I’m sure you’ve read about Roger Ebert’s death from cancer. I don’t have much to add to the many tributes being offered (though I do want to note that he was a science fiction fan before a movie critic), so instead here’s Ebert and Gene Siskel eviscerating Rob Reiner’s North.
Siskel & Ebert Review North
April 5th, 2013Technology Marches On!
April 4th, 2013Is your retroincabulator up to snuff?
Getting drunk with Upstream Color director Shane Carruth
April 3rd, 2013An interesting interview at Grantland which is just that.
Still not sure I want to see Upstream Color.
If You’re Wondering Where my Locus April Fool’s Piece Is…
April 1st, 2013XKCD’s Time
March 31st, 2013It’s easy to assume that everyone in the world follows Randall Munroe’s geeky online stickman webcomic XKCD, since it seems all my friends do. For those that don’t, last Monday he put up a strip called “Time.” This strip, like his uber-large “Click-and-Drag”, plays with the conventions of the form. “Time” started out with a static, non-gag image with the hover-over label “wait for it.” Since then, he’s updated the image every half-hour to an hour, even though he’s done new strips on the usual M-W-F schedule. If you follow the images in order, “Time” shows two people (which XKCD devotees have dubbed “Cueball” and “Megan”) building a sand castle.
Here’s an animated gif of the images so far:
Here’s a quicker version, which you can also step through, speed up, slow down, etc.
Here’s the explanation page for it, as well as its own Wikia. We now have a real-life version of those people obsessively tracking online image snippets from Pattern Recognition, except we actually know who they’re from.
The obvious metaphor is how time continues to flow and things change when you’re not watching.
As of this writing, the images are still being updated. Munroe could keep updating that one comic for a long, long, er, time, especially if he decreases the update rate.
Conceivably, “Time” could be a long-running conceptual art project and keep updating for the rest of our lives, and beyond, like that German church playing John Cage’s “As Slowly as Possibly” for 629 years…
Shoegazer Sunday: Pastel Blue’s “Ariel”
March 31st, 2013Another Sunday, another obscure Japanese Shoegaze band. This time it’s Pastel Blue with “Ariel.”
A lot of people compare them to Slowdive, and this songs tells you way.
Shatner vs. Gorn II
March 28th, 2013Brilliant on a whole lot of levels:
One funny thing: The video game obviously has Kirk 2.0 rather than the Shatner version.
I suspect that someday Shatner’s later commercials may come to be seen as one of his most substantial bodies of work…
Bookshelf Porn
March 27th, 2013Panorama from the Benediktinerstift Admont Bibliotek and Museum in Austria.
I could look at this for a long, long time…
Dispatches From Other Outposts of Bibliomania
March 25th, 2013My own bibliomania is well documented. But every now and then I stumble across instances of bibliomania in others. Some are completely orthogonal to my own, while others have some overlap.
One with a bit of overlap is Awful Books, the page of a collector who has a fair amount of science fiction, fantasy, and horror works. However, Mr. Awful (the owner’s name is not readily apparent on the website) seems to be interested far less in the writing content than the physical quality and presentation of limited and ultralimited editions, which he details and reviews with copious pictures.
And here’s his own collection of limited editions. Including not only comics and artbooks I would never contemplate buying, but even Danielle Steel limited editions (“I bought for a song on eBay [about $15.00 each]”).
And while I’m not a big fan of post-first edition limiteds, I must admit that Hill House lettered edition of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is off the charts. (“Yo dawg, we heard you like traycases, so we created a traycase to hold your traycase.”)
Another example of bibliomania a little more closely aligned to my own madness preferences is Mike Berro’s Vance Tracker. “This page is dedicated to tracking the location of every special edition of books by Jack Vance. Primarily limited editions, but also rare trade editions, uncorrected proofs, and manuscripts.”
I’ve corresponded with Mike for well over a decade on our shared bibliomania (for Vance and others), and he was one of the driving forces behind the Vance Integral Edition. The tracker is well worth looking at if your Vance bibliomania pegs at “fanatic.”
Shoegazer Sunday: Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Antennas to Heaven”
March 24th, 2013I’ve tried listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor before, but nothing clicked until I chanced across “Antennas to Heaven,” the fourth track from Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. The first four minutes are sort of random sound assemblage, but after that there are several extremely interesting segments, recalling everything from the end of “Layla” to Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge, with a lot of tasty gaze and post-rock in-between.
And the entire album seems to be on YouTube as well: