I wrote a thing for ComicsAlliance about Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, and John Romita’s take on Spider-Man. It’s the most amazing piece of writing about comics you’ll ever see in your entire life, even if you live to be two hundred years old. It’s life-affirming and revitalizing. It’s incredible. It’ll make your teeth whiter and clear up your skin. Here’s an excerpt that I’m going to use to spring off into few more thoughts. Prepare yourself — I don’t want you to get hurt when you fall out of your chair in amazement after reading this.

But it makes sense. I figure somewhere around 50% of you out there remember being a teenaged boy. Do you remember that thirst for being seen as a man? Being seen as self-sufficient, cool, and intelligent? Showing the world that the you inside your shell was just as cool as the coolest guy in school, if not cooler? That’s where Spider-Man begins, from that position of deep longing and thirst. He wants to be seen a certain way.

You can see it in how Spider-Man behaves. Keep in mind that Peter Parker was a teenager when he became a hero. He doesn’t know how to be a man. He simply hasn’t had the experience yet. But, he suits up anyway, and he pointedly takes the name Spider-Man, which is a statement in and of itself. And how does Peter Parker, 15-year-old boy, act when he pulls on the red’n’blues?

He acts like a hero. He doesn’t show fear, not usually. He treats his villains, a surprising number of which are double or triple his age, like peers. He condescends to them. He quips. He acts like a man. And he saves the day. He’s acting like a hero, he’s emulating his heroes. He’s pretending, back in those early days. He’s not Spider-Man yet. Spider-Man isn’t the true Peter Parker. It’s just a face he wears sometimes.

I really dig this aspect of Spider-Man’s origin, the idea of superhero as performance. It reminds me of masculinity as performance, and of how rappers amp up what’s perceived as real in an attempt to keep it real. But it also reminds me of my other favorite Marvel dude who started out pretending to be a hero, Mister Carl “Welcome to Harlem, where you welcome to problems” Lucas, better known as Luke “I get the boosters boosting, I get computers puting” Cage. Here’s his superhero origin:

The stuff about Spidey playing a role is an implication, something I can read into the text fifty years later. I have no idea if it’s Lee & Ditko’s intended reading or not, but it works out shockingly well thematically and mechanically. But with Cage, well, the acting is explicit. “Yeah! Outfit’s kinda hokey… but so what? All part of the superhero scene. And this way when I use my powers, it’s gonna seem natural.”

I love that Cage only ever put on a costume because it’d let him do what he needed to do, not because he wanted to be a cape. Cage became a superhero not because it was the right thing to do, but because it’d let him live his life how he wanted to. It’d let him get revenge on William Stryker and use his powers in public. Doing good wasn’t an afterthought, but it definitely wasn’t the first thing on his mind. He needed a way to fit in first, right? So he appropriates superhero iconography to buy legitimacy and freedom.

It reminds me of a couple other things: code-switching and protective reactions to racism. Code-switching is maybe easiest described as the difference between how you talk to your friends and how you talk to your parents. Or you can just read this bit from Dave Chappelle’s episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio, which I edited from a transcript of the episode:

Lipton: Now don’t make fun of me– that when you play white dudes, your speech is pitch perfect, which led me to realize that either one of you could, if you wished, speak that way all the time. In other words, is it a matter of choice?

Chappelle: Every black american is bilingual, all of ’em. We speak street vernacular, and we speak job interview. There’s a certain way I gotta speak to have access.

I had a conversation with someone the other day about baby names. I was trying to figure out a nickname for a certain name, and I tossed one out there. She said that sounds “a little hood.” Her logic was that “hood names allows people to perform preconceived ideas.” I rejected that idea on the basis of the fact that people will form preconceived ideas about you even if your name is John Smith if you don’t look a certain way, so why not make your own way from top to bottom?

I tend to think of code-switching as a negative, a way to fit into a society that doesn’t like you. What’s cool about this Cage origin is that it uses code-switching not just as a way to fit in, but to get over. Cage knows that he’s behind the eight ball in more ways than one. He’s a fugitive from the law, but there were also only so many opportunities for black dudes of a certain type.

So what’s a fella with newly-hardened brown skin to do? The only thing you can do: you find some way around the rules. If you can’t use your powers in plain clothes or get a straight job, then you do something that lets you do that. In the Marvel Universe, you throw on a costume and you come up with a gimmick. You find something that’ll let you get by. More generally, or maybe more specifically from a black American point of view, you find something that’ll let you get by in a white man’s world. (Crack rock, wicked jump shots, telling jokes, putting on a dress and making million-dollar comedies, rapping, underground railroad, enlisting, whatever.) You do what you have to do.

I like this aspect of Cage, though I can’t remember if it was ever tackled explicitly after this scene. But I always liked the idea that Cage just kinda fell into superheroing, instead of setting out to become the next Captain America or Black Power Man. It lends a certain flavor to Cage that isn’t there for a Spider-Man or Captain America, an edginess and realness that I can appreciate and recognize. It feels like a real life phenomenon heightened and translated for a superhero audience.

It’s cool to look at this and then check out Cage these days, where he’s almost completely eschewed the visual trappings of superherohood and just does his job like he wants to. Cage reached the point where he doesn’t have to act a certain way to get access or dance for his dinner. He can just do what he wants, when he wants, and his stature is large enough that nobody can hold him back.

I said years ago that Luke Cage is the American Dream. Still true.

Sunday Sunday Sunday! We’re going to have a weekly chat about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. I buy mine off Amazon, so I’m usually a day behind, but every Sunday around showtime I’ll post an open thread. I’ll probably start linking the Breaking Bad podcasts and trailers and whatnot

If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, you should. You can find Breaking Bad:
-On AMC, Sundays at 10 eastern
–Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
–on DVD
–on Amazon Instant Video (my preferred method)

Rules:
-Don’t be a dick
-No spoiler warnings, so don’t come in unless you’ve seen the latest episode
-Feel free to hyperlink and youtube it up
-Liveblogging is cool, just be specific so we know why you’re going “WHOA DUDE WHOA WHOA BRO”
-Make sure your speculation is reasonable

This week is “Buyout,” written by Gennifer Hutchison and directed by Colin Bucksey. Two episodes left!

Sneak peek for this week:

On the night my tub flooded, after I’d bailed out most of the water and ruined every towel I own, I went for a walk. It was maybe 0200, if not a little later. I’d re-bought Brandy’s Brandy a few days earlier, since it was on sale and I hadn’t heard it since the ’90s. It was part of my Recently Added playlist, but I’d thrown my iPod onto shuffle.

“I Wanna Be Down” came up around when I hit the outskirts of Japantown, and I nearly drowned in the barest hint of a memory. It messed up my pace, and I stumbled as I tried to pull the memory into focus while walking home.

All I thought about for several blocks was Brandy, “I Wanna Be Down,” and the ’90s. It took forever to think it through. Someone — maybe my cousin, maybe my aunt — had the album on a CD, but the only one of us that owned a boombox CD player was my grandmother. She was protective of it, since it was a big purchase at the time, and we had to be very careful with it.

The memory I had wasn’t a specific point in time so much as a spectrum of time. It was a collection of feelings and tactile memories. The slide of the disc coming out of the sleeve in the albums. The fat zip of the binder opening and shutting. The feel of the button that opened the CD player. (It was top-loading, and pressing a button, I think in the front and on top, lifted the lid.) The weak resistance the CD player gave up when you closed it, the quiet click when the hinge latched. The hollow hiss that signified the CD beginning to spin and the weird spiral of electronic noise that it played when you changed tracks.

There are a few other albums I consciously associate with certain places, times, or moods (Atmosphere’s God Loves Ugly and depression, Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein and high school, Aesop Rock’s “None Shall Pass” was my alarm clock for a couple years which makes the song nearly unlistenable now), but I can’t remember feeling anything like that before. In fact, I’ll go a step farther and say that I’ve never had that happen to me before. It was weird, simultaneously pleasurable and devastating. It felt like 1995 or 1996 or whenever it was I spent a summer listening to Brandy and swimming in a pool, but it was a hard memory to take hold of. I was maybe more open to it, more vulnerable after having had a catastrophically bad night in the middle of an incredibly frustrating year, but it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Sunday Sunday Sunday! We’re going to have a weekly chat about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. I buy mine off Amazon, so I’m usually a day behind, but every Sunday around showtime I’ll post an open thread. I’ll probably start linking the Breaking Bad podcasts and trailers and whatnot

If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, you should. You can find Breaking Bad:
-On AMC, Sundays at 10 eastern
–Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
–on DVD
–on Amazon Instant Video (my preferred method)

Rules:
-Don’t be a dick
-No spoiler warnings, so don’t come in unless you’ve seen the latest episode
-Feel free to hyperlink and youtube it up
-Liveblogging is cool, just be specific so we know why you’re going “WHOA DUDE WHOA WHOA BRO”
-Make sure your speculation is reasonable

This week is “Dead Freight,” written & directed by George Mastras. This is his first stab at directing an episode, but he co-wrote “Crawl Space” and eight other episodes over the course of the series.

Last week on Breaking Bad:

Sneak peek for this week:

Back in early July, Rich Johnston posted about a Kickstarter for Telikos Protocol. I thought it looked neat and I had a spare ten bucks, so I kicked ten dollars their way in exchange for DRM-free copies of their first three issues. They were a few thousand dollars short of their goal, but every little bit helps, right? Three hours later, I got an email update from their Kickstarter that began like this:

We are sat here trying to fathom quite what’s happened. We just don’t know how to react – we hit target after just 2 days, 1 hour and 49 minutes. We’re finding this tough to compute, but while we do that, some extra updates!

Three thousand dollars in three hours and they hit their goal. They wanted 9,500 and they got 50,119. They get to make a series of books that’s much, much better than they ever expected. On top of that, they get to make their book. That’s the most important part, I think.

I’ve contributed to ten Kickstarters thus far, supporting a wide range of comics from webcomics to Image comics to OGNs to Dave Sim’s digital efforts. Ten isn’t a lot of projects, but I feel good about it. I can afford that, and it’s nice to be able to help someone get their work done. Paying it forward, maybe — I’m blessed enough to have a steady job so that I’m not living on exceedingly thin margins. So I do what I can.

There’s a conversation going around comics internet right now about Kickstarter. Tom Spurgeon has a nice conversation going here. It was sparked by a post in which TCJ editor Dan Nadel said this:

-And finally, Kickstarter. Guess what? You don’t get to call yourself underground if you’re on Kickstarter. Guess what else? You don’t get to call yourself a publisher either; you’re just someone who pays a printing bill. Take pre-orders on your site. Sell your boots. Do what you have to do. But don’t go begging for money so that you can then give 5% of it to Amazon.com, which is actively trying to put you (!), and the stores you hope to shove this shit into, out of business. I’m all for raising money for art, but it would be nice if there was some sense of proportion. No one needs this anthology but it might do fine “in the market”. I’m so sick of seeing perfectly viable (viable, but not smart or interesting; viable) comic book projects on there. People can do what they want, but when you’re out there hustling dough for your movie-ready zombie-baseball graphic novel, or fucking Cyberforce, or your poorly thought through Garo book, you just look like a schmuck.

Just this morning I saw Sean Collins saying this:

The problem is, well, why on earth do you need to Kickstart a project in which 60 illustrators who (judging from the samples) draw in lush, inviting, commercial-friendly styles make pin-ups from someone else’s intellectual property, drawn from a show that’s so hugely popular with the project’s target audience that it could make its money back and then some during the first hour of SPX without breaking a sweat? If the project’s publisher had asked its 60 contributors to paypal her twelve bucks, that would have covered the $700 goal of the kickstarter right there. Indeed the modest amount being requested makes it more baffling, not less, since it’s undeniable that the zine could have been independently funded with a modicum of self-sacrifice, which again would no doubt be handsomely rewarded the moment the book went on sale. Instead, what we have is a project that’s made three times its goal amount with 18 days to go.

(the bolds in each quote are mine, of course)

and I have a real problem with this type of thinking. ’cause here’s the thing: life sucks. You can get sick once and find yourself under three years of debt. You can save money for two years and see it all wiped out because of something you couldn’t have predicted. You can live life exactly the way you’re supposed to and still find yourself directly behind the eight ball.

That goes for artists, too. A “sure thing” is a fake idea. It’s a cudgel for an argument. Any number of sure things flop and fail every single day, from a new Superman movie taking inspiration from the Christopher Reeve flicks to asking out a pretty girl who smiled at you on the bus. There is no such thing as a sure thing. This is true in life and it is definitely true in comics.

“Maybe you should sacrifice some! Maybe you should sell your boots!” is hilariously insulting. It assumes that the people involved haven’t already done so. It assumes that the people involved can afford to do so. If I wanted to launch a new website with robust content right now, or that podcast I talked about, I couldn’t afford to. I have a full-time job, a vaguely-lucrative part-time gig, and I couldn’t afford to do that. It’s a time and money investment that I simply cannot make right now, no matter how great an idea it is or how much money it might make if I take it to SPX or sell it door-to-door. I can’t afford it because I’ve got bills. I’ve got student loans. I’ve got a lot of things on my plate, and even carving out the time that needs investing for those projects would result in something slipping elsewhere. I can only do so much. I can only afford so much. And I possibly have more freedom than a lot of artists, in that I have a job that pays me every two weeks without fail. I don’t have to seek out freelance work like I used to.

Life is hard. It’s hard to make a living. It’s even harder to make a living as an artist. So I honestly, earnestly, believe that if I believe in something or someone, and I can help them along, I should do so. I don’t have a lot of money, nowhere near as much as I should, but I can spare ten bucks to help out an artist, even when I’m scraping to save money. Why not? I like them, I want what they’re doing, and so I do so.

I don’t think that artists should have to suffer for their art. If I’m interested in what they’re doing, and I can help out, I will. Joe and Jane Schmo having to max out their credit cards to print their comics is stupid when there’s an audience right there willing to kick in a few bucks to help get it done in exchange for a book or two.

“Well maybe the contributors should pay first!” is a stupid thing to say when every week some new artist learns the hard lesson of “never work for free.” If someone chooses to pay to get their art out there, sweet! That’s how people have been doing it, and I’m sure Visa will be very happy. But if I can help someone else keep their head out of the muck, to not suffer for their art and actually get a chance to love what they do before they burn out or whatever, then let’s do it!

I don’t know. Maybe this doesn’t make any sense. I wrote this on my lunch break in a burst, brain to page. But I hate this “I got mine, so go screw yourself if you can’t afford to pay for what you want to do” mentality so, so much. It’s the grossest, annoyingest, Ron Paul-iest thing that has hit comics in a long while. You can help someone get their book made, at no extra cost to yourself, and help them not have to go through the pain of choosing between eating three meals a day and putting out their labor of love. I like that feeling, in part because I hope that other people feel the same way.

Sunday Sunday Sunday! We’re going to have a weekly chat about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. I buy mine off Amazon, so I’m usually a day behind, but every Sunday around showtime I’ll post an open thread. I’ll probably start linking the Breaking Bad podcasts and trailers and whatnot

If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, you should. You can find Breaking Bad:
-On AMC, Sundays at 10 eastern
–Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
–on DVD
–on Amazon Instant Video (my preferred method)

Rules:
-Don’t be a dick
-No spoiler warnings, so don’t come in unless you’ve seen the latest episode
-Feel free to hyperlink and youtube it up
-Liveblogging is cool, just be specific so we know why you’re going “WHOA DUDE WHOA WHOA BRO”

This week is “Fifty-One,” directed by Rian Johnson (Looper! Brick!) and written by Sam Catlin, who also wrote “Crawl Space,” the episode last season that ended with Walt laughing and gave me waking sleep paralysis in the process.

Sneak peek:

One of my favorite things comes from an anecdote Richard Pryor told about Jim Brown on his Wanted album. (Apparently you can’t buy that album in MP3 form, which is a crime. I found the vinyl in a record shop for $1.99, and please believe I bought it just because. If you see it, cop it. There’s at least three all-time classic bits on there, if not more.) Here’s a quick sample:

I had a friend, he was gon’ have a fight with Jim. Another big nigga, ’bout six-five. You know, he said eight dudes was holding his ass, he was gonna get in, just, “Motherfuck Jim let me go motherfucker motherFUCK a Jim Brown!”

And he said Jim said something that just chilled his shit. All right, he said, Jim said, “Gentlemen, I think if you let the man go, he could express hisself a little better.”

Motherfucker said he started whispering to the motherfuckers that was holding him, he was saying, “Any of you niggas let go of me, I’ll kill any motherfucker that take erry finger off my body. Now just ease my ass out the door, that’s right, don’t start no shit.”

That’s cold, Jack. I love Pryor’s Jim Brown stories, because Brown comes off as this real indomitable, unmovable force of nature. “Gentleman, I think if you let the man go, he could express hisself a little better” is the most confident thing in the entire world. It’s so cold-blooded that you can’t help but love it. More than that, though, it’s just good writing. It’s evocative and real, totally believable and alluring, to an extent. You want to see Jim Brown whup this dude just because you knows he can and he knows he can.

This sort of thing is why I enjoy crime fiction and action movies so much. There’s always that point where someone gets to say something and it just infects your brain. “Hey, you” in King of New York, “You probably heard we ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business; we in the killin’ Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’,” from Inglourious Basterds, “We gotta kill every last rat-bastard one of them,” from Sin City: The Big Fat Kill. “No AC, but the heater work — MURRRRK!” off Schoolboy Q’s “Nightmare on Figg St.” (great music video for that one, too, love that intro) from Habits & Contradictions. And, of course, “I’ve punished him from ear to ear, now I’ve saved the best for you,” from Norah Jones’s “Miriam” is a stellar example of murda muzik.

Murda muzik is a term I stole from Mobb Deep, but it’s basically exactly what it sounds like: songs about doing people in. The more creative or technically proficient the better, right? I feel similarly about crime novels and action flicks. You have to wow me. I’m not looking for comfort food, I’m looking for something nuts. So imagine my surprise when one of the top 3 best examples of murda muzik thus far was made by an R&B singer who I don’t usually associate with people getting done in. (The other is Spaceghostpurrp’s “Get Ya Head Bust” off that Mysterious Phonk, and the third is variable because I always forget good ones.) The video is perfect for the song, as far as I’m concerned:

I can’t believe the blood on the oar. Astounding.

This is the second video for Little Broken Hearts that features someone getting killed over love. The album is about heartbreak, obviously, and “Miriam” is my favorite song on the album. It’s low key and stripped down, with not a lot of majestic production on anything but Jones’s voice. Her delivery is a little… not raspy exactly, but rougher than I expect from her.

“Miriam” is about heartbreak, but it’s really about revenge. Miriam slept with Jones’s man in her own house, Jones found out, and now somebody’s got to die. The man is already gone, and now it’s Miriam’s turn.

“I’ve punished him from ear to ear, now I’ve saved the best for you” rocked my world when I first heard it. I thought I heard it wrong, honestly. I tend to have my first listen of albums while I’m out and about and traveling, so I’m not always listening. Words and lines sometimes reach out from the background radiation of the music to grab me, and that’s exactly what happened here.

“I’ve punished him from ear to ear” is such a strange phrase, but it’s not hard to understand at all. You just have to work for it, just the tiniest bit. It’s delivered in such a flat and matter of fact tone. I could see someone quietly confessing to it, or screaming about it as a threat, but Jones’s delivery feels even more menacing. It feels like a foregone conclusion. It sounds inevitable. Hopeless. Like she’s telling Miriam this, with an empty smile on her face and her head slightly cocked. “This is going to happen. You deserve this.”

“Oh Miriam, that’s such a pretty name.” That’s the most cold-blooded thing of all, the way Jones approaches this murder like it’s just a conversation that needs to be had. It’s a responsibility. It’s fate, justice, and right. She’s being sincere, but it doesn’t matter. You’re going to the bottom of the lake. She just wanted to let you know.

I love this stuff. It’s not just about one liners. I’m generally not big on those. (“Stick around” is an exception, of course.) It’s about the intent and malice and sheer cold-bloodedness. Just a complete and utter unwillingness to accept the fact that another human being is an actual person, instead of an object. It’s hard to explain without sounding like a monster, but as an example of escapism, as a fan of revenge tales, as a dude who will read or watch almost anything where people smoke cigarettes and shoot each other, it’s great. I’ve fetishized stylish murder, I guess.

Norah Jones performed the song live on Letterman at some point. I missed it until today, but check it out:

I like how the different instrumentation changes the flavor of the song just a little bit. The addition of that warbly guitar solo and the more prominent drumming… I dig it. I like that she has a backup singer on a few lines, too.

Little Broken Hearts is 3 bucks on Amazon today, and I think eight or nine any other day. I’ve bought a lot of albums this year, but this is one of my favorites.

Sunday Sunday Sunday! We’re going to have a weekly chat about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. I buy mine off Amazon, so I’m usually a day behind, but every Sunday around showtime I’ll post an open thread. I’ll probably start linking the Breaking Bad podcasts and trailers and whatnot

If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, you should. You can find Breaking Bad:
-On AMC, Sundays at 10 eastern
–Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
–on DVD
–on Amazon Instant Video (my preferred method)

Rules:
-Don’t be a dick
-No spoiler warnings, so don’t come in unless you’ve seen the latest episode
-Feel free to hyperlink and youtube it up
-Liveblogging is cool, just be specific so we know why you’re going “WHOA DUDE WHOA WHOA BRO”

This week is “Hazard Pay,” directed by Adam Bernstein and written by Peter Gould, who also wrote the screenplay Gavin’s favorite movie, Double Dragon.

Sneak peek:

I was talking to someone on Twitter the other day about whether or not it was unfair that black superheroes tended to shoulder the burden of addressing racial issues in comics & movies, like the stereotypical angry black man or the uncountable comics where a black hero points out to his white mentor how grimy life actually is when you’re colored.

I agreed that it was unfair, but that we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. White characters will never shoulder that burden because white is treated as the default. They get to have regular adventures because they are treated like regular people. Black people are special. We’ve got baggage.

So the choice is either deafening silence, which is in and of itself an implicit suggestion that things are a-okay, or one type of character being expected to deal with one type of story before they can move on to regular stories. My point, I think, was that it was unfair, but necessary, because you can’t expect white characters to shoulder that burden and someone has to.

I really like this Nike campaign. “Find Your Greatness.” It’s another hit for Nike after a long line of them, and I love that it focuses on regular people instead of superstars. All the spots are pretty good, though I think the one with the diver is my favorite/the cutest.

But I think it’s notable that in a campaign that includes a wide variety of people, from black kids to Chinese martial artists to a kid who plays baseball with just one arm, the only spot to be explicitly educational, in a cultural sense, is the one that features Muslim women wearing headscarves. (The conceit of the campaign is that it’s documenting athletes in not-England Londons, but I’m not sure where in this case.)

The voiceover: If we think greatness is supposed to look a certain way, act a certain way, and play a certain way… we certainly need to rethink some things.

It’s not a complaint, exactly, more of a plain observation. I think it’s interesting that this is the one that has the “Be more accepting” message. The other short spots are of the motivational variety. “If greatness doesn’t come knocking on your door, maybe you should go knocking on its door.” “Greatness isn’t born. It’s made.” “Greatness is a scary thing. Until it isn’t.” “Sometimes, greatness is about overcoming insurmountable adversity. Sometimes it’s just fun.” That kind of thing.

But this one, the message is more pointed. Americans hate Arab peoples and distrust Islam. The role of women in Islam has been boiled down to “oppressed, forced to wear oppressive clothes.” The role of men has been boiled down to “sexists, murderous, terrorists.” That is the narrative right now. Don’t believe me? It was just last year, 2011, that Representative Peter King put American Muslims on trial for the actions of a few.

The narrative needs to be corrected. Which means that people need to be educated. Which means that these messages of empathy and acceptance… need to be said. It needs to be said, it desperately needs to be said to correct the poison we’ve been tainted with, but it is only ever said by, or by way of, the people who are victims of false and hurtful narratives.

That’s the rock and a hard place. It needs to be done, but it’s unfair at the same time. Why should I have to reprogram your idiotic beliefs when I had nothing to do with them being invented? But if I don’t… then the poison continues. And if that poison doesn’t directly affect your life, you’re probably not going to be particularly active about getting rid of it. It’s like being trapped in someone else’s box.

“Find Your Greatness” a great campaign, and I love the message behind it, even the “Stop being so mean to Muslims and Arabs you incredible jerks” one. This one’s my favorite spot, though:

Trying something new! I watch a few TV shows. Some of them are even pretty popular. Who wants to have a weekly chat about Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad? I buy mine off Amazon, so I’m usually a day behind, but I can post a thread every Sunday for us to hash it out. Sound good?

If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad, you should. You can find Breaking Bad:
-On AMC, Sundays at 10 eastern
–Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
–on DVD
–on Amazon Instant Video (my preferred method)

Rules:
-Don’t be a dick
-No spoiler warnings, so don’t come in unless you’ve seen the latest episode
-Feel free to hyperlink and youtube it up

Sound good? I’m going to paste my comments in the c-section and then we can see about hashing out how we feel about whatever whatever. I’ve never done this before, but hopefully it turns out well, even if it’s just two or three of us. Episodes go up for me after midnight, so I’ll probably be posting on Monday night instead of Sunday, but I figure if enough of y’all are interested in talking, that won’t matter.