Boys And Their Toys

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 →

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 →

Aside

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.

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 →

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 →

Aside

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.

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 →

Aside

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.

Aside

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?

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 →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.