Here is visual magic and a surefire way to know that your senses are merely pictures of pictures and not to be explicitly trusted. See that little circle in the center of the swirly hypno-coin? Stare at it and try not to blink for about 30 seconds or so. Then quickly look at any picture. [...]

Christmas, 1979. I was six, my parents were invincible, eternally young-but-still-adult demigods (or so it seemed to me), Santa existed and I wanted a Big Trak. See, there are two different “nineteen-eighties.” There were the “Eighties-that-Were,” the things and the styles and the mood of the time period as it occurred: the big hair and [...]

The blog is sleeping, not dead. Just trying to finish the book I’m writing, so free writing-time goes there and not here. This is the first “Look, ma, I made a meme!” things I’ve done. I’ve often wondered who and where these things come from. So, if you are of a mind, spread it like [...]

I had no idea this cartoon existed until the other day. The opening theme song is quite possibly the best thing you will hear all day. Or year. Or century. It is just so shameless and presentational. If you go that route, you have to go hard and pass through a barrier of “bad” to [...]

I’m really not into the whole spin-the-bottle-mock-o-tron-3000 thing that goes on with stuff like Rebecca Black. My only real take-away from that big, momentary Warhol-fame-bomb was that her parents, society, and people’s general sense of decency failed this poor girl. All in that order. A lot of the mocking people who mocked her awful song [...]

I’m a science booster. I’m a robot booster. When it comes to advances, I’m on Team Boost. But I gotta say, I have a kind of pit-of-the-stomach uncanny valley reaction in my gut and spine when I see robots veering toward anthropomorphism like this. Scientists at UC3M are joining together in a shared project to [...]

Chances are you’ve never heard the name “Gene Colan.” But if you’re aware of super-heroes, if you’ve watched larger-than-life costumed figures on a big screen engage in world-saving acts of derring-do, then you’re living in a world he helped build. Gene Colan is known in the comic-book world as the artist who defined the Silver-Age [...]

Answer: This. I had the full mp3 of this version on a work-computer from a long time ago. Anybody with it can feel free to email it to me and become my favorite person of the day. Possibly even week. Share this:PrintFacebookDigg

Lest you think the billboard-buying, THE END IS NIGH! guys are a recent phenomenon, let me hip you to one of the weirdest chapters in comic book history. Back in the 70s, things were a bit more cowboy than they are now concerning licensed characters and brand-identity.  So one day, a right-wing-born-again comic book artist [...]

Via Plaid Stallions. I had the Batman. The jointed nature of this wall-hanging proved to be its undoing as my constant futzing with it to get just the right, perfect pose pretty quickly spelled doom for the arms. Here’s what I sort of miss about the 70s era of toy-stuff. It was licences and properties [...]

Be water, my friend. What I love about this seemingly esoteric, mystical imagery about the nature of identity and approach is that it is practical advice on how to enter a situation where your goal is to beat the crap out of another person. In context, this is something he wrote as lines of dialog [...]

It is an internet, facebook and Twitter meme that today is “Skynet Day.”  According to the Terminator movies, the Armageddon-bringing computer network known as “Skynet” became self-aware at 8:11PM, April 19, 2011. Shortly thereafter, according to the movie and its series of lesser sequels (don’t get me started with claims that T2 was somehow better. It [...]