On HU
Chris Gavaler with a comics script about twins and death.
Me on Cinderella and pacifism.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Quartz I wrote about
—superheroes as metaphors for assimilation and whitewashing Asian performers.
—Prince, and how rock has always been black music.
At the Guardian I asked Is Mowgli a superhero? (answer, no, thank goodness)
At the Daily Dot I wrote about the inevitable Marvel/Star Wars film crossover.
At the Establishment I wrote about Prescott Colleges’s new scholarship for undocumented immigrants.
At Splice Today I wrote about Little Windows, a great country record by Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones.
At Random Nerds I highly recommended indie pop/rock/awesomeness artist Mobley’s new ep.
Particularly enjoyed the article on Star Wars/Marvel crossover film. Several moments made me laugh quite loudly in an otherwise deathly quiet university library. However, if you’ll allow me to speak like Comic Book Guy for a sec.
“Presumably the inevitable Marvel/Star Wars convergence will start with low-key, Easter egg cameos. Maybe we’ll get to see Darkseid conferring with Kylo Ren;”
I think you’ll find that Darkseid is a DC character. I have a feeling that you’re perhaps a fake geek girl Noah :P
Seriously though, thanks for posting all of your various writings here. I’ll be sure to check out Little Windows when I get the chance.
Yeah, another friend pointed out the Darkseid thing. I do know that. Just gets confusing since he was a Jack Kirby creation.
Noah, I just read your Daily Dot post, “What I learned from my failed Patreon campaign,” and I think you completely missed the point as to why your Patreon failed. I think people around you have been too polite to tell you the truth, because I’m amazed I’ve seen no one mention it, so here you go:
While you deserve a lot of respect for creating and curating this site, the simple fact is that A TON of its value comes from the free contributions of others. The fact that you would start a Patreon to receive some financial payment for HU, is, on paper, not egregious. But it’s uncomfortable and wrongheaded in a way that generates mostly silence and a lack of contributions. You should have sought to both fund the site and pay your writers. Why didn’t you, and why didn’t it ever occur to you that was why the Patreon failed?
Hey. well, I don’t think that has anything to do with why the patreon failed, honestly.
The Patreon wasn’t about this site, or funding the site; it was me funding an individual column. I did hope that if I got enough money I could pay other people too (as you can see if you look at the proposal).
I did have discussions about this beforehand, and tried to think about different ways to approach it. Maybe I would have had more luck approaching it in terms of the site itself as a whole…but the problem there is, I would need a lot (a *lot*) more money to make that feasible. Once you start paying people there’s paperwork and taxes and a whole list of issues; it really needs to be making significant income before it becomes reasonable.
The bottom line is that there’s not enough interest in the site or me to get a campaign funded, for lots of reasons, I think. And maybe one of them was that people didn’t like the idea of me funding a column myself, I don’t know. It’s possible. But it’s certainly not the only factor.