Over at Say Anything, Rob has a post commenting on the strange disconnect between pro-choice beliefs about abortion and those same activists’ beliefs about choice in, well, everything else. I’ve commented about that before, in the context of the bizarre disconnect between believing a woman has the right to choose with respect to an act that (potentially, depending on your definition of “person”) kills another person, but not with respect to a disease that effects only her and those she chooses to be intimate with.

I fully accept that it’s possible to believe either of these things in good faith, but to believe them both seems incongruous to me. It’s an interesting disconnect, and I occasionally have to wonder if Rob isn’t right — the only “choice” that’s really being valued here is the choice to be able to enjoy their lives without facing that their actions sometimes have consequences.

As you may or may not be aware, Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada hates the Peter/Mary Jane marriage in Spider-Man comics. Under his reign, it has been “ended” a few times.

She was killed. Fans protested. She came back.
He forced the writers to then have her leave Peter. Fans protested. She came back.

Now, Quesada handed down from on high a new plan to get rid of the marriage. In One More Day, Peter and Mary Jane made a deal with the devil Mephisto that would essentially erase their marriage from history (though some part of their souls would remember, causing them agony for eternity, which is what he gets out of the deal).

Fans are, as you might have guessed (indeed, as anyone might’ve guessed, except, maybe Quesada), not happy. Eric Burns explains why:

The expectations for mainstream comics really aren’t that hard. We expect there to be attractive people with exaggerated physiques. We expect them to generally have bad fashion choices. We expect there to be a significant conflict, and we hope that will highlight an inner conflict. Some punching generally goes on. Our hero is put on the ropes. Terrible things happen to him. And then at the last possible moment he rallies, he finds a way, he pushes through and he wins. Good takes the gold. evil gets the silver at the most.

Seem overly simplistic? It is. But it’s also implicit. Read any DC or Marvel Comic from the thirties through to the nineties, and you’ll see those mechanisms in play. Even into the nineties, these were the guiding principles of the form. Horrible things happened, but ultimately, the hero wins and the villain loses. Luthor might become the President of the United States, but at the very end of the day he’s wearing a Kryptonian Battlesuit and trading punches with the Man of Steel, with Superman taking him down and breaking all his evil plots. At the end of the day, we expect the X-Men to leave the field with their heads held high. We expect the Green Goblin to go to prison (or worse). We expect the Red Skull to fail.

…

Only this time, they pushed the reset button. The Devil came, forced him to sacrifice his happiness and life, left his (now never-was) wife to suffer for it, restored his secret identity and wiped clean all the stuff that happened, and then oh hey, it’s a Brand New Day!

The covenant was broken. Terrible things happened, over and over and over, and finally the ultimate villain showed up, and he won. And because this was all out of editorial edict to erase something… well, something wildly popular. (Okay, I admit it, I don’t get that at all), Spider-Man loses. He loses everything. And all the crap that had become his life got washed away in the least satisfying way possible.

That’s all part of a rather large post about our expectations when we sit down to be entertained that I found pretty interesting, and the post before that one addresses retconning. That’s not really what I want to talk about, though. What I want to talk about is how Marvel can redeem itself.

You see, one of the features of the storyline following One More Day is that slightly more than the marriage has changed. For example, as this review of the first issue of Brand New Day points out, Harry Osborn, whose death has fed a lot of storylines in recent years (including the resurrection of Norman Osborne), is still alive.

Here’s the thing. Several years of storyline were written off as attempts by Norman Osborne to torture Spider-Man because (in part) Spider-Man had “killed” his son ^[a]. The end result of that torture was that Peter thought he was a clone for a while until the person he thought was the real Peter died and was himself revealed to be a clone.

If Harry didn’t die, there’s no reason for Norman to manipulate Seward Trainer into bringing Ben Reilly back to NYC (because that was all retconned into a plot by Norman to get his hands on Peter’s baby, even though the plot had started before said baby was even conceived, as I recall). If Seward didn’t bring Ben back to NYC, he never died. He’s still running around the country somewhere, doing his nomad thing.

This is the perfect opportunity for Marvel to get me buying comics again — bring back Ben! He could be a sort of nomad-superhero; I’d prefer he call himself the Scarlet Spider, but I’ll take what I can get. After a year or so of that book, the revived Ben could know something is wrong, sort of how the revived Hawkeye did in the House of M storyline. He’d come to NYC, visit Dr. Strange or Mr. Fantastic, they’d figure out what Mephisto did, and fix it. Ben could be revived as a hero in the Marvel Universe, and the marriage would be fixed.

Yeah, it’s just a pipe dream, but c’mon. It could happen.

1. No, he didn’t really kill him, but Norman’s not exactly sane [↩]

Laurel of Politics, Guns, and Beer, has posted a video about a woman who shot and killed her stalker after he broke into her house and attacked her.

The 911 call, released earlier this year, shows that the woman tried to do everything that the gun-grabbers say we should do. She called the police. She retreated as far as she possibly could. In the end, her stalker had gotten into her home and followed her into the bedroom, where he was attempting to strangle her before she shot him.

I tried to come up with a sarcastic title for this post, but just couldn’t bring myself to do it. When you hear any politician complaining about crimes committed with firearms, remember that the important word there is crimes, not firearms. Firearms are powerful tools that can be used for good or evil, and here is an example where the absence of a firearm would have saved a life, but it would have cost another. I don’t think anyone would argue that if it came down to a choice between this woman and her attacker (and her attacker had decided when he broke into her house that it was), that the attacker was more worthy of life.

It doesn’t appear any charges have been filed against this woman or the generous friend who gave her the gun, but, unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

I’ve been ripped off!

Over at Town Hall, Kevin McCullough warns everyone about the evil that is Mass Effect:

It’s called “Mass Effect” and it allows its players – universally male no doubt – to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to “engage” and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game “persons” hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.

Not counting the times I’ve died and restarted (which would be time that isn’t counted in the total on my save game), I have spent 22 hours and 51 minutes playing Mass Effect. Probably 18 hours of that has been spent killing enemies who are allied with a machine race that wants to wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy. Another three and a half hours were spent talking to NPCs in the interest of investigating said machine race’s allies and/or other criminals. An hour and twenty minutes has been spent managing my inventory^[a]. Perhaps a full minute (and I’m being very generous here) was spent on a “sex scene”, which involved a blue-skinned, genderless alien leaning forward and whispering in my character’s ear, and then a shot of her naked arm against what appeared to be an alien headboard.

Also, my character customization options at the beginning of the game consisted of being able to change the basic look of my character’s face. I even tried creating a female character, and I don’t remember any options for “breast size” anywhere on the menu. Removing warts and such? Trust me, the thing does not get that detailed. The best you can do is an option to add a scar, presumably to add realism to your character’s backstory as a soldier.

As should have become clear to you by now, I have been ripped off. I got a fun science fiction/adventure RPG, and what I should’ve gotten was a game that allowed me to make “the most realistic sex acts ever conceived” — more realistic than any sex act that any person has ever even thought of, much less had. Fun science fiction or not, I’m feeling let down by Mass Effect now.

Xbox Live has been having some issues lately, and some brain trust decided they should sue Microsoft for five million dollars because their lives were ruined by not being able to play video games or somesuch nonsense^[b]. Isn’t it obvious that this is grounds for a bigger suit? I demand that Microsoft refund my Mass Effect money and pay me for emotional damages. I think four quadrillion dollars sounds like a good amount, don’t you?

1. Why does the weapon upgrade menu jump to the top every time I turn an upgrade to omni-gel, when the other items that I also wish to turn to omni-gel are at the bottom of the list, because they’re oldest? [↩]
2. Believe me, I’m as much a video game addict as the next person — just ask my girlfriend; if she sees my DS come out of my pocket while I’m waiting for her to do something that will take thirty seconds one more time, she’ll probably snap — but that’s utterly insane. When Xbox Live doesn’t work, they should do what a normal person does: play something offline. If it doesn’t work enough that you’re dissatisfied with the service, cancel your account. Boom. Problem solved. [↩]

In yesterday’s primary elections in New Hampshire, the winners represented the absolute worst case scenario for a national general election: McCain and Clinton.

My problems with Hillary Clinton are, of course, obvious. She is a politician’s politician, willing to say or do anything to win an election. She’s also got no executive experience as an elected official — being the first lady doesn’t count as executive experience any more than being a pilot’s wife would allow a woman to count her husband’s flight time as her own in applying for a pilot’s license. Ordinarily, the lack of executive experience wouldn’t bother me (I’d be willing to consider voting for any number of other senators), but because Clinton’s campaign is very actively pushing her time in the White House as relevant, it makes me considerably uneasy.

McCain, of course, gets no support for me because his name appears on the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, also known as the McCain-Feingold “What First Amendment?” Act. Of course, many senators voted for this absolute piece of trash bill, but McCain put his name on it. Even if I supported him on every other issue (which I don’t), that alone would be enough to keep me from voting for him.

All in all, a general election in which McCain faced off against Clinton would be a sure-fire way to get me to pick a third-party candidate. I haven’t made up my mind who I want to vote for, but I have made up my mind who I don’t want to vote for, and McCain and Clinton are tops on that list.

[UPDATE: Oops. I saved this post rather than publishing it originally.]