I tried to do three things at once during Game On Greensboro — demo games and promote Rotary’s youth programs, in addition to my own authorial projects — and as a result I don’t think any of them went especially well. I was down in the vendor room instead of the game room where most of the players were. I did have a couple of conversations with other vendors about maybe coming to StellarCon, and I did get to play both Arboretum and a two-person game of Pathfinder, where we each played two characters.
A Pretty Packed Friday
I was part of two stream cleanups so far this fall, and last Friday I popped out during lunchtime to check out Project ReBuild, where my Rotary club was helping replace a deck and an entrance ramp on an elder’s home. Most of my farm-based construction experience was on barns, using hammers & nails, not power tools and screws, so I was pretty clumsy. I learned a few tricks, though, like snugging a half-dozen boards up against one another to minimize gaps while the screws went in. I had never seen Quikrete in action, before, either. When I was a kid we dug our own sand and gravel out of the creek banks on the farm and mixed it with powdered cement in a wheelbarrow. It would often take a full day to set properly.
It was only in 2009 that researchers were able to finally pin down the structure of cement at the atomic level.
But the MIT team found that the calcium-silica-hydrate in cement isn’t really a crystal. It’s a hybrid that shares some characteristics with crystalline structures and some with the amorphous structure of frozen liquids, such as glass or ice.
Some of the water in a cement mixture evaporates when it heats up during the curing process, but some of it is trapped inside as a cement hydrate, where it slightly disrupts the crystal lattice, giving the cured concrete a little bit of flex that keeps it from shattering as easily as a pure crystal would.
Finally knowing that structure opened the door to hacking it, optimizing it in different ways.
While I was there on site, carrying boards (‘cause that at least I knew how to do), a camera crew from the PBS web show ncIMPACT showed up.
When I rolled back in to campus, computer scientist Minjeong Kim was presenting to the biology department about her work in image analysis. I learned a little something about that back in the 90s when I was hanging around the Center for Visual Science in Rochester. She was working with radiology images (x-rays, MRIs) of patients with neurodegenerative disorders, trying to work backwards from time point of diagnosis to identify early markers and “trajectories of disease” through machine learning. She hadn’t considered leveraging postmortem tissue from brain banks, which is still the gold standard for Alzheimer’s.
Professional science has become very specialized, as venues like Seeds of Science are always pointing out. There are advantages to being specialized, but there are equal and opposite advantages to other ways of knowing, like being a magpie who collects shiny bits of random information.
My wife likes to say I am not detail-oriented. This is untrue; I just care about wildly different details than she does.
“Spectre of the Gun”
I like to make fun of Arrow. Season 5 has no shortage of dumb stuff, like Ragman’s magical CGI cloth tentacles, or using said magical rags to contain a nuclear blast. Or the tiny computer chip that can track a heartbeat anywhere on the planet.
Season 5, Episode 13, however, is an issue episode on gun control, exactly the kind of thing that the Hard Travelin’ Heroes cross-country saga was famous for tackling in the 1970s when I was a kid. It has been reprinted many times, most recently in an omnibus edition this year.
By this time in the Arrowverse, Oliver Queen is mayor of Star City, burning the social justice candle at both ends, passing low-income housing policies while also leading a whole team of B- and C-list crimefighters, only one of whom (the new Black Canary) has powers. Her they recruited from Hub City, where they did not meet The Question (whaaaaaaat a missed opportunity!).
After a mucker shoots up City Hall, killing 7 and wounding 24, there’s a lot of debate and dialogue, and a little smoky back-room political dealing, and boom, there’s a policy. Resolved in 41 minutes. The Wire it ain’t, but good on them for trying.
I wish more comics and shows would aim high, sometimes.
“We’ve made comics fun again”
There’s an opposite argument to be made, of course, that too much and too consistent darkness and drama alienates people. That’s what’s wrong with journalism, and these are supposed to be escapist fantasies, whose entire purpose is to relieve us of the pressure of having to change things.
I needed that during my teen years. I wasn’t having a lot of fun in real life then. I was too focused on throwing my own pity party (as Felicity Smoak would put it).
Honestly, that’s a big part of why I do direct action, cleaning streams and building ramps instead of writing letters (or worse, giving money) to politicians who don’t listen. Policy is a bigger lever, but it’s also a lot harder to pull.
Back to being shallow for a bit
I was slightly delighted to find out that Matt Ryan reprises his role as John Constantine in season 4, episode 5 of Arrow. I really enjoyed him in the half-season of his own show, before it got canceled.
And I’m still annoyed that they spent all this time teasing Kord Industries on Arrow, and we never got to see the Blue Beetle or the Bug in action.
I’m not sure why I liked Paris Cullins’s artwork so much, because it was neither as realistic as Neal Adams or George Perez nor as fluid as Alan Davis. I did though, and when they included a bunch of his Blue Devil covers as props during a lighter moment in the Swamp Thing tv show, I really enjoyed that. Maybe it was simply that sense of fun they were aiming for, back in the day, reasserting itself.
That’s what the Pyrite series is all about, fun fantasy. We’ll get back to that next week. In the meantime, I heard that nine public schools in Asheville are drilling wells so that they can get the kids back sooner. Here’s to baby steps.