Heavy Liquid
graphic novel by Paul Pope

Paul Pope won accolades recently for his visionary Batman: Year 100, a sort of insane futuristic cyberpunk Batman tale that had undertones of a surveillance society. This is an earlier work, a five-issue series on Dark Horse that takes place an indeterminate amount of time in the future. It concerns a man named S, a semi-criminal “finder” who has recently ripped off a bunch of “heavy liquid,” a mysterious substance and perhaps one of the most valuable on Earth.

Pope’s illustration style is very unique and very eye-catching. The stylized but grounded black-and-white artwork is tinted with one or two colors, and his talent for scene-setting is excellent. If you see it in a used book store or comic place, at the very least flip through it. Or buy it for me.

Had too much to drink last night. While I was letting it wear off at 3AM I was watching old videos in my “Ish” folder and realized I’d never watched Richard Dawkins’ famous Q&A at Lynchburg in its entirety. If you haven’t yet either, do yourself a flavor and get watching.


Mega Man artstravaganza!

You may not be as much of an NES fiend as I am, but I love playing those old games. Among them, perhaps one of my most favorite is Mega Man 2. This unbelievable collection of Mega Man art spans years of classic Mega Man moments, and I love the sharpie art style.

If you like that (or not), you should definitely check out Desktop Gaming, which has totally amazing stuff like this picture above available for backgrounds. Too bad it doesn’t really have a good hosting solution.

Old timey vocabulary: Bleak House edition

From the first half of Bleak House:

ait – a small island, esp. in a river. In green aits and fields…
nosegay – a bouquet of flowers. I knew this one.
patten – a sort of clog worn to give height or keep one out of the mud. I would have guessed some sort of special mitten.
pattening – can’t find anything for this one. Possibly a misprint of “patterning?” It has to do with clothes.
purblind – partially or totally blind. I’m thinking it’s related to “par-boiled.”
weazen – like wizened, but with 100% more ea. Suffix optional.
tapis – a carpet or tapestry.
prolixity – of unnecessary or tedious length. Wordy.
prosing – to speak or write in prose, usually in a dull way. I thought so, just making sure.
paviour – a paving material or person who paves. Might as well just say “paver.”
emolument – profit or fees resulting from labor. Pay, essentially.
nankeen – some sort of yellowish clothing made from Chinese cotton. Makes sense.
desultory – haphazard, inconsistent, tangential (unrelated to sultry)

O Lord!

Bernard Shaw vs. the English language

I’ve been looking for this poem for a while and just ran into it on Reddit. Our language really is atrocious, isn’t it?

“Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore”

The rest of it is here. Don’t worry, there’s lots more where the above came from.

These are so funny I almost died. I was afraid people in my building were going to think I was insane, what with a pair of frenzied Japanese voices screaming bloody murder and me crying with laughter.

Here’s the game (which I fully intend to try as soon as possible): in Mario 64, find a level with a hidden 1up mushroom. As soon as it pops up, you have to collect the 8 red coins and get the star before the mushroom catches you. It constantly flies straight for you at about running speed but can be tricked, teleported away from, and dodged. These kids manage to do it after probably 20 or 30 tries. There are a ton more here.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Imagine my surprise when the Midnighter, part of the world-monitoring superteam the Authority, expressed disgust for our very own Tacoma. I’m thinking the writer at the time must have been a Northwest native.

For the record, it’s volume 3 (Revolution), issue 3, February 2004.

I love this. The Pirate Bay’s trial is going on right now, and pictured are one of the defendants (Peter Sunde, left) and one of the plaintiffs (Per Sundin, right). Both are basically huge people in the world of media and the internet, and here they are looking totally cool and dressed in normal winter clothes. If this were happening in the US they’d be in suits and surrounded by more suits.

Garkov replaces the text of a few Garfield strips with text in Markov chains, “a probabilistic model well suited to semi-coherent text synthesis.” I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it’s semi-random and completely weird. Here are a few good ones I turned up.

If you get a good one, you can’t just “save image,” you have to take a screenshot; the text is not part of the image so you’ll get a blank one.