Category: Entertainment

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I’ve been meaning to write a review of the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Real Life says it so much better. In the rant, I mean, not the comic. I don’t think people who didn’t like the movie are stupid, but I do think that people who didn’t like the movie solely or primarily because it wasn’t identical to the book are being short-sighted, given that Douglas Adams himself changed the story every time he moved it to a new medium.

Some things worked, some didn’t, but overall I liked it.

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This week’s issue of The Flash featured brief introductions to all of the reformed Rogues. The inclusion of Magenta on that team got me to thinking: she’s the only woman on either of the two Rogue teams. She’s also one of only three who have ever been part of the Rogues Gallery. Of the other two, Golden Glider had an in—two, really: her brother and her lover were both members of the group—and Blacksmith actually had to form her own team.

Still, they’re not doing so bad in proportion. It turns out there just aren’t very many female villains in Keystone and Central City. I’ve got 72 villain profiles on my site right now, not counting teams, and just 7 solo women. (8 if you count the second version of Colonel Computron, but who can tell under all that?) By my reckoning 19 villains have been members of the Rogues proper. (That’s counting legacy villains, like the original and replacement Trickster, both times, and counting all of Blacksmith’s team.) 3/19 is roughly 16%, and even 8/72 is roughly 11%, so women are actually represented a bit more in the Rogues than in the general Flash villain population.

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Studio Foglio has been posting the last few pages of Issue #13 (which ended on a rather intriguing clifhanger) over the past few weeks, and on Monday, they posted the first brand-new page at GirlGeniusOnline.com, just three weeks after they announced that the comic would move to the web.

Girl Genius follows the steampunk adventures of “spark” Agatha Clay through a 19th-century Europe littered with the remains of a mad scientist war, dominated by Baron Wulfenbach, who rules his domain from an airship. It’s an adventure/comedy, and if you like Phil Foglio’s style, you’ve probably already read the story so far.

Speaking of the story so far, there are two ways you can catch up. (Well, three if you count hunting through back-issue bins and eBay.) Studio Foglio is selling the first three collected editions (both hardcover and TPB) on their website, and they’ve also begun Girl Genius 101—reposting the original comics online, one page at a time. And of course there’s cast info, a FAQ, summaries—everything you need to get up to speed.

Let me just say again, I can’t recommend this enough. It’s good, it’s funny, and now you can try it out for free! (And if you really like it, they plan to continue releasing the TPBs, so in a year or so you can get it on genuine flattened plant matter!)

Girl Genius Online

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I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.

And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!

Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)

(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)

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