Category: Entertainment

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[Free Comic Book Day]I just realized I’d completely forgotten about Free Comic Book Day, which is coming up in just 10 days: Saturday, May 7.

This year’s books include the usual big names. DC’s got Batman Strikes!, Marvel’s got a team-up book, Archie’s got Betty and Veronica, Dark Horse has a Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith tie-in, etc. Plus there’s another dozen and a half small-press books. It looks like a pretty good round-up of genres, too.

The purpose of FCBD is to introduce people to comics. A lot of people still think comics are just for kids, or just super-heroes, or unsuitable for kids, etc. A lot of people don’t know where to find comics. (Check out the store locator if you fall into this group.) And a lot of people just don’t want to spend $3.00 for a 24-page comic book when they could spend it on renting a movie, or saving up for a video game, or—let’s face it—lunch. The promo books put out for Free Comic Book day are a sampler, ranging from kid-friendly super-heroes, teen dramas, and Disney cartoons to the more story– or art-driven books aimed at adults. In other words: something for everyone.

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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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Standard yellow diamond road sign on a post, featuring a silhouette of a long-necked bird. Below it is a smaller, rectangular sign reading NENE XING. Leaning against the base is an orange-and-white portable traffic barrier with another yellow diamond caution sign, this one with a more detailed line art drawing of a goose and a much smaller gosling, labeled SLOW above and NENE XING below.The Nene (roughly nay-nay), a.k.a. the Hawaiian Goose, is Hawaii’s state bird. It’s also endangered. There’s supposed to be a (comparatively) large population in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, but we didn’t see a single one all week. All we saw were a zillion of these signs warning us to avoid hitting them. Maybe it was the wrong time of year, the wrong time of day, or they’re all hiding away from the road.

They warn you not to feed the Nenes either. The concern is that it will encourage them to hang out near roads where they’re more likely to be killed. This reminds me of another bird we did see a lot of. Whatever it was, they were either very stupid or very confident in drivers’ abilities to avoid them, because they would just amble across the road, pausing occasionally, making no effort to dodge the cars zooming at them at 35, 45, or 55 MPH. It was several days before we saw one actually bother to fly a few feet!

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Here’s a candidate for Engrish.com if I ever saw one… except it’s aimed at the US market. This is from the back of a small metal Justice League figurine:

Warning: Small parts may be generated

OK, I understand what they’re saying, it could break into small parts that could be a choking hazard. But the phrasing is awkward at best, and sounds like it belongs in a tech manual, not on a simple toy.

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