Unfortunately, it’s also a day when I’m getting over a bad case of the ‘flu, and not really coherent enough to write well, and I was seriously considering not doing this at all – after all, earlier this year when my work were after nominations of names of computer scientists to name their meeting rooms after, I’d named Ada Lovelace there, so I could have done my bit. But I’ve decided to go ahead with a post about Emily Short.

(I feel quite embarrassed writing about her as she’s someone I don’t know – at all – but who blogs and whose blog I’ve commented on, and so she may well read this. I just wanted to write about a programmer who’s actually one of those responsible for something I actually use on a regular basis).

Short is the writer of a series of games, all of them ‘interactive fiction’ – the kind of thing that used to be called text adventure games. And while I don’t know as much about the genre as I should, I do know that her games are among the best I’ve played, and are regarded as such by the small community of people who are still interested in these things. Rather than be Zork-esque ‘GET LAMP, KILL TROLL’, her stuff is actual art, its sophistication limited more by the relatively crude tools at her disposal than by her imagination or writing ability – a classicist, she often uses figures from Greek and Roman history and myth (I’ll have to replay Damnatio Memoriae soon, as I’ve recently been rewatching I, Clavdivs), and manages to get quite an astonishing level of characterisation and interaction from her NPCs.

But more important than her games, as far as this goes, is her work on Inform 7, a programming language I’ve written a little about before ( here and here ).

The basic concept behind Inform 7 – and the bulk of its implementation – are the work of Graham Nelson, a mathematician. But Short is the co-maintainer of the project (and increasingly its public ‘face’) , and wrote many of the built-in ‘extensions’ (what most programmers would probably refer to as libraries) to the language – as well as providing more than thirty further extensions on the Inform Extensions Page. She also wrote the vast bulk of the 300+ example programs in the Inform documentation, and the regression test suite used on every release (and as someone whose day job involves, in large part, regression testing software, I can tell you what a tedious, thankless, but necessary job that is).

And on top of that, she’s put in this huge amount of work on a community software project (albeit one not yet fully under a Free license, though getting released that way piecemeal) not for any cash, and not even (as far as I can tell) for ‘real-life’ credit – according to Wikipedia, ‘Emily Short’ is a pseudonym.

No doubt there are better candidates for celebration on Ada Lovelace Day, but I’m assuming you all know about Grace Hopper and Rosalind Franklin, so someone doing good work in a tiny niche, but work I for one appreciate, deserves writing about as much as anyone else…

Firstly, one that might interest Debi and Jennie (and any other feminists who like comics), Colin, who is normally Too Busy Thinking About His Comics, has another blog where he discusses just 2000AD. His most recent post looks at 2000AD’s portrayal of women in light of some quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft.

Lesswrong have a post on information theory as it applies to using Bayesian reasoning.

An excerpt on the late, great Alex Chilton, from 33 1/3.

Coincidentally, on the same day that my post on how UKIP are liars and racists (and it is important as the election draws near to stress that racist UKIP are racists, and should be given their full name of racist UKIP at every opportunity) was commented on by an illiterate (both in English and economics) moron who couldn’t even see the contradiction in ‘sentences’ like “I am all for immigration, i have no object to it whatsoever, but in the current climate and the way this country is and what future it has lying ahead, more immigrants is not the bloody answer.” (I marked the comment as spam – people who want to see my wife deported are not welcome on this blog), Richard Herring’s anti-fascist show Hitler Moustache was disrupted by a racist supporter of Racist UKIP. (Incidentally I saw the show again just over a week ago, and stand by my original review of it – get the DVD when it comes out next year). Just remember – UKIP are racist scum.

And Andrew Cartmell writes about the recent kerfuffle in the right-wing press when they discovered that some twenty-year-old science fiction shows weren’t entirely supportive of the then-government.

Firstly, while I thought I had reason to be mildly annoyed at Google, at least it didn’t decide I automatically wanted to be bestest friends with an abusive ex and a bunch of people who want to rape me, like it did with someone else… meanwhile Twitter has handed a gift to repressive regimes.

(The first link there has since been turned into a private blog and will not be viewable if you click it. I won’t republish what the author said, but the mere fact that she’s now *had* to close her blog down, as a result of Google’s actions, should say a lot…)

Andrew Rilstone is blogging at a more regular pace again. Here he’s got a short tale about the police, which just might be a metaphor. Mark Steel is less metaphorical on the same subject.

The Mindless Ones have another competition.

Marc Singer continues his run through his comics syllabus with a quick look at Watchmen.

And Justin completely demolishes the government’s response to the Binyam Mohammed case.

And after looking through that list (torture, stupidity, war and abuse) I think my migraine’s worse, not better…

(But this has cheered me up – Cerebus valentines:

Cerebus valentine

In the meantime, have some links:
Jazz Hands Serious Business is unimpressed with the Lib Dems’ new social network ACT (I’m on it myself, but haven’t found a real use for it, and suspect it, like a lot of online campaigning stuff, is preaching to the converted. But we’ll see).

Millennium talks about how the banking ‘loans’ were more like outright fraud, and reviews The Empty Child, from the first series of the Welsh series.

Laurie Penny thinks that there should be no feminism without trans feminism.

And a couple more people have come up with reworkings of classic characters – Gavin B has done Doctor Who, as has pillock, while Rab has done a Tarzan.

Justin Zyduck has posted a Doctor Who revamp idea in response to mine.

Jennie asks Do You Know A Rapist? while Roz Kaveney wants feminists to speak out against the murder of transpeople. I wish neither post was necessary…

Over at the Mindless Ones Tymbus talks about the Uncle books

And Eddie Campbell has a couple more posts on ‘the graphic novel‘

Oh, and finally, you should all buy Bryan Talbot’s new graphic novel, Grandville. It may sound like the most cliched thing ever (anthropomorphic animal detectives in a steampunk alternate universe investigating a conspiracy) but it’s great anyway.

No? Suit yourselves then.

Anyway, after a week of late nights at work, concern over hospitalised family members and friends, Doctor Who conventions, seeing off emigrating friends and general STUFF, I’m now back. Tomorrow I’m going to start a whole series of posts, and also get in touch with all those involved in the PEP zine (and with the Mindless Ones). Meanwhile, have some links:

Zom is worried that he might be influencing his kid to become a superhero fan.

The storm in a teacup over Brown’s handwriting has been one of the most obscene examples of everything that is wrong with our society. I had a MASSIVE row with Charlotte Gore about this on Twitter yesterday, and thanks to myself and others (I was impressed with Debi, who managed to make the same points I made but rather less swearily) she posted this later, apologising for making fun of him (the comments there are fairly horrible, but Charlotte’s post is well worth reading). Millennium sums up my own view on the matter.

Gavin R has a very interesting review of a book on stripping (a subject on which I know very little).

Gavin B has a review of a festival of cross platform sound experimentation and art. I particularly like the little side comment about Daniel Johnston.

And Brad Hicks argues for a new New Deal.

ETA This post on the Beatles may be the best thing Christopher Bird’s ever written. It won’t *seem* like it is, til the last few paragraphs, but it is…

Gavin Robinson has a good post on women’s role in warfare through the ages.

Caron quite rightly asks what we’re doing sending people to fight for a regime that allows women who don’t have sex with their husbands to be starved to death.

Eddie Campbell talks about whether ‘cinematic’ comics techniques really are.

Leonard Pierce points out just how far the USA lags behind the rest of the industrialised world in healthcare and income equaity, while Christopher Bird tells you what to do about it and Fred Clark takes on the right-wing faux-indignant people who’ve once again prevented you from having things the rest of the Western world sees as basic essentials.

And Millennium Elephant chips in on the most important issue of the day – whether the UNIT episodes of Doctor Who happened in the 70s or the 80s,

In other news – Charlotte Gore isn’t a witch, she’s a nutter.

A good post on women in free software, asking among other things what can be learned from the experiences of Dreamwidth.

I don’t know why I haven’t linked it before, but I hope you’ve all been reading RIck Veitch’s Subtleman strip…

And Bruce Schneier has a good post on risk intuition.

Some actual content tomorrow – probably comics-based – as well as my return to Twitter (I hope). Been a very busy week at work…

(And having written that sentence, straight away Sean posts a review which says half of the things I was going to say. I disagree with him about Multiversity though – it sounds like Morrison has a good idea of who he wants to work with on that, and he might get them… And while I’m linking Sean, here‘s his rant about comic shops which I meant to link to at the time…)

In this review I’m mostly going to talk about the writing, because that’s the part I’m most qualified to talk about, but I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I think this is ‘the Grant Morrison show’. Cameron Stewart’s work in this series is exemplary, and it couldn’t have been done with any other artist – he is at least as important to the story’s success as the writer is. He does some of the best facial expressions in comics, without exaggerating them a la Kevin Maguire – his expressions are naturalistic, even though most of his art is towards the cartoony end of mainstream USian comics. Just look at Seaguy’s face on the cover – his head cocked, his brow furrowed… it’s clear that this is *serious* to him, and he’s getting quite annoyed – but in the way a non-aggressive little boy would get annoyed. Though the art style couldn’t be more different, I could imagine that expression on the face of a Peanuts character.

Stewart’s style manages to make the ‘normal’ look absurd while making the ‘surreal’ look workaday, allowing us to accept the story’s dream-logic for long enough that the story can sell itself to us. And it’s just gorgeous to look at. My one criticism (and it’s a small one) is that his ink line is thicker than I would like, and has the effect at times, to my eyes, of turning the panel/page into a set of distinct almost abstract figures, rather than an integrated composition. But that is only a very minor criticism, and only affects a couple of images negatively.

Now, of course, many of the things I said in the review of the last issue still hold, but here’s some thoughts on the second issue…

Firstly, if Grant Morrison hadn’t been so over-complimentary about Geoff Johns for so long, I would have taken the Prismatic Age stuff at the beginning (and he is definitely riffing on the Prismatic Age stuff here, with Threeguy splitting into three different-coloured Seaguy lookalikes, though obviously this has precursors both in Triplicate Girl from the Legion Of Superheroes and Superman Red/Superman Blue) as being a rather savage attack on Johns. Three ‘legacy heroes’ inspired by the main hero, all indistinguishable apart from the colour of their uniforms (like the different coloured Lanterns?) who do naughty swearing and kill and maim people (the injury-to-the-eye motif!)? That sounds like… well, everything Johns writes during the large amount of the time that he’s on autopilot. I would *swear* this material was a dig at Johns, were Morrison not such an obvious admirer of his…

Of course, the big story that’s going on in this whole miniseries, and this issue in particular, is the dark night of the soul – Seaguy going down under the sea and then rising again and ending the issue with a diving leap. The whole thing’s about identity – he’s submerged under water and reborn/’baptised’ as El Macho, the bulldresser (and of course dressing bulls up in women’s clothes is another way of playing with identity – in Seaguy, as in most superhero comics, one’s clothing is intimately bound up with one’s role (though I do wonder if the bulldressing is also inspired by PETA’s Running Of The Nudes). The only way he can defeat the bull, and also his rival Cortez, is by stripping himself totally nude, and handing his ‘crown’ to the bull.

The removal of clothes/symbols of power, descent, and rebirth are all, as anyone as obsessed with mythology as Morrison is knows, intimately tied – in fact, this issue contains symbolism that goes back to the very oldest known stories. Ishtar, in Babylonian myth, went down to the underworld and had to remove a symbol of power/piece of clothing at each of seven doors, before dying at the end and having to sacrifice her husband in order to escape (much as Seaguy ‘sacrifices’ his girlfriend (whose name means Sea Of Death, if my cod-Spanish is right) here) .

And in the epic of Gilgamesh – the oldest known piece of what we’d now call fiction – Ishtar sends the Bull Of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh, but he and Enkidu kill the bull instead. Of course, Gilgamesh was as close to the first superhero as you can get, and his search for immortality parallels a lot of the stuff in a lot of Morrison’s writing. For those unfamiliar with the story of Gilgamesh, there’s what looks like an interesting comic adaptation of a lecture about the saga online here.

The birth and rebirth themes show up throughout the comic of course – for example the ‘eight months pregnant’ Carmen/Maria pulling Mickey Eye out of her dress (which reminded me of this classic Bron/Fortune sketch). However, everything in here is multi-layered, and this can easily fit in with the series-as-metaphor-for-adolescence, with this story being the equivalent of the time in many people’s lives when they try to pretend to be cool to impress people they don’t really like, before giving up and just being themselves.

That said, one minor quibble – I saw an arrow (and before anyone thinks that what I’m about to say is a terrible attack on the comic, please read this, and also remember that I’ve defended comics by Dave Sim before now…)

If you combine the figure of Seaguy’s girlfriend (the only female character to do anything other than pose prettily), who lies to Seaguy about everything, tries to keep him stupid, and pretends to be pregnant in order to trap him in the fake life he’s living, with the bulldressing sections, where the bull is humiliated by being dressed in women’s clothes, there is a hint of misogyny to this. As both Morrison and Stewart are too self-conscious and self-critical to do that without realising it, I’m willing to assume for now that there’s a point to that, and that it’s something I’m missing. But it may just be a bad note in an otherwise near-perfect comic.

1) “The Liberal Democrats need to get off the fence and say what their actual policies are”
Yep, because it’s not as if we’ve got tons of policy papers out there, or a simple pocket guide to our policies, is it?

2) “Ringo Starr was a terrible drummer”
Ringo got a reputation as a bad drummer because he didn’t lock in with the bass, as was the fashion in British recordings in the early 60s. That isn’t actually bad drumming, and anyone listening to him can tell that he was one of the most imaginative players of his time period. Just listen to Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows or Happiness Is A Warm Gun.

3) “Pet Sounds is the only good Beach Boys album, and other than that they only did crappy surf songs”
Anyone who says this gets their opinions from the music press and hasn’t bothered listening to any of their other albums. Whether you like them or not, for example, you can’t describe Carl & The Passions or Holland (spotify link) as ‘crappy surf songs’.

4) “New Doctor Who is much more sophisticated than the original series”
The original series was trying to do something rather different than the new series – it was working from a British set of TV conventions that are theatrical in origin, rather than an American, cinematic, set of conventions. This can make it difficult for those attuned to the modern style to watch. But that does *not* make it less sophisticated. In fact, on every level on which one can make a reasonable comparison (except effects – and with a few exceptions the old series was nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests), the old series was vastly superior. Fewer plot holes (note I don’t say ‘no plot holes’), better performances from the leads, better characterisation, more memorable individual lines, and a more coherent worldview. The new series may be shiny, but it’s for the most part a soulless pastiche of the old series made by people who don’t understand it (or who do but fear their viewers wouldn’t – and I don’t know which would be worse).

5) “The free market would run healthcare more efficiently than the NHS”
I don’t believe this for a second, but assume it’s true for a second – as someone who’s seen my (American) wife collapse in the middle of the night, be delirious and unaware of her surroundings, but try to prevent me from ‘phoning an ambulance because her first thought was “We can’t afford it!”, and who’s seen friends in the US believe they have cancer but be unable to afford to have a checkup to find out, I’ll take a little bit of inefficiency over that any day.

6) “I’m buying [Comic X] to support the character, even though I’ve hated the last dozen issues”
The character doesn’t need your support – it’s a fictional character (see also people saying “Dick Grayson deserves a turn at being Batman”). All that you’re doing is encouraging bad comics to be produced.

7) “Grant Morrison’s comics are just weird for weirdness’ sake”
See the comments to this post for several people’s take on this view…

8) “Where are all the female political bloggers?”
here and here and here and here and here. And that’s just the ones on my blogroll.

9) “ZaNuLieBore”
Grow up. As far as I can tell, no critic of New Labour has ever used this ‘word’ – certainly I’ve never seen it. On the other hand, plenty of apologists for them use it as a way of dismissing the arguments of those they disagree with – “Yeah yeh, teh ZaNuLieBore is teh ev1l! We get it, go away.” Not only is this fatuous, but something about the ‘word’, the very look of it, makes me faintly queasy.

10) Any explicit search terms involving Nicola Bryant
Honestly, this really *isn’t* a fetish site for one-time Doctor Who companions.