Chris Dee
- Gender: Female
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Recent
- Chris Dee on Resolutions
- Chris Dee on Cat-Tales Graphic Novel? Well, the beginning...
- Chris Dee on M&M Battles
- Chris Dee on Female Superheroes
- Chris Dee on Cat-Tales 58: Demon's in the Details
- Chris Dee on Heartbeat msg
- Chris Dee on Biased, Stupid, Opportunists or Lazy? This one we can fix.
- Chris Dee on Buds
- Chris Dee on Light Cats
- Chris Dee on Election Day
- Chris Dee on Cat-Tales 56: Armchair Detective
- Chris Dee on Why I don't hate Mondays
- Chris Dee on Joe Straczynski's "Faith Manages"
- Chris Dee on It's got a great beat but...
- Chris Dee on I don't want to jinx this, but...
- Chris Dee on Investment Strategy
- Chris Dee on We're all still a bit mad here
- Chris Dee on Blinders
- Chris Dee on The DEE...but then again
- Chris Dee on 10,000 Times
- Chris Dee on Lighting
- Chris Dee on New Chapter Day
- Chris Dee on Superman Trivia Question
- Chris Dee on The Men in Black
- Chris Dee on Holes
Latest in Chris Dees Blog
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Disneyland
Here's another one that I don't think needs a lot of unpacking or explanation. John Hench, who was essentially the architect of the original Disneyland, is one of the few people who knows what it is to make something out of your head that becomes a standard and benchmark in a million other people's heads. Here he is speaking about Main Street U.S.A. The forms of these buildings are locked into old associative forms. The old forms weren't designed by some person at a desk, an architect-the designers responded to a kind of group dream, a group aspiration. In the same way, a folk song was not written by some guy at a piano. That represents a lot of experience, and no one person can put it down. In a symbolic way, architecture is the same-an old architectural form has those reassurances locked in there. You take a certain style, and take out the contrdictions that have crept in there through people that never understood it or by accident or by som ekind of ... -
Cat-Tales 56: Armchair Detective
Some nights, you get to swing across the city on a silken batline, pose on rooftops like an ever-present Angel of Justice, and pummel bad guys to the pavement with a satisfying thump... Other times, you have to sit and exercise the little gray cells.
The story begins with Chapter 1: L4 Revisited on the Cat-Tales website.
CT also now on FanLib.com
Enjoy, everybody!
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You've GOT to see this guy
Those of you who played the ARG, may remember two videos at Gotham City News which talked about an Art of the Dark Knight exhibit at Sale Gallery, and then did a "Where Are They Now?" feature on one of the artists a few months later. Let me introduce the spectacular real life artist behind the Gotham one:
Brian Jones of Gotham Enterprises
His sculptures and costumes are simply spectacular, and today he's just uploaded some spectacular screenshots of his Dark Knight Command Station to his DeviantArt Gallery. Be sure to check them out.
There's still liquid in that glass
It's hard to come away from Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture:� ; Achieving Your Childhood Dreams without feeling inspired. It's impossible not to sense that you've just spent an hour with one of those truly superior individuals who hasn't been passively putting on time on the planet, he has been living his life.� ; It's impossible not to notice that he has learned a lot, and because he is a born teacher, he is sharing it.
A very good friend of mine watched this with me recently, and I was struck by the first thing they referenced afterwards was virtually the only negative in the entire program. Fairly early he talks about practicing with a football team.� ; No ball. Coach asks how many men on a team. 22.How many has the ball at any given moment? 1. Right. Today we're going to focus on what the other 21 are doing. Moral: what is NOT THERE is sometimes the most significant. Afterwards, someone comments that the coach ran them pretty hard, and he...WHYK: New York, New York
Good news for comic book fans: we're all born into pocket universes. We all spend our formative years in these tiny insulated bubbles populated by very few people with very similar lifestyles and beliefs. Army brats, sorry, you are no exception. Your formative years may cover more geography, but they see even less diversity in the people that surround you. PLUs, ditto. Summering in St. Barth's and learning French at the same time you learned English is a pocket universe too, but you knew that before any of us because your nanny explained it that time when you asked if her kids have a Death Star treehouse at her summer cottage in Newport. We all figure it out eventually. It's a big world out there with lots of different people believing a lot of different things and living in very different ways. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, mostly just different. Last time I checked, New York City's population was creeping up on 9 million. Well over 1 million of those are just..."Write what you know."
"Write what you know." A well-known writing maxim, although not entirely true-and yet completely true. Here's the paradox: George Lucas had never been in space, and J. R. R. Tolkien had certainly never been to Middle Earth. But Lucas did know MOVIES and MYTHOLOGY, and Star Wars is one magnificent fusion of movie iconography and classic hero mythos. Tolkein was a linguist, and the whole history of Middle Earth began as an experiment in the evolution of language. So even though these men did write something completely foreign to their personal experience, they still KNEW it. The essence of the maxim is the corollary: don't write what you don't know. Let us consider the shipper who, on viewing a JL cartoon with a flashback to Crime Alley, remarked that it was "interesting" to… wait for it… learn something about Bruce's early life. Show of hands, who thinks that someone purporting to be a Batman devotee should probably know something about...Of Hideouts and Henchmen
First things first: I didn't get as much done as I wanted yesterday. It's been too long since I did certain things like editing video, and being out of practice really slowed me down. But I got through everything I needed to as far as the deadlines that aren't confined to my own head. I recovered with - no surprise for readers of this blog - a nice glass of scotch (JW black label) and a stick of the new incense. Iris, very meow. So, today's topic: hideouts and henchmen. Like most Batman fans of a certain age, the very first exposure I had to the Caped Crusader was the 60s series. One advantage there is that it is so much of another time and place, it forces you to pick and choose elements rather than just swallow it whole. Most of us with some knowledge of comics used to sigh when someone came in that lived and died by the BTAS cartoons. (Don't even get me started on Batman Beyond or the Justice League of character Assassination.) Point is, with anything...I'm in love
Our exploration of scotch whisky will resume next time. Today? I'm in love. Just look at what I was just sent...
Okay, now I know what the shoe fund is saving towards. Reowrl.
Thank you for reading. This is a mirror of Chris Dee's real blog, The Catitat. If you care to comment, it is better to do so there.Scotch, Part 1
Scotch gets a lot of product placement in Cat-Tales. Harvey and Eddie both drink it, and Bruce pretends to. Since I went so far as to divulge Alfred's method of making tea, it's certainly fair that we look into this delightful beverage a bit more. First, let's address why. Scotch is a higher status drink. Among the myriad of preposterously wrong characterization Bruce Wayne is subjected to in fan fiction (and some pro stuff, sadly) tons of it comes down to social class and not understanding the fundamentals of the world he was brought up in. Lesson 1: Drink dry. To put a wine cooler, a sloe gin fizz, one of those foamy milky things, or a glorified slushy in Bruce Wayne's hand is to have him declare that he loves magic and Joker isn't such a bad guy once you get to know him. (Conversely, when Matches Malone enters the picture, he's going to design Matches's lower class tastes from the perspective of his own patrician ones. Enter the "bourbon and...Arkham Asylum
Had a good question in email, and figured it was worth mentioning here. The reader asked about Arkham's penchant for releasing the likes of Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, and Riddler time and time again. Sure, we have to suspend our disbelief for the sake of an ongoing series - I mean, let's face it, the Enterprise's warp drive seemed to hit a snag more often than Porsche 924 turbo - but it's certainly not unreasonable to ask for a credible foundation. Sadly, when it's anything connected to government, or an organization or a system that becomes dysfunctional, we can usually look to the three-headed monster: money, bureaucracy, and politics as the cause. With Arkham, this is a private institution that has been contracted by the City of Gotham to provide mental health services, not unlike real world prisons that have contracted HMOs. Snag #1: those who made and approved the original decision will not admit anything is wrong, because that would mean
