Pictures I Like For A Variety Of Reasons - I Give Up
I should have linked to this a year ago when I first saw it. Try to figure out what’s going on in this photo.
31 August 2006
Hedgehogs humble McDonalds - Yahoo! News UK
Hedgehogs humble McDonalds - Yahoo! News UK
McDonalds has redesigned their McFlurry cups so that they’re small enough that hedgehogs don’t get their snouts caught in them. Is this real?
Booms and Busts
Mark Millar, on how Hollywood’s going to ruin comics. The thing is, there’s no shortage of people in the world who can draw well. Sure, the superstars may get sucked up movie deals, but you just need to cultivate the ability for talented people to make go
29 August 2006
TheFourthRail.com - Two in One
TheFourthRail.com - Two in One
After five years of reviewing comics online, The Fourth Rail is shutting down.
28 August 2006
bwtf.com: Ben's World of Transformers (Generation One)
bwtf.com: Ben’s World of Transformers (Generation One)
Pics of just about every classic Transformer ever released.
Upcoming.org: News: Undiscovered Events, Flickr Integration, and More
Upcoming.org: News: Undiscovered Events, Flickr Integration, and More
Upcoming adds integration with Flickr and Yahoo! Local.
Great shot - where'd you take that?
Great shot - where’d you take that?
Neat map interface to designate where a given photo was taken.
Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last
Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last
New York Times tracks down the Pachelbel’s Canon in D guitar virtuoso.
27 August 2006
26 August 2006
HOV Traffic Waits for No Man, Even the President
HOV Traffic Waits for No Man, Even the President
President Bush asked to have 395 closed during rush hour so he could attend a fundraiser for George Allen. The request was denied. If it hadn’t been, the traffic jam would have lasted until 10 PM.
24 August 2006
Annotations: Justice League of America 1
Annotations: Justice League of America 1
I thoroughly enjoyed this issue, but was mad they split the cover into two covers instead of presenting it as a fold-out page.
Schneier on Security: What the Terrorists Want
Schneier on Security: What the Terrorists Want
“Our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized.”
23 August 2006
Google Music Trends
Aggregated from the “show current music track” status setting in the standalone Google Talk app. Should be skewed toward techie interests, as most everyone else uses AIM or chats within Gmail.
22 August 2006
collision detection: Grand Theft Coca Cola
collision detection: Grand Theft Coca Cola
Good little piece on the parody ad.
21 August 2006
USGS Astrogeology: Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature - Categories for Naming Planetary Features
USGS Astrogeology: Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature - Categories for Naming Planetary Features
Recently discovered a new small satellite of Uranus? It must be named after a Shakepeare or Pope heroine.
17 August 2006
16 August 2006
Bagley to Leave Ultimate Spider-Man
Bagley to Leave Ultimate Spider-Man
He’ll move on after issue 110. After 103, he and Bendis will break the record for the longest time a creative team has worked on one title.
Delays
In the same week that I find out that the Battlestar Galactica season 2 DVD actually only contains the first half of the season, meaning that once I finish watching the discs Netflix sent me I have to wait for Sci-Fi to re-air the rest, I find out that Marvel has had to delay Civil War 4 by over a month. One might think this is bad news, but it’s not. The reason for the delay is that the artist, Steve McNiven, is behind on his drawing. Marvel could have gotten someone to do the fill-in work, and published 4 on time, but that would mean breaking the artistic consistency of the series and, probably, compromising on its quality. And this change doesn’t just affect Civil War. A number of Marvel’s books tie into the events of the main story, so in order to avoid a tie-in issue spoiling the main book, they’re delaying other books as well. Lots of them. According to the press release, issues of Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, Civil War Frontline, and the debut of Punisher War Journal will all have to be pushed back. This represents a huge financial decision on the part of Marvel. Civil War, Fantastic Four, and Amazing Spider-Man are three of their biggest books, and Civil War itself is the best selling comic book of the entire decade. For them to decide to delay it for the sake of artistic integrity is an amazing decision.
The amusing thing about it is that Civil War is written by Mark Millar, who also writes The Ultimates. The first volume of The Ultimates, a monthly comic, took three years to publish its 12 or 13 issues, and only five issues of The Ultimates 2 have been published in the past year, and three months will probably have elapsed by the time the next one comes out. Funny, because so plagued by delays was the first volume that Marvel actually delayed the start of the second volume to give Millar and artist Bryan Hitch more time to work on it. Even with that head start, they’re still behind.
None of this, of course, really matters much. The Ultimates was still a huge success, even with its sporadic publishing schedule. Most comic book readers subscribe to titles at their stores, so it doesn’t matter if the books are late. When they come out, the retailer will get it for them. If the comic book industry still did much business on the newstand market, this might have a greater effect, but they don’t. In fact, a large portion of their business is moving to the bookstores. Most books end up getting collected into larger volumes and published as trade paperbacks or hardcovers. Once the book is done, it sits on Barnes & Noble’s shelf waiting to be bought. No one who buys it in collected form cares if its initial publication was delayed. In fact, I bought the first volume in hardcover even though I own all of the original issues, just so that I have one easy volume that I can lend out to friends. That the book had publishing delays in no way diminishes its quality and that Marvel tolerated Millar and Hitch’s schedule means that it was allowed to be such a work of art, instead of a rushjob.
Posting on his forums, here’s what author Mark Millar had to say about the delays to Civil War:
Hey,
Just out of bed (unusually early at 7.55am) and just found out about this in an email from Tom B mere minutes before seeing the following on Newsarama…
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=80636
All I can say is that this is really good of Marvel. Why? Let me explain. Civil War is seven issues long and both the first and last issues were extra-sized. Steve is a pretty fast artist, maybe a nine or ten books a year guy, but he only had a six or seven week head start on this series. Absolutely nothing at all. And it was always going to catch up with him, especially given that 100 characters appear in every issue and it’s the most labour-intensive thing he’s ever drawn. It also happens to be the BEST work of his career and Marvel could easily — EASILY — just done what DC did and stick fill-in guys on the series. In fact, we EXPECTED it for issue five because we knew a lot of titles like FF and so on were tying in.
But you know what? They didn’t. MCW has rocketed Marvel profits lately. The new figures aren’t available yet, but we’re doubling and sometimes trebling the sales on the tie-in books, the anthology title — an ANTHOLOGY TITLE — is doing over 100K and we’re heading towards 400K with the book itself. Marvel believe in the project and they feel me and Steve have formed a good team. Something they don’t want to fuck with for the sake of squeezing a few more bucks into the next financial quarter and so, after doing their sums, decided they’ll take a hit. Now this is a pain in the arse for being reading the book because it means waiting a few more weeks for Steve to finish. It’s also a pain for people enjoying the tie-ins. But Steve is hammering away here and these books will all be done and dusted by the New Year and the series, and tie-ins, will all be published completely soon afterwards by the original teams and without some grotty fill-ins. It also means the collections remain looking great.
It’s a hiccup, sure, but I appreciate what they’re doing. Seriously, it would have been easy for them and made them MUCH more money to get someone else in to draw issue five, but they believe in our thing, it’s worked out bigger and better than any of us dreamed and they want it to look as cool as it was originally conceived.
In short, apologies for the art delays, but it’s worth it.
Lotsa love, MM
Bryan Hitch, artist on the always late Ultimates responded in the same thread about how delays work from an artist’s perspective:
It’s easy to think that having a late book is terminal and everybody flies into a panic because it’s been a condition of the industry for so long. This is an industry that has, for most of it’s seventy years, made it’s living on periodicals and we all know they have a limited shelf life. If your book is a month late n the magazine racks your space goes to somebody else because the stores and newsagents wnat it filled.
This is not the case now; for a start comics are mostly sold in specialty stores and they will keep books on shelves for far longer than a single month, secondly there has been an enormous growth in revenue from collections and so called graphic novels.
Years back Perez hit his deadlines on Crisis by eventually going to breakdowns but had Ordway on finishes so the standard was high. Nobody was expecting twenty-five years of continued reformatting and sales of the collections, they were just aiming at deadlines. However, as much as I love my Absolute collection of Crisis as a mark of my comics reading childhood, I don’t love the fact they had three different styles on the finish from three different inkers. I hate that on Infinite Crisis that so many cooks are involved when the fab Phil J should have been allowed to complete the project for my own tastes, anyway.
Two of my favourite re-reads in collections are Dark Knight and Watchmen. Nobody now remembers that each was late at the time of the original periodicals but that was a blip, a couple of years in each’s 25 year publication history and these will STILL be published 25 years from now. I love these books but how awful would it have been if the otherwise brilliant Jim Aparo had drawn issue 3 of DK, or that DC had Alan Davis do an issue of Watcmen. Both brilliant guys but you would have hated the blip in the collections for the short term gain.
These days we have the benefit of hindsight and there are precedents. You can’t set out to create a classic or a series with longevity but it’s getting easier for publishers to spot them as they unfold because the collection market is so large now and one can see what works and what doesn’t. A fill-in might potentially stave off an unfortunate delay but hurt the long term property potential and the only reason a company would consider a fill-in necessary would be to avoid a financial hit in the short term not to keep you guys happy. If they are willing to take what must be a massive hit in the pocket, believing in it’s long term potential, to allow it’s creators to finish the book as intended then that isn’t really a bad thing.
If we do things the way they have always been done then we don’t develop. It pays to be flexible, I guess and Marvel obviously believe they are doing the best thing in the long game for a product they believe in and one that has already proven more successful than they belived possible.
Mark isn’t exaggerating when he talks of how quickly this thing was put together and the small lead time. Nobody had intended the book to even exist; other plans were in place but the geniuses of Bendis and especially Mighty Mark started the ball rolling that Mark would evolve into Civil War (which also means we have to find a new title for our big follow up, so thanks MM). It’s also been the biggest jobs of both Markie and Stevie’s careers and required an enormous amount of work from both. Watcmen was bi-monthly remember and wasn’t a crossover. I envy them their massive sucess but not the even more massive work involved. Nobody gets paid more for working harder in comics.
Mark and Steve should be applauded for the efforts as those efforts are a clear indicator of why the book is a success. Marvel should also be applauded for making sure everybody gets the best prossible product. It’s a delay guys, not a cancellation. Certainly not a crisis!
Hitchy
And a show of support from comic author Brian Michael Bendis:
i just reread infinity gaunlet for some research, and just like i did when i first read it, my heart sank when george perez dissappeared. and i mean no disrespect to ron lim, i think its his best work. but its not perez on perez’s book.
would i have waited two months, six months, a year for perez to draw the big finale? YES!!!
dark knight, watchmen, camalot 3000… the lest goes on and on.
the last issue of camelot 3000 was almost a year late.
books that needed the time, took it, and now stand the test of time.
is Civil War on the same level? i don’t know, but because of the extra time it has the chance to be.
and hey, this actually effects my income and i’m not mad. its art- it’ll come when its ready.
And finally, a note on from Civil War artist and cause of the delay Steve McNiven:
Hey folks, just thought I should get a post up here. First up apologies to the fans and retailers of Civil War. The responsibility for the art delays lies with me, period. I’ve been working harder than I ever have, (and this is my third profession), but this is the hardest project I’ve ever done and as Mark said, I had little lead time. It was as big a surprise to me as anyone else that Marvel changed its publishing schedule to allow Mark and I to finish the series together.
When I was sent word of this yesterday, I realized the problems that this will cause for readers and retailers immediately. After reading Hitchy’s post I am beginning to understand why Marvel went this way, but it still amazes me. Of course I am proud of the work I have done on Civil War and I am chuffed that Marvel feels the same way, but I worry for the people that could be negatively effected by this. Please realize that the art delays were never meant in a malicious way nor am I being a prima donna with my work. What I’m trying is to do service to the exceptional story that Mark has written. That’s it, and is all that I focus on when I’m at the table. I let Marvel know exactly where I am on a daily basis, from day one, so that they can make the decisions like the one they have made. I’ll continue to work hard to put out the rest of this series with the best work I can do in the time I have been given and I hope that you, the fans and retailers will stick with us, ‘cause Mark has written a real gem here.
Thanks, Steve
So anyway, there’s lots of time for you to pick up issues 1-3 of Civil War before the next one comes out. I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait.
Update: a good piece here about it. Basically it looks like this is what happened: Marvel decided that, no matter what, they were going to have a big crossover starting when Civil War did. They had something planned, but then Millar and Bendis came up with this idea, which was better. Rather than push the start date back to give more time for the artist to get the book going, they kept with the big summer crossover timeline, and now are paying the price. In other words, their editorial direction trumped their better common sense/artistic sense, and now they’re making the retailers pay for it in delayed sales, and making the artist look like he can’t meet his deadlines. Still, they could have used a fill-in artist, and are to be commended for not doing that.
Update 2: Editor Tom Brevoort talks Civil War delays.
Marvel's Civil War Delayed
It actually is awesome that Marvel’s willing to delay the book rather than rush through a fill-in artist. In 10 years, no one will care that it was late, but it’ll still be selling in trade paperback. This way, it’ll be preserved at a high quality.
15 August 2006
The Video Game Industry Has an Image Problem and Mostly Itself to Blame
The Video Game Industry Has an Image Problem and Mostly Itself to Blame
Even if the Wii doesn’t succeed in mainstreaming gaming, I can see this just changing as more and more gamers get older. The average gamer is 33 now, meaning more and more of the workforce each year are gamers.
A Good Quote I'd Never Heard
“Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.”
—C. P. Scott
14 August 2006
Tales Of The Black Freighter
Wow. What would happen if you took the pirate story out of the rest of Watchmen? Here it is.
Wipes
I’ve mentioned this in conversation a few times, often to the horror of those listening in. You may be familiar with the star wipe, immortalized by The Simpsons. The Star Wipe serves well whenever you want to transition from one scene to another, and do it with style. George Lucas uses a number of different wipes in Star Wars, though none so fancy as the Star Wipe. Generally, if you use one at all, you use a wipe when transitioning between scenes that take place in different locations, like from a scene on the Death Star to one on Tatooine. But what if you wanted to represent a transition between one reality and another? What wipe would you use to represent that the world is being re-made? To show that the current world fades out, and the new one fades in?
I give you the Vagina Wipe. What says rebirth better than the birth canal? In House of M, Scarlet Witch uses her powers to remake the entire world. Here’s how it’s represented visually:
Doesn’t get much clearer than that, does it?
While we’re on the topic of sexual imagery in comic books, I spent a big part of the weekend re-reading all 40 issues of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. Issue 118 causes a stir when it came out a few years ago when people realized that almost every page has the word “sex” on it somewhere. The artist denies it, but that doesn’t always mean much. Some of the alleged appearances of the word are a bit of a stretch, but others are fairly clear, like this one:
This site has them all, so you can judge for yourself. As the author of that page says, the issue is full of sexual imagery, and the Morrison spent a lot of time building up his depiction of Cyclops and Jean Grey-Summers’ marriage as one that had lost its fire, with Emma Frost stepping in to fill that void. More on that in The Unofficial Guide to Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, and in Tom Coates’ great piece, “On Cyclops and the Male Gaze”
International Lefthanders Day
It fell on a Sunday so naturally I never checked my calendar and didn’t realize it, but yesterday was International Lefthanders Day. How did I (unknowlingly) celebrate? I bought a copy of Metroid Prime: Hunters for the Nintendo DS, and got frustrated enough learning the controls that I almost returned it. In fairness, this isn’t a left-handed/right-handed issue, as the game designers included control setups for both, but if you’ve played this game and been frustrated by the controls, it’s similar to the clumsiness lefties experience elsewhere in life.
The controls of Metroid DS are similar to a PC first-person game, except that you use the stylus to look around where you’d use a mouse on a computer. The problem is that means you have to support the entire DS with your other hand, and you have to hold it on the edge, which is not its center of gravity. In doing so it makes it hard to support the weight of the unit and be able to read the L/R buttons to fire your weapon while also moving. Eventually I figured out how to support the other side with the pinkie of my stylus hand, but it’s not quite strong enough for the job.
12 August 2006
GameSpy: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Preview
GameSpy: World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Preview
Major changes to the raid game in the expansion revealed, including the announcement that all new raids will be 25-mans.
YouTube - The original ending for THE DESCENT
YouTube - The original ending for THE DESCENT
Saw this today. The American version cuts out the last minute or so. Here it is.
11 August 2006
NPR : Pluto: Is It a Planet?
Pluta will be voted to official be a planet, but a dwarf planet along with a number of other small bodies floating way out there.
10 August 2006
Feed Icon Guidelines
Mozilla’s official document on the use of feed icons, with an accompanying FAQs.
After the Crisis, Summer Ends Early
After the Crisis, Summer ends Early
Funny piece on DC’s 52 website. How hard it would be to teach history when the space-time continuum keeps changing!
09 August 2006
Tales of the telegraph (kottke.org)
Tales of the telegraph (kottke.org)
Great piece about a part of history that’s now officially dead.
Time Machine
So Time Machine. Brief summary: the next version of the Macintosh operating system will include software that automatically backs up all of your files, and lets you easily (using the cheesiest interface since Dashboard’s) restore lost files with a few clicks. Every single document you create will be versioned daily, so if you accidentally deleted a bunch of stuff a month ago and need it back, you’ll be able to get it. I may be getting ahead of myself (and Apple), but I think there’s a good possibility that TIme Machine is part of an architecture that will take your entire computer to the next level: the famed information superhighway.
Here’s a fairly frequent annoyance of mine: I’m sitting on the coach and I want to look something up. I grab Katherine’s laptop, look that thing up, and then I want to do something else, but the files or programs or whatever are on another computer, which is clear across the room. Both computers are on the same network, so I can log in and get what I need, but it’s not the same as sitting at that computer.
Let’s say that with Mac OS 10.5, Apple announces that through their .mac service you’ll now have unlimited storage space for Time Machine, either at a price, or even free (“Buy a new Mac, get infinite storage for all your data — never lose a file again.”). When you set up your account, you set up your .mac service, and Time Machine automatically over the next week copies all your data to your secure .mac server. (Seems crazy, but consider that in the course of a day you probably only work on a few documents at once and receive some emails. Once the initial upload is done, all Time Machine needs to do is back up those files.) So great, now you have a backup of your files that you can access whenever you need to, provided you have internet access. If your house burns down, you can buy a new computer and restore all the files from the backup, or maybe even pay Apple a small fee to burn you DVDs of those files and send them to you.
Why stop at backups, though? If you can back everything up to a server, you can also do it to an iPod. Plug that iPod into another computer, and you could log into your account just like normal and have access to all of your files. That computer can resync any changes, as can the iPod. Have a second computer you’re using all the time? That one can stay synced, too. What results is a huge shift in how we use computers. The only thing that we all accept to be ubiquitous right now is email. I can log into Gmail at home, then at work, and know that all my email is there. Imagine if every single file on your computer were this way. Log into any Mac, anywhere, and have access to all your files.
There is, of course, no evidence that this is where Apple’s headed with all of this. Bandwidth is a huge problem as well, obviously. Still, forcasting into the future, it seems silly that we’d have all these computers hooked up to a network, but still have to recall on which one we saved some particular file.
08 August 2006
lilrivkah: Paneling, Pacing, and Layout in Comics and Manga #1
lilrivkah: Paneling, Pacing, and Layout in Comics and Manga #1
Really great read. Lots of stuff you didn’t realize people had to think about.
The myth of the living-room PC
The myth of the living-room PC
As I’ve said before, the future of the media PC lies in stripping away everything computer-like about it and just letting us watch TV on it.
07 August 2006
The Wilhelm
The most recent example I’ve heard was in King Kong.
Wikipedia, of course, has a detailed entry on The Wilhelm.
06 August 2006
WWC: Sam Loeb College Scholarship Fund Charity Auction
WWC: Sam Loeb College Scholarship Fund Charity Auction
A ton of money was raised for the scholarship named after Jeph Loeb’s late son.
03 August 2006
Netflix Rolling Roadshow
Free film festival featuring movies shown in the places in which they take place.
Imagining the Tenth Dimension
On the left of the screen in the navigation, click on “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” and watch. Good stuff.
02 August 2006
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