A Chasing After Wind

I got a book from the library yesterday: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, by Ben Goldfarb. I found it on the shelf. It had fallen out of my library's catalog and the librarian had to manually re-add it. I haven't gotten very far yet, so I don't have much to say, but I very much approve of a book focused on beavers.

I'm reading the latest of the Sierra Club's magazine. I send them money, they send my magazines. Also they sent me some really nice bags once. They send me a wall calendar, but not until late January, so I have no use for it.

I'm re-watching All About Agatha. Really love it. In some ways I love it more than Wandavision, which struck me as both really creative but also true to how Wanda has been portrayed in the comics over the years. Honestly I don't have a lot of memories of Agatha from comic reading days. I definitely encountered her, mentoring Wanda and so forth, but I don't remember a lot.

So I'm watching Taken. Actually I'm watching it for the second and a half time. And I just found out about it last month. I cannot justify this movie. It's very well-done, but the plot is...not good. One detail I'm especially not thrilled with is the virgin/slut contrast between Kim and her friend Amanda.

With the podcast I listen to, You're Wrong About, I'm up to their episodes on Tipper Gore's campaign against Heavy Metal.

I'm reading Under His Very Windows by Susan Zuccotti, a depressing book about what little the Pope did to help Holocaust victims during World War II.

I'm re-reading my Cable and Deadpool trades. This was a Marvel comics series in 2004 that took two very different characters and put them in a book together. Cable is a soldier-from-the-future who has deep ties to X-Men continuity. Deadpool is a brain-damaged mercenary who cracks jokes and can break fourth wall. This leads to a hard-to-describe but very good series.

 I so much prefer TV-verse Elektra to comicverse Elektra.
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 How come movieverse Ant-Man gets real ants, but the Falcon doesn't get a real falcon?
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I am going through a Winter Soldier phase, in both comics and movieverse.

This is cute.

The funny thing is, it used to be the other way around. In the 1960s there was a Daredevil comic where Spider-Man mad a brief appearance. DD was cheerful, and cracking jokes (obviously before Frank Miller got his hands on him), while Spidey was cranky and irritated.

I've never liked the traditional love triangle, the triangle where a man or woman is torn between two opposite-gender romantic candidates. This triangle is a simple question: Which man/woman will our hero/heroine choose?

( Love Triangles )

At the the time Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was first broadcast (? Is that the proper term for an internet series?) in 2008, it received a lot of criticism from fandom for sexism because how Penny was written--especially her death, a classic case of refrigeration (i.e., a female character killed to advance the storyline of a male character). But while the blatant refrigeration can't be denied, I think the story is portraying the way guys like Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer view women like Penny in a much more critical light that than its reputation (at least, its reputation as I am aware of it) would lead you to believe. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in that little story.

( Dead girlfriends under the cut )