Comic Con Tommorow

So the title pretty much says it all. I’m picking up Erik from the train station tonight, and then tomorrow it’s on! I’m a huge comic fan, but I’ve never been to ‘con before, and honestly I don’t know what to expect so I have a small level of anxiety about the whole thing. Maybe the booth babes will help calm my nerves ; P I plan to take a shitload of pics, so after I get back, I’ll probably do a mass dump on flickr and maybe try to do some twitter while I’m there. Y’know, this is one of the few times I actually feel “privileged” to live in San Diego.. I mean, think of all those suckers who are paying for hotel rooms and taxis right now ]; )

Nothing can stop the Juggernaut.. from jobbing.

I recently read most of Marvel’s “World War Hulk” crossover event. This crossover was the culmination of some extremely well-written and “Gladiator”esqe events which took place in the “Planet Hulk” story arc. Without giving you my feelings on how satisfying the concept of Hulk beating the assess of and/or pulling the “punk card of” every hero in the Marvel Universe was, and how ultimately unsatisfying the resolution of said “plot” was, let me get right to the point and tell you what my greatest disappointment was.

In the issues of X-men where “WWH” crossover spilled over to, we see the Hulk making short work of all of the young X-trainees at the Xavier mansion. He even shrugs off the combined forces of X-Factor, the X-men themselves, and Excaliber. However, there is one final trump card the “X-forces” have to play, and he’s my favorite, cherry-red penis helmeted super-villian of all time: Juggernaut.

Now, I’ve been out of comic collecting for a few years, so I was mildly surprised to find out that apparently Juggernaut has been a member of Excalibur for a while now, and that has lead to him becoming weaker, since Cyttorak, his sponsor/source-of-powers isn’t happy about him hugging trees and saving the world, when he’s supposed to be out demolishing buildings and single-handedly fucking the x-men up.

So a watered-down Juggernaut against a “powered up” Hulk doesn’t sound very interesting, right? I think Marvel was on my same train of thought – up to that point. So about half-way through the comic, Jug makes a deal with Cyttorak that if his old school power level is restored, then after he gets done putting a size 20 red boot up Hulk’s anus, he’ll go back to beating up the x-men and doing cool shit like leveling sports arenas where emo concerts are happening at. Cyttorak, being a Slayer and Front Line Assembly kind of deity agrees to the proposal, and off we go..

Now before my blow-by-blow, let me put a term out there for those who don’t already know it: JOBBING

I’ve only heard this term used referring to professional wrestling (wwe) characters, but jobbing could colloquially being defined as: “Actions taken by a character who is renowned as being formidable, tough, and generally difficult/impossible to defeat by conventional means, which allow him to be overtaken by a typically much-less established, strong, or otherwise formidable opponent – for purposes of elevating the status of the “lesser” opponent, in a quick and dirty fashion.”

For example: If I started wrestling, and they were serious about making me look credible and advancing my career, they might script a match where by some miracle, I beat Hulk Hogan.

So keep that definition in your head while I define the following:

Juggernaut has been shown to have unlimited healing capabilities, endurance, equal strength to the Hulk (or, non-pissed-off hulk), has beaten the Hulk’s ass before, is wearing pretty-much-indestructable armor, and can make forcefields.. and of course his trademark “can’t be stopped once moving” power.

So with high anticipation, I sat back and expected a hella’ fucking awesome, balls to the wall 20 page throwdown.

but unlike Akira Toriyama/Dragonball Z, I guess Marvel just doesn’t have anyone on staff who appreciates 20 pages of two massive, super-powered characters beating the shit out of each other. So basically what I got was 2 panels of Hulk having some dental work done by Jug’s fists, and then Jug trying to bullrush Hulk and being sidestepped while Hulk says “Unstoppable, huh? Well go right ahead..” – ending with Jug running into the lake in the backyard.

ARE.. YOU.. FUCKING.. SERIOUS? That’s all I could say. I’m almost glad they didn’t make the fight 20 pages, because if they had, that would’ve been so anti-climactic that I would’ve probably had to waste 500+ bucks travelling to NYC so I could visit Marvel’s offices and piss on the side of their building for pissing away would could have been the most “stepped in fanboyism” fight of WWH. Ugh.

So there you have it. Juggernaut jobbed for Hulk. It shouldn’t really surprise me.. he jobbed for Onslaught back in the day, and I’d almost go so far as to say he jobbed for X-Force way-back-when. All I can say is that I hope that was just a dramatic way of setting up a rematch later on.. but I doubt it.

I dunno Marvel, I know you have to be dynamic and change with the times, but you make it really hard for a “true believer” to come back to the fold. Until you can dig a little deeper, I’m still going to have to reserve the $3.50 a month (or whatever it is comics cost now.) for other pursuits.. ‘Nuff Said.

Philosophy and semantics

So my philosophy 102A class “Reality and Metaphysics” has so far been pretty lackluster, but tonight I was actually “on the edge of seat” for about 45 minutes. Proof there really is a god who takes pity on the insanely bored? No – proof that even the most mundane, on the verge-of-misery-and-torture class can have a decent session.

Anyway, the topic was “consciousness” and after talking about Functionalism and Identity Theory, we came to Connectionism. To paraphrase, Connectionism basically suggests that the brain works like a massive computer application, made up of millions(?) of functions and operations (chemical, electrical, etc.) That work in concert to create thoughts, emotions, ideas, etc etc.

It makes perfect sense to me, possibly more so because I’m an “aspiring” Comp Sci. student.

So the Professor brought up this guy John Searle. He came up with a pretty fascinating thought experiment called the “Chinese Room.” Basically (paraphrasing again) it goes something like this:

A man is trapped in a room with lots of small balls that have chinese pictographs (characters) printed on them, along with an instruction manual. There is a hole in the wall that more balls enter through, and another hole in the wall that he sends balls out through. His instructions are to take the balls entering through the “input” hole, read the appropriate instruction from the manual, and send a corresponding ball out through the “output” hole, basically acting as a human sorting program.

Searle’s argument is that no matter how many pictograms the guy processes, he’s never going to learn Chinese.. and that syntax in no way implies semantics. He also relates this to computer AI, by saying today’s computers couldn’t figure out Chinese under these conditions either.

I’ll really have to look into some arguments against Searle’s “Chinese Room” but I was just sitting in class wondering: If the guy is really interested in trying to figure out the language, couldn’t he look for patterns in the process? Then he could start writing he own rulebook/dictionary possibly.

I think Searle is/was probably right about the limitations of today’s computers though, because I don’t know much about etymology or neural networks, but if I had to guess, I’d say that to simulate a brain with computer technology, you’d need:

relational databases with the ability to instantly reference any given object related to the current “thought”,

functions that were aware of each other, and constantly watching and evaluating each other’s operations/expressions down to the use of operator.

the ability to index data not only by it’s characteristics, but by possible contexts it could be used in.

Basically, I picture all of these things put together like an orchestra playing together which produces a song where the harmonics of each of the instruments mesh with each other to create a cohesive, purposeful sound that could never be achieved by any of it’s individual players/instruments. An intelligent thought, basically.

So yeah, that’s just a sci-fi analogy, but even that I think would be difficult at best to setup, nowadays. But then again, I read that they have simulation programs that can realistically model the hydraulic systems of an entire aircraft carrier, so maybe we’re not far off from something like that.