the Slow Death of MP3 Blogging

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:49:10 -0700

Spotify, Rdio and the Slow Death of MP3 Blogging:

perpetua:

This is a very thoughtful essay about the inevitable decline of mp3 blogs as technology has provided more efficient ways for people to discover music. I’ve had a few encounters recently with people who are way into things like Spotify and were nevertheless like “ugh, I can’t find anything I like on that,” and didn’t have any idea that sites like mine even existed. It was interesting, because on one hand it makes me realize how quaint and old-timey my site is these days, and also it highlights a huge difference in the way most people in my general cohort - particularly the people who aren’t hardcore music fans - engage with music now vs. how I listen to music. I personally hate streaming. Haaaaate it. I only use Spotify when I’m at work and want to listen to some artist’s catalog and YouTube doesn’t have what I need. Which has happened…I don’t know, twice in the past few months? But I totally get why Spotify is attractive to a lot of people, but I just don’t think it has anything to offer me, especially when I demand an extremely high degree of control over my listening experience and can barely tolerate listening to a radio station.

The biggest reason why I can’t really embrace Spotify and won’t be switching my site over to that or a similar service in the foreseeable future is that they simply don’t have everything I’d want to cover when I want to cover it. You can see this in the Spotify versions of the survey mixes I have made in the recent past — huge chunks of those sets end up being omitted, basically ruining the entire point of the project and cutting out exactly the kind of obscure acts a casual listener ought to be “discovering.” If you’re listening to those things on Spotify and Rdio, that’s cool by me, but you’re missing out on crucial stuff.

I do my site because I can write about what I want any way that I want. If I am going to be hemmed in by what is allowed by corporations…well, I have day jobs for that, you guys! The beauty of blogs and the internet is that you can do things on your own terms: “This is happening without your permission.” I am fine with the audience that I have, and even if I lost a LOT of the audience I would keep doing my site the way I want to do it because doing my site the way I have for a decade now has been an engine that has brought a lot of wonderful music in my life that I wouldn’t have found if I was more passive listener, it has sharpened and developed my writing skills and has brought a lot of incredible professional opportunities into my life. I always write for an audience, but ultimately, I mainly write for me.

Perpeuta hits on the precise reasons why I can’t get into streaming music services—and also why his own Fluxblog has been one of my few indispensable daily internet stops for the last decade. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fluxblog is responsible for introducing me to 99% of the great new music I’ve heard in that time. There’s a big psychological difference, for me at least, between a Spotify playlist and the music-blog model of someone with excellent taste recommending an mp3. It’s the difference between someone pointing at something and saying “hey, check that out” and someone giving you a gift. It’s easier to just point, but I hope Perpetua keeps giving with Fluxblog for a long time to come.

registeredweapon: REGISTERED WEAPON: CAREER DAY Story by...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:25:40 -0800

registeredweapon:

REGISTERED WEAPON: CAREER DAY

Story by Gardner Linn & Chris Thorn

Art by Dave Lentz & Rob Simmons

Frank and FELIX have taken on psychotic murderers, lawless gangs, crazy old grannies and talking animals, but now they’re facing their most terrifying adversaries yet: fifth graders. School’s in session in this all-new 9-page story, available in PDF, CBZ, and the new iBooks format for your iPad!

DOWNLOAD IT!

Registered Weapon: Career Day (PDF)

Registered Weapon: Career Day (CBZ)

Registered Weapon: Career Day (iBooks) (for iPad only; download to your computer, then open in iTunes and sync to your iPad, or email it to yourself and open from Mail on your iPad)

jonwithabullet: The Simpsons intro/couch gag, Game of Thrones...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:52:04 -0800

jonwithabullet:

The Simpsons intro/couch gag, Game of Thrones style

wow, just wow.

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Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:29:00 -0800

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Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:22:46 -0800

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Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:21:15 -0800

I made this!

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:39:44 -0700

I made this!

Is Jon Favreau a half-giant?

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:34:13 -0700

Is Jon Favreau a half-giant?

Look at this picture

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:31:54 -0700

Look at this picture:

Is your first thought

a) What the fuck happened to Jonah Hill?

b) What the fuck happened to French Stewart?

Speaking of being more interested in Powers...

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:01:43 -0700

Speaking of being more interested in Powers...:

The T-Mobile girl is Retro Girl? APPROVED.

FUCKING YES

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:01:43 -0700

FUCKING YES:

While Jason Patric and Lucy Punch don’t strike me as ideal for Walker and Pilgrim, the presence of Titus Welliver in anything automatically raises the interest level a thousand percent. (Also, in addition to having a name that would sound right at home in Westeros, he would have made a great Stannis Baratheon.) I’m pretty excited for the Powers TV show in general; FX has a pretty decent track record with cop shows, and the comic was one of the series that got me back into comics after college, but my reading dropped off after the move to Icon (I decided to wait for the trade, and that wait has turned into like seven years). Some weekend I need to sit down and get all caught up.

Free Hilarious T-Shirt Idea 2

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:35:45 -0700

“In-N-Out employees don’t do it at all because it’s a super-religious company.”

This is probably a dumb analogy

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:24:24 -0700

A Song of Ice and Fire = “Monster” by Kanye West

A Game of Thrones = Justin Vernon’s intro

A Clash of Kings = Rick Ross’s verse

A Storm of Swords = Kanye’s verse

A Feast for Crows/A Dance with Dragons = Jay-Z’s verse

The Winds of Winter/A Dream of Spring = Nicki Minaj’s verse (hopefully)

The genesis of this nonsense was my belief that A Feast for Crows is an underrated, underloved, sometimes-hard-to-enjoy but absolutely crucial linchpin to the larger series, and Jay’s “Monster” verse is the best thing I’ve come up with so far to compare it to. Like AFFC, Jay’s verse wallows in misery, paranoia and disturbing imagery, while the rest of the song has a little more fun with the same dark subjects. Also, they both contain a sort of thesis statement for the rest of the work: Septon Meribald’s speech on war and broken men in AFFC, and Jay’s line “LOVE—I don’t get enough of it.” The rest of the analogy doesn’t quite work, though I think we all do hope that the final books match Nicki’s verse in go-for-broke insanity and technical mastery.

KING OF THE WINOS Resolved: NewsRadio Season 5 would have been...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:45:34 -0700

KING OF THE WINOS

Resolved: NewsRadio Season 5 would have been more successful if Johnny Johnson, not Max Lewis, had replaced Bill McNeal.

Free Hilarious T-Shirt Idea

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:56:39 -0700

“In-N-Out employees do it Animal Style.”