I have a tab open to the site where you can stream the Angora Napkin cartoon. I was keeping it around to point you guys at it, and explain why you should take a look. But my soon-to-be-comics-pusher Christopher Butcher beat me to the punch, so it’s a lot easier to just point you to his post. (As an aside, in an aside, I met Troy Little when he stopped in to do a signing at Strange Adventures–he did a sketch for me in my Chiaroscuro collection, which book I think I prefer to the Angora Napkin one, not least because it has a decidedly less Ren & Stimpy art style–and he seemed like a totally nice, straight up guy.)
Category: Linkapalooza
Making Excuses
I see that the people over at Rotten Tomatoes have compiled a list of the worst reviewed movies so far this millennium. I was pretty worried about how many of these I’d have seen–I’ve seen some pretty dodgy things this decade–but apparently I have only seen four of the 100 on the list. Here are my excuses for those: #79… Read more →
Metatextual Wonder
Alice at R’lyeh. You know you want to go look already Here’s a snippet of Lovecraft and Alice talking to convince you: “But this monster is merely the mask of what’s worse — “The faceless monstrosity of the cold universe! “The meaninglessness of our bleak situation “The smallness of Man amidst dark obfuscation!” “What you say,” ventured Alice, “may be… Read more →
Parasitic Homes
Now here’s an SF idea from the post-cyberpunk era–something out of Sterling, Stephensonalthough his would be built from nanofabricated diamond or something., or the Metatropolis guys: parasitic homes. There’s lots more images and details over at Inhabit.com, but the basic idea is that the ongoing rise of urban density (presumably driven by increased fuel prices and the hollowing of the… Read more →
Links On A Saturday Night
Between this whole house-selling/house-buying thing, and the relatively insane week I’ve had at work, I have been neglecting the blog. Let’s catch up on a few things that have popped up in the meantime. I may have mentioned here before that I enjoyed Farmer’s Riverworld books (for getting me into Burton, among other things), and I certainly have mentioned my… Read more →
Aside
I think I would title the story Swedish Surrealist Heli-Ninjas Commit Perfect Theft. But the writeup at The Punch is pretty good too. That’s caper movie material right there–“competence porn”. I love that it actually happened.
Was He The Last Ottoman?
I saw a story on Wikinews today about the death a couple of days ago, at age 97, of Ertuğrul Osman, who, according to the story was the last pretender to the throne of the Ottoman Empire. That lead to some fascinating reading about the Ottoman Dynasty (start here) who ran the Empire for more than 625 years until the… Read more →
Pirate Jenny
For vaguely Alan Moore reasons I was recently checking out some renditions of Threepenny Opera tunes, and I found this version of Pirate Jenny that out-creepies the Nina Simone and Ute Lemper versions that I was familiar with. I thought I’d share. Read more →
Natal Day Link Post
Holiday Monday has kept me too busy to properly blog, so you get a bit of a tab-closing list instead. I’m not sure that it covers anything new, but the piece from More Intelligent Life (the quarterly from the Economist) about authors and drinking was a fun read anyway. I’ve seen some stories about tough people in the news, but… Read more →
Going To Mars
Have you taken a moment to add your name to the 2011 Mars mission? I did, and I can prove it. I partly did because hey, it’s Mars, and partly because one of my poker group works on the Mars Rover. I can get a lot of comedy out of “my participation” in the project. Sure, he did the mechanical… Read more →
Visualization And Facts
Are you familiar with GapMinder? It’s a great resource for visualization of all kinds of interesting data. One particular visualization that I’ve been thinking about lately is this presentation of life expectancy, average income, and population for several countries over time. It tells a primarily positive story about what’s been happening in the world over the last couple of hundred… Read more →
De Gustibus
Normally you’d expect to visit an article titled 15 Ugliest Products Ever in order to have a bit of a drive-by laugh at what some people think is tasteful or interesting or whatever. Ugly is a subjective judgement, after all, but you do expect to be able to pretty well mock anything that someone is willing to put up as… Read more →
I would not have believed it.
If I were playing Balderdash, or something similarI have this very vague memory of an old game show called Liar’s Club–I must have seen repeats of it or something, since it only ran until I was 5 or 6 years old. The premise of the show was that people would make up a set of incredibly unlikely explanations for something,… Read more →
Yes, that explains it.
You may recall that we’ve discussed the Drake Equation here before, and also Nick Bostrom’s efforts to amend it with what I called a Doom Constant. Well it turns out that a very plausible answer to the Fermi Paradox that doesn’t involve either post has been suggested by a cartoon over at Abstruse Goose. I don’t know that the cartoonist… Read more →
Saturday Night Shotgun Post
While I’m uploading some MP3s for a music post a little later tonight, let’s do the tab closing dance: Did you see the story about the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic? I can’t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian story, since the actual… Read more →
