is a blog by Brendan
The unlooked-for side effect of my generation’s financial crisis has been, for me, that the world of finance is suddenly quite interesting, and worth learning about. There’s nothing like open-mouthed horror and blind panic to inspire autodidacticism. I still know very little about how finance really works, of course, but the punch line is that most financiers apparently didn’t either.
In that vein, I recommend one of the most darkly hilarious articles I’ve read in a while.
Sequel to Stephen’s: a gentleman by the name of Gabriel had the clever idea of taking all the words in the Proserpina stories, minus her name, and doing up an eerily well-informed wordle.
Ian and I are a bit obsessed with Brian Cox, and I was very happy to notice that the AV Club had done a Random Roles bit with him (an excellent interview schema, which takes the annoying bolded reporter-voice almost entirely out of it and just leaves the meat of the subject rambling about cool stuff). I was not disappointed. You might say I was reappointed. I mean, read this stunningly clear and concise evaluation of American film versus British theatre, prompted by a little question about his career arc post-Rob Roy:
“If you grow up in these islands—especially where I grew up in these islands—the theatre is very powerful, very potent. It’s a part of our heritage. Our culture is really a theatrical culture, not a cinematic culture. Feudal societies don’t create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don’t fall into ‘Everybody in their place and who’s who,’ and all that. But the theatre’s full of that. Especially in Shakespeare. So in a way, it behooves you as a British actor to try and master the classics and become a classical player. I got caught up in it. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I was too late.
“You see, the free cinema, the cinema of Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay… That all ended by the time I came along. So I went to work in the Royal Court, because they weren’t going to be making any more of those movies.”
Whoa, I guess they figured out the Antikythera Mechanism?
When realities collide, the Evening Standard is ON THE SCENE.
Almost makes you wonder if he did it on purpose.
A cool thing about the emergent behavior generated by Flickr’s embedded Creative Commons licensing: people can actually find your stuff and reuse it at will, the way CC was intended to work. That means that this year, my pictures have shown up in an abridged article about the scientific accuracy of the animals in 10,000 BC, a newsblog post about a stupid person claiming to have a phobia of little people, and an opinion piece about HIPAA usage from the father of a kid with ASD.
People have taken up this idea of “challenge: draw yourself as a teen” and changed it to “draw yourself ten years ago (ie as a teen) versus now.” Since tomorrow’s my birthday, I thought it appropriate to chip in.
How come everybody’s all like “ooh, Dresden Codak” and “so awesome Dresden Codak” and “put your Dresden in my Codak” and yet I’ve never heard a single mention of Nobody Scores? The only reason I found out is because its creator personally came to my table at Stumptown and I had to ask him what he did. And it’s great! Full-color, long-scrolling strips with apocalyptically gleeful jokes that never descend into self-parody or fanservice. I love transhumanism as much as the next guy (the next guy being Dresden Codak), but I also love transplanted Indiana Jones gags and runes (and, for my North Carolina crew, The Björk Dojo).
It actually reminds me a lot of Return to Sender, in visual style and whimsy, but with a less sympathetic bent. Oh, and also with like five times the archive length.
Have I even posted about my webcomic pull list in the last few years? For my own records, in secret and arcane order: Starslip Crisis, Achewood, Scary Go Round, PvP, Narbonic: Director’s Cut, xkcd, Octopus Pie, Shortpacked, Penny Arcade, Darths and Droids, Gunnerkrigg Court, Basic Instructions, Chainsaw Suit, Three Panel Soul, Thingpart, Bob the Angry Flower, A Softer World, Wonderella, and Raymondo Person and Dresden Codak whenever they’re updated. And don’t think I don’t hit Checkerboard Nightmare pretty often too. Just in case.
