It's hard to believe, but the latest installment of McMansion Hell's (previously) tour through the architectural monstrosities of America's tastleless elites is even better than the previous ones -- possibly that's because in this edition, editor/critic Kate Wagner is visiting Virginia's Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, these being affluent DC suburbs where beltway bandits and other swamp-dwellers make their dens.
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Update: Shona from Gig Workers Rising clarifies: "Gig Workers Rising isn't organizing the national day of action. Drivers in each of the 6 cities taking action are coordinating the day of action together. Drivers in LA with Rideshare Drivers United Los Angeles called a strike and asked other cities to take action on the same day. Gig Workers Rising supports and educates drivers who are organizing across the state. We are not organizing drivers."
On May 8, Uber drivers are organizing a nationwide shutdown of Uber, with drivers turning off their apps in protest over low pay: so far, seven cities' drivers are signed up: Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis, LA and DC. Uber and Lyft have both slashed pay for drivers and raised prices as they try to assuage the capital markets.
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Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg continue to dissect the turbulent comic book speculator boom on the 1990s while looking through antique copies of Wizard Magazine.
Some of this issues contents:
• Jae Lee takes center stage and talks Youngblood: Strikefile, WildCATs Trilogy, Namor, John Byrne, and more!
• Liefeld interview 2: Youngblood, Bloodstrike, Brigade, Prophet, Image, editors, publishers, and late books
• Star Trek comics
• Ray Bradbury comics at Topps and the all-star lineup of artists drawing them: Richard Corben, Al Williamson, Mike Mignola!
• Topps' Kirbyverse comics: Steve Ditko draws the Secret City!
• The Comics Code, Mike Allred in Palmer's Picks, and Wizard's editor vows to never read manga - a proclamation that upsets Jim and Ed so much that they make a new t-shirt in response:
• PLUS - the winners of the Cable cover contest in Brutes & Babes!
Subscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel for more vids celebrating the medium of comics. Read the rest
Not all heroes wear capes.
Dischord is to punk and indie rock what Def Jam and Death Row Records are to rap. Read the rest
Jason Kessler, organizer of last summer's violent, murderous "unite the right" rally in Charlottesville, has received preliminary National Parks Service approval to stage a "white civil rights rally" in Washington, DC, on Aug 11-12. He anticipates 400 attendees.
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An NBC investigative journalism team and a security researcher went wardriving around the DC area with a cell-site-simulator detector that would tell them whenever they came in range of a fake cellphone tower that tried to trick their phones into connecting to it in order to covertly track their locations (some cell site simulators can also hack phones to spy on SMS, calls and data).
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An act of heroic trolling from Net Neutrality advocate Rob Bliss, who "throttled" access to DC's 12th Street by traffic-coning all but one lane, then cycled slowly up and down the remaining lane with a sign offering drivers "priority access" to his "fast lane" for $5/month.
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Wonder Woman earned $100.5m in its first weekend at the box office, breaking the record for a woman director and taking in $223m worldwide. Patty Jenkins's only previous feature film was the very different Monster, an award-winning biopic of serial killer Aileen Wournos. Critics say Wonder Woman is also the first DC universe movie that isn't a grim, tedious trudge through the dark end of superhero fandom. Read the rest
My US/Canadian tour for my novel Walkaway continues tomorrow with a 7PM event at Politics & Prose; I'm in NYC the next night (with Edward Snowden) and it's sold out but you might be able to get some rush tickets; then on to Fountain Books in Richmond, VA; then Flyleaf in Chapel Hill. Read the rest
On Monday, March 6 at 10AM, I'll be participating in a non-partisan R-Street event on "Property Rights in the Digital Age," with participants from the Heritage Foundation, R-Street, the Open Technology Institute, and Freedomworks: "As we enter an age near total connectivity, we must ask ourselves, are our laws keeping up with technology? Do we need to rewrite the rules to preserve our traditional notions of property, or embrace the brave new world of licensing everything?" (RSVP) Read the rest
VP-elect Mike Pence's political career has consisted of a series of attacks on the rights of LGBTQ people and women, and his new neighbors in the navy blue precincts of DC know it, and they want him to know that his medieval views are considered aberrant by good people, so they've festooned their homes with rainbow flags that he'll have to pass during the transition -- until he gets to move into the new VP's residence in the basement of Trump Tower. Read the rest
Alex Schmidt of Cracked makes a passionate (and hilarious) argument for DC putting Superman and Batman into the public domain, pointing out that comics companiesmake a hell of a lot of money on public domain characters from Sherlock Holmes and Thor. Read the rest
When DC administrative judge Roy Pearson sued his local dry-cleaner for $65,000,000 over a pair of lost pants, it was a gift to newswriters everywhere, and especially Kevin Underhill of Lowering the Bar, who followed the case with headlines like: Read the rest
Bryan Whitman -- familiar to many as the Pentagon's top spokesman during much of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- has settled a case with people who live near him in DC, who caught him repeatedly stealing the license plates off their nanny's car using a hidden camera. Read the rest
My former EFF colleague Kevin Bankston writes, "For Boing Boing readers in the Washington DC area, here’s a great event: this coming Tuesday, science fiction writer (and Cory's occasional collaborator) Charlie Stross will be doing a happy hour interview at think tank New America. He’ll be talking about cross-pollination between science fiction and real tech and policy with Kevin Bankston, who runs New America’s tech policy shop the Open Technology Institute." Read the rest
