http://www.koreus.com/video/disney-ressemblance

Disney plagiarizing itself

Holy jesus, I never noticed this. This is completely insane.

(Source: http://www.koreus.com/)

Spontaneous Human Combustion, the worst Wikipedia article ever

Spontaneous Human Combustion, the worst Wikipedia article ever

Reading Bleak House, I became interested in spontaneous human combustion, as it occurs to a character in the book – during an excellent chapter, I might add. I remember hearing about it as a kid and it occurred to me that I’d never checked up on its authenticity. Although it seems far-fetched, I could see how it may be possible that some cellular process goes amok and sets off a chain reaction. So of course I googled it, and of course what turned up but Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is reliable in some areas (the battles of Plataea, Arbela, and Cannae are well-related), and hilariously poor in others. The SHC article is the latter to the nth degree. I quote:

“Thus his unfounded nitpick being presumed by him to be an all inclusive conclusion is yet another slippery and bogus means used by amateur debunkers like him. In order to achieve the goal of steering others away from this phenomena as being "Real”, Simpson hopes that his depravity of thought and logic will go unnoticed. (Wrong.)“

Yes. He also questions both Newton and Einstein. It reads like a personal tirade defending someone’s favorite "unexplained natural phenomenon,” which I suppose it is. It’s been flagged, unsurprisingly, for needing more citations. Good reading.

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.

Buck Rogers!

Here are the cover and the first two pages of comics. Yeah, those are some big images. The book itself is coffee-table size.
Click through to get the full size.

Page 1
Page 2

Isn’t this stuff absolutely amazing? It just gets more insane, and the stories run into one another like movements in a ridiculous space symphony.

Wow. I just made a great find at Half Price Books. It’s not every day I feel the need to drop $50 on a book, but this one just called out to me. The Collected World of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I know – what the hell, right? But it’s awesome. I’m a big fan of Little Nemo, as my family knows, which is really the only comparable strip from the era (20 years earlier, but still).

This sci-fi epic lasted for some 35 years, chronicling the adventures of the eponymous Buck Rogers. The world has been enslaved by a sort of conglomerated Asiatic race, the Mongols, who sport Chinese hats and Fu Manchu mustaches. Buck, a refugee from 1929, preserved by mysterious gases in a mine shaft, awakens just in time to save flying soldier/flapper Wilma from certain death at the hands of the “half-breeds.” The whole thing is just busting with imagination, detail, and innocent sci-fi fun. And boy is there a lot of it.

The picture above isn’t the book itself, but the one I have is rare and out of print, especially with an immaculate dust cover. Even Amazon only has a 100-pixel-wide picture. It was worth every penny.

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I heard another Eric Whitacre piece on the radio one day and was surprised to find he was a contemporary choral composer, not however many decades or centuries old. “Sleep” is not particularly complicated musically, but his sense of harmony is stunning.

06_5_15_train

A Sunny Day In Glasgow – 5:15 Train

Excellent and otherworldly electro-dreampop. Not sure how else to describe it.

The weekend on the island (not over yet) has been flickr’d. Check out some Orcas-y pictures.

We’re playing Oregon Trail up here on Orcas and in the old-school hunting simulation, I made this amazing shot. From just above where my guy is, I nailed that deer between the two trees there. If that doesn’t impress you, then you haven’t tried it. Those suckers are about as fast as the bullets.

I made it by the way, but Scottie drowned in 3.5ft of water and then our wagon overturned on the Snake River (?) and Jim went under as well. Sara and Piper survived until the end, despite constant measles on Piper’s part.

Remember: don’t waste your money on food, it’s there for the taking. And grueling is the only pace.

An Oyster of the old school, whom nobody can open.

Dickens again

The plaintive–so Mrs. Piper insists on calling the deceased–was reported to have sold himself. Thinks it was the plaintive’s air in which that report originatinin. See the plaintive often and considered as his air was feariocious and not to be allowed to go about some children being timid (and if doubted hoping Mrs. Perkins may be brought forard for she is here and will do credit to her husband and herself and family). Has seen the plaintive wexed and worrited by the children (for children they will ever be and you cannot expect them specially if of playful dispositions to be Methoozellers which you was not yourself).

Dickens, Bleak House

Pistachios. Shells back in the bag? Is that as bad as double dipping? Or is it natural? You don’t lick the shells, after all. Well, I do sometimes but not always. This is a serious etiquette question.