Der PigDog's PigBlog

Watched those two movies this week. Never saw any of the Godzilla movies before. Damn this post would be better with pictures but it's low-effort late-night blogging and you get what you pay for. In Shin Godzilla, the monster just walks. People say this a couple times through the movie, and it's a great line, so it's worth repeating. The monster did all that... and it just walks. It doesn't want anything. It isn't angry and it doesn't hate you. It's not trying to hurt you. It just walks. That's a fantastic(al), alien portrayal of a monster. Monster as natural disaster. (Everybody else has already made the comparisons with the tsunami and nuclear incident, which is intentional, but none of the reviews on wikipedia talk about how the monster just walks.) (Ok it smacks people and shoots lasers when somebody is attacking it, but that barely counts.) Still from Shin Godzilla; the monster's first form, adorkable! I love how fishy it looks The monster is to...

Recently I have been reading a lot of comics, including a lot of Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, Miracleman, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Watchmen, From Hell). A mixed bag, but he constantly opens up interesting topics. In this series of posts I'm going to go through each of his writings that I have read, in publication order. I'm particularly interested in Moore's treatment of race, sex, gender, and authority. I'll try to talk about art as I go, but I'm not well-educated on the topic. Consequently I'll be giving the artist short shrift, and probably assigning Moore too much responsibility in plotting and conceptualizing the comic.  V for Vendetta I first read this as a child, without any strong preconceptions for what comics "are like" or "should be". Therefore its innovative formal qualities were totally lost on me. I had no idea that comics didn't usually feature changed page orientations or musical interludes, a...

Making a character for  Champions Now  by Ron Edwards. Two statements from Jon H:  Super powers come from outer space or other dimension You can’t choose your family When I make a character in this game I'm supposed to bounce back and forth between three topics: person, powers, and problems. This has gotta be someone likeable, someone I'd actually want to read about in the comics. Drafting  I wrote up the following a month and a half ago: My guy is a robot from space. He was created to be some kind of perfect being by some kind of unstable space scientist/sorcerer. Unfortunately he metaphysically smashed into a SpaceX shuttle and metaphysically fused with an astronaut there. Now he's half human half robot. Not in a creepy cyborg way either -- he shifts back and forth. He has the astronaut's memories (and emotions?) but none of the astronaut's intuitive understanding of earth matters. For powers I'm thinking flight, minor invulnerability (he's made of badass ...