Superuseless Superpowers

Complementary Chameleon:

The superuseless chameleon assumes the complementary color of his surroundings, thereby rendering him highly un-hard to see. This superpower was inspiration for the failed children’s book franchise titled “There’s Waldo.”

Looks like it's just getting started, but it shows promise. Some are less useless than others, with a little imagination.

Superuseless Superpowers

via @random

The Comedian Mark II

The origins of Watchmen:

Alan Moore's initial outline for Watchmen was already more than Dave Gibbons 'could have imagined', but it went on to become one of the greatest graphic novels of all time. Here we present preliminary designs and early sketches which chart the development of their alternate reality

Graphic Poem: Emily Dickinson, “It was not death, for I stood up”

The Poem as Comic Strip #2

via In the Labyrinth

Green Grassface

(video link)

Rebecca Sugar

I liked Johnny Noodleneck, too.

via Cartoon Brew

Plunge into the depths of Despair

Moore Collection of Underground Comix

stray bullets

If you tried to follow the link from the Mark Cuban item yesterday and got nothing, here is why.

Players You Don't Hear About The war here is described as "complicated," which is another way of saying that there are several different factions fighting, sometimes as allies and sometimes against each other. The major players are... (via)

Why So Serious? The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format.... Most people are aware that this clockwork routine—reassuringly dependable or drearily predictable, depending on whom you ask—is of recent origin, and that before 1900 concerts assumed a quite different form. I've read about bloody sword-fights in the aisles and composers and musicians pulling crazy musical stunts to get the attention of the audience. (via)

Alan Moore on 'Watchmen' movie: 'I will be spitting venom all over it' "I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying," Moore told me during an hour-long phone call from his home in England. "It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. (via)

stray bullets

Deep in the radioactive bowels of the smashed Chernobyl reactor, a strange new lifeform is blooming Ever since, a 30 km 'exclusion zone' has existed around the contaminated site, accessible to those with special clearance only. It's quite easy, then, to conjure an apocalyptic vision of the area; to imagine an eerily deserted wasteland, utterly devoid of life. But the truth is quite the opposite. The exclusion zone is teeming with wildlife of all shapes and sizes, flourishing unhindered by human interference and seemingly unfazed by the ever-present radiation. Most remarkable, however, is not the life buzzing around the site, but what's blooming inside the perilous depths of the reactor. (via)

Global Trail of an Online Crime Ring As an international ring of thieves plundered the credit card numbers of millions of Americans, investigators struggled to figure out who was orchestrating the crimes in the United States. When prosecutors unveiled indictments last week, they made a stunning admission: the culprit was, they said, their very own informant.

Unabomber objects to cabin display at Newseum Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski wrote a letter to a federal appeals court complaining about a museum exhibit of the tiny cabin where he plotted an 18-year bombing spree. Kaczynski, who is serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole, says the display at the Newseum in Washington runs counter to his victims' wish to limit further publicity about the case. (see the letter) (via)

FBI seeks owners of stolen art after collector dies When New York art collector William Kingsland died in 2006, he left behind hundreds of works of art. But some, including works by Pablo Picasso, turned out to have been stolen.

Is 'gene doping' the next Olympic threat? Could this be the first Olympics in which athletes are discovered altering their own DNA?

In search of Western civilisation's lost classics The unique library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, buried beneath lava by Vesuvius's eruption in AD79, is slowly revealing its long-held secrets (via)

also:
Photography Bans (what will they do when we have cameras in our heads?)
The Agritopia Project is an effort to design and build a neighborly community around an urban farm. (via)
Old Computers Recycled to Make Construction Material
Watchmen: The Movie Blog - A Mysterious Discovery in New York
Carl Craig Gets an Orchestra
Should You Worry About Digital Drugs?
Is the New Bernie Mac & Samuel L. Vehicle Cursed?
Update from the Samorost world (games)
Public Computer Errors pool (via)
Bugs made from found objects (via)
Cat butt menagerie
Cat Butt Museum (via)

Atomic Wednesday: Project: Upshot Knothole

viddy:
Q-Tip works the turntables
Tommy James and the Shondells - Cellophane Symphony
Robert Anton Wilson - Maybe Logic

The Dynamic Duo

warhol + nico + batman + robin

via Quiddity

stray bullets

Trading Places We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen... This has been happening in the South for close to ten years. (via)

Mark Cuban: A Note to the MPAA = Promotion works better than prevention Invest in a positive message that can get people more excited about their member products and the unique experience offered in theaters, or send a message that your customers are crooks and pirates... I have more than 1 billion dollars invested in the entertainment industry. I get to see our content distributed illegally online. I get a daily report of all the torrents and other files available online. You know what I think about that? So what. That's what I think. It's collateral damage. Unlike music, it takes time to upload and download movies. People with more time than money will steal content. They weren't going to pay for it otherwise. People with a conscious will pay for the content. Fortunately that is most people.

also:
The Five Things You Need to Know About Finding the Work You Love (via)
10 Literary Geniuses Who Went To Jail
'Dancing Plague' and Other Odd Afflictions Explained
Parasite 'turns women into sex kittens' (via)
First Look: The Road (photos)

viddy:
Fishing with Ween: Brownie Troop Fishing Show (latest episode: Ween fishing with the Butthole Surfers) (via)
This Video will Make You Understand Fuel Cells and Catalysts in 10 Minutes
Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture 2008 - Steven Pinker (via)
Grant Morrison interview

Batman in Wonderland

Batman in Wonderland by Dustin Nguyen

via Hugo Strikes Back!

stray bullets

Beijing Taxis Are Rigged for Eavesdropping As with digital cameras used in cities such as London, Sydney or New York, the stated purpose of the microphones is to protect the driver. But whereas the devices in other countries can only record images, those devices in Beijing taxis can be remotely activated without the driver's knowledge to eavesdrop on passengers, according to drivers and Yaxon Networks Co., a Chinese company that makes some of the systems used in Beijing. The machines can even remotely shut off engines. The whole world is rigged for eavesdropping. (via)

They Will Survive UNLESS John D. McCann, the managing director of Survival Resources, based in Hyde Park, N.Y., is wearing a suit for some sort of business meeting, he always carries in his pants pocket an Altoids tin. There are no mints inside it. Instead, he painstakingly packs the tin — which he explains can double as a mini-frying pan if you’re ever marooned in the wilderness — with a remarkable assortment of worst-case scenario supplies. Survival is good. (via)

Credit card thieves ran a polite, professional help desk Organized criminals often seen to be a step or two ahead of the competition. Many of us would settle for a help desk that was helpful.

also:
The Most Important Generation in History is the One Now Alive
blog all dog-eared pages: understanding media (McLuhan)
Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time (like the list, not the order) (via)
Gear Porn: Chemical Brothers Daft Punk
Cleveland Museum of Art via Flickr
Bartleby, the Scrivener.pdf (via)
The temple of tame tigers (photo essay) (patient, maybe)
A PhD in Ufology (via)
Frankie Knuckles Interview
Michel Gondry writes a comic book (via)

viddy:
An Interview With Jim Coudal (via)
The Prisoner: Caviezel and McKellen's First Reading
Smart Birds use cars to open their food (via)
Silent Shadow of the Bat-Man
Lessig on i-9/11
Powers of Ten A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero.
Ladislas Starewicz - The Mascot, 1933 (creepy stop-motion animation) (more Starewicz)
Late Night TV in Japan: Spanking Class (this guy takes his spanking seriously)
MST3K 624: Samson Vs The Vampire Women (one of the best) (via)

Greetings San Martín De Sarroca!

Commodore Eugene Linder-Flowman and Adventure Fish

Danny Zabbal's Superheroes:

Commodore Eugene Linder-Flowman lives in a man-sized aquarium at the zoo, with his very best friend Adventure Fish. After nearly ninety years of thrill and peril, he's decided to give himself the golden handshake and call it quits. Nowadays it's sleepy afternoons and writing his memoirs.

dannyzabbal.com

(prev)

Alan Moore's Advice for Young Artists

Watch the whole interview here

via Pyr-o-mania

The Reluctant Debutante

Mike Mitchell (great)
shop SirMitchell

stray bullets

All Streets All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. (via)

also:
The Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy
Sweden's Underground Naval Base at Muskö
Musicovery Mood Music (via)

viddy:
Dog Years Ben 39, Leo, castrated mongrel needs love, G.S.O.H essential. (via)
Orson Scott Card Interview Ender's Game is fine and dandy, but Speaker for the Dead is one of the greatest novels ever written. I have a hard time getting my non-sci-fi friends to read it because I have to get them to read Ender's Game first. (via)
Tesla Coil Guitar Amp
Spoilsbury Toast Boy 2 Warning: Do not watch this if you are easily depressed, easily offended, moderately easy to offend, at work, or a kid. Truly some of the most bizarre shit I've ever witnessed. Spoilsbury Toast Boy 1 (they run in reverse order) Spoilsbury Toast Boy (I loved it.) (via)

Marcus Thiele - King Nemo

Can't wait to see more.

King Nemo
King Nemo, the pitch
via Super Punch

Watchmen Trailer

Seems like every time someone posts this, it gets taken down shortly thereafter. I'll keep an eye on it and make sure it's up. I don't know what's wrong with these people. The Watchmen movie YouTube page stopped posting embeddable videos. (At least ones relevant to the production that anyone would be interested in.) The more exposure the better, yesno?

Watchmen the movie

update: OK, let's see how many times I have to repost this.

A few weeks back, I found a video by Hot Chip that I really liked and wanted to post. The first version I found was on the Astralwerks YouTube. The embedding is disabled, for some reason. Eventually, I found it on the hotchipofficial page, embedding enabled. The kicker is, if you go and look at the view count, on the Astralwerks page, as of this moment, there are 4,617. On the Hot Chip page, 142,037. Do I need to explain?

Do these people think that we're somehow getting over on them by posting and watching these videos? Have they even seen them? If they had, they might have figured out that playing these tiny crappy videos on our computers could not possibly cut into their margins. It's ridiculous. If anything, it's free promotion. Wake up.

Insomnia Man

The hero that never sleeps.

dannyzabbal's superheroes are truly awesome and uncanny.
via @random

Geektopia

You think you have a formidable collection of geekabilia? Step off sonny, you got nothin' on this guy.
via Crooked Brains

Found Comics

Seen previously in Uncertain Times, Found Comics is now on hiatus. However, they're still being posted from the archive and, of course, it's all in there and a lot of fun to pick through.

As a refresher, or an introduction:

A small computer app will stream six random photos recently posted on the internet tagged with whatever key word I'm feeling that day. These are put into a nice 3x2 matrix. Just like a comic strip. I don't allow myself to switch out photos or change the order. I have to work with what fortune gives me...

My job as a creator is to then take this randomly generated photo montage and contextualize it with a narrative theme...

I've seen a bunch of these, but not all, and they still surprise me.