Still drowning in work, but here’s a few divertimenti for you:
- Seeing one artist’s rendition of the Simpson’s cast in a more realistic, and heavily manga-influenced, style didn’t do much for me. I mean, I dig Marge’s hair, and the twins look great, but it’s not like the image is a revelation or anything. On the other hand, the same thing applied to the Futurama cast blows my mind for some reason. Now I want to watch a Futurama feature animated in this style. (I love all the sight gags: the finglonger, the dog, the Slurm, the brain slug, the tiny Tim bot, etc.)
- You know that thing I do where I take science news storys and clutch at anything that might be considered even a tenuous link to Lovecraftania? Well jwz has me beat lately, managing to work in references to shoggoth and Leng in two links to two recent science stories.
- Do you remember Atlanta Nights? Or the similar takedown of The Screenplay Agency? Well, it’s happening again. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present Crack of Death, another purposefully terrible book I will be buying from Lulu.com. You can read the story of the construction of this travesty starting from the relevant post at Making Light. (I might need a special shelf for these books, especially since I’m also planning to buy that new printing of the Eye of Argon–and while it wasn’t purposefully bad like the PublishAmerica mockeries, it could fit onto a themed shelf of “books that are good because of how bad they are”.)
- Interwiki linking is a great idea–it’s kind of like that hyperlinking thing you might have heard of, you know the basis of that World Wide Web thing? Some wikis, though, probably shouldn’t be wired up…. (That’s a cheap shot at what looks like a pretty puerile site, but the basic idea behind the site is sound and could produce an interesting result with the right community of editors. However, since it appears that the editors are roughly at the evolutionary level of Maxim readers at the moment, I wouldn’t hold my breath.)
- Music blog The Aquarium Drunkard is currently sharing a 37-track mix entitled L. A. Burnout (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). I’m listening to it now–it goes nicely with some period mysteries I’ve been reading. “If you too live in Los Angeles, play this mix around dusk while driving through the hills or Topanga with the windows down — it’s the next best thing to time travel.” Grab it quickly, since MP3 links don’t live forever–although the tracklists should be around for the life of the blog in case you want to assemble it yourself at some later date.
- From Eurozine, an article on how blogs contribute to the decay of several social instituion, and an attempt at a critical theory of weblogs: Blogging, the nihilist impulse. What a great read–it’s like a look at the back side of all the shiny Web2.0 facades and technophiliac promises, but without taking too much joy in iconoclasm. Frankly it’s nice to read a piece on the effects of the move towards a collaborative web where you don’t find subtexts of either “VCs should give me money” scammery or “Information wants to be free” granola. I’ll be thinking about some of the ideas from this article for a while.
Here’s a snippet:
Nicholas Carr has called the Web 2.0 hype, blogs included, “amoral”. “Of course the mainstream media see the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we’ve recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur.”
- “You be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.” (Seriously? Wow. That article is worth it just for the image of Hulk Hogan as Andre’s bus-jumping beer gopher.)
