Citation Needed

This week over on ‘UNEARTHED’ we’ll wrap up ‘Elric: The Dreaming City’, and let me tell you, it’s been a joy to return to that story after decades apart. They say that to dissect humor kills the humor, but I’ve found that dissecting writing and artwork just enhances the experience.

I’ve always loved P. Craig Russell’s work but never really got down to understanding why. Doing this graphic novel helps me get to grips with my response to the art in ways that were just surface before. So much of what draws me to Russell is his design sense and the way it informs even the seemingly trivial story beats. Go check it out!

Living with a pet is a unique experience. I’d grown up with dogs as pets and neighborhood cats dropping by the house now and then to be admired, but it wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco and lived with my partner that I discovered the joy/aggravation of being with a cat.

Of the two of us, my cat loves me more than she loves my partner. She actively runs away from my partner, mostly because my partner likes picking her up and nuzzling her, and my cat hates to be picked up. But she’ll jump in my lap every chance she gets, she’ll come when I call her, I wake in the morning to find her lying on my legs. She loves me and I try to remember that when she’s in the next room yowling for no apparent reason, or when she agitates to be fed an hour ahead of normal feeding time.

The other day she was on my lap and I winked at her and she winked back. That was a startling moment! She was probably just mirroring me for some reason; I very much doubt she understood the purpose of a conspiratorial wink. But it did set me back a bit and made me wonder exactly how much my cat understands the things I say to her, and what she makes of our living dynamic. Pets are tiny mysteries and I never want that to change.

What I’m reading

I’m still trying to get through ‘House of Leaves’, but it’s proving much more difficult these days than on my very first read. I’m finding reading to be a chore lately, which bothers me a bit. I used to gorge myself on novels, but I find I get bored really quickly when I read now. I think it has something to do with the authorial voice. I used to just accept it as the price of reading a story, but now I’ve become very critical of someone’s writing style if I judge it to be too cute or trading on typical character shortcuts. I don’t know. Maybe I should abandon ‘House of Leaves’ and get to ‘The Essential Ellison’, this gigantic tome of Harlan Ellison’s short stories. I’ve read the thing through before, and I’m itching to get back to some good, messed-up Ellison. Stay tuned.

I’ve always been fascinated with the long-running MMO ‘EVE Online’. It’s a space simulation game quite unlike anything else out there. The creators have devised a game world with a wonderfully-balanced economy and working systems such that any player who joins the game can immediately and significantly contribute to the whole.

I’m not doing it justice, but suffice it to say that while playing this incredibly complex game isn’t for me, learning about it was amazing. I watched a YouTube essay about ‘EVE Online’ that was nearly six hours long, which I had to watch in chunks, of course. But it was so in-depth and amazingly researched and well written that it was a joy. And I remain completely in awe with this game and the stupendous amount of player agency it allows for people to create their own stories. It’s an incredible piece of journalism, and the only problem I have with it is the narrator, who apparently only knows how to read a script in one kind of inflection with no variance. But! If you have the stomach for it, watch it here. I can guarantee you’ll be amazed by ‘EVE Online’ as I was.

And that’ll do it for this week’s Citation Needed. I hope you’ll get into my ‘UNEARTHED’ series on ComicsBreakdown.com, whether or not you have an invested interest in comics. I’m really enjoying producing these little commentaries and I think you will too. See you next week, and here’s your reality check: Hilarious Accidents In Anime