Interesting Links for 29-06-2020

[andrewducker]

A thread of US Police Brutality videos. Started a month ago. Now up to over 600 videos.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1266935422883676161.html
(tags:police violence usa videos )

How important "Cerebus" was for doing things nobody else was doing with comics. And how it went so badly wrong.

I still feel that _something_ happened 2/3 of the way through. The comic just feels different, and I'd love to know why.
(tags:cerebus comics )

Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest (blame the Permian Extinction)

(tags:life oxygen birds dinosaurs prehistory earth )

CRISPR gene editing in human embryos wreaks chromosomal mayhem

(tags:genetics fail )

I firmly believe that Visa should not be allowed to deny service to people. Even terrible people. Nobody should be banned from being able to use electronic money.

To be clear, I'm in favour of electronic banking having the same level of Universal Service Obligation that the post office or the phone companies do.
(tags:money business visa OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[armiphlage]

Interesting - Visa has usually just blacklisted charities sending medical supplies to Cuba, LGBT bookstores, and companies selling binders for transfolk.

[andrewducker]

Ooh, got a link to any of those?

[armiphlage]

For the LGBT bookstore issues and binders, that was back in the 1990s with Glad Day Books, Little Sisters bookstore, and Come As You Are in Canada. Canada Customs was also blocking the import of those items into Canada at the time (despite it being perfectly legal to buy or own them in Canada). This led to the excellent movie "Better Than Chocolate".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168987/


The blocking of financial transfers to Cuban charities by credit card companies is still going on, but appears to be part of the overall US government sanctions against Cuba, rather than targeted maliciousness on the part of the credit card companies after all. I withdraw my criticism of Visa for that.


https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/cuba_faqs_new.pdf

[claudeb]

Why am I not surprised that messing with the machine language of a CPU we barely understand can create dangerous bugs that are hard to track down?

And this is why I keep telling people: plastic is bad. To have any kind of freedom at all, we need money to be physical, anonymous and hard to follow, or to invalidate. In other words... cash. Which is a necessity for other reasons, too.

[zz]

thanks for noting police brutality. most people i know don't seem to give a flying fuck, when they're otherwise very vocal about other injustices.

[dewline]

I wasn't a fan of Cerebus. I knew of Dave Sim, I think I saw him at a Maplecon. Back when Ottawa still hosted those conventions. I know Roberson now via Facebook.

I don't know what broke Dave Sim as a person. But I think he's staying broken for the foreseeable future.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, he's so tied in knots that I can't see him wanting to be fixed.

How important "Cerebus" was for doing things nobody else was doing with comics. And how it went so b

[jducoeur]

I still feel that _something_ happened 2/3 of the way through. The comic just feels different, and I'd love to know why.

It wasn't 2/3 of the way through -- it started right around issue 114, when the style changed. (Actually right around the beginning of _Jaka's Story_.) And it's not all that mysterious.

The thing is, while _Cerebus_ was always billed as a sort of one-man show, that wasn't actually true at the beginning: AFAIK, Dave's wife Deni was deeply involved in the publishing, and I believe was also providing at least light editing and sanity-checking.

But in the early-to-mid 80s (I forget exactly when), Dave and Deni had what appeared to be an acrimonious divorce. Deni left Aardvark-Vanaheim, and went off to found Renegade Press.

At this point, Dave was on his own (well, aside from Gerhard, who was the constant quiet other partner), and things began to go slowly downhill. Precisely why, I dunno, but I suspect that Dave had some latent misogyny that Deni had been keeping in check. (Quite possibly that was a causal factor in the divorce.) Afterwards, she was no longer in the picture, *and* he was pissed off, stewing, and slowly going around the bend, as that becomes a lot less "latent".

That's my impression, anyway. I was just a reader, but a pretty devoted one -- one of the crazy few who bought all the original issues *and* the collections, even the nearly-unreadable later ones, and who was following the fan press. By all accounts, Dave was slowly turning into a raging misogynist, and the timing of the divorce certainly didn't seem coincidental there...

Re: How important "Cerebus" was for doing things nobody else was doing with comics. And how it went

[andrewducker]

Yeah, but during Jaka's Story, and a fair bit on from there, he was showing empathy towards a ton of his characters. Somewhere that empathy vanished.