The Netflixing of Everything

#drwho #bigfinish #scribd

It kind of amazes me that this is slipping in under the radar, none of the big fan sites or outlets for Doctor Who seem to have noticed that a lot of the Big Finish Audio adventure range is now available on Scribd.  They also seem to have most of the novels and all the new comic lines from Titan, making Scribd one stop shopping for everything Doctor Who except the episodes themselves.

To be fair neither Big Finish Productions nor Scribd seem to have rushed to announce their new partnership either, there seems to be almost a deliberate effort to have this happen on the down low.

In other words Doctor Who fans who have dipped into the full cast radio play style Doctor Who adventures featuring actors from the entire 50 years of the BBC series and those who may have never heard of them can now gorge on many hours of them with an $8.99 a month subscription.  Plus Scribd gives you access to thousands of books, audiobooks, magazines and comic books - all the major comic publishers except DC, Image and Dark Horse in fact.

I have drastically reduced the number of comics I buy while drastically increasing the number I read. I'm saving a hell of a lot of money and storage space and enjoying comics more.

Between my Marvel Unlimited and Scribd subscriptions the comics of virtually every comics publisher except DC, Image and Dark Horse are delivered right to my tablet with a combined cost of under $25 a month for the two subscriptions. Since Scribd also has a large Marvel catalogue you could scrimp and just get the Scribd, but I like the weekly dose of Marvel newish stuff in Marvel Unlimited, even though it is six months behind the comic shops. The Scribd subscription also gives me thousands of books, audio books and magazines.

I still love the medium of paper, I still buy comics and books in physical form and probably always will, but now my slightly OCD completist urge can be satisfied much more cheaply with much less use of storage space.

This is the model I respond to.  Whether its music, movies, tv or books the model that intuitively works best with the existing technology is the subscription streaming service.  DRM is still a concern but for price, ease of access and storage space the Netflix model will conquer all others because its how people want to get their media. 

THIS is the best way to combat illegal downloading.  Give people a simple, economical alternative and they will take it.

Brave New World

The DC Universe is rebooting again.

I was a teenager in 1985, probably the perfect time to be a comic book geek as the DC Universe experienced its first major reboot in the groundbreaking maxi-series Crisis on Infinite Earths.  Over 12 feverishly cosmic issues Writer Marv Wolfman and artists George Perez and Jerry Ordway detonated decades of intensely intricate comic book continuity full of alternate dimension variations of all the main characters.  Whole universes of characters were devoured, crushed or grafted together to make new streamlined versions of older stories.

It was exhilarating.  It felt like being on the ground floor of something big, the original DC universe had lasted pretty much unchanged since the early 60's and here I was getting to read how a whole new universe that would surely last for decades began as it happened.

Twenty-six years later and the DC Universe has been picked at, unspooled, re-written and re-booted literally dozens of times since the original Crisis.  All the multiple universes destroyed in Crisis on Infinite Earths were brought back.  Most of the major characters killed during the Crisis or in its many aftermaths have been resurrected and now a generation later DC, staffed now with writers who grew up in the 80's, have returned the DC Universe to much the same shape it was before that first cataclysmic re-boot.

Now, in the coming aftermath of the Flash miniseries Flashpoint where Flash nemesis The Reverse Flash is using time travel to alter history, all of the DC titles are re-starting with new number 1's, new continuities and new status quos.

The constant wave of re-boots is starting to wear a little thin to this long time reader, but it's probably going to be thrilling to a lot of geeky teenagers.  I can't begrudge them it, out of nostalgic solidarity if nothing else.

The picture is from the upcoming Justice League #1 art by Jim Lee.  There are some interesting visual changes, Superman has a New S symbol and appears to no longer wear his underoos over his tights, most of the characters sport a similar Star Trek Next Gen uniform collar on their costumes and the way the Flashpoint series is launching Cyborg from the B - List to the A-List seems to be something they're keeping in the new continuity.

I just really hope that Grant Morrison's big fairly recently newish take on Batman isn't one of the pending victims of universal reboot although its rumored that Morrison will be given the Superman rewrite so we'll see.

I'm iffy on the new Hawkman, but with rumours of a possible Hawkman movie I can see why they would want to butch him up:

You are my Asylum - Alan Moore knows the score

Alan Moore performs at the launch party of his absurdly wonderful magazine project Dodgem Logic.



Every issue is a stuffed to the margins collection of music, culture and humor.  It made the fan headlines recently, when Moore publicly resigned from the New Gorillaz Rock Opera project pointing out that as the band couldn't get their act together to produce a promised 3 page story for his magazine, Moore felt little inclination to make the time to contribute the script and design work for their project. Moore is clearly having more fun with this retro underground newspaper/magazine then he's had in years.  It's a loving evocation of a particular era of rebel press in British counter-culture.  One almost expects to find a double page spread of unspeakable things being done to Andy Pandy.

Moore is one of those rare and wonderful chimera, a lifelong idol and artistic north star who never disappointed or  disillusioned.  With a bibliography full of the greatest texts in the medium Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to name just a few. Fiercely, unbendingly ethical and uncompromisable, he refused movie money, refused to be punked by corporate tools and refused to be bullied artistically.  My Alan Moore shelf sags under the weight of his output, comics that dragged the artform years forward, reinterpretations of heroes and monsters, elegant pornography, rigorous science fiction, social satire and critical analysis.

He's also a practicing ceremonial magician of an idiosyncratic Golden Dawn style but with an eclectic syncreticism of his own devising.  His ultimate exegesis on the subject, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is at the top of my wish list of anxiously awaited future projects.

Every issue Of Dodgem Logic includes extras, a CD in issue one featuring the song at the top of this post among other local alternative musicians in Moore's orbit, issue two had an 'insert' comic Astounding Weird Penises, both written and with a rare art job by Alan Moore himself.  The latest, issue three has an old fashioned classic iron on transfer of a plump pin up beauty by Moore's collaborator and lady love Melinda Gebbie.

Moore is able to put this out, in a model perhaps inspired by his early experience with the creative collective the Art Lab, while also producing multimedia extravaganzas and putting on magically transformative spoken word performances in the tunnels under London.

He also knows the score about the ducks.  Little bastards.

Public Policy, Games Theory and the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse

Oh sure our leaders and administrators are worrying about trivialities like global warming, simmering warfare, global food shortages and economic uncertainty...but who's planning for the ravening hordes of the hungry dead?

The prestigious journal Foreign Policy fills the dangerous zombie gap in large scale public policy planning and puts some serious wonk time into exploring different strategies for dealing with the hungry dead. they explore differing approaches based on ideology, resources and military strategy.

There are many sources of fear in world politics -- terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.
For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse,
with a strong desire to eat human flesh -- the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero's 1968 classic, Night of the LivingDead, and which has been rapidly proliferating in popular culture in recent
years (far upstaging its more passive cousins, the reanimated corpses of traditional West African and Haitian voodoo rituals). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

Followers of cold blooded Realpolitik would call for closing the borders and leaving the rest of the world to be over-run by the shambling hordes. Selfish but effective if you don't mind watching the rest of the world get eaten alive. Liberals would band together and cooperate against the zombie threat, a little hippie-dippy perhaps, but ultimately probably the best long term strategy for cooperating against the undead on a global level - see the book World War Z, an Oral History of the Zombie War for the best description of the UN VS the Zombies model. Finally neo-conservatives would probably go out in the world proactively bombing, shooting and presumably torturing the walking dead in the fight against the undead evil-doers. Effective in the short term but the 'You're either with us or you're with the Axis of the Evil Dead' approach would turn off potential allies.

In the end, what I am suggesting is that with careful planning and a consistent approach, the zombie threat can be managed. The purpose of this essay is not to make a policy recommendation or suggest that one approach is superior to another. It is up to the reader to exercise his or her own judgment in determining what to do with this information. Indeed, interested and intelligent students of world politics should use their own brains -- before the zombies do.

Quote of the Day

If the absence of sensation means a living death, then perhaps zombies are merely creatures thrown up by evolution to live in the urban environment.

-Roger Ebert, from his review of Little Murders, 1971