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Mostly Nice
We’ve had a mild week so far and I’m rather enjoying it. The confounded floor got done and I have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday to deal with some of the issues I had over the weekend.
Summer of Love
To love another person is to see the face of God. ~Victor Hugo
Which is why marriage is sacred. Loving someone is forever if you actually pick the right person.
So many people get married for so many horrible reasons.
The only reason to get married is because you’ve found your best friend in life and you couldn’t imagine life without them.
That’s why I asked Kelly. That’s why she said ‘Yes’. We were made for each other and we celebrate that every day, even when we’re grumpy or sad or irked or whatever.
If you think you love somebody, think about whether you love them even when they’re being a total jerk.
If you do, congratulations.
If not, it’s infatuation.
Passion is momentary; love is enduring. ~John Wooden
Stargirl!
Stargirl The Best CW Show! DC Universe App Theory | Comicstorian
The guys in the video tend to go off on tangents, but I agree strongly that Stargirl is a show with high production value, is well-acted and has more than a little teen drama. Go figure, the primary characters are teens.
The premise of the show is that the villains of the Injustice Society of America have wiped out the heroes of the Justice Society of America. The sole remaining (honorary) member is a sidekick who has a knack for all things mechanical. He inadvertently connects with and marries the mother of his late partner’s daughter.
Starman (formerly The Star-Spangled Kid) never revealed his true identity to his widow or daughter and apparently only visited them at Christmastime. Nevertheless, the Cosmic Staff recognized Courtney‘s lineage and has now aligned itself with her.
The family moved back to Mom’s hometown of Blue Valley, Nebraska where the members of the Injustice Society have been hiding as they prepare to roll out their “Project: New America“. The project sounds nice on the surface but, since it’s being run by supervillains, it’s actually some kind of insidious mind-control thing. LOL, supervillains…
Meanwhile, Courtney and her step-brother, Mike, have to adapt to life in a small town. She has some trouble making friends at first, but her heroically cheerful demeanor starts winning people to her side. Some of the kids are actually supervillains in training. Some are unwitting beneficiaries of their parents’ evil deeds. Slowly, Courtney is rebuilding the JSA by presenting friends of hers with tokens of the fallen heroes.
It’s a very interesting story, and from what my son tells me, it’s pretty spot-on with the comics the show is based on. Director Geoff Johns is not only the creator of the Stargirl character in the comics but is also the Chief Creative Officer at DC Comics. He named Courtney Whitmore/Stargirl after and based her characterization on his sister. She was killed in the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. His close attachment to the character seems to be the driving force of the program’s consistently upbeat tone.
If you don’t happen to have a DCUniverse subscription, you can still see the episodes for free on The CW roster of shows. As Benny points out in the video, it’s all from the same production company so it was bound to wind up on a common platform.
Time for a Rant
When artists make art, they shouldn’t question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another. ~Sol LeWitt
When I first conceived of The Sentinels, it was something of a given that it would take place in New York (like Marvel Comics) or a fictional New York-like place (such as DC’s Metropolis). I started it off in New York but decided to rename it in order to make it clear that this was the New York City of a parallel dimension where superheroes existed.
There would be some tweaking of history, place names, demographic distributions and other factors as needed.
That being said, it’s still essentially New York City. There are Black people in New York City. There are Jewish people in New York City. There are all kinds of people in New York City. Naturally, some of my characters would be representative of the rich demographic tapestry of NYC.
Holy crap, Rob!!!
You can’t do that!!!
That’s cultural appropriation!!!
Ah, yes, the SJWs and random Karens will quickly leap from the woodwork to screech at me that I have never been, nor could I ever be a Black man. How dare I include Black characters in my book when I have NO IDEA of the…
Whatever!
It’s clear to me that the very same people who would plunk me for daring to give voice to fictional Black people in my story would be just as quick to harass me for not having any non-White people in my story.
How dare you?!?
There’s such a thing as diversity, @$$hole!!!
They would scream and howl and excoriate me for having the temerity to put pencil to paper.
It goes somewhat without saying that none of these people would ever buy my books except to burn them, so why be bothered about it?
To a certain extent, I’m not. The perpetually aggrieved masses will always be bitching about something.
On general principle,
I’m extremely bothered by it.
How dare they say I can’t have Black characters because I don’t understand what it is to be a “Person of Color“? Who the hell are they to be judging stories for “sensitivity” and “political correctness” anyway?
Why the hell should I have to give a second thought to making any given character any given demographic? As I said above, there ARE people in New York (and by extension in Empire City) who happen to be Black. Should I exclude them? Wouldn’t people like to see a bit of demographic reality? Aren’t there ACTUALLY a lot of different kinds of people in New York City?
I’d like to think that my characters aren’t dreadfully stereotypical or in some way offensive to a person who isn’t automatically triggered by anything and everything racial. Of course, that’s what Beta Readers are for. I’ll need to see if I’m doing my characters correctly since I am neither a Black man nor a Jewish woman nor an extra-dimensional alien 🧝🏻♀️.
I don’t actually know what it’s like to burst into flames and fly around like the Human Torch. I don’t actually know what it’s like to be able to bench press a dump truck. I don’t actually know what it’s like to fold space or create cookies from nothing.
In fairness, I’d really like to know what it’s like to be able to create cookies from nothing. 🍪 Christmas cookie season would never freaking end if I knew how to do that. 🍪 Poof, a gingerbread man. Poof, a Tollhouse cookie. Poof, a batch of Thimble cookies. 😋 That would be phenomenal!
I can’t, but I can ✨imagine✨ it.
That’s the heart of writing fiction or acting or creating art of any kind. Taking something reasonably mundane and wondering what might happen from there is an act of creation. What if is the spark of creativity.
They say you should write what you know. Ian Fleming was actually a Naval Intelligence officer, but we can be fairly certain that he had to embellish things to get James Bond to be as interesting as he is in the stories. Spy work is typically quite tedious and perhaps even boring. You don’t generally get to invade the hideouts of megalomaniacs wearing a laser-emitting wristwatch or drive an Aston Martin with machine guns.
They say you should draw from your own experience when creating art. Pablo Picasso survived the Spanish Civil War, but we can be fairly certain that the victims of the bombing in the town of Guernica didn’t actually only have four toes or that a bull had its eye under its ear. It’s called “artistic license” and his goal was to express the horror of the situation rather than to create a photorealistic representation. It’s meant to evoke emotion despite the lack of apparent realism.
So, what if there was a guy who could bench press dump trucks and heal quickly from grievous wounds? Why can’t he be a Black guy? Does the fact that I’m not Black mean that I can never, never, never write about Black characters? Wouldn’t I get excoriated for not having any Black characters?
Unfortunately, that’s exactly the point.
You can’t win with these assholes!
No matter what you do or don’t do, you cannot win with all of these perpetually triggered, special goddamned snowflakes. It’s enough to drive you freaking crazy!
As with most things these days, you have a violent tyranny of the minority. There is some small population of dyspeptic trolls whose sole mission in life is to annoy people by virtue signaling and trying to suppress creative people for no other apparent reason than to make the rest of us as insufferably miserable as they are.
It’s easy enough to simply say, Fuck ’em, but the problem is that they have the ability to magically mobilize hostile masses to their cause. One word from these idiots and a world of dominoes topples and you’re up to your ears in manufactured outrage. These assholes need to find a therapist and learn to find their happy place so they can leave the rest of us alone.
We’ll see who’s triggered by what when The Sentinels: New Blood comes out. I’m paying basically no mind to the howling masses as I write it but I just know there will be some kind of damned controversy raised over my character choices as soon as it hits Amazon. 😠
That’s the excitement for this week. Hope you’re enjoying a reasonably clement summertime hump day, too.