July 2011
54 posts
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SCOOP: What really happened at the infamous Dan... →
Heidi MacDonald weighs on on the Dan DiDio New 52 panel controversy, with her own report from one of the panels. Well worth reading in total, so do click through, but her closing salvo is worth repeating here:
Occam’s Razor. Maybe DC is struggling to find women creators who can write their books, in an attempt to broaden their audience, but no one has shown up yet.
Or maybe DC doesn’t think...
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New Doctor Who novel will travel into Time Lord's... →
Award-winning science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds is to delve into the past of Doctor Who in a new novel that sees the Time Lord in his Jon Pertwee incarnation taking on the Master.
I for one am in favor of this thing of established writers doing Doctor Who novels, and I hope there will be more. Michael Moorcock’s The Coming of the Terraphiles was an oddball thing, but it was a...
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Stick Out Your Chin: An Interview with the Batgirl... →
chicklittumbls:
lizlet:
dcwomenkickingass:
There were lots of stories that came out of SDCC this year, but the one that has caught the attention of the comics community was a woman who dressed up as Batgirl to ask questions about female characters and creators at several DC Comics’ panels.
Even if you don’t care about comics, you should read this. This is the reality of women in the media....
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Horse Jerky and Sandcamels by Lindy West →
In which Ms West provides an overview of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series for the newcomer. Includes this helpful section titled “Trigger Warnings”:
It’s probably a good idea to stay away from these books if any of the following has ever happened to you: Rape. Incest. Twincest. Domestic violence. Throat ripped out by a wolf. Disemboweled by a stag. ...
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Too Hot in the Kitchen? Antarctica is Hiring... →
Of special note to Herzog fans who have seen Encounters at the End of the World: McMurdo Station in Antarctica needs chefs. Be sure to read the whole thing, especially the bit about why Jell-O wrestling had to be formally, officially forbidden.
The transcript of the meeting at which the Jell-O wrestling was discussed is solid fecking gold.
Let me just make… okay, let me just make it clear for...
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Things that I am just about done with. (Addendum)
blackbutshining:
hangingfire:
Remodels
remodels really only interest me as adaptive reuse - which is a less wasteful venue for creation. I suppose it’s a bit hypocritical to criticize magazine architecture for its wastefulness and deride remodels as boring, but it’s cognitive dissonance I just have to live with.
N.B. I should note, for clarity, that I was using “remodel” in a...
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Things that I am just about done with.
Reboots
Re-imaginings
Mash-ups
Minimalist redesigns
Remixes
Remakes
Prequels
Sequels
Reinventions
Remodels
Do-overs
Homages
Pastiches
Rip-offs
Which means I should probably get the hell off Tumblr, shouldn’t I?
And look, I recognize that none of these things are inherently bad, and that they’re all valid approaches to art and culture. Go on, remind me like I need it...
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WatchIn which John Oliver explains the News of the World hacking scandal on The Daily Show.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-7-17) →
Gidon Kremer (32)
Katy B (11)
David Bowie (9)
John Adams (9)
Jamie Woon (7)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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Sheriff's Department Doesn't Think "Yakety Sax"... →
I’m actually fairly certain that adding “Yakety Sax” (aka the Benny Hill theme) and speeding up any video automatically makes it 100% funnier. Click through and watch.
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“[Camille] turned away; he didn’t feel he could bear it. He was terribly...”
– Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
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“Almost every sound in rock and pop history that’s caused your ears to prick up,...”
– 40 Noises That Built Pop | Word Magazine
The samples are what make this article. If you’re moderately interested in popular music, you’ll recognize almost all of them.
(via immlass)
This is pretty great. I was surprised to find the Amen Break so far down the list, though. (It must be said that...
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“2/ Escapism
Times are tough. Everyone wants to get away, ergo everything sounds...”
– Simon Reynolds, “Party Like It’s Nineteen Ninety Three”, providing one possible reason why the 1990s club sounds are dominating the pop music airwaves. Read that, and also be sure to read his piece from Sunday’s NY Times.
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Brainstorming
More thoughts on the Seven Kingdoms Cocktail Project:
Re: The Dornishman’s Wife. Being that infusing Domaine de Canton could be a stupidly expensive mistake, I think I’ll just develop a spicy simple syrup instead. Should still use the Canton, though. And blood orange juice, since that’s what the Water Gardens of Dorne are planted with.
The Iron Islands cocktail should use a...
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This is how my brain works.
I’m reading Gaz Regan’s Annual Manual for Bartenders 2011, and in there I find a mention of Martell VS cognac. Immediately my first thought is, “ha, clearly that needs to go into a cocktail inspired by GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire books”, since one of the major noble houses in that series is House Martell, who rule the kingdom of Dorne.
Of course then I realize...
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First Demonstration Of Time Cloaking - Technology... →
The trick to building a temporal cloak is to place two time-lenses in series and then send a beam of light through them. The first compresses the light in time while the second decompresses it again.
But this leaves a gap. For short period, there is a kind of hole in time in which any event is unrecorded.
So to an observer, the light coming out of the second time-lens appears undistorted, as...
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Pop's Punching Bag: Hating The Black Eyed Peas :... →
The Black Eyed Peas have long been the most successful widely despised pop group in the world. Trashing the foursome is the pop critic’s equivalent of playing Angry Birds: a semi-mindless activity that one takes up to keep the reflexes sharp or just to pass the time. Yet I’ve noticed that the virulence the Peas inspire, while responsible for some very funny and often...
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The Body Odd - Spiderphobes spot the bugs first,... →
Hat tip to rocketsandrayguns for sending me this, with attention to this bit:
Instead of bees and butterflies, the researchers turned to arachnoids and cult TV: they exposed 72 British subjects to a variety of photos, including some of spiders and characters or objects (including the T.A.R.D.I.S.) from the British show “Dr. Who.” (The researchers are proud of this, nothing that...
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Brian Wood - Comics + Graphic Novels:... →
brianwood:
In more ways than one, this Northlanders installment brings everything full circle. This is also the final Northlanders story, the longest story, and probably the largest in scope.
Beating the Northlanders drum again. Even if you haven’t been reading it, you can jump in on the latest (and last) story arc, and then go back and pick up the trades of the previous volumes. The...
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immlass:
hangingfire:
Haters to the left, bitches.
Gwen, it’s good to have you back. :D
(I still think you should’ve punched Jack in the head at the end of Children of Earth, but we’ll let that slide for now.)
(And Tom and Lorenzo are following it. My day is complete.)
I suspect I’m going to end up to the left on this one, but I’m considering giving it another chance.
Fair warning:...
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Time Magazine — The Boy Who Lived Forever, by Lev... →
I’m just going to sit back and enjoy Lev Grossman’s clear-minded, even-handed discussion of fan fiction culture and try to ignore the inevitable commentary explosion that’s due on the internet … starting now, probably.
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“There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej,
against which the fellahin...”
– Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
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The Rachel Maddow Show: Haboob is the word →
In which Rachel Maddow cracks up over the fact that the dust storm in Phoenix resulted in newscasters across the country having to say the word “Haboob” over and over and over again.
… okay, yes, sure, there’s an element of “let’s make fun of the funny-sounding word from another language!” here, but … really, it IS a funny word to an Anglophone and...
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Death by Critique →
chicklittumbls:
I’ve been though some of this before. A crit partner read a story, got excited about it, and made a bunch of stylistic edits. I made almost all of the suggested changes and then, for some reason, put the manuscript aside. When I looked at it a year later I didn’t recognize the writing and could not make it through a page before I completely hated what the work had become. I went...
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Not by the Direct Method.: Sadie the Goat, Hudson... →
jessnevins:
Of the Charlton Street Gang, a group of Hudson River pirates, Asbury writes:
….for the first year or two of their new career roamed the Hudson in rowboats, but with scant success until the spring of 1869, when they were joined by a woman known as Sadie the Goat … Sadie acquired her sobriquet because it was her custom, upon encountering a stranger who appeared to possess...
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2011-6-26) →
Queen (26)
Pet Shop Boys (7)
Ella Fitzgerald (4)
Antony and the Johnsons (3)
Talking Heads (3)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
