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Mood: Amused ]
I ran across this entertaining site with cartoons that make references to Linux and Unix. LinuxToon reprints selections from Doonesbury, Dilbert, Robotman, Foxtrot, Dr. Fun, and even some Norwegian strips!
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Editor Steve Bissette‘s seminal late-20th century anthology Taboo, perhaps the finest horror anthology of all time and a model for my own horror anthology Weird Business, offered over 100 pages of visceral, no-holds-barred horror from the finest cutting edging creators of the late eighties and early nineties. Initially self-published under Bissette’s Spiderbaby Grafix imprint (and later continued by Kitchen Sink), each Taboo volume presented contributions from the likes of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Eddie Campbell, Chester Brown, Charles Burns, John Totleben, Tom Veitch, Bernie Mireault, Michael Zulli, Richard Sala, Paul Chadwick, Moebius, Phil Hester, Dave Sim, D’Israeli, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Charles Vess, Jeff Jones, Matt Howarth, Mark Bode, Scott McCloud, Paul Grist, Joe Coleman, Jim Woodring, Tim Truman, and Bissette. Running for nine amazing books (1988-1995), Taboo contained some of these creators’ finest works.
Some 13 years later and horror comics are once again all the rage, isn’t it high time for someone to produce a 200 page best of compilation? Even without From Hell, which started in those pages, the books offer enough incredible talent that it’s sure to be a much sought after item.
Last night, I had this long, complex dream about Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. The gist of the dream was that they took a group of diner-goers hostage in order to explain their latest literary theory. Not surprisingly, no one understood it. Frustrated, the duo planned on killing a hostage an hour until someone comprehended it.
Vandermeers hard at work on what I can only assume is a new literary theory!
Since I seemingly grok Jeff’s books (and presumably the only one in the vicinity stupid enough to help), the cops called me in to decipher the theory. Problem was that it was complete unintelligible, When it became obvious that I had no idea what the hell they were talking about, the couple kissed and similar to the beginning of Pulp Fiction, Ann stood on the table pointing her gun at people. Before she could scream "Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of ya!’", I woke up.
Some weird ass shit there.
As I often do during my day, I checked my Google Reader to see what was going on with my favorite blogs. Tech-Ex included an entry with the heading "Hackers Break into Palin’s Yahoo! Email."
In case you can’t read it, the post says:
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| Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running-mate, has come under fire for using her private Yahoo! email address for state business. The reason? As a public official she’s supposed to use her official email address (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). She even has a Blackberry, so why would she even need to use Yahoo! mail?
At any rate, the hacker group Anonymous, famous for taking on the Church of Scientology, said Wednesday it had hacked into a second Palin Yahoo! account, and shipped off screenshots and emails to Wikileaks, the web site started with the intention of allowing whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, "an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. " Sounds like a good place to send them, if in fact Palin was hiding anything. Here’s the announcement from Wikileaks (someone seems to be firing back at Wikileaks as it is unreachable at the time of this writing). Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) Wikileaks’ sources loosely affiliated with the activist group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to avoid government transparency mechanisms. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, example emails, address book and two family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism. |
That was enough to send me to Tech-Ex and read more.
Strange. The page is missing, but was yet to be deleted from Google Reader. I decided to click on the link within the Google Reader entry for the Wikileaks info.
Similar to as reported in the Tech-Ex entry, Wikileaks is still unresponsive. I got the same results after attempting to reload the page several times. I also go the same results when I tried to load the main Wikileaks page.
I’m not saying she nor the Republican Party had anything to do with this, but what the hell?
And for those who can’t read the final bit of small type at the end of the first image, here’s what else Tech-Ex had to say:
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| While, of course, it would be easy to fake an email address like this, the quantity of emails, the contacts list, and the fact that Wired got a response confirming at least one email leads me to believe it’s not a fake.
Amy McCorkell, whom Palin appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in 2007, confirmed to Wired that one of the emails was legitimate. The e-mail, a message of support to Palin, tells her not to let negative press get to her and asks Palin to pray for McCorkell, who writes that "I need strength to 1. keep employment, 2. not have to choose." |
Be sure to check out the Wired article while you still can!
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| After years of searching, astronomers may finally have recorded the first image of a planet orbiting a sunlike star beyond the solar system. The body, about eight times Jupiter’s mass, lies exceptionally far from its presumed parent star — roughly 11 times Neptune’s average distance from the sun. |
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| The faint dot in the upper left could be the first snapshot of a planet orbiting a sunlike star (central object) beyond the solar system. The planet’s unusually wide separation from the star may challenge planet formation models. |
It’s sad when what you know-to-be-true is painfully documented in an lengthy, well-written article from a prestigious magazine.
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| The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.
Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t. |
Since my Mojo Press days in the mid-1990s, I’ve argued that the entire dinosaur-like publishing industry needed to change or be eaten alive by the newer mammalian media. I’m not saying that books will disappear, just the major publishers with their archaic methods.
I’ve long been concerned that Amazon will simultaneously save the industry and destroy it. Now others agree…
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| The ultimate fear is that the Kindle could be a Trojan horse. Right now, Amazon is making little or nothing on Kindle books. Lay down your $359 and you can get most books for $9.99. Publishers list that same Kindle version for about $17.99, though, and—as with all retailers—charge Amazon roughly half that price for it. Which means that Amazon keeps only a dollar on each book, while the publishers make $9.
But Amazon may be offering a sweet deal now in order to undercut publishers later. If their low, low prices succeed in making e-books the dominant medium, they can pay publishers whatever they want. “The concern is they want to corner the market,” explains one books executive, and then force publishers to accept a genuine 50 percent discount. “If they took over as little as 10 to 20 percent of the market,” says an agent, “publishers simply would not be able to exist.” |
This anonymous quote near the end of the article sums up my long-running feelings over publisher reactions to the changing world.
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| “We’re an industry more willing to watch the boat sink than rock it a wee bit.” —ONE FRUSTRATED PUBLISHER |
It does seem to be an industry bent on suicide. Possible solutions exist out there, but will only happen if the authors, publishers, and booksellers work together and stop pointing fingers of blame. I’m tired of hearing how things use to be and how bad they are now. The "good old days" of publishing are gone and ain’t coming back. It’s time to re-invent the wheel, to figure the new publishing dynamic.
With "The End," New York writer Boris Kachka produced an excellent eulogy to the way things use to be.
(Thanks to Mark London Williams for the link.)
My review of the latest Coen Bros film, Burn After Reading, appears at Moving Pictures.
| Quote: |
| Similar in tone to the Danny DeVito/Bette Midler vehicle Ruthless People (1986), except with a superior cast and script, Burn After Reading relies on the humor inherent in stupid, unlikable people in untenable situations behaving badly. The characters engage in one moronic action after another, often inducing groans and eye-rolling in the helpless viewer. |
“I’m crazy about movies. It’s why I became an actor. I could cry watching C.H.U.D. (Cannibal Humanoid Underground Dwellers). I buy into movies. I love it." — Robert Downey, Jr., "I Am Iron Man", a behind-the-scenes documentary from the Iron Man DVD.
Good thing that Brandy and I arrived at Barton Creek Mall around 1 on Sunday.
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| Man fires gun in South Austin movie theatre AUSTIN, TEXAS (KXAN) — A man stormed inside an Austin movie theater and fired off a gun and then stormed out. But it’s not the shooting police are most worried about, they say they’re concerned because the man who fired off the shot is still on the loose. It happen at the AMC movie theaters at the Barton Creek Mall around 11 Sunday morning. Police say the man was wandering inside one of the theaters and appeared intoxicated according to a witness. He made his way down to the exit at the bottom of the movie screen, then fired off a shot before leaving. Witnesses outside the theater tell police they saw the suspect put a handgun into his waist-band, then fled on foot. The good news is no-one was hurt as the movie theater was not very crowded according to police. |
Just one more reason to not go to the mall!
