I was flipping through The DC Comics Encyclopedia looking up names, and noticed something interesting about Green Lantern. All the major Green Lanterns’ names have had the same stress patterns, except the original, Alan Scott.
Molly Holzschlag writes about the Accidental Blogger Effect—what happens when you post something offhand that somehow ends up as a prime search result, leading to that offhand remark taking on a life of its own. I made a comment about how Another One Bites the Dust turned into a 3-year-long thread about Frosty, Heidi and Frank, but it occurs to me that the often-viewed Fallen Angel cover art I posted about last week is the same phenomenon.
The first photo is from Wednesday morning around 8:00. Katie took it on our drive to work. There’s actually another shot that shows more of the sky, but this one is more striking. The second shows tonight’s sunset as seen from the Metro Pointe parking lot. Yes, it’s a freeway in the foreground, but the sunset itself was incredible. Both thumbnails are linked to larger copies of the photos.
Finally, here are some vaguely lenticularish clouds I saw looking north at sunset on Friday. This one’s full-size already:
The BBC has posted an interesting article on the US Military’s plans for Internet operations. But that’s not what I want to write about here. What I want to write about is this accompanying photo of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
The article mentions that messages put out for psychological operations in foreign markets are making their way back to American audiences. I’m not sure this photo qualifies as PsyOps, but I think it does qualify for a caption contest.*
Please post your suggestions in the comments.
*OK, you won’t win anything, but with luck the other entries will make you laugh.
It’s really annoying that the writers and editors on The Flash didn’t see fit to actually tell us the names of Wally and Linda’s children during the final 6 issues of the series. All we know is that one is a boy and the other is a girl.
Even more annoying is the fan speculation that the twins will turn out to be one of two existing pairs of characters:
It looks like the media is still viewing Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in terms of 3-D computer animation vs. 2-D hand animation. I still think they’re missing the point.
Disney’s new golden age started with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and ran through The Lion King in 1994. Pixar’s unbroken string of hits started with Toy Story in 1995. Disney has continued to release at least one animated movie each year, but hasn’t had a hit on the same level. It’s tempting to say “Well, Disney’s doing 2-D animation and Pixar is doing 3-D animation, so that must be the reason.” But Disney’s own Chicken Little did only passably well at the box office.
I’ve maintained all along that the issue isn’t the animation style but the quality of the movie as a whole. Yes, Pixar is very good at 3-D animation, but they’re also very good at story. Let’s look at Disney’s recent films for a moment—just the films, not the competition, and not the box office take. Has anything from Pocahontas onward been as good as Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin? Or has the quality dropped off? I don’t mean just the animation—the animation is still top-quality in the ones I’ve seen. I mean, is the story compelling? The characters? The premise? Would the average moviegoer look at Home on the Range and say, “I have to see this!”
I think there’s plenty of life in both 2-D and 3-D animation. Disney’s in-house animated features didn’t “lose” to Pixar because they were 2-D. They lost because Disney got boring. Switching from hand animation to computer animation isn’t going to change that.
I found a 419 scam in the spamtraps that started, in typical fashion, with an all-caps name and address, then the line:
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL REQUESTING
What made this funny (aside from the bad grammar) was the fact that the To: line contained over 1,200 addresses!
Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word confidential that I wasn’t previously aware of!
