After four drive-bys, I finally managed to get a picture of the Gondor street sign. It was far enough away that it’s barely readable (this is the native resolution on a 5 megapixel image — it’s not shrunk, it’s just cropped). Eventually I ought to turn onto a side street, park the car, and walk to a nice vantage point instead of just holding the camera with one hand while zooming by and hoping I get an image.
I’ve updated Living in Middle Earth.
You know how you see some numbers in one context so often that you think of that meaning when you see them somewhere else? Seriously: If you’ve spent a lot of time on the web and you notice the clock reading 4:04, or a price coming up as $4.04, etc., chances are you find it funny, right? It’s like realizing that someone’s initials are A.T.M.
Well, I was looking at the Star Wars Trilogy on Amazon and noticed it had 1394 reviews:
I saw that number, and my mind instantly thought “Firewire.”
(Yes, the question of the day is, “How can I make a post about Star Wars even more geeky?”)
Well, I picked up JLA Secret Files 2004 today. Not because I read JLA, or even Justice League Elite (I read the first two issues, but it hasn’t really grabbed me), but because I figured there’d be a good image to scan of the Flash’s alternate costume for JLE. (It’s odd to be using that abbreviation again.)
The main story, as it turned out, focused on the Flash dividing his time between the two teams as they work cases that turn out to be related. It’s an OK story, up until the end, which features the most boneheaded use of super-speed I’ve seen in a long time. Continue reading
For quite a while now, the always-excellent This Is True newsletter has been advertising writer Randy Cassingham’s latest (?) project: JumboJoke, a weblog-style daily joke post. I finally took a look at it, and thought I’d share the following pair of lists based on our political parties’ often contradictory platforms and rhetoric:
Now this is interesting: the Amus worm will verbally taunt the user using Windows XP’s speech-generating features. F-Secure has posted a .wav, and McAfee’s writeup has an MP3.
Oddly, Symantec’s entry says nothing about the speech. Maybe they don’t have speakers on their test boxes.
Oh, this is good!
You may have heard a few days ago that the latest MyDoom variant includes a request for work in the antivirus industry.
Well, the comic strip User Friendly has come up with the perfect solution!
Via PeterDavid.net:
To promote Fallen Angel, DC re-released the first issue as a free promo edition and sent it out to comic stores this week.
It seems someone’s already selling it on eBay as a “Hard-To-Find Retailer Variant.” In fact, based on the auction start time, it looks like it went up Thursday afternoon, within hours of it being available to, uh, “sell.”
Keep in mind that this has the word “FREE!” emblazoned in at least 48-point type on the cover (you can read it clearly even in the thumbnail).
Of course at $6.49+$3.85 shipping it’s already creeping up on the cost of the trade paperback ($12.95) that contains the first six issues. Anyone who’s just curious about the book and can’t find the promo copy would probably be better off ordering the trade instead.
This is the kind of thing you’d expect on Opposite Day. Selling something free. Marketing the reprint as a collectors’ edition. Heck, just targeting the collectors’ market for a book that’s more suited to people who actually read comics.
“We’ll clean ’em out the American way.
For something free, they don’t care what they pay!”
—The Engineer, Miss Saigon
