Here’s the short version of the story for non-bloggers: Movable Type is the incredibly cool software that lots and lots of blogs use because it works really well. Up until recently there was a pay version for commercial customers and a donorware version for personal use, but with their new version (3.0) MT now charges for personal use beyond a certain point — specifically, if you have more than 3 blogs and/or more than 1 author. This has sent a lot of people into a kerfluffle. Those with the least cause to complain are the ones who just don’t care for the concept of paying for software. The ones with cause are those who host a number of blogs by different authors (like “Michael”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ or “Ginger”:http://www.whiterose.org/pam/), for whom Movable Type jumps from being free to being exorbitantly expensive in an instant — and with a release that doesn’t provide all that much that’s new, to boot.

I find myself in a more annoying situation. Two blogs, two authors. Because Suanna posts on “Cerin Amroth”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella once in a while, I have pay $70 if I want to use MT 3.0. The thing is, it’s easily _worth_ seventy bucks. The very worst thing I can think of to say about MT is that, now that the blog has a lot of archives, it can take a little while to reindex after a new post or a rebuild. Other than that it’s worked perfectly.

But. There’s a difference between something being worth $70 and something I can afford to spend $70 on. And “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org looks pretty darn cool. It’s another piece of blogging software that’s open source (big brownie points there), small, and elegant. I must confess that a big impulse to switch comes from the desire to tinker with something new. (The other day I briefly considered buying a new computer case — not because I _need_ one, but because I thought it would be fun to take everything out of the old one and put it into a new one. Same sort of thing.) And I like the notion of switching to open-source software. But at the same time I feel a little bad because, unlike a lot of folks, I bear no ill will toward the Movable Type folks whatsoever.

Decisions, decisions . . .

UPDATE: WordPress looks better and better the more I look into it. Its big downside is in visual design: MT has a number of very attractive style sheets, and a default template that’s elegant and flexible. MP’s template is less flexible, and the default style sheet is atrocious. So any switch will have to be preceded by a bit o’ CSS tweaking, which is the kind of thing that always takes me a lot longer than I’d like.

I never bring anything with me to read when I go to the Outer Banks. This is partly because my friend Joe brings his Xbox, but also because he invariably brings a Box o’ Comics Goodness. In one swell foop I am able to catch up on all that is hip in the world of sequential art. Or at least some of it. Here are some capsule reviews (with minor but no major spoilers):

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II, by Alan Moore

The first issue, taking place on Mars and starring John Carter and Lemuel Gulliver, is wonderful fun, what with all the sweeping Martian landscapes and warring alien armies. Everything after that runs downhill. The rest of the story never comes back to Mars, but rather deals with our “heroes” fighting off the alien invasion in and around London.

Running counter to expectation and thwarting convention are fine things to do, but only if you have something else to put in their place. I can’t see what’s to be gained by creating the expectation that the action will get to Mars, and not going there. Or of sending Moriarty up into space and then not bringing him back in when the bad guys come from, y’know, space.

On the other hand, given the actual characters that were presented in Volume I, as opposed to their literary antecedents, what ensues in Volume II among them (betrayal, brutality, rape, death) should come as no surprise whatsoever. Without that first thrill of the premise, though, there’s not enough left to make the sordid details anything but just plain sordid.

My chief thoughts after reading Volume II involve some much bigger ideas that tie in The Authority and The Ultimates from comics, The Sopranos from TV, and Tarantino from film. But it’s going to take a bit more ruminating (and a new entry) to do those thoughts justice.

Up points on Volume II: great art, lots of of fun literary references, and the wonderful miscellany in the back of the book, especially the board game.

Fray, by Joss Whedon

Fray is a far-future tale set in the universe of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and involving a Slayer in a post-magic world. Despite the unusual setting, it felt very Buffy-like, and invoked themes, tone, even plot devices from the TV series. I suspect it was something that Whedon tossed off rather quickly while the main force of his creative energy was directed at Firefly. Still, it’s a decent enough story, and an interesting extension of the Buffy mythos, for those interested in that sort of thing. The art (by Karl Moline) is perfectly suited to the setting and tone.

Orbiter, by Warren Ellis

A long-lost space shuttle crashes back to Earth after ten years, having been tampered with by something extraterrestrial. Three scientists have to figure out what the heck happened. That’s the premise, which masks what is essentially an extended argument for continuing the manned exploration of space. Orbiter is too short by at least half, with heavy amounts of scientific jargon and only the lightest touches of character, which is too bad because the scientists seem like pretty interesting characters. Still, I’m enough of a geek to get into the technical explanations for what had been done to the shuttle, and enough of a dimwit to not know whether they were the least bit plausible. As such I was caught up in the story, and felt the exact sort of thrill I’m sure Ellis was going for as things got revealed at the end.

Blankets, by Craig Thompson

The worst thing you can say about the much-hyped Blankets is that it fits too neatly into a tired genre. Jim put it well a few months back:

Surrounding the teen romance and the middle aged breakup is a lot of very familiar genre baggage, The Diffident Adventures of Sensitive Lad, as it were. Overbearing father: check. Repressive background (evangelical Christianity): check. Mean kids at school: check. Early sexual abuse: check. Renunciation of repressive background: check. Saved by his creative vocation: check. Almost a century after Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the cliches of this genre have been as solidly established as those of the locked-room mystery or superhero comic. (Sensitive Lad always has, for most of his early years, a secret identity. But he desperately wants someone to discover it.)

I like superhero comics just fine, but I can sympathize with the folks that talk about getting comics “past” the genre of its infancy. All too often, though, what’s put in its place is coming-of-age and/or gritty autobiography—a genre that is quickly tiresome and hard to do well. I set down Blankets after the first several pages because I had no desire to read another comics story about a comics artist whose childhood sucked. Only after I ran through a bunch of other stuff in Joe’s box did I come back to it—but I was glad I did. I’ve had enough of a tangential experience with evangelical Christianity growing up to appreciate Craig’s deft description of that sort of world in rural Wisconsin. And he gets first love just right, too.

So, a very well-done example of a genre I’m still not much inclined to read more of any time soon.

Runaways: Pride and Joy, by Brian K. Vaughan

This little bit of light, even teenybopper fare turned out to be my favorite of the week—it certainly garnered the most laughs. The premise: a bunch of kids finds out that their parents are a team of supervillains. This first series introduces the characters and has them struggling against the previous generation and running from home; subsequent issues will, presumably, track their adventures from there. While the original issues were printed as regular-sized comics, the TP version is released in the smaller, manga-sized format—Marvel is clearly gunning for the younger audience, here.

The kids speak in a hip lingo full of all sorts of pop-culture references, many of which I actually got. This makes me suspicious. Is this really how kids speak these days? It seems much more likely that this is the take of someone clever and roughly my age on how kids might speak these days—which may explain why I find it so very entertaining. Anyway, Vaughan has that knack for good dialogue, a la Bendis, that makes it fun to read even if not much is going on in the way of story development. But here, there’s actual story development going on, too! The real trick will be sustaining the series having established the premise, but I’m eager to see if he can pull it off.

Murder Mysteries, by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell

I doubt anyone would have bothered to turn this short story into a comic if it hadn’t been by Neil Gaiman. Strip away the completely superfluous frame story and you have a decent gumshoe tale taking place in the literal city of angels. It’s the sort of thing that might easily have appeared somewhere in the run of Sandman, had Morpheus only had a cameo in a couple of panels. Best part about it is Russell’s art—always a treat.

Fables: Animal Farm, by Bill Willingham

This is the second volume of Fables, and I kind of wish I had read the first first. The schtick is that all the creatures from fairy tales and fables exist but live undercover in New York and (if they can’t mix in with humans or anthropomorphize) in The Farm in upstate New York. Anyway, as the subtitle suggests, there’s a little bit of a political problem at the Farm, a sort of revolution of the proleteriat, and Snow White has to fix it. Fables is to Hans Christian Andersen as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is to Verne, Doyle, et al. And, similarly, the best parts are the throwaway literary references. The rest is just OK.

The Bloody Streets of Paris, by Jacques Tardi

Such are the vagaries of reading from a borrowed box: I only got about a quarter of the way into this one. It’s a gumshoe tale taking place in occupied France. Very promising so far.

Just a few this time around. Many of the funnier ones I’ve already commented on in previous months.

*great white shark outer banks* — See, I _knew_ it . . .
*the long haired sucker* — That was me a few months ago, but now it’s just “The Sucker,” if you don’t mind.
*idle baby weight in 7 months* — If a baby at six months is any indication, then little to none of their weight will be idle at seven months. Oh, wait, you meant _ideal_. I dunno, but I _do_ know that googling is a rather unreliable way to accumulate baby lore.
*where can i find fun facts about the drug opium?* — Um . . . right here! It was legal in the U.S. until 1915 or so. It’s used to make both heroin and codeine. It’s the number one crop of Afghanistan, though the U.S. government is trying to get them to grow different things, but doing so without collapsing their economy (such as it is) is proving difficult. It’s not much, but there ya go.

Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Franklin on _Babylon 5_, has died suddenly and unexpectedly. That sucks. “Jonathan”:http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000124.html has the link, and a picture.

There may be a better way to be introduced to the “Black Rebel Motorcyle Club”:http://www.blackrebelmotorcycleclub.com/ than cruising at unsafe speeds on Route 12, down the center of Hatteras Island on a warm May night, with the windows open and not a person in the car unopposed to sticking their head out the window and hollering.

But if there is, I can’t imagine it.

“Bull sharks”:http://www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/cleucas.htm are highly aggressive and don’t mind shallow water one bit. They can even swim in fresh water for a time. I was obsessed with sharks when I was a kid, and read all that I could about them, especially one book that described a number of different species, with accompanying full-page color illustrations. One in particular — maybe it was the bull shark, I don’t recall — depicted a cross-section of a freshwater river in Madagascar. The top half of the page depicted two hapless native fisherman, and beneath them, a shark angled up out of the murky river water, ready to strike. Upon seeing that picture I rushed to find a world atlas so I could locate Madagascar and see how likely it would be for such a shark to make its way from there to Lake Michigan, where I’d swim from time to time. It was a long and arduous journey — around the Cape of Good Hope, up the coast of West Africa, and cutting across the Atlantic at some point. The shark couldn’t do so very far north because of the temperature (I checked), and it probably wouldn’t be able to hold its breath all the way across the ocean at a wider point to the St. Lawrence Seaway, and from there through the Sault Ste. Marie locks and eventually to the beach at Holland State Park. Probably. But I’d watch the Lake Michigan water with a suspicious eye, just the same.

In their battles against us, the sharks are losing. But they have the whole psychological-warfare part of the struggle sewn up. (They’re faring well when it comes to “propaganda”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000025.html, too.) They’ve got me beat, at any rate. I stood at the edge of the ocean yesterday, waves batting around my waist, and I couldn’t will myself to take a step further. This wasn’t entirely irrational, considering I’m in “Avon, North Carolina”:http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/04/shark.attacks/ at the moment. But still. I had to wait for my buddy Joe to arrive before I could plunge in without fear — on theory that there’d be someone to pull me out if a shark gnawed off my leg or something.

Odds-wise, even here, not going into the water out of shark-fear is like updating your will just because you’ll be flying on a plane soon. And yet I still couldn’t make myself take that step alone. What purpose does this intimidation serve? Surely if the sharks wanted more of us for food, it would be better to lay off the “ravenous lurker” image and encourage more twilight swims. They must be _working_ on something down there, beneath the waves. Something they don’t want us to see.

We may be winning, but the war is far from over.

The Polytropos clan is off to the Outer Banks for a week. Blogging opportunities will arise in direct proportion to the number of rainy days we have, but will be infrequent in any case. Try not to break anything while I’m away.

Unqualified Offerings had better be a “middling blog”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_05_16.html#005368, otherwise I don’t even want to think about what Polytropos is . . .

First, there were Birkenstocks. Well, probably not—I’m sure there was some sort of uber-hip sandal before that, but I wasn’t privy to it. I admired Birkenstocks in college, but didn’t get my own pair until 1994. Before that I made do with a $10 pair of something vaguely resembling Birks that I lovingly called my “Shadowstocks.” Even then, when I couldn’t afford sandal cool, I coveted sandal cool. And that’s really never changed.

What redeemed Birks from being merely a granola fashion statement or a gesture of allegiance to functional German design was that they actually were really comfortable. But their biggest obstacle—and I’m talking about the classic pair of Birks here, all cork and leather—is that water was hell on them, and they weren’t particularly rugged, so you couldn’t use them for a day at the beach or the lake. Indeed, Birks are best as winter sandals, on a frigid, snowless day, worn with really thick wool socks. (Sadly, the current Birkenstock web page is advertising the “Heidi Klum collection”—clearly, Birks as a brand have jumped the shark.)

I still own and cherish a pair of Birks, but sandal fashion has moved on. Sportier footwear came into vogue, and the place to buy it was (and is) REI. Sure, there are other outdoor stores that may sell similar things, but REI is a co-op, which gains it an unbeatable amount of sandal cool cachet. For the past six or seven summers I’ve been using my pair of Tevas which, at the time I bought them, were the height of sandal cool. They’re waterproof, they’re sleek, and they’re embroidered with an interlocking scorpion pattern. One big problem with Tevas, though, is that they absorb and even magnify foot odor. That was explained to me when I bought them, but at that time, when they were the “it” sandal, having to contend with the odor by soaking them regularly was a badge of honor. Now, of course, it’s just a pain in the butt, and besides, they’ve aged to a point when they’re no longer super-comfortable—and they were never anywhere as comfortable as my Birks in the first place.

So earlier this week I set out to REI to regain my sandal cool. And I thought that meant going there to buy a pair of Chacos. Suanna bought hers before we went to Thailand, and couldn’t praise them enough. Their gimmick is that the strap is one continuous piece, making them kind of funky to adjust, but very minimalist and light. I had envied her Chacos for a year and a half, and was good and ready to catch up with the times . . .

But Chacos are so 2002. The new big thang in sandals are Keens. Keens eschew the minimalist aesthetic and go so far as to put a big rubber toe in the front. They’re kind of ugly-looking, actually, but sturdy enough that, if you had to sprint away from a tiger, whether across the jungle floor or across concrete, they’d back you up. Plus, wearing them is like wearing a cushion of air. I can’t explain it, because they look big and clunky, but they feel great. I’ve walked on mine for about six miles so far and they keep getting better.

It seems that, with Keens, the pendulum has swung as far as it can go in the direction of functionality-as-fashion. Eventually, the non-sturdy-but-groovy-looking Birkenstocks, or something like them, will come back into vogue. Maybe when that time comes I’ll still have my old pair. Now that would be cool.

Jon Stewart gave the “commencement address”:http://web.wm.edu/news/index.php?id=3650 at William and Mary this year. And yes, it’s Jon-Stewart-good. Excerpt:

Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I . . . I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately, but it just kinda got away from us. Somewhere between the gold rush of easy internet profits and an arrogant sense of endless empire, we heard kind of a pinging noise, and uh, then the damn thing just died on us. So I apologize.

But here’s the good news. You fix this thing, you’re the next greatest generation, people. You do this — and I believe you can — you win this war on terror, and Tom Brokaw’s kissing your ass from here to Tikrit, let me tell ya. And even if you don’t, you’re not gonna have much trouble surpassing my generation. If you end up getting your picture taken next to a naked guy pile of enemy prisoners and don’t give the thumbs up you?ve outdid us.

We declared war on terror. We declared war on terror — it’s not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I’m sure we’ll take on that bastard ennui.

Hat tip to Joltin’ Joe.