Mr. Quesada,

I really respect a lot of the decisions you've made since becoming Editor-in-Chief at Marvel in 2000. I like many of the writers and artists who've arrived during your tenure. I'm glad to see the Avengers' return to prominence in the Marvel Universe. While I was initially a skeptic, the concept of the Ultimate comics has won me over. I was very happy to see you return cancelled/relaunched series to their original numbering. The Civil War was, at the least, an interesting concept, and its ongoing repercussions give it additional weight. I give you a lot of credit for rescuing Marvel from the stagnant and stale comics they were publishing for much of the 1990s.

However, I have a big problem with what you've done to Spider-Man in the "One More Day" storyline.

I've read that you have a long-running disdain for Peter Parker's marriage to Mary Jane. Assuming (as I do) that most of the 1990s-era Spider-Man comics are forgettable, you could argue that most "classic" Spider-Man stories took place before Peter and MJ tied the knot. And I recognize that, as a publisher, there's a fine line you must walk between continually developing characters for longtime readers like me, and keeping them accessible and iconic for new generations of fans.

But what you've done in "One More Day" is just ridiculous. I know this is comics, where death is a minor inconvenience and no plot device is too outlandish. But seriously - to build all that drama surrounding Spider-Man's unmasking in public and Aunt May's mortal injury, only to wipe it all away (and the marriage too) with a huge deux ex machina-istic wave of Mephisto's hand? We longtime readers who were interested to see how it all played out were rewarded with shoddy, cheap, gimmicky storytelling of the worst kind. Doesn't it tell you something when JMS, the writer whose historic run you're allegedly commemorating, wants his name taken off the final product?

I've been reading Marvel Comics as long as I can remember, and have a great fondness for Spider-Man in particular (my first comic was Amazing Spider-Man #250 at age five), but your amateurish "One More Day" reboot has reduced my interest in Spider-Man's ongoing adventures to almost nil. I look forward to the day when this fiasco gets retconned away - and I hope that the sales boost you get out of this stunt justifies the big middle finger you've given to us dedicated fans.

Sincerely,
Ross Snyder

One of the big stories recently in the land of American politics has been Republican Mike Huckabee and his dramatic leap in popularity in the 2008 presidential primary polls. His rapid ascension from marginal candidate to front-runner has been largely attributed to the other candidates' lack of appeal to evangelicals - one of the GOP's core constituencies.

On first consideration, I can see why Republican voters like this guy. He's folksy and down-to-earth, he tells jokes, he plays guitar in his band, he was fat but got skinny (the American dream, circa 2007), and his relatively moderate views on immigration stand in contrast to the xenophobic views put forth by some of the other Republican candidates.

Huckabee is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister, and here's where my biggest problem with him lies - he doesn't believe in evolution. Not only does he reject evolution, but he also believes that students should be exposed to creationism (the idea that the universe did not evolve, but was created by an "intelligent designer").

This should set off loud warning bells in the head of anyone who believes in rational thought and appreciates the majesty and accomplishments of science. Evolution is not a theory, as some religious people would claim; it's scientific fact. It's not immediately verifiable in the way you can drop a rock and observe gravity, but it's universally accepted and has led to breakthroughs in a wide range of fields. Creationism, on the other hand, is a pseudoscience with no basis in fact.

Huckabee says that his opinions on evolution have little impact on his ability to be president, but I disagree. Our president will be our emissary to the world - what kind of message would it send if the USA, home of so much innovation and technological achievement in the past 200 years, elected a president who simply tosses out one of the ideas at the core of all that science? What does it say about Huckabee's capacity for critical thinking when he so willingly sides with the Bible over science? If he wants to be a man of faith, that's fine, but our president needs to operate on facts, not faith.

It blows me away when people treat belief in evolution as a matter of personal opinion. Do you also make up your individual mind about whether or not you believe in the combustion engine? How about microwave ovens? Or maybe cell phone technology? Science has brought us all of these things and far more, and we accept them unconditionally - yet people treat the topic of evolution as a "yes or no" question. Sorry, but it's not a question - evolution is real, whether it jives with your religious beliefs or not, and electing a president who doesn't understand that would make us officially the dumbest electorate on Earth.

(Not to mention that we're currently mired in a bloody mistake of a war thanks to an administration that went with truthiness over facts. Isn't it time we elected a leader who's not allergic to logic?)

I'm an 80s music nut, with a special fondness for cheesy & upbeat New Wave/synth stuff - it clearly carved out a part of my brain during my formative years. I'm always mining the 80s for new music that I haven't heard yet - there's just so much of it.

So, recently I discovered the song "S.O.S. Bandido" by Carrara. Outside of its inclusion on some relatively obscure Italo-disco compilations, I can't find much about either the song or the artist.

However, I did find a live video for the song on Youtube, and holy crap, does it set new standards for international fruity-ness. It's one guy, on a stage in front of a zillion people, prancing around his keyboards, and... I guess you have to see it to understand. Best parts: the fist-pump synched with the sound effect at 1:01, the creepy Italian guy gyrating at 1:32, and the "air drums" at 1:57.

This video did not age well. Still - a good song.

Recently I re-watched one of my favorite movies, The Insider. It's about Jeffrey Wigand, a former executive at the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, one of the companies commonly referred to as "Big Tobacco". After being fired, he comes into contact with a producer at 60 Minutes who eventually convinces him to blow the whistle on his former employer's shady dealings in a taped interview. Much legal wrangling and corporate maneuvering follows, CBS won't air the interview, Wigand's life begins to crumble, and just when it looks like Big Tobacco is going to win yet again, redemption arrives. It's a great film and if you haven't seen it, you definitely should.

Much of the movie takes place in the 60 Minutes offices, and I was always struck with how they portrayed everyone working there as so impassioned and driven - it's not that they have jobs, it's that they are their jobs. They make journalism look romantic - the opposite of a 9-5 job where you draw a paycheck and go home.

I'm down with that. I never thought of "work" as simply something you do to get money, which you use to go enjoy the non-work portion of your life. I always wanted to have a job I cared about and took pleasure in - there's the old saying, "if you find a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life." It's kind of a cliche, but I buy into it.

Still, I know not everyone looks at it the way I do. I have lots of friends who take the Office Space approach - find a job you don't entirely hate, earn your salary, and go home. Not everyone has to be passionate about their job, and I respect that.

Lately I've been insanely busy, between doing my NG work, my assignments for my two grad school classes, and maintaining my "side project" MyFootballPool. I truly enjoy all three of these things, but together, the workload is wearing me down, to the point of wanting to run away from it all to an island somewhere with no electricity.

I used to have a 9-5 job that was easy and paid well. The actual work I did was mostly boring, but in retrospect, that was a pretty happy time in my life. I made a lot of friends, I was able to enjoy my life outside of work, and all that made the work itself bearable. Contrast then with now, when I have lots of good work to do, but I'm overwhelmed and feel like I'm just trying to get through one task so I can get to the next one, never having time to relax. I'm not getting to spend enough time with my family & friends, and my workout schedule is suffering.

Wigand has a line in The Insider where he says, in contrast to working for Big Tobacco, "Can you imagine me coming home from some job, feeling good at the end of the day?" Should this be of primary importance when thinking about our jobs? Is it more important to have a job that's fulfilling and makes you feel good, or one that doesn't intrude on the rest of your life?

Maybe I don't need a job that's completely absorbing, as I've always thought. Or maybe I have an addictive personality and need to figure out how to have a job without being consumed by it.

Or maybe I'm just burned out on my schoolwork and need a vacation.

The NFL is fun to watch for many reasons, crazy endings being high on the list. Yesterday, in Baltimore, the visiting Cleveland Browns, down by three with a few seconds left, attempted a 51-yard field goal to tie the game and send it into overtime. What happened next made my jaw drop:

http://www.nfl.com/videos?videoId=0900 0d5d80448909

Phil Dawson, the Cleveland kicker, launched a big kick that hit the inside of the left upright, bounced diagonally down and went through the posts, hit the curved support beam holding up the uprights, and then bounced back out! The referees were understandably confused, and after a bit of hesitation, ruled the field goal was no good. The coaches shook hands, players went into the locker room - the game was over and Baltimore won.

Except... if a ball goes through the uprights, it doesn't matter what it hits or whether it bounces back out - it's still good! Unfortunately, the NFL replay system dictates that a field goal is not reviewable - which is a stupid rule. As the replay was playing on TV, everyone in America knew with 100% certainty what happened - everyone, except the referees on the field. Thankfully, they discussed it and figured out the right call (without the benefit of replay), the players were summoned back onto the field, and wouldn't you know it, Cleveland won in overtime.

The thing that gets me about the kick is how unlikely it was. In order for it to happen, the ball would have to be coming down as it approaches the upright, and then hit it at exactly the right place so it angles down towards the curved bar on the base, and it would have to hit that bar with exactly the right spin so it bounces back out. The chances of all that happening have to be astronomical.

I love the shot of Dawson kicking it where the camera's at his back. Man, that goalpost looks 10 miles away when he kicks it.

Marvel Comics recently announced that they're putting a big archive of back issues on the web, and you can get access to it for $10/month. This is something that a lot of people have seen coming, and now that it's here, it got me thinking.

I have a huge emotional investment in my comic book collection. As I've grown up and realized that "stuff" does not bring true happiness, I've gotten rid of most of the clutter in my life - except for my comics, which I prize above everything else and read constantly. I have many more blog posts to fill on the subject, but for now, take it at my word that I have a very large collection which I've spent a lot of time assembling.

So now Marvel is letting people read comics on the web. I'm not on board with the concept of reading stuff on your computer - it's great for articles, news stories, blog posts, etc, but entire comics? And never actually having something you can touch, only being able to access it via Marvel's website? I'm too "old guard" to warm up to this just yet, and will gladly trek to the comic store and pay my $2.99 for new issues.

For as much of me that thinks (hopes?) this venture of Marvel's will fail, their reasons for doing it make sense. When I was a kid, we had no Internet, no cable - comics were (and still are) my passport into a fascinating world of wonder, awe, and excitement unlike anything else. But today, comics are competing with (and losing to) the many other forms of entertainment readily available at the click of a mouse or flick of a game console switch. Back in 1986, I was excited beyond compare to see a new 24-page comic arrive in the mail; today, kids can hop online and download entire movies and seasons of TVs shows with minimal effort. As we move towards a world where ever more entertainment is delivered online, it makes sense that comics go that way too.

But the trend worries me. What if this is just the beginning, and eventually Marvel abandons print altogether, choosing to distribute new content only over the Internet? What if eventually their entire catalog of back issues is available online? Have I just wasted my life putting together this collection?

And even scarier - what if my generation is the last one to be really "into" comics? Sure, everyone is going to see the Spider-Man/X-Men/Superman/Batman movies, but how many are actually reading comics on a regular basis? New comic sales have been in slow decline for a long time, which some people attribute to the prevalence of trade paperback collections (many people, myself included, skip some monthly comics and wait for the trade). I think it's more than that - it's that the readership just isn't there anymore. Top-selling comics used to have print runs approaching 1 million copies, although some of those big numbers were artificially inflated by the comics bubble of the early 1990s. But sales are still way down - today, Marvel is lucky if they have a handful of books that break 100,000 in a given month.

My concern has nothing to do with price guide values - when people hear I'm into comics, they always ask, "What's your most valuable issue?" And the answer is that I have no idea. I can speak to the scarcity of some of my comics, and I have some sense of what certain titles go for on eBay (since I'm often on there buying), but I don't treat them as "collectibles" or consider them "investments".

It's more about my collection being worthwhile and important to someone other than myself. In the movie About Schmidt, there's a memorable scene where Jack Nicholson's character retires after a lifetime of working for one company. He compiles his 35+ years of work into a well-organized system for his successor, only to find his files put out on the curb for the garbageman within days of his retirement. I find that profoundly depressing, the idea of your life's work being casually thrown away, and I wonder... will there come a day many years from now when I die, and my collection is discarded similarly, since no one cares about comics anymore? It goes against all rational thinking (if I'm dead, why do I care?), but the thought of this makes me ache.

It seems silly to start off by acknowledging that "stuff" can't make you happy, and then going on about my unnatural attachment to my comic book collection and fear that I'll be the last one who cares about it. Get over it, right? If I get enjoyment from it, isn't that all that matters? In the final tally, I guess nobody wants to be among the last of a dying breed - a role in which I increasingly see myself.

I never paid much attention to local politics before I moved to Hoboken, NJ two years ago. However, in a city that's just over a square mile with a population near 40,000, local issues become much harder to ignore (though, as in most of America, many people still manage to find a way).

Hoboken has a reputation for corruption and dirty politics. For example, Anthony Russo was the mayor of Hoboken from 1993-2001. He was then convicted on charges of public corruption and sent to jail. Sounds bad, but in this town, it's par for the course, and not only did Mr. Russo get a deal whereby he'll never have to pay back most of the payoff money he got (and he's out of jail by now), but his son was also elected to city council, to ensure his family doesn't miss out on their cut of the back-room deals.

Another big issue here has to do with the influence of real estate developers. 50 years ago, Hoboken was a waning industrial town, down on its luck, not exactly the most desirable place to live. However, in the last 10-20 years, gentrification has set in (due in part to the city's close proximity to New York City), making real estate here very, very valuable. Developers hover like sharks, eager to snap up any property for sale, knock down whatever's on it, and build "luxury condos". As you might imagine, these developers often "donate" lots of money to local political campaigns in exchange for favorable treatment down the line - a fact that the entrenched politicans make no attempt to hide.

On top of that, Hoboken suffers from the classic problem of questionable election validity. Each time around, it seems like there are stories of homeless people being paid to vote, or people arriving to vote and finding that someone already voted under their name, or dead people managing to vote, or people who moved away 10 years ago mysteriously casting a vote, etc. Without being required to show ID at the polls, this is a big problem. But with Hoboken having the reputation it does, these stories all seem to get swept under the rug, at least until the next election.

One of the primary political tensions here is between "born & raised" and "reformers". The B&Rs have been here since Hoboken was a slum town and have profited immensely off its revitalization. They've been running the show for a long time, and have an extensive "old boys" network to ensure they stay in power. The reformers, on the other hand, are usually newer residents, people who are interested in good government, slowing down the rapid pace of development in favor of long-term urban planning, and putting an end to the secret deals that have profited those in charge at the expense of residents. It's been a long, uphill battle for the reform movement to gain traction here, with limited success until recently.

Last May, ward elections were held. (Hoboken is divided into six wards, and each ward gets one representative on the city council.) Happily, my ward managed to elect Peter Cunningham, a true reformer who's done a great job so far.

However, in the 4th ward, things took a turn, in one of those ways where you can't make this stuff up. This ward had been represented for six years by Chris Campos, a lawyer and product of the 4th ward's public housing projects. Campos played to his base in the projects, and with his ties to the old boys network, seemed to have a lock on his council seat. He was challenged by Dawn Zimmer, a white woman originally from New Hampshire. Zimmer is another true reformer, putting the two candidates at opposite ends of the spectrum in almost every way. Campos is part of the political establishment; Zimmer is an independent. Campos took lots of developer money; Zimmer took none.

So the election was held and Campos got 746 votes (47.5%). This meant that a run-off election would be held a month later between himself and Zimmer, who finished second with 609 votes (38.7%). This was a bit of a surprise - the prediction was that Campos would get more than 50% of the vote and win without a run-off being necessary. Still, many people assumed he'd cruise to victory in the run-off.

June finally arrived, the run-off was held, and amazingly, after a huge voter registration drive and some late-afternoon rain that allegedly persuaded a number of Campos supporters to stay home, Zimmer got 892 votes (50.17%) to Campos's 886 (49.83%). Zimmer got fewer votes on the voting machines, but won it with a large number of absentee ballots (NJ allows anyone to vote via absentee ballot, you don't even need a reason). This was considered a huge upset.

Campos would not concede. First he filed a lawsuit to prevent Dawn from being sworn into office; this was denied. He then enlisted the aid of Gerry McCann, former mayor of neighboring Jersey City (and convicted felon, naturally) to dig up dirt on people who voted for Dawn via absentee ballot. They took their case to the courts, with the goal of invalidating enough of Dawn's absentee votes to change the election's outcome. For example, one vote for Dawn came from a mother who was breast-feeding her infant child, so her husband filled out her absentee ballot, and the woman simply signed it. Strictly speaking, in New Jersey, this is against the law! Still, most people (myself included) thought this process would play itself out, Campos would lose his court case, and the election was over.

However, a couple months ago, the ZImmer camp realized that the courtroom battle would be long, every person who voted for her via absentee ballot would be called to testify, and the outcome was potentially unfavorable - so she vacated her council seat and agreed, along with Campos, to throw out the previous election and hold it again, for the third and (hopefully) final time.

This time, knowing full well what he was up against, Campos turned up the heat. He started paying attention to issues that he had ignored but which Dawn brought to the forefront, such as flooding. He claimed to support an alternative redevelopment plan with more park space for his ward, after previously supporting a developer-friendly plan with little park space. He sent his goons to photograph and videotape Dawn, resulting in this bizarre incident/lawsuit. He blanketed the ward in fliers designed to smear and misrepresent Dawn. All of his cronies on the council (part of the old boys network themselves) spoke out in support of him. I assumed, pessimistically, that he'd win this one.

The election was held last night, and not only did Dawn win, but she won with enough of the vote (1,088 to 969 - 52.9% to 47.1%) that there's no possibility of Campos trying to lawyer his way back into the picture. Campos tried every dirty trick in the book, and Dawn emerged triumphant - I'm reminded of the line from The Shawshank Redemption about how Andy Dufresne "crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side." My recap doesn't do it justice - this was an ugly, bitter race and it's a testament to Dawn's tenacity that she didn't give up the fight.

Last night's outcome was quite the happy surprise. Dawn's presence on council for the next four years will be a great thing for the reform movement here in Hoboken. It won't last long, but for right now, my faith in people is pretty high - 4th ward voters saw through the b.s. and got this one right.

A lot of people cried "Why??" awhile back when Viacom (parent company of Comedy Central) pulled all the Daily Show and Colbert Report clips off of YouTube. I was one of them... but now I understand why.

Behold: the relaunched Daily Show website. At first glance, it might not seem all that special - until you check out the video page, where they have almost every Daily Show clip archived, going back to 1999! That is a LOT of content, and it's all tagged, searchable, and embeddable in other webpages.

The page also has a nifty AJAX search thingy (see picture below) that lets you search by show air date or by topic. I have a few minor gripes with it (return key doesn't submit search, can't sort the results by date/views, some duplicate clips) but overall I love it. I'm a big fan of web-based information repositories - to me, it's what the Internet was made for.

I wasted an hour yesterday finding some favorite segments from when I was in college - stuff like Stephen Colbert's report on the inventor of Gaydar, and Steve Carell's attempt to get on John McCain's 2000 campaign bus. I'm sure I'll be spending lots of time here trying to dig up old classics from former correspondents Beth Littleford and Vance Degeneres as well.

Nice job, Comedy Central. I hope a similar site for the Colbert Report is soon to follow.

(And I like how, true to Web 2.0 form, it's a "Beta".)

Since last winter, I've been taking classes towards my master's degree in computer science at NYU. One of my current classes is Computer Graphics, and while I enjoy most of them on some level, this one I really like a lot. It's taught by Dr. Ken Perlin, who's been doing computer graphics for a long time (he worked on TRON!) and has an obvious passion for the topic.

I really like the way Dr. Perlin structures everything. In some of my other classes, the instructor narrates a PowerPoint deck they've prepared ahead of time, which is usually posted online after the class. And that's fine, but a lot of people just skip the lectures and download the notes, which devalues the whole process. Plus, depending on the instructor, it can be pretty dry.

In Dr. Perlin's class, there are no PowerPoint slides. In fact, as far as I can tell, he doesn't use notes in any form. Instead, he gets up and speaks extemporaneously (using the chalkboard) on the next topic in the gradual progression we're following, building up to doing some pretty advanced 3-D stuff. Other professors use this lecturing method but end up rambling aimlessly - with Dr. Perlin, it's always clear where we're going and why. Overall, I really enjoy his teaching style, and I can't be the only one - few people in the class ever miss it.

I also like that his homework assignments encourage creativity. Each week, we're tasked with implementing the graphics techniques discussed in the previous lecture - and we're given total freedom of how to do it. I usually prefer having very specific requirements, but his homeworks have forced me to be creative, and I've actually surprised myself in a few occasions with what I've been able to pull off.

On top of all that, I'm glad that instead of using an existing graphics library (like OpenGL), we're getting our hands dirty at a deeper level, learning the math required to make OpenGL itself. We started with nothing but the ability to draw lines from point A to B on the screen, and we're already able to create and animate some sophisticated 3D shapes. We do everything in Java, and for those who say Java's too slow to do any real work, I'd present the real-time rendering we're doing as a counter-example.

When I first got into programming, like many coders starting out, I hoped to learn how to do graphics so I could make games. I guess that impulse got buried over the years - the web stuff I spend all my time on is about as far from graphics as you can get, and I rarely play computer games anymore. But with this class, I feel like I'm making good on a long-forgotten promise I made myself, and it's reminded me how much fun programming can be. For me, there are few coding endeavors as fulfilling as working the math to model some 3-D shapes.

So if you're a computer science person, and you ever get the chance to take a graphics class with a really good professor like the one I've got - do it! I wish I had more time in the day, so I could experiment even more with the things we're learning, and few classes have ever made me say that.

(Below: a torus, the quintessential computer graphics shape.)

I'm a longtime fan of Stephen Colbert, from his days as a correspondent on The Daily Show, to his performance as Mr. Noblet on the underappreciated Strangers With Candy, to the ballsiest White House Correspondents Dinner speech ever delivered, and his magnum opus, The Colbert Report. There's just something about him that I find hilarious - he plays the privileged, opinionated, clever buffoon better than anyone. I expected to get tired of his Report schtick early on, but two years later, I'm still watching (and cracking up). I also went to a taping of the Report last winter and it was a total blast.

So of course, I was thrilled when Stephen announced on Tuesday that he's running for President! He's only running in South Carolina (his home state), and I'm fairly certain it's all a big publicity stunt and he'll never appear on any ballot. But man... if he were to participate, it would really enliven those dull, repetitive debates that've been happening for the past eight months. In fact, that'd be about the only way I'd ever watch any more of them.

And continuing with that - contrary to the claims of real-life buffoons like Bill O'Reilly, Daily Show / Colbert Report viewers are some of the more politically savvy and affluent around. Maybe for a candidate eager to reach that demographic, hanging out with Stephen Colbert could be a shot in the arm for your campaign? Think about it, Tommy Tancredo.

UPDATE: Check out Stephen in the most surreal Meet The Press interview you'll ever see. Awesome - I laughed until it hurt.