Month: September 2005

Cage Match: Gaiman vs. Whedon

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Okay, so no, it’s not really a cage match. What it is is a really good interview in Time with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon, on the eve of the release of their movies, Mirrormask and Serenity (respectively).

Plenty of good stuff in this interview — I knew I was going to enjoy it right from the start…

TIME: Joss, this is Lev from Time magazine. You’re also in the virtual presence of Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman: I’m not virtual. I’m here.

TIME: Sorry. You’re virtual, Joss. Neil’s real.

Joss Wedon: Okay. I wondered.

TIME: I’m glad we settled that.

Neil on writing, and the drive to avoid repeating yourself:

I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do a better trick or a different trick because they’d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We’ve done it, so let’s do something different.

Neil and Joss on their primary fan base:

TIME: Let’s talk about your respective fan bases. A lot of them self-identify as kind of on the geeky side.

NG: I think the fan base is literate. You need to be reasonably bright to get the jokes and to really follow what’s going on. That, by definition, is going to exclude a lot of people who will then get rather irritated at us for being pretentious and silly and putting in things they didn’t quite get. But it’s also going to mean that some of the people who do get the stuff will probably be fairly bright.

JW: Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you’re seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don’t bother to read. So yes, I think it’s kind of the same thing.

But I also think there’s a bit of misconception with that. Everybody who labels themselves a nerd isn’t some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who’s never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.

On mainstream culture’s growing acceptance of genre work:

TIME: I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody’s into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I’ve been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.

JW: I miss a little of that element, the danger of, oh, I’m holding this science fiction magazine that’s got this great cover. There a little bit of something just on the edge that I’m doing this. That’s pretty much gone. Although when I walk into a restaurant with a stack of comic books, I still do get stared at a little bit.

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven’s sake. They’re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. ‘No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!’ We like it here in the gutter!

JW: We’ve been co-opted by the man.

Neil on “family” films:

…in America, it almost seems like family has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas. I didn’t want to do that. I like the idea of family as something where a seven-year-old would see a film and get stuff out of it, and a fifteen-year-old would get something else out of it, and a 25-year-old would get a different thing out of it.

Joss on his upcoming “Wonder Woman” treatment:

NG: She’s such a character without a definitive story. Or even without a definitive version.

JW: That’s how I feel. I hope to change that because I really feel her. Let’s face it: She’s an Amazon, and she will not be denied.

TIME: I’m really hoping her bustier will slip down a little bit further than it did in the show.

JW: You’re just after a porno, aren’t you?

TIME: Yes.

JW: It’s all about priorities. Yes, it’s very empowering for her to be naked all the time.

(via Pop Astronaut)

Help: CSS2 selectors

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I’m working on setting up a print stylesheet for the site. I’ve got it about, oh, 98% done — done enough that I could leave it as-is, except that there’s one little thing that’s bothering me that so far, I’m not able to fix. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Because hyperlinks are essentially useless on the printed page, in the print stylesheet, I’m using CSS2 selectors as outlined in this A List Apart article to insert URLs after links in the text. This way, instead of links simply printing as colored and underlined text, the destination address of the link is printed out after the link text.

Here’s the code I’m using to accomplish this:

a:link, a:visited {
    text-decoration: none;
    }

.entry-body a[href]:before,
.entry-more a[href]:before,
.trackback-content a[href]:before,
.comment-content a[href]:before {
    content: " [";
    color: #000;
    text-decoration: none;
    }

.entry-body a[href]:after,
.entry-more a[href]:after,
.trackback-content a[href]:after,
.comment-content a[href]:after {
    content: " " attr(href) "] ";
    color: #000;
    text-decoration: none;
    }

So far, so good, it’s doing exactly what it should. Here’s a sample of what it looks like when printed from a browser that understands CSS2 declarations (that is, pretty much everything except IE):

However, I often insert images into my posts that are linked, either to larger versions as in the above screenshot, or to the Flickr pages for the original images. In that instance, I’d prefer that the target URLs not be inserted, as they are less relevant, and tend to muck up the final printed page in odd ways.

Example number one: the panoramic image that appears at the beginning of the Cal Anderson Park post from earlier today:

Example number two: the Flickr imagebar from the bottom of the same post. The web version shows five thumbnails side-by-side, but once the URLs are appended for the print version…

…only two of the thumbnails can even appear on the page.

Okay, sure, so these things aren’t exactly major disasters, but I’m just anal enough that I’d like to fix them. What I’d like to do, then, is figure out just what CSS code I’d need to use to exclude images from the code shown above.

Of course, I haven’t got a clue how to do this (obviously, or this post wouldn’t even exist). I’ve been poking at it all morning, and I’m stuck. Any ideas?

Anyone?

Bueller?

NOTE: Possible Safari Bug? In the original A List Apart article, the example code used a combination of a:link:after and a:visited:after to ensure that the links were inserted after all the links — if the code was only attached to a:link:after, then any links that the user had visited would not get the link appended when the page was printed.

While I was working on this, I started with that code. However, I was noticing an odd bug that was only appearing in Safari (at least, it wasn’t appearing in Firefox or Opera, the other browsers I have available to test with) — Safari would pick one URL of the URLs on that page and insert it after every link. In other words, if one link on the page pointed to www.example.com, then no matter how many other links were on the page, they would all display as www.example.com.

I wrote that off as something to worry about later, and kept fiddling around trying to get my images to do what I wanted. In the process, I skimmed over a more recent ALA article on print stylesheets and noticed that Eric Meyer had presented slightly different code: instead of combining a:link:after and a:visited:after, he simply wrote a[href]:after, and that took care of both instances. I swapped out my old code for the new, more concise version, and not only did it work as it should…but the repeating URL bug disappeared. Now, when printing from Safari, all the correct links print out just as they should.

Weird…but good to know.

Think of the Children!

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Tangentially related to my being asked to delete photographs I’d taken of children last 4th of July, a rather absurd situation from New York: a woman was ticketed for sitting on a park bench because she didn’t have any children.

It’s an only in New York story. A woman was given a ticket for sitting on a park bench because she doesn’t have children.

The Rivington Playground on Manhattan’s East Side has a small sign at the entrance that says adults are prohibited unless they are accompanied by a child. Forty-seven-year-old Sandra Catena says she didn’t see the sign when she sat down to wait for an arts festival to start. Two New York City police officers asked her if she was with a child. When she said no, they gave her a ticket that could bring a one thousand dollar fine and 90 days in jail.

The city parks department says the rule is designed to keep pedophiles out of city parks, but a parks spokesman told the Daily News that the department hoped police would use some common sense when enforcing the rule.

The spokesman told the paper that ticketing a woman in the park in the middle of the day is not the way you want to enforce the rule.

Yes, of course, pedophilia is a terrible thing. But this approach of assuming anyone who so much looks at a child that isn’t theirs is a pedophile is paranoid to the point of ludicrousness, and incredibly offensive to boot.

(via Joel Blain)

I’m Employed Again!

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In other news, I’ve got a job!

Starting on Thursday, I’ll be working at the Kits Cameras store in the Northgate Mall. Better pay than I expected at first, the people I’ve met so far seem really nice, hours that work quite well with my going back to school in January, and fun toys to play with. All in all, seems to be a pretty good deal.

So now I’ve got tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday morning to goof off — guilt free! — before I’m back in the realm of the working class.

Go me!

iTunes “Revolutionary Generation” by Public Enemy from the album Fear of a Black Planet (1990, 5:43).

Northgate Theatre and Medical Office Building

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Word came out this week that Seattle’s Northgate Mall was finally going to be getting an upgrade, part of which is going to involve demolishing the Medical Office Building and the Northgate Theatre that have long stood empty and unused.

Northgate Medical Office Building and Theatre, Seattle, WA

Since I had some time to kill yesterday, I wandered down to the Northgate Mall and spent some time wandering around the old buildings. I was able to shoot my way around about three quarters of the soon-to-be-demolished buildings before mall security took noticed and asked me to stop. To their credit, the guy that spoke to me was very polite, just letting me know that the mall didn’t allow photography on mall property, and told me that I’d be welcome to take photographs from the street if I wished.

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On Dissent and Disloyalty

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True then, and true now:

If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox — if we deny the essence of ratial equality (sic) then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the … confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.

— Edward R. Murrow, Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show, CBS and NBC, June 1953, “Conclusion.”

Found on Wikipedia while looking up information on Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joe McCarthy after watching the trailer for Good Night and Good Luck — which, by the way, looks very interesting.