A public library, a good one, is always more than a mere collection of books. Libraries are a hub of the communities that have them. They act as founts of knowledge, crucibles of human thought, and the foundries of creativity. In a library, one seeking the tools to engage the world will find them.
With that principle in mind, picture, in the lobby of your local library, a box. It's open, with the top torn off like a supermarket candy display. A hastily-scribbled note taped to the box simply says: "FREE! TAKE ONE!" You reach into the box and, instead of candy, you pull out a flash drive. A cheap one, say, no more than 4 gigs in size. The kind they hand out as promotional items at trade shows.
You take it home, plug it into a USB port on your computer, and (perhaps against your better judgment) turn on the machine.
It boots up to a desktop that you've never seen before, but this is no hijack. You're clearly still in control of what's on the screen.
A quick exploration of the menus reveals what you suddenly have at your fingertips.
A full office suite. Powerful Photoshop-level graphics programs. 3-D applications, both simple and complex.
Game engines of all sorts.
And that's not all. There are audio and video editors.
And so much more, that it seems like, with time and application, one might be able to create almost anything.
A box full of these little drives, there for the taking on a library table, all free and legally available. All unasked for, but discovered by people who had never thought to seek these tools out.
Putting aside, for the moment, matters of funding such a project, or its feasibility. What wonders would grow from such a scattering of seeds?
Friday, August 21, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Don't try this at home.
When a shitty, inexplicably popular franchise needs to be bashed, sure, you could just sit on the couch and mock it between handfuls of Doritos. But are you really bashing it? Are you applying the full spectrum of sheer scorn that needs to be heaped upon this insult to the collective intelligence of humanity? Or are you just winging it as best you can within your limited scope of insult humor while trying to avoid choking on a Dorito?
In cases like this, it's best to call on the movie bashing professionals at RiffTrax, for quality MST3K-style acts of cinematic destruction:
In cases like this, it's best to call on the movie bashing professionals at RiffTrax, for quality MST3K-style acts of cinematic destruction:
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
I am that which I used to mock.
So yesterday morning I found myself alone with both breakfast and the remote, my wife still feeling tired and having gone back to bed. I'd had more than my fill of Michael Jackson coverage (here's the latest: He's still dead), so it was time to head into the outer limits of basic satellite service.
At 5 AM it's mostly a trip into infomercial hell, of course. I had no urge to have the question "Is Colon Detox Hype?" answered, and so too did other such siren calls go unheeded. My normal refuge, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, was showing something like Home Movies, a crudely-drawn sitcom featuring annoying kids, self-absorbed adults, and not a single speck of actual comedy. Plus for some reason everyone on the show, from the tall to the small, wears footie pajamas 24/7. Seriously.
Finally, shelter was offered in the form of VH1's 120 Minutes, which used to be the MTV show for the latest in alternative rock and pop. Now it's a nostalgia show, its content very much unchanged from the days when it came on after Headbangers Ball.
I had just taken a sip of my coffee and was nodding my head to the beat of the Pet Shop Boys when realization hit me: Here I was, wallowing in nostalgia for my youth, just like the forty-somethings I used to make fun of during my youth. Only now the bands in question were Sonic Youth and Depeche Mode rather than the Grateful Dead and Manfred Mann.
Ah, well. I guess somewhere in my brain it will always be somewhere between 1987 and 1991. It's the karmic price I pay, I guess: Leaving myself an open target for the next generation of smartasses, as those middle-aged men before me.
I won't be going so far as posting "The Circle of Life" or "Sunrise, Sunset" here, but I am willing to throw out some Love and Rockets:
And if I'm playing Love and Rockets then I have to follow up with Sonic Youth (with special guest Chuck D):
And follow that up with XTC:
And end it all with a bang with Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics:
At 5 AM it's mostly a trip into infomercial hell, of course. I had no urge to have the question "Is Colon Detox Hype?" answered, and so too did other such siren calls go unheeded. My normal refuge, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, was showing something like Home Movies, a crudely-drawn sitcom featuring annoying kids, self-absorbed adults, and not a single speck of actual comedy. Plus for some reason everyone on the show, from the tall to the small, wears footie pajamas 24/7. Seriously.
Finally, shelter was offered in the form of VH1's 120 Minutes, which used to be the MTV show for the latest in alternative rock and pop. Now it's a nostalgia show, its content very much unchanged from the days when it came on after Headbangers Ball.
I had just taken a sip of my coffee and was nodding my head to the beat of the Pet Shop Boys when realization hit me: Here I was, wallowing in nostalgia for my youth, just like the forty-somethings I used to make fun of during my youth. Only now the bands in question were Sonic Youth and Depeche Mode rather than the Grateful Dead and Manfred Mann.
Ah, well. I guess somewhere in my brain it will always be somewhere between 1987 and 1991. It's the karmic price I pay, I guess: Leaving myself an open target for the next generation of smartasses, as those middle-aged men before me.
I won't be going so far as posting "The Circle of Life" or "Sunrise, Sunset" here, but I am willing to throw out some Love and Rockets:
And if I'm playing Love and Rockets then I have to follow up with Sonic Youth (with special guest Chuck D):
And follow that up with XTC:
And end it all with a bang with Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics:
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wizard World Philadelphia: The belated con report
Yes, Bill, I'm posting it now.
Pre-Con:
I can be hard on my friend Bill, a cataloguer in Technical Processing, the department across the hall from mine. When I agreed to go with him to this year's Wizard World Philadelphia I had actually broken precedent by agreeing almost immediately, without hemming and hawing for weeks while he nagged and cajoled me, as I had done in previous years.
By affirming that this year I was in almost as soon as the subject was brought up, I had, in essence, taken all of the fun out of it.
Sorry, Bill.
After I ruined everything by being so goddamn cooperative, our preparation for the convention mainly consisted of me checking in at his workstation to take a quick inventory of the guest list. We checked to see who had been added and who had been dropped almost every day. I personally kept an eye on Artist Alley, scanning it for names I recognized and doing a quick calculation of how much I'd be willing to pay for a sketch balanced against my budget for the day.
Thus were the days passed until...
The Day of the Con:
Bill picked me up and we headed down to the train station in Bryn Mawr to catch the R5. Despite just having had breakfast, my stomach felt like it was going to eat itself, so I went into the station and ordered a toasted bagel from the snack bar. The proprietor was a nice, sociable fellow, who even sat down with Bill and me to chat while we waited for the train.
Great bagel, too.
The R5 came and went with us on it, and we headed toward Center City with great feelings of anticipation.
Once we reached the con we checked in quickly and headed toward the main floor. The Convention Center staff kept the lines moving, though each and every one of them looked like they had been forced to eat a bug after clocking in.
The first thing I usually notice upon entering a convention is the costumes. This time was no exception. Harley Quinn and Emma Frost arrived together and posed for pictures (no doubt fueling many a fevered fanboy fantasy). There was a striking Black Manta costume, in the helmet of which the maker had installed a voice changer, making him sound much like the way the villain did on the old Super Friends show. Fan anticipation for the upcoming GI Joe movie was evidenced by the clusters around Snake-Eyes and The Baroness. And movie quality renditions of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and an entire platoon of Imperial Stormtroopers were an inescapable presence.
Bill and I tooled around the floor a bit before separating to pursue our parallel lines of fandom. He headed for Autograph Alley while I started scouting out the bargain bins for trade paperbacks. I kept my focus on series that I had already started to collect instead of trying to break new ground. I was rewarded with a copy of Grendel: Devil's Reign, which rounds out my Grendel reprints from the original Comico run. Other books were had, but Reign is the day's crown jewel from the bins, as far as I'm concerned.
From there I went to Artist's Alley, where I found the booth of my favorite cartoonist, Evil, Inc.'s Brad Guigar.
By a weird little bit of serendipity, I was actually standing by, waiting my turn, while this video was being shot:
I love meeting Brad Guigar. He's a great guy, and gracious to his fans, even refraining from telling them outright that the gag they thought of for his strip was too awful to use (cough-cough). I make a point to seek him out whenever I'm at Wizard World and this year his book was the only one for which I paid cover price. For each book purchased he added a quick head sketch on the flyleaf for free. Like I said, a great guy.
I was a bit boggled to find only one vendor - Krypton Comics - actually selling comic art supplies. I mean, it's a no-brainer that artists and artist wannabes like myself are drawn (heh) to these events. You'd think more vendors would have twigged to that. Still, that one did was enough for me, even if they had run out of non-photo blue leads for automatic pencils, thus forcing me to buy the old-fashioned variety (grrr...).
On the downside, scarcity seemed to be an unintended underlying theme to the convention. There were hardly any freebies to speak of, mainly due to the absence of the companies in the best position to hand them out. DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, none of the major publishers had a booth there and pickings were slim. I attributed it at the time to the economy, but that wasn't the whole story.
More on that later.
Well, Bill and I fulfilled our various personally-assigned missions and headed home. We were generally satisfied with the day, having both gotten what we'd came for.
Post-Con:
After plowing through the adventures of the Ultimates, John Constantine, and the Justice Society, and beginning to savor the story of the rise of the Grendel-Khan, I got to wondering about the absence of the major publishers. And not just in comics, either. When I had last gone to Wizard World there were a couple of game companies taking up a lot of space that dealers and artists were then noticeably spread out to fill.
With the high of the trip having worn off, I thought about some of the rumblings I'd heard from the fans and vendors. I was hardly the only one to notice the big companies' absence. One or two gone might be attributed to economic forces, but all of them?
Something was up.
I'm sure this is old news to fans who follow the politics of the convention scene, but I'm an occasional con goer, and my eye was completely off of this ball. Happily, I wasn't the only one disturbed by the omens and portents.
My go-to guy for the day after turned out to be the same as it was the day of: Brad Guigar. You can just hear the scribbling of signatures on restraining orders right now, can't you?
The fans had, indeed, noticed the absence of DC, Marvel, et al., from what was supposed to be a major East Coast convention. It boded ill for the future. Fans had even gone so far as wearing "WWP-RIP" t-shirts on Sunday, the con's final day.
Apparently Wizard had tried out its 800-pound gorilla status in the comics industry and came up about 500 pounds short, scheduling the Philadelphia con on the same weekend as the venerable HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina. It blew up in their faces as DC, Marvel, and more took their toys down south, deciding that the Charlotte con was a better use of their resources.
This led to some bloodletting on the Wizard payroll, as the people responsible for the fiasco were sacked and their replacements were left to try to salvage the mess left with only a few short weeks to go.
So the egg on Wizard's face was unavoidable by that point. In retrospect, it was clear that this year's Wizard World Philadelphia was a holding action. That notion was reinforced by the fact that Wizard couldn't even staff its own booth, leaving only the merest fraction of a display in place (never has the original cover art for Watchmen looked so lonely...).
The day after the convention, damage control was already underway. The Wizard World site put up next year's dates as June 11-13, a full week earlier than HeroesCon's traditional Father's Day weekend dates. So it's a first step in a walk back from previous mistakes.
Time will tell if the show redeems itself in the eyes of the fans.
Pre-Con:
I can be hard on my friend Bill, a cataloguer in Technical Processing, the department across the hall from mine. When I agreed to go with him to this year's Wizard World Philadelphia I had actually broken precedent by agreeing almost immediately, without hemming and hawing for weeks while he nagged and cajoled me, as I had done in previous years.
By affirming that this year I was in almost as soon as the subject was brought up, I had, in essence, taken all of the fun out of it.
Sorry, Bill.
After I ruined everything by being so goddamn cooperative, our preparation for the convention mainly consisted of me checking in at his workstation to take a quick inventory of the guest list. We checked to see who had been added and who had been dropped almost every day. I personally kept an eye on Artist Alley, scanning it for names I recognized and doing a quick calculation of how much I'd be willing to pay for a sketch balanced against my budget for the day.
Thus were the days passed until...
The Day of the Con:
Bill picked me up and we headed down to the train station in Bryn Mawr to catch the R5. Despite just having had breakfast, my stomach felt like it was going to eat itself, so I went into the station and ordered a toasted bagel from the snack bar. The proprietor was a nice, sociable fellow, who even sat down with Bill and me to chat while we waited for the train.
Great bagel, too.
The R5 came and went with us on it, and we headed toward Center City with great feelings of anticipation.
Once we reached the con we checked in quickly and headed toward the main floor. The Convention Center staff kept the lines moving, though each and every one of them looked like they had been forced to eat a bug after clocking in.
The first thing I usually notice upon entering a convention is the costumes. This time was no exception. Harley Quinn and Emma Frost arrived together and posed for pictures (no doubt fueling many a fevered fanboy fantasy). There was a striking Black Manta costume, in the helmet of which the maker had installed a voice changer, making him sound much like the way the villain did on the old Super Friends show. Fan anticipation for the upcoming GI Joe movie was evidenced by the clusters around Snake-Eyes and The Baroness. And movie quality renditions of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and an entire platoon of Imperial Stormtroopers were an inescapable presence.
Bill and I tooled around the floor a bit before separating to pursue our parallel lines of fandom. He headed for Autograph Alley while I started scouting out the bargain bins for trade paperbacks. I kept my focus on series that I had already started to collect instead of trying to break new ground. I was rewarded with a copy of Grendel: Devil's Reign, which rounds out my Grendel reprints from the original Comico run. Other books were had, but Reign is the day's crown jewel from the bins, as far as I'm concerned.
From there I went to Artist's Alley, where I found the booth of my favorite cartoonist, Evil, Inc.'s Brad Guigar.
By a weird little bit of serendipity, I was actually standing by, waiting my turn, while this video was being shot:
Meeting Brad Guigar from Rafael Irizarry on Vimeo.
I love meeting Brad Guigar. He's a great guy, and gracious to his fans, even refraining from telling them outright that the gag they thought of for his strip was too awful to use (cough-cough). I make a point to seek him out whenever I'm at Wizard World and this year his book was the only one for which I paid cover price. For each book purchased he added a quick head sketch on the flyleaf for free. Like I said, a great guy.
I was a bit boggled to find only one vendor - Krypton Comics - actually selling comic art supplies. I mean, it's a no-brainer that artists and artist wannabes like myself are drawn (heh) to these events. You'd think more vendors would have twigged to that. Still, that one did was enough for me, even if they had run out of non-photo blue leads for automatic pencils, thus forcing me to buy the old-fashioned variety (grrr...).
On the downside, scarcity seemed to be an unintended underlying theme to the convention. There were hardly any freebies to speak of, mainly due to the absence of the companies in the best position to hand them out. DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, none of the major publishers had a booth there and pickings were slim. I attributed it at the time to the economy, but that wasn't the whole story.
More on that later.
Well, Bill and I fulfilled our various personally-assigned missions and headed home. We were generally satisfied with the day, having both gotten what we'd came for.
Post-Con:
After plowing through the adventures of the Ultimates, John Constantine, and the Justice Society, and beginning to savor the story of the rise of the Grendel-Khan, I got to wondering about the absence of the major publishers. And not just in comics, either. When I had last gone to Wizard World there were a couple of game companies taking up a lot of space that dealers and artists were then noticeably spread out to fill.
With the high of the trip having worn off, I thought about some of the rumblings I'd heard from the fans and vendors. I was hardly the only one to notice the big companies' absence. One or two gone might be attributed to economic forces, but all of them?
Something was up.
I'm sure this is old news to fans who follow the politics of the convention scene, but I'm an occasional con goer, and my eye was completely off of this ball. Happily, I wasn't the only one disturbed by the omens and portents.
My go-to guy for the day after turned out to be the same as it was the day of: Brad Guigar. You can just hear the scribbling of signatures on restraining orders right now, can't you?
The fans had, indeed, noticed the absence of DC, Marvel, et al., from what was supposed to be a major East Coast convention. It boded ill for the future. Fans had even gone so far as wearing "WWP-RIP" t-shirts on Sunday, the con's final day.
Apparently Wizard had tried out its 800-pound gorilla status in the comics industry and came up about 500 pounds short, scheduling the Philadelphia con on the same weekend as the venerable HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina. It blew up in their faces as DC, Marvel, and more took their toys down south, deciding that the Charlotte con was a better use of their resources.
This led to some bloodletting on the Wizard payroll, as the people responsible for the fiasco were sacked and their replacements were left to try to salvage the mess left with only a few short weeks to go.
So the egg on Wizard's face was unavoidable by that point. In retrospect, it was clear that this year's Wizard World Philadelphia was a holding action. That notion was reinforced by the fact that Wizard couldn't even staff its own booth, leaving only the merest fraction of a display in place (never has the original cover art for Watchmen looked so lonely...).
The day after the convention, damage control was already underway. The Wizard World site put up next year's dates as June 11-13, a full week earlier than HeroesCon's traditional Father's Day weekend dates. So it's a first step in a walk back from previous mistakes.
Time will tell if the show redeems itself in the eyes of the fans.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Stalking ≠ Romance
I'll get to the matter of Wizard World and the good time that was had by all momentarily. First, as a lover of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a loather of Twilight, I wanted to share this video that was posted up at Pandagon.
Without spoiling it, let's just say that one Edward Cullen picks the wrong teenager upon whom to try his creepy "stalk ya/control ya/maybe wanna kill ya" shtick.
I really don't know how Twilight manages to get pushed off as "romance." Vampire, shmampire, the dude is a stalker! Even in these little re-edited snippets the guy is giving off a vibe of genuine danger. Not the old writer's crutch of "bad boy with a heart of gold," but an actual predator to whom the only logical responses would be restraining orders, arrest, and/or the business end of a shotgun.
Friday, June 19, 2009
All the young zombies
Wizard World Philadelphia is underway even as I write this. I get my shot at the place tomorrow (details forthcoming, of course). But I want to draw your attention to a facet of the celebration that had me scratching my head.
I like to grab me a copy of the Philadelphia Metro on the way in to work. While paging through it an ad for Wizard World caught my eye. This wasn't a difficult task, as the ad featured Terminator 3 star Kristanna Loken (a wise choice; don't get me wrong, I love the Guest of Honor, Garth Ennis, but, well, look at him, then look at her, and tell me who you would put in the ad copy).
But while Ms. Loken grabbed my attention, what kept it was the copy at the bottom of the ad: "Kids 10 & under get FREE zombie face painting!"
Who what now?
I've known for some time now that, as long as three or more are gathered in any social function, someone will set up a table to paint kids' faces. But I had to wonder: Why zombies? I mean sure, there's the gross-out factor, and... well, we're dealing with 10-year-olds here. Do we need more than the gross-out factor?
But there's more going on here, it seems. In addition to the smell of comic ink, there's the definite whiff of the charnel in the Philadelphia air this weekend. Low, guttural moans emanate from the darker corners of Arch Street, and the stiff shuffling of feet can be heard in the shadows of the Trocadero Theater.
Wherein the Philly Zombie Beach Party is taking place.
And while I'm sure everybody wants to get in on the act, it's only open to zombies who are 21 and over.
Sorry kids. Back to scaring the neighbors.
UPDATE: OK, they won't be knocking back zombies with the grownups at the shindig, but it turns out that this ain't no "soccer-mom-with-a-tray-of-greasepaint" setup for the facepainting. This is professional caliber movie makeup.
Let me put it this way: If I came home with a face like that, nobody could blame my wife for using the only logical response:
She's got the knives and everything. Seriously.
I like to grab me a copy of the Philadelphia Metro on the way in to work. While paging through it an ad for Wizard World caught my eye. This wasn't a difficult task, as the ad featured Terminator 3 star Kristanna Loken (a wise choice; don't get me wrong, I love the Guest of Honor, Garth Ennis, but, well, look at him, then look at her, and tell me who you would put in the ad copy).
But while Ms. Loken grabbed my attention, what kept it was the copy at the bottom of the ad: "Kids 10 & under get FREE zombie face painting!"
Who what now?
I've known for some time now that, as long as three or more are gathered in any social function, someone will set up a table to paint kids' faces. But I had to wonder: Why zombies? I mean sure, there's the gross-out factor, and... well, we're dealing with 10-year-olds here. Do we need more than the gross-out factor?
But there's more going on here, it seems. In addition to the smell of comic ink, there's the definite whiff of the charnel in the Philadelphia air this weekend. Low, guttural moans emanate from the darker corners of Arch Street, and the stiff shuffling of feet can be heard in the shadows of the Trocadero Theater.
Wherein the Philly Zombie Beach Party is taking place.
And while I'm sure everybody wants to get in on the act, it's only open to zombies who are 21 and over.
Sorry kids. Back to scaring the neighbors.
UPDATE: OK, they won't be knocking back zombies with the grownups at the shindig, but it turns out that this ain't no "soccer-mom-with-a-tray-of-greasepaint" setup for the facepainting. This is professional caliber movie makeup.
Let me put it this way: If I came home with a face like that, nobody could blame my wife for using the only logical response:
She's got the knives and everything. Seriously.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
MuppetMuppetMuppet!
A classic Sesame Street song about the diversity of human experience.
With the notable exception of the lactose intolerant. Heavy. ;p
With the notable exception of the lactose intolerant. Heavy. ;p
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