kate

At The Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner reports on a fascinating copyright case. The estate of Sherlock Holmes, which initially failed to respond to a lawsuit by the lawyer and Sherlock Holmes expert Leslie Klinger (he’s responsible for the new annotated Sherlock Holmes collections) aiming to prove that Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation is out of copyright, is now trying to argue that all the works in the Sherlock Holmes canon–not just the ones written before the end of the copyright deadline–need to stay copyrighted because they’re a part of a contiguous creation of a character. As Gardner reports, the estate is arguing that:

Plaintiff’s position would create multiple personalities out of Sherlock Holmes: a ‘public domain’ version of his character attempting to only use only public domain traits, next to the true character Sir Arthur created. But there are not sixty versions of Sherlock Holmes in the sixty stories; there is one complex Sherlock Holmes. To attempt to dismantle Holmes’s character is not only impossible as a practical matter, but would ignore the reality that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a single complex character complete in sixty stories.

Gardner explains that “it’s an argument that rejects certain temporal views of copyright and certainly have implications to what’s commonly assumed about the copyright term, which in the minds of many, is analogous to a clock.” But the estate’s argument raises another interesting question: at what point does a character have such an impact on popular culture, and become the basis for so many other creations, that the character is an archetype, rather than a singular person with a coherent self and personality?

There are three ongoing Sherlock Holmes franchises at the moment. Robert Downey Jr. portrays the character as a steampunk brawler in the same period in which the Sherlock Holmes stories were initially set, with an added affinity for the ladies. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Holmes in BBC’s Sherlock as a modern technophile, with a tobacco habit instead of an addiction to injectable cocaine, but with the original Holmes’ disinterest in sexual contact. And in CBS’ Elementary, Jonny Lee Miller is Holmes, but in recovery, with Lucy Liu as a female Watson, this time working as Holmes’ sober companion instead of a general practitioner.

Obviously, these are three wildly different interpretations of Doyle’s initial character, though it’s interesting that both modern versions, given the prominence of the cultures of recovery, foreground Holmes’ addiction as a character trait to different degrees. But does their existence actually harm the character arc that Doyle created, especially given that Doyle himself betrayed his initial intentions for the character and resurrected Holmes after his presumed death at the Reichenbach Falls? Or do these different meditations on Holmes himself, on his relationship with Doctor Watson, and on Watson himself–Sherlock‘s consideration of the impact of a very different British engagement in Afghanistan has been particularly insightful at times–expand our relationship to Doyle’s work and to the characters he created as we consider how the dynamic between the two men could play out in different moments, and how the phenomena that captured Doyle’s imagination have manifested themselves again in the modern era?

What about arguably transformative works, especially those that fill in areas of Holmes’ life that Doyle himself didn’t write, or in the manner of J.K. Rowling explained what happened to the characters in her Harry Potter series after the end of that set of novels, fill in after the fact? Does the Doyle estate want to shut down works about Holmes’ later life, like Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice series, which imagines Holmes as a retiree with a female trainee, or Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution, Michael Chabon’s novel about an older man who may or may not be Sherlock Holmes and the assistance he gives a young Jewish boy in 1944, towards the end of World War II? Or what about a work like the young adult novel Double Trouble Squared, which involves two sets of telepathic twins encountering the ghost of Mycroft Holmes in contemporary London, and is self-evidently a meditation on the power that Sherlock Holmes has on readers far removed from his age and social mores? I can’t even imagine what a ruling that Sherlock Holmes is a unified character whose story must be preserved as a single continuity for the sake of his integrity would do to this huge range of works, or the lawsuits that could result if the Doyle estate decided to try to shut down decades of non-continuity uses of the character to try to bring the public Holmes back into compliance with Doyle’s original stories.

And how about Sherlock Holmes stories that don’t use the famous detective’s name at all, but that are obviously deeply based on Doyle’s creation? Would the Doyle estate like the rights to Fox’s medical procedural House, in which Gregory House and James Wilson are both medical professionals, House has sexual relationships with women, and there are many more cases and many more long-running supporting characters than Doyle ever created, but is in all other respects substantially drawn from Doyle’s ideas? What about Rake, another show Fox has in development, about an eccentric lawyer with Holmes-ian personality traits? Could the Doyle estate try to claim some sort of profits from any character or character dynamic that seems plausibly derived from Doyle’s stories.

There’s no question that the Doyle estate would be richer if they win their argument that the Sherlock Holmes stories should stay in copyright. But it seems to me that our culture is richer, and greater honor is done to the power of Doyle’s creation, if the judge in this case rules that not only is Sherlock Holmes out of copyright, but that he’s an archetype rather than a unified personality, a template with an enormous stamp on our culture that extends far beyond four novels and fifty-six short stories.

The post Is Sherlock Holmes A Character? Or An Archetype? A New Copyright Fight Raises An Important Question appeared first on ThinkProgress.

DESPERATION?! IF BOSS IS…
LET’S “IMITATION GAMESOFT”!!

IT’S THE MONOGATARI OF “MIGHTY NO. 9”, ACTED BY MASAKA-CHAN AND MAJIDE-CHAN.

DO YOU KNOW “THE KING OF FIGHTERS?” POSSIBLY, IT’S THE MOST PAKURI-ED SINGLE GAMESOFT.

EVEN THE “IT’S ALMOST ‘98” CN ONLINE VERSION WHICH SNK-SAN BECAME FRIENDS WITH.

EVENTUALLY IT EVEN BECAME LIKE THIS!! “OFFICIAL KOF GAMESOFT, SOMEWHAT”.

Me: What dimensions should I make your logo?

Client: 2D.

isaia:

masterarrowhead:

#long post

I saw angerfish's tags and I had to make the crossover even if it's already been made or whatever here's some scribbles

lays down

done with life

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

I would have liked to know what the drummer hoped and what she expected. We'll never know why she decided to take a drum to the central markets of Paris on October 5, 1789, and why, that day, the tinder was so ready to catch fire and a drumbeat was one of the sparks.

To the beat of that drum, the working women of the marketplace marched all the way to the Palace of Versailles, a dozen miles away, occupied the seat of French royal power, forced the king back to Paris, and got the French Revolution rolling. Far more than with the storming of the Bastille almost three months earlier, it was then that the revolution was really launched—though both were mysterious moments when citizens felt impelled to act and acted together, becoming in the process that mystical body, civil society, the colossus who writes history with her feet and crumples governments with her bare hands.

She strode out of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City during which parts of the central city collapsed, and so did the credibility and power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI that had ruled Mexico for 70 years. She woke up almost three years ago in North Africa, in what was called the Arab Spring, and became a succession of revolutions and revolts still unfolding across the region.

Such transformative moments have happened in many times and many places—sometimes as celebratory revolution, sometimes as terrible calamity, sometimes as both, and they are sometimes reenacted as festivals and carnivals. In these moments, the old order is shattered, governments and elites tremble, and in that rupture civil society is born—or reborn.

In the new space that appears, however briefly, the old rules no longer apply. New rules may be written or a counterrevolution may be launched to take back the city or the society, but the moment that counts, the moment never to forget, is the one where civil society is its own rule, taking care of the needy, discussing what is necessary and desirable, improvising the terms of an ideal society for a day, a month, the 10-week duration of the Paris Commune of 1871, or the several weeks' encampment and several-month aftermath of Occupy Oakland, proudly proclaimed on banners as the Oakland Commune.

Weighing the Meaning

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear is a sign of their recognition that real power doesn't only lie with them. (Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can't believe.) That's why the New York Police Department maintained a massive presence at Occupy Wall Street's encampment and spent millions of dollars on punishing the participants (and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions more, in police brutality payouts for all the clubbing and pepper-gassing of unarmed idealists, as well as $47,000 for the destruction of the OWS library, because in situations like these a library is a threat, too).

Those who dismiss these moments because of their flaws need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them and what real changes have, historically, emerged because of them, even if not always directly or in the most obvious or recognizable ways. Change is rarely as simple as dominos. Sometimes, it's as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly turn out to be flowers that emerge from plants with deep roots in the past or sometimes from long-dormant seeds.

It's important to ask not only what those moments produced in the long run but what they were in their heyday. If people find themselves living in a world in which some hopes are realized, some joys are incandescent, and some boundaries between individuals and groups are lowered, even for an hour or a day or—in the case of Occupy Wall Street—several months, that matters.

The old left imagined that victory would, when it came, be total and permanent, which is practically the same as saying that victory was and is impossible and will never come. It is, in fact, more than possible. It is something that participants have tasted many times and that we carry with us in many ways, however flawed and fleeting. We regularly taste failure, too. Most of the time, the two come mixed and mingled. And every now and then, the possibilities explode.

In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a "we" that did not until then exist, at least not as an entity with agency and identity and potency. New possibilities suddenly emerge, or that old dream of a just society reemerges and—at least for a little while—shines.

Utopia is sometimes the goal. It's often embedded in the insurrectionary moment itself, and it's a hard moment to explain, since it usually involves hardscrabble ways of living, squabbles, and eventually disillusionment and factionalism, but also more ethereal things: the discovery of personal and collective power, the realization of dreams, the birth of bigger dreams, a sense of connection that is as emotional as it is political, and lives that change and do not revert to older ways even when the glory subsides.

Sometimes the earth closes over this moment and it has no obvious consequences; sometimes it's the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all those glorious insurrections in the East Bloc in 1989, and empires crumble and ideologies drop away like shackles unlocked. Occupy was such a moment, and one so new that its effects and consequences are hard to measure.

I have often heard that Freedom Summer in Mississippi registered some voters and built some alliances in 1964, but that its lasting (if almost impossible to measure) impact, was on the young participants themselves. They were galvanized into a feeling of power, of commitment, of mission that seems to have changed many of them and stayed with them as they went on to do a thousand different things that mattered, as they helped build the antiauthoritarian revolution that has been slowly unfolding, here and elsewhere, over the last half century or so. By such standards, when it comes to judging the effects of Occupy, it's far too soon to tell—and as with so many moments and movements, we may never fully know.

Preludes and Aftermaths

If aftermaths are hard to measure, preludes are often even more elusive. One of the special strengths of Thank You, Anarchy, Nathan Schneider's new book about Occupy Wall Street, is its account of the many people who prepared the fire that burst into flame on September 17, 2011, in lower Manhattan, and that still gives light and heat to many of us.

We know next to nothing about that drummer girl who walked into a Parisian market where many people were ready to ignite, to march, to see the world change. With every insurrection, revolution, or social rupture, we need to remember that we will never know the whole story of how it happened, and that what we can't measure still matters. But Schneider's book gives us some powerful glimpses into the early (and late) organizing, the foibles and characters, the conflicts and delights, and the power of that moment and movement. It conveys the sheer amount of labor involved in producing a miracle—and that miraculousness as well.

Early in Thank You, Anarchy, Schneider cites a participant, Mike Andrews, talking about how that key tool of Occupy, the General Assembly, with its emphasis on egalitarian participation and consensus decision-making, was reshaping him and the way he looked at the world: "It pushes you toward being more respectful of the people there. Even after General Assembly ends I find myself being very attentive in situations where I'm not normally so attentive. So if I go get some food after General Assembly, I find myself being very polite to the person I'm ordering from, and listening if they talk back to me."

This kind of tiny personal change can undoubtedly be multiplied by the hundreds of thousands, given the number of Occupy participants globally. But the movement had quantifiable consequences, too.

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Me: Do any of these appeal to you?

Client: Possibly.

Me: What would you like to see changed?

Client: Make it more sexy and family-oriented.

Turns out Cookie Monster has a second love: Film. In this video by the National Film Society he shares his cookiefied versions of classic movies. I know quite often the response to “[Blank] movie is being remade!” is a hearty grrrrrroan, but if you say you wouldn’t watch The Biscotti Kid you are lying.

Thanks to GeekMom, we also know some of the geeky actors and actresses who’ll be appearing on Sesame Street‘s 44th season, which starts tomorrow: Henry Cavill, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Rutina Wesley, Lena Headey, and Peter. Freaking. Dinklage. Check out a picture of Cavill hanging out with Elmo and some Muppet pigs behind the cut, then go re-watch that video of Tom Hiddleston meeting Cookie Monster. You know. If you want.

(via: /Film, GeekMom)

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After this summer’s Marvel-themed episode of Phineas and Ferb, Disney’s next burst of synergy to hit young Flynn and Fletcher will be a Star Wars crossover. As we previously learned, the episode’s storyline is to take place in parallel to the events of the first Star Wars film, Star Wars. You know the one, it’s the one the kids call A New Hope.

Looking at this concept art you might be able to infer just a thing or two about their approach. Perhaps the biggest surprise is the image above, showing Ferb as a Darth Maul type. That doesn’t quite fit the plan, not as expected, but everything below seems Episode IV adjacent.

That collage comes from Animation Fascination who found the images on a Disney Wiki. The Han and Chewie image, which you can see full size below, appears to have been photographed from a screen at Comic-Con, as with the Darth Ferb fight at the top of this post.

The images are credited to Kyle Menke, a storyboard artist on the show.

 

Perhaps this would all have meant a lot more to me if I knew Phineas and Ferb better. Nudge me when they have Chewbacca move in with the Big Foots – Big Feet? – of Gravity Falls.

Concept Art From The Star Wars Crossover Episode Of Phineas And Ferb

L’arte della felicità (The Art of Happiness), an animated drama about a bitter, existential taxi driver with familial abandonment issues in urban Naples, debuted recently at the Venice Film Festival’s International Film Critics Week section.

The film is a 2D/3D hybrid helmed by first-time feature director Alessandro Rak, a graduate of Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia Film School, and produced by Neapolitan studio Mad Entertainment, newly formed by producers Luciano Stella, Antonio Fresa and Luigi Scialdone. “Italy lags behind in the animation sector, especially in terms of being able to adapt to changing storytelling forms for new media,” Stella told Variety. “We are trying to change that.”

In a recent Q&A with the National Union of Italian Film Critics, director Rak reflected on the processes of resourcefulness and collaboration used during the production of L’arte della felicità: “We tried to realise this film with what and on what was available to us. We looked carefully. We have been lucky enough to collaborate with some talented artists belonging to the new Neapolitan music scene. We can say that this film is also their film, if they are happy with it.”

Reviews for the film have been reserved but hopeful, as typified by Deborah Young’s comments in the Hollywood Reporter:

“…this first feature is promising but stuffed with a little too much to finally click, and an noxiously loud, ever-present music track adds to the confusion. In Italy, young adult audiences will most easily latch on to its crudely expressed but ultimately uplifting message, and the same qualities may entice adventurous offshore buyers.”

The most positive sentiments come from David Ollerton in the London Film Review, whose review also points out how different this is from conventional feature-animation fare:

“The film moves backwards and forwards in time in a whimsical and playful manner as Sergio drives through the city. There is no big drama here, no huge crisis, no hero overcoming an obvious obstacle or struggle. Instead we are presented with a beautiful looking and sophisticated story combining philosophy, memories, love, music and politics all in one easy-going narrative.”

In October, the film will open in Italy through the distributor Luce Cinecittà Institute. Paris-based sales and acquisitions company Elle driver has picked up all international rights so perhaps audiences worldwide will soon have an opportunity to judge for themselves.

American food chain Chipotle eschews TV advertising and stopped using external ad agencies a few years ago, but when they create ad campaigns, they go all out. Their latest project is “The Scarecrow,” a game-and-film collaboration with Bill Joyce’s Moonbot Studios based in Shreveport, Lousiana.

“The Scarecrow”, conceived in collaboaration with CAA Marketing (a division of Creative Artists Agency), is a free arcade-style adventure game for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch that encourages players to think about industrial food production and the processed foods that they consume. Players can win coupons for free Chipotle food if they achieve certain goals within the game. There’s also an accompanying short film directed by Brandon Oldenburg and Limbert Fabian, and music by Fiona Apple:

Like their earlier “Back to the Start” campaign, Chipotle’s “Scarecrow” campaign is being praised for putting across its message in an entertaining, classy package. Adweek says, “Branded entertainment goes doesn’t get much more well rounded or better executed than this.”

Moonbot, which won the animated short Oscar in 2012 for The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, has created a lush and well-conceived feature film-quality universe for The Scarecrow. The golden-hued nostalgia that defines the studio’s visual aesthetic is a perfect complement to the environmental themes of Chipotle’s campaign.

This making-of video reveals some of the effort that went into creating The Scarecrow:

The Initial D character, not the VOTOMS director.

Takahashi Ryousuke, leader of the Akagi Red Suns, the White Comet, and the creator of Project D is one of the most prominent and important characters in Initial D and so inevitably he appears in every main Initial D anime. Now, each stage of Initial D has come out at different times, sometimes years apart, and even the art style of the original manga has evolved over the course of more than a decade. Character designs change according to the artist’s whim.

That still doesn’t explain how Ryousuke manages to look wildly different from one sequel to the next, while other prominent characters such as Takumi and Keisuke remain relatively intact.

Look at the guy. His face can’t stay the same size, his hair changes back and forth between blue and brown, his bone structure morphs as well. The only things that remain remotely consistent are his thick eyebrows and his full lips. Even his hair, which is roughly the same style until Fifth Stage, still undergoes some peculiar shifts. The closest he gets to looking similar is between Third Stage and Fourth Stage, and even that’s a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out why all of the anime have struggled to decide on a proper hair color for Ryousuke. Maybe it’s like how Raoh is blond in the manga but has brown hair in the anime?

Just saw this and wanted to share it before it was no longer Friday the 13th… Or at least before it was no longer Friday the 13th in my timezone.

Jennifer Landa decided to do some investigative journalism at San Diego Comic-Con to sort out this whole “fake geek” issue. And she enlisted help from our good friends Andre Meadows and Dr. Andrea Letamendi!

I never recommend reading the comments but I find it hilarious several folks on YouTube missed the satire part of this whole thing. For instance: “Yeah, I hate to break it to you, but most of the female cosplayers aren’t any nerdier or geekier than the males you accuse of fake nerdom. I find your video incredibly derisive and insulting.” Ah, life.

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Cosplayer Nikki sent us this fabulous photo of herself as The Stalk and her boyfriend as Prince Robot IV from Saga. (photo by Thomas Spanos)

• Taystee, aka Danielle Brooks, from Orange is the New Black has landed a role on HBO’s Girls. (via The Frisky)

About time Stan Lee got his own Funko Pop! figure. This one will be a New York Comic Con exclusive. (via Figures.com)

• Brave’s Brenda Chapman is going to be speaking at a TEDTalk at the United Nations next week for BRAVE: United in Action. Find out more on her website.

MTV Splash Page has a few behind-the-scenes shots from Agents of SHIELD. I’m posting this one because I want that bed capsule.

The majority of Pacific Rim‘s illusions were created by Industrial Light & Magic, but not, notably the pre-credits portion of the film. The prologue, in which Raleigh narrates the first decade or two of the human/kaiju conflict, features lots and lots of kaiju, jaegers, and related destruction, no two of which could be the same, and all of which had to fit a standard of realism to be taken as news footage. Pretty impressive stuff.

(via Gizmodo.)

Previously in Pacific Rim

• Chinese Military Thinks PacRim Was Propaganda
• How Pacific Rim Should Have Ended
• Sneak Peek of Pacific Rim 2

Social Media Code:

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Seeing films and television series adapted as comic books is nothing new, but in the past decade we’ve experienced a new phenomenon in which canceled TV shows are finding a second life, and a second chance, in comics form. In many cases, these properties pick up right where their television runs left off, such as [...]

While Superman calls the fictional American cities of Smallville and Metropolis home, half of the Man of Steel's creative team has roots in our neighbor to the north. Honoring Jerry Siegel's Canadian-American collaborator Joe Shuster's origins, the Royal Canadian Mint is forging seven new silver/gold/cupronickel Superman coins ranging in price from around $30-750 CAD (that's roughly $31-775 USD - "more in Canada" indeed, old comics).

Continue reading…

Q: How do you square what happened to Bill Finger with your love of Batman? Is it a problem? -- @MikeFromNowhere

A: You know, it is and it isn't. I think the record will show that outside of a few years here and there where I just wasn't interested in what was going on in the comics, there has been very little that has stood in the way of my love of Batman. It is river deep, mountain high for me and Batman, and at this point, I don't think there's anything that's going to change that. But at the same time, there are those moments where I'll be reading one of my favorite stories, or watching Batman: The Animated Series or Brave and the Bold, and that damn "Batman created by Bob Kane" credit comes up, and I'm just angry about it for the rest of the day.

Jack Kirby said it best, Mike. Comics'll break your heart.

Continue reading…

Card Hunter is a classic homage to basement-dwelling role-players, filled with heart and generosity

The CW, network for all your teen-angst, ripped abs, and model competition needs, is developing a drama about a transgender teen.

I’ll admit, The CW doesn’t have much to offer me these days. Dawson’s Creek is long gone and Arrow is the only show I watch on the network, but I might have to give this one a chance in the hopes they do something great with it.

The Hollywood Reporter says The CW is developing an hour-long drama:

Written by playwright-musician Kyle Jarrow, ZE revolves around a Texas teenager who announces that she is transgendered and will be living life as a boy. As his dysfunctional family spirals into identity crises of their own, he discovers that despite his appearance, he may be the most well-adjusted of them all.

Without knowing too many details at this point, I have to say the name of the show alone will help to spread awareness. Many won’t know it’s a gender neutral pronoun and its use could become more widespread.

ZE certainly won’t be the first television show to feature a transgender character but I think it might be the first to actually focus on one. While they’ve certainly got my attention, I’m now interested to know whether or not they’ll cast someone who is transgender in the role. Recently, Laverne Cox featured on Netflix’s critically acclaimed series Orange is the New Black, which has helped highlight her already existing transgender activism.

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The full season will debut online September 26

While this image is adorable, I cannot believe that I am actually about to say this, I am more excited about Mighty No. 9 right now than I am for anything in the actual Mega Man franchise. For someone who is as big of a Mega Man fan as I am, both figurative and literally, that is really saying a lot.

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When I got up today I put on my exercise clothes, because if I don’t do that early on I know I’ll just stay on the sofa after work eating Ruffles and wasting my time on Tumblr. You know how it goes. And then these awesome geeky workout shirts by Etsy seller Activate Apparel popped up. It’s a sign. A sign that I need all the geeky workout shirts.

Because, honestly, would you rather have boring workout shirts or shirts with references to Mulan, The Lord of the Rings, Legally Blonde, Pokémon, The Hunger Games, and more on them? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

(Via Twitter)

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Only one thing can stave off Super High School Level Despair--massive amounts of sugar! Confectionery maker Patisserie Swallowtail White Rose held a Dangan Ronpa-themed pop-up shop in the Shinjuku Marui One department store and we stopped by on the final day for a big slice of hope.

The rich Monokuma cake was split down the middle between white chocolate and bitter raspberry mousse with blackberry filling--better than munching on stuffing, and one of the tastiest treats we've ever enjoyed.

Next were the boxes of Aoi Asahina’s donuts decorated with hard sugar sprinkles. The fancy flavors like Earl Gray and persimmon were too high brow for us, so we went with the Monomi-colored strawberry glaze. The doughnut had a thick, moist body, not unlike Asahina after a dip in the pool.

Each item came with a sturdy rubber coaster emblazoned with cast members. Not bad for a parting shot.

On the way out we grabbed a stack of milk cookies for the team back at the office. The amount of detail on the characters is awesome, but it’s a bummer that half of them will be dead by the end of the series. Though we can’t think of a better sendoff for the fallen classmates then dipping their likeness in milk for a mid-afternoon snack. Praise the students of Hope's Peak Academy! Your despair is delicious.

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Once again, we find ourselves at the day after 9/11, and this time America stands alone. Alone not only in our abandonment even by our closest ally, Great Britain, but in facing a crossroads no less significant than the one we woke up to on September 12, 2001. The past 12 years have not been good ones. Our leaders consistently let the missiles and bombs fly, resorting to military force and legal abominations in what passed for a foreign policy, and then acted surprised as they looked up at the sky from an ever-deeper hole.

At every significant moment in those years, our presidents opted for more, not less, violence, and our Congress agreed—or simply sat on its hands—as ever more moral isolation took the place of ever less diplomacy. Now, those same questions loom over Syria. Facing a likely defeat in Congress, Obama appears to be grasping—without any sense of irony—at the straw Russian President Vladimir Putin (backed by China and Iran) has held out in the wake of Secretary of State John Kerry's off-the-cuff proposal that put the White House into a corner. After claiming days ago that the U.N. was not an option, the White House now seems to be throwing its problem to that body to resolve. Gone, literally in the course of an afternoon, were the administration demands for immediate action, the shots across the Syrian bow, and all that. Congress, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, seems to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that it may not be forced to take a stand. The Senate has put off voting; perhaps a vote in the House will be delayed indefinitely, or maybe this will all blow over somehow and Congress can return to its usual partisan differences over health care and debt ceilings.

And yet a non-vote by Congress would be as wrong as the yes vote that seems no longer in the cards. What happens, in fact, if Congress doesn't say no?

A History Lesson

The "Global War on Terror" was upon us in an instant. Acting out of a sense that 9/11 threw open the doors to every neocon fantasy of a future Middle Eastern and global Pax Americana, the White House quickly sought an arena to lash out in. Congress, acting out of fear and anger, gave the executive what was essentially a blank check to do anything it cared to do. Though the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly Saudis, as was Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda itself sought refuge in largely Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. So be it. The first shots of the War on Terror were fired there.

George W. Bush's top officials, sure that this was their moment of opportunity, quickly slid destroying al-Qaeda as an organization into a secondary slot, invaded Afghanistan, and turned the campaign into a crusade to replace the Taliban and control the Greater Middle East. Largely through passivity, Congress said yes as, even in its earliest stages, the imperial nature of America's global strategy revealed itself plain as day. The escape of Osama bin-Laden and much of al-Qaeda into Pakistan became little more than an afterthought as Washington set up what was essentially a puppet government in post-Taliban Afghanistan, occupied the country, and began to build permanent military bases there as staging grounds for more of the same.

Some two years later, a series of administration fantasies and lies that, in retrospect, seem at best tragicomic ushered the United States into an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Its autocratic leader and our former staunch ally in the region, Saddam Hussein, ruled a country that would have been geopolitically meaningless had it not sat on what Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called "a sea of oil"—and next to that future target of neocon dreams of conquest, Iran. Once again, Congress set off on a frenzied rush to yes, and a second war commenced out of the ashes of 9/11.

With the mighty American military now on their eastern and western borders and evidently not planning on leaving any time soon, Iranian officials desperately sought out American diplomats looking for some kind of rapprochement. They offered to assist in Afghanistan and, it was believed, to ensure that any American pilots shot down by accident over Iranian territory would be repatriated quickly. Channels to do so were reportedly established by the State Department and it was rumored that broader talks had begun. However, expecting a triumph in Iraq and feeling that the Iranians wouldn't stand a chance against the "greatest force for liberation the world has ever known" (aka the US military), a deeply overconfident White House snubbed them, dismissing them as part of the "Axis of Evil." Congress, well briefed on the administration's futuristic fantasies of domination, sat by quietly, offering another passive yes.

Congress also turned a blind eye to the setting up of a global network of "black sites" for the incarceration, abuse, and torture of "terror suspects," listened to torture briefings, read about CIA rendition (i.e., kidnapping) operations, continued to fund Guantanamo, and did not challenge the devolving wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Its members sat quietly by while a new weapon, armed drones, at the personal command of the president alone, crisscrossed the world assassinating people, including American citizens, within previously sovereign national boundaries. As a new president came into office and expanded the war in Afghanistan, ramped up the drone attacks, made war against Libya, did nothing to aid the Arab Spring, and allowed Guantanamo to fester, Congress said yes. Or, at least, not no, never no.

The World Today

Twelve years later, the dreams of global domination are in ruins and the world America changed for the worse is a very rough place. This country has remarkably few friends and only a handful of largely silent semi-allies. Even the once gung-ho president of France has been backing off his pledges of military cooperation in Syria in the face of growing popular opposition and is now calling for U.N. action. No longer does anyone cite the United States as a moral beacon in the world. If you want a measure of this, consider that Vladimir Putin seemed to win the Syria debate at the recent G20 summit as easily as he now has captured the moral high ground on Syria by calling for peace and a deal on Assad's chemical weapons.

The most likely American a majority of global citizens will encounter is a soldier. Large swaths of the planet are now off-limits to American tourists and businesspeople, far too dangerous for all but the most foolhardy to venture into. The State Department even warns tourists to Western Europe that they might fall victim to al-Qaeda. In the coming years, few Americans will see the pyramids or the ruins of ancient Babylon in person, nor will they sunbathe, among other places, on the pristine beaches of the southern Philippines. Forget about large portions of Africa or most of the rest of the Middle East. Americans now fall victim to pirates on the high seas, as if it were the nineteenth century all over again.

After 12 disastrous years in the Greater Middle East, during which the missiles flew, the bombs dropped, doors were repeatedly kicked in, and IEDs went off, our lives, even at home, have changed. Terrorism, real and imagined, has turned our airports into giant human traffic jams and sites of humiliation, with lines that resemble a Stasi version of Disney World. Our freedoms, not to speak of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, have been systematically stripped away in the name of American "safety," "security," and fear. Congress said yes to all of that, too, even naming the crucial initial piece of legislation that began the process the PATRIOT Act without the slightest sense of irony.

When I spoke with Special Forces personnel in Iraq, I was told that nearly every "bad guy" they killed or captured carried images of American torture and abuse from Abu Ghraib on his cellphone—as inspiration. As the victims of America's violence grew, so did the armies of kin, those inheritors of "collateral damage," seeking revenge. The acts of the past 12 years have even, in a few cases, inspired American citizens to commit acts of homegrown terrorism.

Until this week, Washington had abandoned the far-from-perfect-but-better-than-the-alternatives United Nations. Missiles and bombs have sufficed for our "credibility," or so Washington continues to believe. While pursuing the most aggressive stance abroad in its history, intervening everywhere from Libya and Yemen to the Philippines, seeking out monsters to destroy and, when not enough could be found, creating them, the United States has become ever more isolated globally.

Our Choice

The horror show of the last 12 years wasn't happenstance. Each instance of war was a choice by Washington, not thrust upon us by a series of Pearl Harbors. Our Congress always said yes (or least avoided ever saying no). Many who should have known better went on to join the yes men. In regard to Iran and George W. Bush, then-candidate for president Senator Joe Biden, for instance, said in 2007, "I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for 17 years. I teach separation of powers in constitutional law. This is something I know. So I brought a group of constitutional scholars together to write a piece that I'm going to deliver to the whole United States Senate pointing out that the president has no constitutional authority to take this country to war against a country of 70 million people unless we're attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked. And if he does, I would move to impeach him. The House obviously has to do that, but I would lead an effort to impeach him."

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Necropolis

Prologue

Page Three

-Jake Wyatt

Looks like T.M. Revolution will soon be joining his Valvrave opening co-star Nana Mizuki in super deformed Nendoroid figure form. The anison veteran (Rurouni Kenshin, Gundam SEED, Soul Eater, Sengoku Basara) tweeted a photo of his figure, dressed in the costume from Valvrave's first opening, "Preserved Roses."

 

T.M.Revolution and Nana Mizuki reunited for new opening "Revolution Dualism" when Valvrave returns this October.

 

ねぇねぇ、これカワイくない？(๑˃ٮ˂๑)♪ http://t.co/kdxblhFJVn

— 西川貴教 (@TMR15) September 11, 2013

 

 

 

via ‏@seiyufan

 

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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.

Necropolis

Prologue

Page Two

-Jake Wyatt

When they’re not out attacking titans, the Survey and Training Corps are busy raiding convenience stores. The Lawson chain of stores began their second Attack on Titan campaign on September 3rd. During the period, special announcements by Eren and Mikasa, and Eren and Levi are broadcast inside the store several times a day at specific times.

The first campaign offered four variations of earphone jacks. This time around customers can receive one of five clear files with every purchase of two eligible snack items. Collaboration goods included butter cookies rationed by the Survey Corps, Sasha’s sweet potato chips, 6 assortments of candy tablets, and four types of mini cases. Due to its immense popularity, the candy tablets and mini cases were already all sold out by the time I got there just after 8 in the morning. I wasn’t even able to get my hands on the cookies and chips until a restock a couple days later.

The butter cookies taste just like you would expect from military ration cookies. Hey, you are paying for the fantasy. For just 105 yen you can have a midday snack and become part of the Survey Corps!

With the package art of Sasha munching on a sweet potato, I knew the sweet potato chips were going to be great. And they were! How can you go wrong with sugar-glazed potato chips? Much like Sasha, Boke Nasu couldn't resist the temptation. He went as far as asking for a bite with “Am I worthy?” giving me a Shingeki-style military salute… with his left hand. FAIL!

The event runs through the 16th, but with rations in such low supply you'll need to pray to the wall to be able to find a store with stock. Good luck, soldiers!