As I’ve mentioned quite a few times here, I buy a significant number of comics. One thing I have almost entirely managed to avoid, though, is the purchase of dolls. Every month there are literally hundreds of “action figures” and “statues” solicited in the Diamond Previews catalogue, and mostly I sneer at them–yes, I know, there’s something sad about the… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
Aside
So, it seems my post about getting the swank edition of From Hell, has caught the attention of Eddie Campbell himself, and he tells some of the story of how that edition came to be. Another great side effect of this is that a couple of the other owners of the swank edition put up links to scans of the paintings in their copies.
Everything(*) You Know Is Wrong
How fast does the average electron move through a copper wire? If you thought “at the speed of light” or “something close to the speed of light, but varying with the conduction medium” you are so wrong that’s it’s almost immeasurable. What’s the temperature in a complete vacuum? If you answered “near absolute zero” or “very cold”, then you might… Read more →
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Boy, that was a good movie. Peter O’Toole and Joseph Bologna are so good, that I can forget how much I want to punch Cousin Larry every time he’s on the screen.
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I’m watching My Favourite Year. How is it that I have never seen this before? I’ve even seen the one where O’Toole turns into electric death Jesus.
Bachelor Lifestyle
My family is away this weekend, visiting more of our extended family. I couldn’t go with them, for a combination of reasons. One of the consequences of this is that I am getting to do some things I haven’t done in more than 4 years. Yesterday, I woke up at 8AM, rolled over and went back to sleep until 10AM,… Read more →
The Deepest Thought I Can Manage
Life is hard: Wear A Helmet. Read more →
Truth Is Out Of Style
Many disparate things have come together to activate deeply stored things in my brain. First there was a PvP strip that actually made me laugh. My immediate reaction was to adopt the name “Muppet Jesus” for my career as a hiphop artist. Secondly there is the constant reinforcement from the world of politics that there is no use for objective… Read more →
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Upgrade to WordPress 2.7 was painless, save for the extended tagging plugin I use needing a bit of code tweaking (I’m sure there will be a new version along shortly with 2.7 support, but I was able to make it work for now anyway). Nice UI.
Canadian Cultural Heritage
You know, between the Heritage Minutes, Hinterland Who’s Who, and now the National Film Board’s online archives, it’s possible to have a really weird Canadian culture flashback online–at least for people my age. I don’t expect the Yanks to understand this post. Read more →
The key observation
Humans are essentially social animals. No man is an island. Etc. You’ve heard it all, but now there’s science that actually kind of shows it. Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon. Happy people tend to cluster with happy people, and unhappy people likewise–shocking,… Read more →
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Did you see the page of spirit photography that Jeff Ford linked to the other day? That stuff is pretty cool, especially in the historical context. I admit, though, that it makes me want to see if I could use my meagre Photoshop skills to cook up something similar from some digital photographs.
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Remember when Microsoft had the genius idea of embedding code inside documents–remember how that worked out from a security perspective? Remember when browsers started allowing executable code to be embedded in the pages–there was no security problem with that, right? So clearly the best thing for us to do is to add a new way to embed natively executable code in web pages. There’s no way that could go wrong, right?
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From Canada To Wal*Mart: You’ll Take Your Unions, and You’ll Like It.
Christmas Spirit (sincere)
I should note that while I maintain a little bit of hipster irony about the whole Christmas thing (for instance, this made me laugh right out loud) there are some other people in my household who are completely into it. And, since I am completely unable to say no to them, I have found myself singing carols and taking part… Read more →
