Yes, E3. I’m pretty goddamn sure.

Beautiful art, although I can’t say I agree with his treatment of the books.

1918: 18,000 National Guardsmen at Camp Iowa stand in >100 degree heat to form a human Statue of Liberty. True.

Album art for Yeasayer’s All Hour Cymbals.

This sign is on Reddit right now as if it’s some sort of anomaly or Engrish. What? I thought everyone knew this from like grade school on. Make yourself look big, don’t turn your back, and fight back if it jumps you. What’s so hard about that? Other than the fighting a mountain lion bit.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Amazing chart of the electromagnetic spectrum. Looks like it’s probably from the early 80s. I love this stuff – the amount of knowledge summarized in this one illustration is staggering.

I have more, Chris. Don’t make me use them.

Mirror Stage, a fascinating game that is hard on the eyes and very hypnotic. Stages are completed by exploration, usually involving a sort of mindbending dream logic that you don’t really understand even though you’re doing it.