We went to see Scott Shaw’s show, Oddball Comics last night. Maybe a block away from the Acme Comedy Theatre, we saw this billboard:
It’s hard to see in the photo, but they’re touching their index fingers together. There’s nothing else in the center of the billboard, just empty space.
As near as I can tell, they’re combining Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf, a mirror universe, and a pair of Vegas showgirls. All of which adds up to a resounding: “Huh?!?”
Last week Peter David signed an exclusive deal with Marvel Comics. The contract has exceptions for stuff he’s already working on, like the Spike mini-series and Fallen Angel (both at IDW). The comments on that post linked to an interview at CBR, which had this interesting remark:
DC has been great and I’m very pleased and relieved, bizarrely enough, that they cancelled “Fallen Angel.” Had they not, I’d be in a very tough position because if they were still publishing it and Marvel wanted me to go exclusive, well they certainly wouldn’t have let me keep writing “Fallen Angel” for DC. So, I would have had to make a really tough choice—weigh a comic book I love against my family’s security and health. Fortunately enough I was spared having to make that decision.
It reminded me of the time I realized that VR.5‘s cancellation freed up Anthony Stewart Head to join the cast of Buffy. Or that the Sci Fi Channel turned down the B5 spinoff Crusade in part because they’d just launched Farscape.
I do wonder, though. JMS also had several books grandfathered in when he signed an exclusive with Marvel. Those included Rising Stars and Dream Police at Top Cow… and a Babylon 5 graphic novel for DC/Wildstorm (which has yet to be finished). I suspect the facts that it was a media license and a one-shot probably helped.
It’s also interesting to read Peter David’s comments about Fallen Angel and Icon. You’d think Marvel’s Icon label would be perfect—bigger circulation, lower price, still creator-owned—but IDW put so much effort into relaunching the book that he felt it would be wrong to just pack it in and take it to another publisher as long as they still wanted to publish it.
It would have been odd, though. I wonder how many books have, at different times, been published by both Marvel and DC? The only one that comes to mind right now is Elfquest. Marvel reprinted the original series through Epic in the 1980s, and DC is now handling the manga-sized reprints, the Archive editions, and new stories (still from Wendy and Richard Pini).
As I was about to get into the car after lunch, I spotted a full-circle halo around the sun.
I’m fairly certain it’s a 22ยบ halo based on the size. Continue reading
You’ve probably heard by now that AOL and Yahoo are preparing a system by which large-volume email senders can pay to get their mail sent on to subscribers. You probably haven’t heard that it’s not just pay-to-send so much as it’s pay-to-get-accredited. Senders pay a company called Goodmail to say “we won’t send spam,” Goodmail checks them out, and Yahoo and AOL use Goodmail to bypass their regular spam filters.
This, of course, hasn’t stopped a flood of knee-jerk reactions. (via Spamroll)
What’s funny is that this conundrum has been almost exactly like the controversy two years ago over Microsoft choosing Bonded Sender as an accreditation service/whitelist for Hotmail—knee jerking and all.
Back then I wrote the following article and never got around to posting it. Thanks to AOL, it’s finally topical again. Sadly, I haven’t had to change much to bring it up to date. Continue reading
Spotted the following in a grocery store on Saturday, three days before Valentine’s Day.
I think the holiday decoration/candy/card industry has started selling two holidays ahead. Christmas stuff was out in October, with both Halloween and Thanksgiving ahead. Here’s Easter stuff on sale with both Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day in the future.
Decoration-wise, there’s not much between Easter and Independence Day. Sure, people get the day off for Memorial Day, but the closest you get to a themed aisle in the grocery store is that you can buy American flags in more places. After the big Fourth of July patriotic blow-out (which of course is on sale by June), the holiday-industrial complex doesn’t really get going again until October—though back-to-school sales seem to be getting earlier all the time. I wonder when they’ll start going straight into back-to-school from graduation sales?
Last week I received a message offering a 30% discount on Norton Internet Security 2006. It claimed to be from Symantec, but the email address was at digitalriver.com, and all the links—including the ones that claimed to be at symantec.com—went to bluehornet.com.
Now 5 minutes of research turns up the facts that Symantec does work with Digital River and Digital River owns Blue Hornet. And it did go to the address I used to register Norton Antivirus last year. So it’s probably a legit offer.
But let’s think about this for a minute.
Assuming it’s legit, Symantec—a company that deals in internet security—is deliberately sending out offers via third-party domains, email and web servers. Depending on how security-conscious you are, they are either making their messages look suspicious or training users to ignore warning signs.
Or have you never seen spam offering enormous discounts on Norton products? Which generally turn out to be pirated. And I seem to recall—though I can’t find an article to back it up—that the bootleg copies are often infected themselves, or crippled in some way.
Given how many shady operators are out there, taking advantage of the big guys’ name recognition, you’d think the big guys would at least make some effort to make their own offerings look less, well, shady.
Monday morning dawned foggy. By the time we left for work, most of the fog had burned off, but we looked out the car window and saw a huge, billowing gray cloud hugging close to the ground. If this had been the usual fire season, or if there had been no fog to start with (or if there had been time for coffee to take effect), I think we would’ve both immediately recognized it as smoke from a brush fire. The Sierra fire in the Cleveland National Forest had started just a few hours earlier.
There was still fog around, though. Continue reading
