Blogging for a Cause: Pakistan Earthquake Relief

Hey all, I banged out the check for Kung Fu Monkey's Charity of the (two) month. We went with Direct Relief International for a donation to aid those people currently suffering through a brutal high-altitude winter after the earthquake.

Nicely done, considering so many people maxed out on Katrina Relief, and then double-dipped to help people in need in another country. You stepped up with $2,387.21. Let's round that up to $2,400, meaning I match with my filthy screenwriting monies to

$4,800.

I think we'll take a break for Jan, then find another good charity for Feb. I'm going to line up a couple auctions from my new comic book compadres along the way.

I'll leave the button active for now, and write a second check at the end of the month for any trailing donations. Remember -- if you like what I write, give a little to help those in need. If you hate what I write, give a LOT and force me to forfeit my filthy lucre!

Your Kung Fu is strong, young Monkeys.

Index-Fu for January 2006

In anticipation of some new humans attracted by upcoming announcements, and all the new Blue Beetle folk, a rough guide to what we do here:

Comics - Business-y Stuff

Zombie Tales: Memento Mori - Complete Story/panels
Zombie Tales: Luther -- by Mark Waid
Funnybook Publishing Pt.1: Old and Busted by Ross Richie

Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle Model Sheets
BB Preview

Comics and Geekery

Fandamentalism
The famous "Geek Hierarchy" Chart
Moral Advantage: Gamer
Comics: Year of the Bummer
Comics: Womb Crazy!
Wold Newton Universe
Zombie News/ ZOMBIE TALES
Comics: Sweet Four-Color Vengeance
SPOILERS -- the Interview with God
Zombie Tales #1 - Everybody Digs Zombies!

New Media Writing (Rage against the Studio Machines, Baby):

4th Generation Media
Video Ipod: 4GM Baby Steps
Where Anime Gets it Right
4GM: Perception Wars

Writing:

Writing Life
Writing: Beginning
Writing: Whose Viewpoint?
Eternity Has Residuals
Writing: Adaptation (Pt.1)
Writing: Adaptation (Pt. 2)
Writing: Adaptation (Pt. 3)
TV: Corner Gas
Writing: Adaptation (Pt.4)
Writing: Software
Writing: Adaptation (Pt. 5)
Writing: Plot and Story
Writing: How Small a World?
Writing: Q&A #1
Writing: Q&A #1 Followup
Writing: You Don't Need Pg. 11
Writing: Agents & Managers
Writing: The Pitch
Writing: The Pilot Pitch - Background
Writing: The Pilot Pitch - Prep
Writing: The Pilot Pitch - The Room
Writing: Screenwriting The Sequence Approach - Book Review
Writing: Action Sequences

Our attempt at screenwriting academia:
TV Jargon Preservation (Pt.1)
TV Jargon Preservation (Pt. 2)
TV Jargon Preservation (Pt. 3)
TV Jargon Preservation (Pt. 4)

Global Frequency

It's a "Global" Frequency Now
Miranda is ... annoyed
One Last GF Question
GF wow
GF Reviews and E-mails
GF Update #1

The True Geek Conversations(tm)

#3892: Batman vs. Punisher
#651: Catwoman Edition
# 5643: Ju-On, Red State Version
#36679: In Which Bo & Luke Duke Kick a New York Jewish Election Worker to Death
#36679 cont'd: Sophie Mae's Choice
#436: I Love Lucy -- Issue Zero! The Origin Issue!

Politics:

The Latest Rants:

Defense Against Celebrity Marriage Amendment
Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor
One Angry Feingold
Rule of Law? Over There, Behind My Socks
Al-Quaker
The George Who Cried Wolf
Oversight
New Year's Resolution
The Half-Assed President

The Rest:

Who's Your Daddy, Broward County?
I Miss Republicans (nominated for a Koufax, spiffy!)
Spongiform Sexuality
Win Kamchatka, Win the World
Oh. Oh, Canada.
Gay Marriage
Activist Judges
Will of the People - (the inter-racial marriage/gay marriage polling stats)
I will Punch Florida in the Goddam Neck
SPOILERS! -- the Interview with God
Swearingen for Senate
You Can Know Jesus ...
Learn to Say Ain't
Senate Quicksand
Learn to Say Ain't - Feedback & Criticism
That Ironic Smell
"Toxic Spiritual Nature" ...
The Groom Grinds a 360!
The President and Intelligent Design
I WISH Hollywood Was That Organized
Hybrids and Hypotheses
Iraq and Roll
Booming Babies Still Want Bidey
57% of Americans are Traitors
I'm All Out of Reasonable
'ellllooooo Clinton!
Somehow We Have Grown Too Small for our Britches
Commander in Chief

Fundraising

Army Emergency Fund - Total
Katrina Relief - Total

The semi-famous LOST: You Uncurious Motherf*ckers

... and, just because it was always my favorite:

Top 10 John Wayne Titles That Could Also Be Porn Titles.

Thanks for visiting. And leave with the assurance that anything you find interesting or amusing -- that was an accident.

Organizational Tools

Yes, because the only thing better than writing, is thinking about ways to be better organized at writing instead of actually writing. I am not immune.

That said, you may dig Backpack and Writeboard.

Linkslut Thursday

All to be added to the sidebar in a bit:

Glenn Greenwald is on fire guest-blogging over at Digby's joint. This post on the atmosphere of fear and this one cleanly and methodically crushing/ridiculing every possible excuse and rationale over the President's behaviour in the domestic spying case are particularly strong. Someone I need to make a point of reading every day.

Marc Bernardin, writer and editor now moving into Spec-Monkey territory, over at Rhinoplastique. Currently discussing Monster Island, and race on Bones.

Why the hell did I forget to add Paul Guyot's Ink Slinger to the Pro Monkeys? Jesus, at least when I was drinking, I had an excuse.

And Ken Levine, who I pimped and then didn't add. I am filled with shame.

Michael Nelson's on-line novel DINGO rockets toward its pleasantly weird-ass conclusion. Go get caught up.

And I've said it befor, I'll say it again: Latigo Flint is consistently the funniest fast-draw on the web. Go back through his archives. It's ... just so wrong.

Rude Journalism

Our very, very angry friend The Rude Pundit has ceased his entertaining rants and is currently doing a multi-part series of essays about travelling through New Orleans 4 months after Katrina.

He is veering perilously close to doing better journalism than the pros, in his spare time.

Miners

EDIT: Well, dammit. Seriously. Just ... dammit.

Cut the post. Having it stare at me every time I went to check a link was too damn depressing.

"... Bring a Little Something from the Candy Dish"

All right. It's my job to know these things. Much like Hollywood saw the South Park video Christmas Card a year before everybody else*, this very, very funny and very disturbing viral video dropped onto my laptop about a month ago as it first made the rounds ...

... a video in which two young rappers extol the virtues of GILF. Yeah, that's right. They're rollin' Vintage Honey Style.

What's weird is, it's now on the web running parallel to the publicity for this weekend's Fox release Grandma's Boy. There's a MySpace for the band, called GrandmazBoys, and the url for the band's video is www.grandmazboy.com

So either the lads who made it hijacked the parallel name, and are therefore not just funny film-makers but more clever than I am by half, or Fox grabbed the video and then instead of making it an Easter Egg at the movie's site, buried it at a url which no one actually has any reason to type. Which is both insanely hip and smart and not particularly bright all at the same time. I'm going to contact the people who made it and find out which, and will report back.

In the meantime, it makes an excellent one-two punch with Chronic of Narnia to help prove that a couple funny guys who know how to write and shoot will out-funny the big studios every time.


* another reason to hate George Clooney, by the way. Not only is he handsome, intelligent, politically active, can write and direct like a motherfucker, the original South Park was his video Christmas card. We even owe him South Park.

The Half-Assed President

From our friends at Sadly, No!:

BAGHDAD - The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

[snip] ... Iraqis nationwide receive on average less than 12 hours of power a day. For residents of Baghdad, it was six hours a day last month, according to a U.S. count, though many residents say that figure is high.

So, let me see if I understand the plan here. We're not going to set a timetable or any benchmarks for when we're pulling American troops out of Iraq. Because what we used to call "operational planning" and "strategy" is now "cutting and running". But at the same time, we're not going to fix the infrastructure, so those soldiers who are there indefinitely will be the targets of increasingly large numbers of pissed-off and radicalized civilians.

Eeeeeeexcellent.

This is my main complaint with the current Administration. If they had policies I disagreed with, but actually accomplished something, I could kind of wrap my head around it. But George Bush (and this, in my useless and humble opinion, should have been the one issue of the last campaign), is the half-assed President. Was going to get Osama, never got Osama. Was going to rebuild Afghanistan, bailed out of Afghanistan. Was going to secure the Homeland, and the 9/11 Commission shows how they haven't finished the job. New Orleans was going to be rebuilt, but it ain't happening. Sent our soldiers into a war, but with no clear mission plan and not enough equipment. Now we find he was going to rebuild Iraq, and he's half-assing that. Other than massive tax cuts for the rich during war time and some really spiffy tricks in promoting people who will tell him whatever he wants to hear, he really hasn't accomplished, for better or worse, anything.

All I can say is, thank God for Dick Cheney. I sleep better knowing that there's at least one firm, if evil, hand on the wheel. I, personally, welcome our Cheney-bot Overlords.

EDIT: Hmm, must be something in the air. John at America Blog has a much more detailed, cross-linked list of half-assery.

The Light! IT BUUURNNNS!!

Via Pam at Pandagon, another reason I stand on guard for frikkin' thee:

The Reverend Tristan Emmanuel says that for evangelical Christians, "there is a form of persecution taking place in Canada." Emmanuel says the legalization of same-sex marriage, and hate crimes laws that criminalize discrimination against homosexuals, have fueled an intolerance against Bible-believing Christians.

The executive director of the Ontario-based Equipping Christians for the Public-Square Centre warns that that's what American evangelicals could face in the years ahead. Emmanuel is urging his fellow believers to help vote Canada's Liberal government out of office in next months' national election. But he says many Canadian Christians tell him they are ready to give up and move to the United States.

I have distinct issues with some of Canada's hate-crime laws, specifically more with the language elements (once you're born in a country with the First Amendment, it's pretty much burned into your DNA. Even when the country itself occassionally seems to have abandoned it ...), but they're in no way so restrictive that you can't make your political point ... scratch that, let me put it another way: If you can't make your political point without violating Canada's hate crime laws, then frankly, there's a reason.

But as I've said before, I'll say again: feeling hard done by is the great addictive drug of humanity. What's even more offensive here is they way that this clown uses "Canadian Christians" and "Evangelical Christians" and "Evangelical Christians who are militantly against gay marriage" as if they're interchangeable. It's a bit of framing shorthand the media falls for whole-heartedly and lazily, a way of conflating your minority view with a statistically larger population.

This is connected to a series of essays about Flightplan and Munich, but I'll pace myself. More later this week.

But in the meantime, apparently we'll be able to buy some cheap real estate from motivated sellers to expand the Compound. Excellent! The plans for the Hydroponics Wing can be expanded!

Oh, and re: Pandagon's comments. First Discovered Law of 2006: If ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union you're still using "socialist" or "commie" as perjoratives, no one else has to take you seriously.