davextreme

21 August 2008

Focus on art: Dan Havel, Dean Ruck | David Airey » Graphic and Logo Designer

Crazy art project that looks like a house being sucked into a wormhole.

The vexed question of punctuation

Includes rules for typesetting emoticons.

20 August 2008

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War II - Rhino Diary 1

THQ, makers of the 40k game Dawn of War, are making a life-sized Space Marine Rhino to show off at a con and promote their game.

Endor Holocaust

Apparently there’s a fan theory that the destruction of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi causes an extinction level event on Endor, killing off the Ewok species. From what I can read, it hasn’t been explicitly described in any canonical book or game, but some works do refer to what might have been its effects. Also, there’s this darling image in the Wookiepedia article about it.

Meet Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop

“At the climax of Return of the Jedi, Death Star II explodes while orbiting a forested moon called Endor […] the sheer tonnage of debris its destruction […] must have rained death and nuclear winter onto the teddy-bear tribe.” It’s called “The Endor Holocaust”.

18 August 2008

I Beg You To Be A Little More Observant - The Comics Reporter

Great, great piece about how DC Comics treated Superman’s creators early on. Read the linked articles at the top if you don’t know the background. Amazing how the mistreatment of these artists led to a resentment that’s still being played out in court 80 years later.

Lego Olympics

Olympic Fever 2

Thoughts from the first week of the Beijing Olympics:

I really like the type treatment of “Beijing 2008” in the official logo.
I like the idea that the picture of the man in the emblem is based on the Chinese character for the “jing” in “Beijing”, but the picture itself doesn’t look that cool to me.
I can’t take volleyball seriously. Sorry. I won’t go as far as Slate does and call it not a sport, but it doesn’t look Olympic to me and, bikinis aside, I don’t think it merits prime time coverage instead of, say, bastketball.
I wish instead of showing entire volleyball matches they’d use the time to show highlights from less popular sports. They seem to want to fool us into thinking everything is live, but viewers are pretty used to highlight reels. I think we’d be okay with it.
I finally figured out why I don’t like women’s gymnastic floor routines: they’re forced to pretend to dance, but aren’t forced to do anything on beat. If there’s music playing, I want them to have to hit landings on rhythm. I admit I’m mostly uneducated in gymnastics, but I know music pretty well and don’t like it being there just for mood so a nymphet can prance around. In this regard I think the men are treated much more like adults who are respected athletes. Why not just let the women do actual gymnastics?
Once you figure it out, NBC’s Olympic coverage website has lots of good stuff on it. You will have to install the Silverlight plug-in, which doesn’t run on non-Intel Macs.
The Michael Phelps stuff really was exciting. The interview with him and Mark Spitz was amusing because it contrast Spitz, who’s clearly made a life of making inspirational speeches to young swimmers, with Phelps who could only muster cliches like “if you put your mind to it you can do anything”. I wonder how he’ll handle the burden of role modeling. Anyway, the best of his racing was the 4×100m freestyle relay, but the photo finish from Friday night was damn exciting. Sports Illustrated has a good set of pictures of that, and this piece discusses how the timekeeping technology works.
Despite all that, Phelps’s last event couldn’t match Golden Girls spin-off Empty Nest in ratings.

14 August 2008

Condiment Gun

Exactly what it sounds like. Why use a bottle when you can fire ketchup at your hot dog from a gun?

13 August 2008

Countries That Don't Use Metric

Countries That Don’t Use Metric