- Good morning. Today I will apparently be earning my masters degree in hearing people talk about stuff they have no right to spout off about. #
- @savymarie_ Be strong, & know that there is a community around the world that supports you in your actions and cares about your well-being. #
- Rape victim held in contempt of court for tweeting names of attackers who shared photos of her assault after plea deal. http://t.co/qixMEJkV #
- Good morning! #
- @brimil Well, not where YOU are, but I'll take the sentiment :) in reply to brimil #
- @dgoodman_nbd Ah, but what sort of adjective does it deserve? in reply to DGoodman_NBD #
- @dgoodman_nbd Acceptable Morning! in reply to DGoodman_NBD #
- I said "See You Next Tuesday," and here we are… on Tuesday… and I'm seeing you. #
- Good morning! After a night of chores, I'm happy to wake up to a tidy house. What was the first thing to make you smile today? #
- "You guys are talking like robots. RTs, impressions, HTML, javascript, gleep, glork." – @marykateruf, on my conversations with @socialbrown #
Archives for July 2012
What I Tweeted, 2012-07-22 Edition
- @djwaldow @JustinKownacki No one missed this. Encouraging people to be assholes does not make him higher level art…it makes him lead asshole in reply to djwaldow #
- @MissGinaMartino About time :) #
- @djwaldow @JustinKownacki I read it in full. in reply to djwaldow #
- @amanda_nan Scars on 45. Haven't turned it off yet this week. Like a sexy hybrid of Snow Patrol and Arcati Crisis. in reply to amanda_nan #
- @ericsmithrocks I want the one on the right SO BAD. in reply to ericsmithrocks #
- @aworldgoesnova @polymwac Loved seeing you on the dance floor! in reply to aworldgoesnova #
- Ongoing @Marvel sexism: Storm a "blaster" on Avengers Alliance? She's one of your longest-running leaders; she does not just shoot lightning #
- @alexirvine Plus I always think of Ms. Marvel as a scrapper given that Rogue stole all that crazy strength from her, but in games she blasts in reply to alexirvine #
- @alexirvine But in specific, Storm has hundreds of issues of team leadership to her credit, and the blasts don't even originate from her. in reply to alexirvine #
- @alexirvine Loving the story, devious social sharing/spending hooks, the multiple roles for each character, & Kitty Pryde: Agent of SHIELD! #
What I Tweeted, 2012-07-15 Edition
- Channeling @EricSmithRocks to get all my writing and SM posts done on Sunday night so I can be an awesome socialite rock star all week long. #
- @ericsmithrocks @nedroid hahaha, that’s totally what my writing process is like, only with pizza alternated with mugs full of ice cream. in reply to ericsmithrocks #
- @alexcmurphy Give it a moment; everyone at work has been rhapsodizing about it despite the bad reviews. in reply to alexcmurphy #
- @alexcmurphy I could not look away from Studio 60. It was so riveting, even at its most overbearing. in reply to alexcmurphy #
- @allieharch So transfixing (both him and the show)! in reply to allieharch #
- Good morning! Still feeling positive from my @TheColorRun adventure yesterday. What part of your weekend will you bring with you to Monday? #
adventures in intentionally losing my voice
Last month I was not allowed to sing for two entire weeks.
It was terrifying.
I blame Adele. Late last year she was infamously put out of commission due to surgery to remove a polyp on her vocal cord that had hemorrhaged. Symptoms can include a hoarse-sounding voice, vocal fatigue, or a reduction in range.
I don’t sing as well as Adele, but I’m willing to bet I sing just as much, between my three bands and various elevator serenades. After several years of peak vocals that were rangy and in-tune, for the past few months my voice just felt sore. I didn’t know how else to explain it. It didn’t come simply from being loud, or even just from singing. It was tired, and singing around the pain was starting to sound bad. My highs and lows weren’t as strong, and I was not as in-tune on harmonies.
Thus, a trip to my ENT, which resulted in such fun escapades as sticking a camera down my nose to watch my vocal cords while I sang.
(It really was fun! I had a special playlist of songs to sing for my follow-up appointment, but I didn’t have a long enough camera-down-my-nose set to get through them all.)
The camera revealed not nodes or polyps (hooray!), but a massive bruise on my left vocal cord. It honestly looked like someone had punched it! And, well, I had been punching it a lot – at rehearsals, in meetings, and screaming at the Garbage concert. Still, it wasn’t nodes or polyps (hooray!), so I would not need any surgery. Probably. It depended on the nature of the bruise – which was the kind of thing that could lead to nodes (boo!).
What I did need was vocal rest. “Tell me about your bands’ schedules,” my doctor asked me. I thought she wanted to come out to a show, but really she was trying to find a window for me to keep my mouth shut for over a week – ideally two.
Luckily, this was the week prior to the #140Conf, which would preempt some of my standard rehearsals. Simply tacking a few extra days onto my break would get me through two weeks so we could follow-up.
I walked out of the appointment with a smile on my face. No surgery for nodes (hooray!), a set of custom-molded ear-plugs that would let my voice ring through, and two weeks of doctor-prescribed quiet time. It all sounded rather glamorous.
At least, it did up until my first conference call that afternoon. I was shouting across the room at the tiny speaker in the phone on my director’s desk. I caught myself absent-mindedly pressing a hand to my chest – a sure sign that my voice was aching. I quietly stood up and moved several seats closer to the phone. The next day E and I were driving somewhere with Garbage’s “Automatic Systematic Habit” blasting on the speakers. I joined Shirley for her pre-chorus harmony and E shushed me from the driver’s seat.
“No singing,” she said. The irony of the song’s title was not lost on me. I turned away from her to stare out of the window. It wasn’t just a matter of missing rehearsals. I had to intentionally lose my voice – treat it as if I couldn’t project beyond quiet, indoor tone.
My two week rest pressed on. I had to contain myself at author’s club, unable to joust loudly with my peers. I stopped singing people’s names in hello every day at the office. I could not venture inside the VIP event that Nan and I staffed at the #140Conf – it was too loud.
My glamorous two weeks of vocal rest sucked. My life without the full power of my voice sucked, too. Our voice is one of the things that lets us know we’re real and alive – instant feedback that we really exist. At least I could still talk at a normal volume! I thought about Adele and her months of silence, and Julie Andrews and her ruined singing voice. It could be much worse. I caught the problem early.
My return visit to the doctor and her nose-camera was all good news. The bruise was almost gone, and my cords generally looked healthier and springier than before. But there were ramifications. It was clear that my speaking was stressing me out as much (or more?) than my singing. I needed speech therapy, different allergy medication, less of certain foods, and other tweaks to my daily life.
Tonight will be my first time fronting the full, electric version of Arcati Crisis since this whole ordeal began. I’m excited and a more than a little nervous. Will I sound okay? Will the ache return? Will I have all my typical low and high notes – the four octaves of D I need to get through an AC set?
Only time will tell. The answer I do have now is something was wrong with my voice. It could have been much worse, and if I hadn’t intervened it could have grown much worse.
The morals of this story? Listen to your body. Adele was maybe singing a little too much and a little too loudly. And appreciate your health for every day you have it.
Does the past matter after a reboot?
We are living in the age of the reboot.
Last week, Amazing Spider-Man relaunched the webhead’s cinematic universe while the body of the old Tobey Maguire series was still warm. There’s a new Dallas series on TV. Sherlock Holmes revisionist history movies are being released alongside a present-day version of the detective on BBC TV.
So do those older, original versions matter?
Alternate Future History
Think about your favorite TV show or series of books. It’s a serialized, ongoing story that builds with every installment and references its past. You love it. You watch every episode and buy every volume. You are a super-fan.
What if there was some prior series with the same characters and concepts, but it was not a part of the current story you love? Would you buy it? This is increasingly common in our age of reboots. If you loved the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movie – which departs from the traditional Trek timeline post-Enterprise – are the other TV series and films automatically a must-watch? What about past Spider-Man movies, original Dallas, Sherlock Holmes books, Charlie’s Angels, G.I. Joe, Inspector Gadget, or Battlestar Galactica?
Probably not. All those past series are just an alternate reality to the present ones. You don’t need to watch both.
Case Study: DC’s Crisis of Collected Editions
DC Comics is one year into their successful line-wide New 52 reboot. Now they’re faced with a major crisis: they have a huge back catalog of trade paperbacks and hardcovers that might not matter.
DC’s rich history of iconic characters stretches back to 1938. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman – these heroes emerged as pure archetypes and over many decades evolved into the rounder, more dynamic characters they are today. There are many hundreds of older issues of their exploits available to reprint and press into the hands of eager young fans of today.
Except, today’s characters are not the same people – and I don’t just mean their personalities. DC’s Crisis On Infinite Earths rebooted everyone back in 1984, making post-1984 books the equivalent of new-Trek. Some of the characters beneath the masks of Flash and Green Lantern weren’t even the same as before! Then, after many years of tweaking, DC rebooted again last fall – creating a new-new-Trek.
What wasn’t immediately evident from those #1 issues was that some characters survived more intact than others. Batman’s corner of the DC Universe? Seemingly mostly the same, even if Bruce is younger than before. Superman? Origin retold from scratch, parents now dead, never in a relationship with Lois. Wonder Woman? Major changes in the Amazonian status quo, right down to her parentage.
Which brings me to my titular question: do DC Comics Collections matter? Yes, there are the Watchmen and the Killing Joke, the indisputable evergreen classics of the comics medium that will move units regardless of if their stories still count for anything.
But what about DC Archives, their premium hardcover reprints of Golden and Silver Age comics? What about Wonder Woman #205? Action Comics #527? The 70s Green Arrow / Green Lantern series?
None of it counts in continuity, so does it matter anymore? These classic stories have little to nothing to do with the current state of my favorite heroine. They aren’t all prohibitive classics. So, is there any point in reprinting them?
(Marvel doesn’t have this problem. Aside from some isolated soft reboots of certain characters, everything still counts, all the way back to the 40s. Every issue of X-Men is acknowledged and in continuity.)
Does the alternate past matter? You decide.
I want to know what you think. Do older stories still have a place post-reboot? If you loved JJ Abrams’s Star Trek did you immediately jump back to rewatch the original series?
And, on our case study: Should DC even bother to reprint non-seminal stories of characters other than Batman if they don’t matter in current continuity?
What do you think?