As a followup on my previous auction post, here are the prices realized on the items I highlighted in yesterday’s Heritage book auction. All prices include buyer’s premium:
Prices Realized on SF Books in Heritage Auctions’ April 10 Offering
April 11th, 2013Japanese Pop Punk Band SpecialThanks
April 10th, 2013While plumbing the depths and breadths of YouTube for suitable Shoegazer Sunday entries, sometimes I stumble across something interesting that doesn’t fit in the Shoegaze label. Today let’s take a look at Japanese band SpecialThanks.
The first 20 seconds of silence is just to mess with you.
So a pop-punk band with a deadly cute female lead who sings in English that sounds like a cross between Blink-182 and [Insert Current Teenage Female Pop Sensation Here]. This is the sort of Japanese cross-cultural pop artifact that Bruce Sterling circa 1992 would have been all over. As it stands, I’m pretty sure some canny American record label would make millions signing them over here…
Preview: SF First Editions in Heritage Auctions’ April 10th Offering
April 8th, 2013Heritage Auctions has another signature book auction coming up on April 10, and there are several interesting SF/F/H first editions up for offer. Here’s a preview of a few:
Plus a few other miscellaneous SF items. However, the main strength of the auction overall is a number important scientific first editions, a signed first of ian Fleming’s Moonraker, etc.
Shoegazer Sunday: Clams’ “Sundae Bird”
April 7th, 2013From Japan comes Clams with “Sundae Bird.” The first 48 seconds are space music drone, but after that the catchy dreampop tune kicks in.
More Roger Ebert Tidbits
April 5th, 2013A few more interesting pieces of writing from him:
So I don’t just show them giving pans, here’s a young Ebert and porn-stached Gene Siskel splitting on Taxi Driver:
Reviewing one of my favorite films, This Is Spinal Tap:
And here’s them loving Ed Wood:
Siskel & Ebert Review North
April 5th, 2013I’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.
Technology 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…