Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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The weblog of Seth Johnson -------------- INKSLINGER.ORG -------------- OD ARCHIVES -------------- FEEDS Posts:  Shared Items:
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Friday, September 26, 2003
In his latest Column for CBR, Mark Millar is making a startling claim:
"The embryonic superhero concept wasn't even ten years old when perhaps the most illustrious director of his day, Orson Welles, seriously considered doing a Batman picture and even got as far as production designs, an early draft of a script and some casting photographs featuring various friends and colleagues in prototypes of what would eventually become the finished costumes."
That's right: a Batman film directed by Orson Welles. Frankly, my hoax detector is registering some background radiation, especially since a Google search on his supposed source, "movie critic and respected film historian" Lionel Hutton comes up dry. But I'll join the rest of the fans in spending the weekend not just wishing but hoping it's true.
A couple weeks ago over on Recomendo, Kevin Kelly recommended The Penguin Companion to Food. Putting together an Amazon order last weekend, I saw that the book was just over twenty bucks and ordered it on a whim. It arrived yesterday afternoon, and after a night spent casually dipping into it I can already say that the book is twenty dollars well spent. Like my beloved Brewer's Dictionaries of Phrase and Fable, in addition to being a great reference it's also a perfect browser's book. Open it to any page, and you'll find both the fascinating and the unexpected. From the horrifyingly fascinating explanation of how to make 'monkey sauce' (under the entry for "Larvae"!) to an entry for "Orange" that puts the fruit into a historical perspective*, what you won't find in recipes (none) is more than compensated with a wealth of amazing reading. Best I don't leave it in the kitchen, though, or I'll end up burning dinner when I get sucked into the book's depths...
*John McPhee remains the king of orange writing. But the Penguin entry on the fruit isn't bad for a book with more than 2,500 articles packed into just over a thousand pages.
So simple, yet quite possibly the coolest thing I've heard all week, courtesy of physicist and Analog columnist John Cramer: the sound of the big bang.
"It sounds rather like a large jet plane 100 feet off the ground flying over your house in the middle of the night. You can hear the falling frequencies as the universe expands and becomes more of a bass instrument, the rise and fall of CMB emission, and the interesting counterplay of the frequencies that were measured. It's what you might hear if you could "listen" to the cosmic background radiation during the first 760,000 years of the birth of the universe."
Thursday, September 25, 2003
You saw the post about the marshmellow gun and yawned. You read about the giant potato mortar and were nonplussed. Fine. Read a blog where you can learn to make your own railgun (via boing boing via nanobot, which looks like interesting reading itself.)Over the course of the last hour, Winamp has shuffled through the depths of my music collection and put together a strange yet really enjoyable playlist. A lot of the really great music I listen to now comes from bands and obscure albums I first heard via blogs and webpages. So allow me to toss an odd mix of goodness your way in a new irregular update to OD: Radio Inkslinger (resurrecting some of the old Newsfeed HTML! Hurray for recycling!)
Reporting from the floor of the Comic Book Stock Exchange via the Newsarama Wire, Crossgen down 7 3/8, continuing its freefall. Fantastic Four up 3 in a startling turnaround. Valiant remains unchanged.
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
The snakeheads have arrived in Wisconsin. Luckily, REI isn't selling Polartech Snakehead Wraps, so the hope is that the winter will freeze 'em out. But then, isn't that the way all monster stories start? "You thought they were dead...." It may just be time for the Great American Ice Fishing Horror Novel. Not that I'm going to write it. I've got other plans. But that news will still have to wait a few weeks...
Via boing boing, news that Neal Stephenson has launched the Quicksilver Metaweb, where he and readers will annotate his new novel (which I have promised myself as a reward in only 8,684 more words. Say, Saturday.)Browsed through tonight doing research: Considerations on the Doctrine of Phlogiston and the Decomposition of Water, a brief history of batteries, and the modern history of wire rope. I learn something every day.
Fametracker's slightly self-indulgent posthumous Fame Audit of John Ritter. Press on and don't miss the Emmy Galaxy of Fame.
"The remaining few minutes of the craft will be spent in darkness."
A breakdown of the last few minutes of the flight of Galileo (via robotwisdom)
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Friendster as a storytelling medium: Nathalie is using a Friendster profile to spin a tale attempting to leap the thin border from "imaginary" to "virtual" (found via my referral logs, she leaps past BLOGROLL straight to FOLKS--her Cup of 
Via Metafilter, Candidate Camera, where all the candidates in the California recall were offered digital cameras and the chance to keep a photo album of their campaign on the web. The albums feature a bit more red, white and blue, and have a better-than-normal interface, but otherwise they're pretty standard photoblogs. You can, however, learn Gallaghar's first name from his album, discover out which candidate has his campaign headquarters in a bathroom, measure one candidate's scale against a building, and, of course, browse through Gary Coleman's photos.
Get ready for cool! Get ready for fun! It's the super-neat Rubik's Cube Dissasembled (via Incoming Signals.)
For those with skullsweat to spare, check out the incredible Rubik's Hypercube. Tell you what--I'll mess it up for you, and then you can solve it. It'll be fun. Honest.
Excellent Radio Lazlow T-shirts for GTA fans are now available over on Lazlow.com!
If I might make a personal note on the side, if you'd told me in junior high that someday I'd be staying into the wee hours at my job making computer games to work on freelance work writing role-playing games (and taking a break to post about game-related music on some Jetpack Future computer network), I would have been really excited*. But later I might have wondered who you were and why time travel technology was used to come back and tell me about my future.
* On another note, "Jetpack Future" would be a great name for a band. Dibs.
As a followup to yesterday's post on marshmellow guns, Theo passes along a link to a traditional concept--the potato gun. Except that this potato gun is ten feet long, powered by compressed air, and can turn a watermellon into a cloud of fruity debris.
Another followup, to last month's post on vocal wonder DOKAKA. If you're reckless enough to have Real Audio installed you can listen to an interview with the man himself. Apparently it only takes him between eight and twelve hours to record one of his songs. Amazing.
Monday, September 22, 2003
Verisign's wildcard squatting has revealed an even darker taint--it's being reported that when users mistype a URL and are shunted to Verisign's Site Finder, Verisign drops a tracking bug into the user's web session.
It's now almost undeniable. Verisign sucks.
Another microportal collecting items seen before on OD with a few new'uns: The Alphabet's Bastard Children. So many months later, it was particularly fun to return to Typophile's smaller picture project. Don't miss checking out the battle being fought over the capital J--watch the full 9000 frame animation to see the serifs make one last ongoing stand.
(Via the terrific discussion over on language hat of the scrambled-language meme rocketing around the web in the last few weeks, which in turn is via Making Light. And the surf goes on...)
"We had four clowns on stage, and from the 72 pages of the Shakespearian text we were reduced to 14 pages. We had just one scene - the first scene - played completely, and that was not even completed because we had a prompter helping the clowns to read the text."
That's right. Hamlet with clowns (via Bookslut.) Makes a fella wish he were in Cairo right now.
Over on the boing boing sidebar, a great post by Textfiles.com head honcho Jason Scott on "The Race to Digitize Everything Ever". In the past I've linked to a number of the archives he mentions, but here's a big reminder for all of you. Go spend the day digging.
The Instructions! Here are the PVC pieces you need. All the PVC pieces are ½ inch.
- 1 9" piece
- 1 7" piece
- 2 4" piece
- 1 3" piece
- 2 2" piece
- You will also need two elbow pieces, two tee's, and two end caps.
In addition you will need a pair of PVC pipe cutters.
What for? A marshmallow gun, of course! After reading about them in the Bleat today, I had to find out how to make one. Tomorrow the office will know my sugary wrath!
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Woo hoo! Jeff Beal won the Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Theme Music for his theme to Monk! Go download the theme over on Jeff's site, then join all right-thinking people in signing the petition to reinstate the music as the rightful theme to the show (read more about the debate on the Monk Theme Debate website.)
Courtesy of JP and Karla, some of you may see the new OD icon in your browser's address or window title bars:
If you have a moment, let me know if you see it or not, and your browser.
Every couple of weeks I swing by 75 Degrees South, a blog describing preparations leading up to November, when the author will begin working for the British Antarctic Survey. It's an interesting peek into the decisions he's had to make, from the personal electronics he hopes to take to recent deliberations on how much liquor one purchases to last out ten months. Hopefully he'll keep posting once he goes south.
Another blog that's new to me and might be new to you is Terra Nova, a blog from Play Money's Jullian Dibble and others on "our world and its synthetic offspring: MMORPGs, toy worlds, social worlds, and other realms of emergent collective reality."
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