Awoken; Thoughts on Marvel vs DC

Lost somewhere deep in space, a cruiser orbits a local Internet server cluster. Though seemingly inert,  inside, long-gestating processes reach completion, triggering subroutines. A long-dormant computer system comes online. Hibernation monitors begin thawing procedures. A green LED on the lid of a plasteel coffin begins blinking steadily, and inside two blue eyes open. A cursor begins flying across the screen. The Voyages of Yano Solong have begun again.

I had originally planned to write my first new entry on a different topic, but I didn't, because procrastination. Anyway, a friend and I were recently comparing the various superhero films on offer these days, and he asked me, "Does DC tend to be darker than Marvel?" This was my considered response, and I think it's a pretty good one, so I'm publishing. 

EDIT: ok, this is really really long. TL;dr: if you didn't read superhero comics as a kid, you're better off reading basically anything else, and watching as few of those movies as you can get away with. I have gobs of non-superhero comics to recommend as well as fiction and non-fiction books. 

NOW. Ahem:

DC and Marvel both have alternating darker and more cheesy comics and periods. Think of it like Coke and Pepsi. Each does have an overriding identity, but both are going to try and have a diverse line of choices and also copy whatever else they see competitors doing. 

In general, DC's superhero comics are waaaay cheesier, because they have been around for way longer. Their two biggest heroes, Superman and Batman, also happen to be two of the first superheroes period, and definitely the first two still starring in major books. Those characters, and the justice league and associated stories, etc, have been rebooted many many times, first when the golden changed to the silver age, and then many more times after that. Except the old versions of the characters stuck around too, and spent many adventures with the new versions, in stories which showed the heroes of various "alternate earths" having fun together. So when flash of earth-1 and earth-2 are hanging out, or fighting the evil superman of earth-5 or whatever it's pretty geeky for anyone who isn't insanely familiar with the history of the characters. Similarly, because of the craze for kid sidekicks like Robin back in the day, every DC character has a kids version of the character, also usually rebooted multiple times, as well as female sidekicks, dogs dressed in costume, and on and on. 

Marvel had been around in various forms for a while, but when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the other guys really started creating their universe it was the 60s, and they were really seen as a breath of fresh air. Hippies read Marvel comics, not DC. They were more realistic, psychedelic, dealt with social issues, etc. By the time I was a kid in the late 80s, it was accepted knowledge among the comics readers I fell in with that it was only cool to read Marvel comics. DC was for babies and old people. 

When the Batman movie came out, it really seemed separate from the comics world. Part of that was just the cultural attitude that comics weren't really that cool, but as an adult I also think that DC comics lend themselves to being rebooted endless times. The stories are more mythical, everyone kind of knows them even if you don't really read comics, and I think there isn't a problem when the story is told differently. Like the awful Catwoman movie withHalle Berry--when it came out I was shocked that her story was completely different from the one played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and then I found out that the version in that movie isn't necessarily from the comics either. 

With the Marvel stuff, even though they have done some limited reboots, the main reboot is the Ultimate universe, which didn't replace the original marvel verse but is a more intense version. The Cinematic Universe is basically the same thing. Unfortunately this model requires the films to all be kind of same-y. The formula that was a revolution back in the day, demanding a consistently higher bar be set in terms of characters, story, setting, etc than had been seen before, now has created a culture of the mediocre, a same-ness. Personally, because it's nostalgic for me, I like the CU, especially the Avengers. I haven't seen guardians yet but it sounds similarly fun, although I'm not familiar with those characters. But in order to enjoy it I have to enter a somewhat corporate headspace. 

Unfortunately, because Marvel is so successful, it looks like DC is trying to copy them. I loved the Dark Knight trilogy from Nolan, but it seems like there won't be any continuity between that and the new DC CU. I wasn't a huge fan of Man of Steel, it was definitely pretty, but the end seriously pissed me off. If that's the tone they're taking I'm not sure I'll be along for the ride. Obviously I'll be there for Bat v Sup. 

From Jeannette Winterson's Oranges are Not the only Fruit...

"I bought the mince and the onions and found that Trickett's snack bar was still in the same place serving the same things. Betty still had the tape round her spectacles, all these years after Mona had dropped her beefburgers on top of them. She didn't know who I was, and I didn't want to talk about it. I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever been anywhere. My mother was treating me like she always had; had she noticed my absence? Did she even remember why I'd left?

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy. If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places. There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away.

Perhaps for a while these two selves have become confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out."

A million lives as a silkworm

Bryan is a Canadian living in Japan who breeds silkworms to weave handmade silk and makes fine kimonos from them. In his blog, he writes: "I'll probably be born as a silkworm in my next million lives ( A rough estimate of the number of silkworms I will have raised and then killed in this life.) and for eternity face one of the several choice fates the silkworms have faced because of me...Today I used the hell-hot-roasting-roof to do the trick."

A sad story, reminding me of the price paid to bring things of beauty into this world, often by creatures with no knowledge of their sacrifice. It takes 5,000 silkworm lives to weave one kimono, a process which Bryan repeated seven times last year.

(I first read about Bryan in the Japan Times, but only because Mark Frauenfelder read it first.)

Who is Yano Solong?

Now that these blog posts are appearing on my Twitter and (shudder) other social networks, some people may be asking themselves, Just who is this Yano Solong? I'd like to draw back the curtain and invite you inside my wunderkammer:

A rebel hero. A wanderer of the psyche. A self-aware fictional character, Yano Solong is the son of Han Solo and the grandson of a French anti-hero named Lone Sloane, created by a young author to serve as his avatar in an autobiographical space opera, set in an armada of corporate warships known as the Nova Consortium, on the anarchic fringes of which Yano S. was the pilot of a small mailroom freighter. Along with his co-author, androidized clerk Douglas Reich, Yano conducted raids against the fleet of Fleet Commander Bill van Fleet and thwarted the flamboyant dealings of Darth Scarf, Sith lord and relentless windbag. After rescuing Reich from the clutches of the supercomputer Nova1 Sonomi, Yano and Douglas escaped to the desert resort city of Safern on the planet Shenker 4, where they lost track of each other. It was some time before the young Yano, finding himself living in the Imperial Capital, reforged an old bond with the illustrious Dr. Lance Cardigan, elective prosthetics expert, and the two set to work building an engine of knowledge and discovery known as the Science Patrol.

It was during this time that Yano increasingly became this author's online pseudonym for all explorations of science fact and fiction, the building of new realities, and the study of ancient and dying arts. Now working as a freelance reality builder, learning the trade of harnessing lightning, Yano continues to tinker in his workshop on the structure of time and space itself.

By the way, most of the original stories of Yano Solong and Douglas Reich have been lost, but the legends remain, and may be set down on paper again sometime in the future. Continue to follow his adventures through all three venues:

Science Patrol

The Voyages of Yano Solong

Yano Solong's Twitter Feed

So long,
Yano

How Realities Are Created

"What is Reality?" -Philip K. Dick

The Philip K. Dick head. Photo courtesy of jmarshallpittman.

It's a common idea in video-game theory that we are seeing the birth of an entirely new art-form, something that has never been seen before, and that many people will soon go flying off into the future of virtual worlds. It's an even commoner idea in antique ways of thinking that this is a horrible proposition and we should destroy the machines before they destroy us.

the truth is neither as dramatic or as mundane as all that. actually, i believe video games are the future in a field of study that's older than history: the quest to mediate reality.

Neurologically, all our knowledge of the world around us is mediated--transformed by our sensory apparatus into something the brain can process. this interface of your senses with your brain is the original set of virtual-reality goggles, a fully immersive interface that displays data to you that most of us usually assume to be "reality." It is, in fact, mediated reality, which is very different. it is, to put it bluntly, a bubble, constructed around the Self, through which nothing can pass before being transformed so our brain can digest it. It is a tiny world that only exists for one person, and these worlds can vary infinitely.

So, right from the start, we understand that all reality is constructed, and that we use a meat machine to interact with the squishy stuff, and that different worlds exist, different head-spaces created by this tendency of our mind to create a world around us. Each brain inside his own environment, whether it's a jungle, a hovel, or a grand central station of ideas. The point is not that each of us has our own---we all have hundreds. Thousands. (Try to have even more.)

So the idea of creating our own realities that exist independent of the four-dimensional universe, that exist alongside our own, in thoughts, dreams, stories, plays, music, movies, or lines of code, well, that's something our people have been working on since the very beginning. the cave paintings at Lascaux were the original Disneyland ride, the first movie. The Philip K. Dick head is one of the most advanced. These arts are called media because they insert another layer of translation onto the world, interpret reality and tell their own story. The ancient jewish mystics would descend into a cave whose walls gave off a vapor that delivered psychedelic revelations of the One True God. They emerged and wrote the Scriptures which are still studied today as glimmerings of "unmediated truth"--while the medium actually exists right underneath the ground. This is what books are--a translation of a previously experienced mental state, which may or may not create another instance of the author's thought, or a new shard of his thought which has a completely different effect on someone else.

in any case, mediation is our first tool, the equivalent of our first joystick or NES controller, movie projector and personal musical singing theater, the thing we grab to make sense of and take part in the world. Making video games is not only natural, it's necessary to move forward the Human Experiment, the quest to interact with all existence in a way that's meaningful and pleasurable for all parties.

and this idea of strapping goggles on your head and using a wired-up glove or a Wii-mote to grab things and move ideas around inside your headspace, well, to me it's the natural extension of what we've done so far. I will become a cyborg, because we have always been cyborgs. Weld the keyboard finger- and wrist-bones into my hands, and the analog rotary servocontrollers into my thumb joints, and make me whole.

In future explorations of CREATING REALITIES, I'll delve further into old and new realities I have loved, and look at how all kinds of different realities can talk with each other.

Creating Realities

I'm trying to bring together three or four thoughts at once here, so let's just say this is a light jaunt through the nature of reality as a growing accretion of simulacra, and an attempt to find the true meaning behind mediated reality. I learned in philsophy that there is no unmediated reality, and so the question I would like to ask you is, who or what is mediating the particular reality you find yourself in?

I sent out an email link to some friends this week, in which the author asserts that President Obama has stopped using the word "we" in his speeches and has begun to use the word "I" to begin sentences, assert his will, and claim dominion of various parts of the govenrment apparatus. Not to make too much of a fuss about an email, or besmirch my rogues' gallery, but the response was briefly "meh..." The point I was trying to make was not, Oh dear, look at the language on this guy, but that language shapes our reality, and even the substitution of a single-syllable word can serve as the fulcrum upon which our world turns. Furthermore, there is every reason to analyze and attempt to triangulate the purpose of everything Obama says, because as with any political figure, his words and actions have a very unique set of motivations that bear looking at. Reality is not as it appears, but it is changing in very specific ways, and only by observing the changes can we attempt to decode what is actually happening beneath our perception of things.

This week I am reading Halting State, a novel by Charles Stross, in which the world has become hooked into the ubiquitous Internet, served on high-res displays inside eyeglasses and mediated by phones, which in 2017 are the primary components of worldwide distributed networks. Much of the populace are engaged in several layers of augmnented reality at any given time, including massively persistent worlds thast exist in parallel with our own. One of the three protagonists enters a gaming convention and instantiates all his realities at once, superimposed on each other, and views goblins conversing with spacemen and secret agents dickering with Cthulan horrors. In this reality, the banks which control in-game possessions and harness liquidity are managed by real-life financial concerns, and a heist of in-game loot constitutes a very serious threat of economic stability. Clearly, this world is only a few steps beyond our own in terms of its commitment to artifical worlds, and we are rapidly heading in that direction. Another protagonist, a police detective, lives with her glasses projecting CopSpace on top of her daily world: floating beacons, indications of crimes in progress, threat analysis, and constant communication between members of the force. These are realities that are being constructed even now, as Great Britain last year claimed to have created the world's first technological panopticon. (I am still looking for a link on this story.)

The next thing that piqued my interest came just an hour ago, in the form of an essay I've been looking for for some time. Titled How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick, he begins by talking about the craft of writing but then widens his scope to the creation of the universe by God, whose mind may be synonymous with the universe itself. He reaches this territory by telling the story of writing "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said," which was recounted by Richard Linklater in Waking Life. It's a fascinating story, and like Linklater I don't know if he reached the final, unmediated conclusion, but I think it's something everyone has to experience it themselves. It goes into the realms of synchronicity, and if you've ever spent any time thinking about 11:11, the numbers 42, 5, 23, or the shamanic journey, you'll recognize the gist of the idea at once. Everything is now. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again. All of us travel inside God's channel. As I said to Berman last week,
"Reality is thermoplastic."

While I was composing this article, the words "Quantum Jumping: Traveling Alternate Realities" came up in Google Ads. I'm also hoping that one of these guys has something to say on the subject. In the meantime, I'm always looking for suggestions on which world to visit next.

It will have been important to have this

This will be needed in the past.

some people i would like to meet

Of all the people listed as guests for Jon Favreau's Dinner for Five, there are very, very few that I wouldn't love to sit down and have a meal with. I have only seen the Stan Lee/Kevin Smith/Jason Lee/Mark Hamill/JJ Abrams episode, so I need to get cracking. Luckily, they are available on Netflix Watch Now and tv.com.

YANOSOLONG

Get Your Cyborg Name

I'm considering changing my name to Yano now....

Pandora: Not Just Crappy Radio

I've been thinking about this unit since I saw it this morning; theoretically it will allow emulation of any videogame system and open-source homebrew of limitless types, will run Firefox 3 over a Bluetooth connection to your phone with data plan, and generally provide a PC in your pocket, in a basically DS-size case.