What I’m Reading, December 16, 2014

The Comic-Book Guys Quivering in Fear of Cosplay, Noah Berlatsky, The Atlantic, December 10, 2014

The backlash to cosplay is in part guys trying to keep girls out of the male clubhouse. But in this context it can also be seen as feminized guys panicking at yet another in a long line of demonstrations that the male clubhouse isn’t all that male to begin with. You could argue that cosplay’s associations with fashion actually make it more highbrow than comics—the New York fashion runway and the New York gallery scene are more kin than either is to low pulp superhero comics. Cosplay is appropriating superheroes for art, much as pop art has done—and some in comics fear the results.

But they shouldn’t. The truth is that cosplay is not a continuation of pop-art denigration by other means. Instead, it’s an antidote. Pop art’s self-conscious manipulation of comics is only possible, or painful, in a world where comics defines its legitimacy in narrow terms. Lichtenstein is only an outsider co-opting comics if you insist on seeing Lichtenstein as something other than a comics artist himself. Cosplay—like the Batman TV series before it—could be a way for fans to be the pop artists: to cast aside the wearisome performance of legitimacy for a more flamboyant, less agonized fandom. Once you stop neurotically policing boundaries, the question of whether comics or superheroes are masculine or feminine becomes irrelevant. If superheroes and comics are for everyone, that “everyone” automatically includes people of all genders, wearing whatever they wish.

The Real Story Of Apollo 17… And Why We Never Went Back To The Moon, Andrew Liptak, io9, December 12, 2014 Continue reading

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A Cosmic Urban Legend Meets Its Demise

I’ve often heard the story of how NASA blew millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that would work in space, while the Russians just used a pencil. The tale even popped up on The West Wing and in the 2004 movie Primer, but it never quite felt right. I suppose the point was to mock NASA’s large budgets and seeming inefficiency, but of all the problems with the story and the “smell test,” if you will, consider this: the moral seems to be that the Soviet space program, part of the great communist experiment of the 20th century, was somehow more efficient than the private industry-dependent American program. Ponder that for a bit.

A friend posted this picture on Facebook (h/t Paul), which led me on a brief investigation to confirm that yes, the pencil story is incomplete, if not complete bullshit:

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If the above image doesn’t load, here are the highlights: Continue reading

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