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  1. 5
    ayjay:
    “

    You might thus assume that superhero comics, the original properties on which these franchises are built, are in flush times. They aren’t. The upper limit on sales of a superhero comic book these days is about 230,000; just two or three series routinely break into six digits. Twenty years ago, during the comic industry’s brief Dutch-tulip phase, hot issues of “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” sold millions.

    Where this audience went is a bit of a puzzle, especially because comics, broadly speaking, are respectable as never before. Good cartoonists’ books are reviewed in the quality papers and nestled on readers’ shelves next to comic-book-inspired novels by Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. Even the University of Chicago, where fun goes to die, recently held a three-day conference to which it invited brilliant cartoonists like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.

    If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new “Avengers” comic, why don’t more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology.

    ”
    — Book Review: Leaping Tall Buildings - WSJ.com
    The Wall Street Journal
     
  2. 21
    dailydalek:

    Day 191: Daleks In Black 3

    Source: tonecartoons.co.uk
    #Men In Black 3 #MIB3 #Will Smith #Film #Crossover #Mashup #Spoof #Scifi #doctor who #daleks #Dalek #comics #cartoon #lol #Tone Cartoons
     
  3. 758
    clientsfromhell:
    Client from another century

    To be fair, this client is more of an old acquaintance that I’ve more or less adopted. He shows up every couple of years with a new idea he needs help with. The latest is a one page website for his wood sculptures. He does all his email and web browsing at the library and calls from a pay phone.

    Client: I noticed down at the bottom where my email address is that when I click it, it launches some kind of email thing.

    Me: What’s the problem? Is that the wrong email?

    Client: No, it’s the right email, I just don’t want that on my website. That technology has got to be expensive and I don’t want to be paying for that. So just take it off. I just want my email there so people can read it. I don’t need any of this fancy stuff that makes things pop up.

    Me: That’s how every email address on every site in the world works. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s just a hyperlink that launches your email client.

    Client: You mean that doesn’t cost extra to make that happen?

    Me: No. But now I’m curious. What do you normally do when you see an email address on a site and want to email them?

    Client: I just get out a pen and paper and write it down. Then I go to my Hotmail account and type in their email. Isn’t that what everyone does?

    Me: Nope, you’re probably the only one.

    Client: Okay then.

    He paid me in a vial of gold nuggets, a mini-sewing machine and a fishing knife. He offered me a homemade surfboard, but I didn’t have room for it at my place. 

     
  4. 7
    ayjay:
    “

    It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.

    My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.

    ”
    — Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson. Via Matthew Battles on Twitter.
    Source: theparisreview.org
     
  5. 34
    “

    I acknowledge that I have used four-letter words familiarly all my life, and have put them into books with some sense that I was insisting on the proper freedom of the artist. I have applauded the extinction of those d——d emasculations of the Genteel Tradition and the intrusion into serious fiction of honest words with honest meanings and emphasis. I have wished, with D. H. Lawrence, for the courage to say shit before a lady, and have sometimes had my wish.

    Words are not obscene: naming things is a legitimate verbal act. And “frank” does not mean “vulgar,” any more than “improper” means “dirty.” What vulgar does mean is “common”; what improper means is “unsuitable.” Under the right circumstances, any word is proper. But when any sort of word, especially a word hitherto taboo and therefore noticeable, is scattered across a page like chocolate chips through a tollhouse cookie, a real impropriety occurs. The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but a literary lapse, related to sentimentality. It is the sin of advertisers who so plaster a highway with neon signs that you can’t find the bar or liquor store you’re looking for. Like any excess, it quickly becomes comic …

    Some acts, like some words, were never meant to be casual. That is why houses contain bedrooms and bathrooms. Profanity and so-called obscenities are literary resources, verbal ways of rendering strong emotion. They are not meant to occur every ten seconds, any more than—Norman Mailer to the contrary notwithstanding—orgasms are.

    ”
    —

    Wallace Stegner on Profanity - Magazine - The Atlantic. In the forty-seven years since Stegner published this piece — the whole of which is not online anywhere, as far as I can tell, which is a shame, because it’s a brilliantly funny and insightful essay — the situation have gotten far worse. Swearing is now a lost art. I should know: I grew up under the tutelage of a virtuoso. I’ve never heard anyone curse as rhythmically, poetically, and polysyllabically as my father did.

    But the key to successful cursing is restraint: saving the most powerful words for the occasion when they are needed. As Stegner comments elsewhere in the essay, if you “say shit before a lady,” what do you say when your car breaks down at rush hour on the Santa Monica Freeway? Presumably, in those days, you would take that opportunity to drop the f-bomb, but to judge by my Twitter feed, many people now use that word fifty times a day, which leaves them with absolutely nothing in reserve when something genuinely bad happens. Not only is it not the f-bomb any more, it’s not even the f-sparkler. The word has been eviscerated. I am not speaking in moral terms here, just linguistic ones: the spread of cursing into more and more situations where it once would have been forbidden has been one more form of linguistic inflation, like calling everything that’s even mildly pleasant “awesome.” It betokens a lack of judgment, a failure of assessment, and it leaves us with limited or no linguistic resources in the hour of need. We need to clean up our language, if for no other reason than to have room to make it dirty when dirty is really called for.
    Source: The Atlantic
     
  6. 1,241
    doctorwho reblogged everythingdavidtennant:
    Young David Tennant in "Takin' Over the Asylum"

    everythingdavidtennant:

    image

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    David Tennant—Campbell, Takin’ Over the Asylum (1994), episode 1

    Made by me! =P

    #david tennant #takin' over the asylum
     
  7. 5,749
    doctorwho reblogged likeapuck:
    The Doctor

    Master of deduction

    #Doctor Who #David Tennant #Ten
     
  8. 10
    ayjay:
    “What I discovered in my researches about this part of the country was a vigorous civic idealism and a deep commitment to education. In its early history there was a significant presence of young clergy from places like Yale and Amherst who came to the frontier intent on starting the civilisation over again on the basis of real equality, and proofing it against the encroachments of slavery. Their approach to every problem was to educate – women, African Americans and, crucially, the general population. It was an exhausting and extremely generous campaign, carried on for decades. Its effects are still palpable. The fine little colleges they founded in surprising numbers flourish still. It is true at the same time that the history behind this heritage is largely forgotten, that it persists as custom rather than as memory. In practical terms it has meant that the clock was turned back and the best reforms were compromised or lost until the civil rights movement took hold a century later. John Ames lives in this middle period, old enough to remember his abolitionist grandfather, and to see the beginnings of the new era. I am sad to say that in this respect he is a conventional good man of the period. The novel is, among other things, an inquiry into the question of how individual lives interact with culture and history, for weal and for woe. A modest query and a vast question. Still, as an American, I can only grieve at the thought of the possibilities that were raised on this gorgeous, storm-ridden prairie, then foreclosed and forgotten – history somehow erasing itself. There is a deep and abiding loveliness nevertheless, the ember still to be breathed upon. And this is in Ames’s mind, too. The prairie still shines like transfiguration.”
    — Marilynne Robinson on writing Gilead
    Guardian
     
  9. 8,169
    neil-gaiman reblogged ezliconfuzzed:

    Well, I know that I’d watch it…

    ezliconfuzzed:

    Please, PLEASE someone make this movie. You can have all my monies.

    #Things that people send you on the internet that make you smile
     
  10. 284
    Mr. Gaiman, I have been writing, or trying to write, most of my life. One of my main issues is that I seem to be unable to break up my narratives into chapters, and thus my stories end up as really, really long "short stories". Do you have any advice on how to actually create chapters?

    Nope. 

    Terry Pratchett doesn’t do chapters, except in his books for younger readers. He says chapters are just to tell parents where to stop reading for the night anyway.

    I’ll often only decide where the chapter breaks are going to go after I finish the book.

    Ask neil-gaiman a question