Sundry

Too Big to Judge

One of the important turning points in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns comes as a citywide power outage — and the attendant escape from prison of scores of members of the violent “Mutants” gang — threatens to plunge Gotham into anarchy. The new police commissioner, Ellen Yindel, sees Batman and Robin ride on horseback into the middle of a crowd of Mutants.

Yindel has, up to this point, been a foe of Batman’s, a by-the-book cop infuriated by Jim Gordon’s willingness to turn a blind eye to vigilantism, whose first act as commissioner is to issue a warrant for Batman’s arrest. Gordon has tried to prepare her to understand the necessity of Batman by relating a story about evidence FDR had advance warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but let took no action to stop it, in order to motivate the US to fight a necessary war. The idea is monstrous — but so was the Axis, and US involvement was key to the outcome of WWII. Gordon concludes, “It bounced back and forth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big.”

So, then, into the middle of the crowd of Mutants escaping from the jail, Batman rides triumphantly on a giant horse, and commands all their attention with the sheer power of his will. Commissioner Yindel watches the scene with several cops by her side, and one asks whether they should arrest Batman. “No,” Yindel stammers: “he’s…too big.”

I started writing this post right after Steve Jobs died, and reactions mainly fell into two camps. Many mourned Jobs as a fallen hero, a world-changing visionary, an incalculable loss; on the other hand, many castigated the first group, decrying Jobs’s perceived megalomania and his history of not giving publicly to charities, Apple’s tight controls on its product ecosystem, and especially the terrible conditions under which Apple products (as well as many other companies’) are manufactured, at Foxconn and other Chinese suppliers.

If you think I’m leading up to comparing Steve Jobs to Batman, you’re not quite right, but you’re not quite wrong, either.

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Twenty/Ten

Twenty years ago today, Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten, was released.

Twenty years.

Ten in particular (and to a similar extent a lot of its contemporary albums, including of course Nevermind, which will turn 20 just under a month from now) defined my transition into the teenage years in ways that aren’t really easy to capture in writing.

I grew up sheltered and nerdy, surrounded by scientists, on the East coast. The frenetic energy of “Even Flow” was something I was completely unprepared for when I first heard it. To this day I’m absolutely incapable of evaluating the record* — just hearing the opening to any of its songs switches off the critical part of my brain, and plays back all my memories of being twelve years old, beginning to be capable of understanding the world, and not knowing what to do with my energy.

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Welcome!

I see I’ve been getting a relatively high number of visitors lately, mostly from links to I Don’t Care if You’re Offended via Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. Hello! I’m happy to see people reading, and I hope enjoying, my work.

If you look around, you may notice that my posting frequency has dropped significantly. I’m hoping to bring the rate back up somewhat in the coming year, but it’s anyone’s guess how well I’ll succeed at that. In any case, thank you for reading, and I’ll try to be worthy of continued attention.

Quick Hit: Minibosses!

(While I’ve got PAX and games on the brain…)

I’m way behind the times on this.  Apparently, awesome 8-bit rockers Minibosses — whose performances were, I am assured, highlights of the already spectacular PAXen 2003 through 2008, and whose albums all tragically appear to be out of print — put up the entirety of their album Brass as free MP3 downloads on their above-linked website…about two years ago.

If the 8-bit NES was as big a part of your childhood as it was mine, the dulcet strains of their arrangements will have approximately this effect on you, with a healthy dose of \m/ thrown in for good measure.

Update: Minibosses’ Mega Man 2 medley, via YouTube, below the fold.

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The Century

Two years, four months, and five days from my first post: this here’s my hundredth.

(Update: also, a year and a few days from my previous arbitrary milestone.)

In that time, I’ve had a bit over 18,000 pageviews:

A snapshot of the WordPress stats for today.

That’s…an average of about 0.116 post per day, if I did my math right.

…

Huh.  Guess I’d better try to pick up the pace.

And through the magic of post-publish editing:

Portion of WordPress Dashboard showing a count of 100 posts and 100 comments

The trackback from this post to my first is the 100th "comment."

Thanks to all who’ve read, linked, and/or commented!  Onward to the next hundred!  Maybe in less than a year this time!