The color beyond space?
Comic-al
I know lots of people who collect comics. The theory is that they’ll be worth something someday, but the fact of the matter is that I just don’t have the patience for collector’s hobbies — when I buy a comic, I’m getting exactly the face value out of it — a half-hour’s reading enjoyment, maybe a bit more. I’ve got issues #1-#3 for Spawn, Punisher Warzone, Wildcats, Youngblood, Crimson, Witchblade, and a bunch of other stuff for which I know as well as anyone else I’m never going to go though the research and effort necessary to get any sort of collector’s “payoff” for, nor do I really want to keep most of them — most aren’t much more than one-shot entertainment to me, and that’s fine — that’s why I bought em.
But why did I keep them?
Something De mentioned last week about how she turns over books to the Goodwill gave me an idea — I’m selling my unused game books on Amazon because they’re usually in pretty good shape and I stand a chance of getting a reasonable price for them, but there’s no way I want to go through the hassle of shipping bundles (and it would have to be bundles to be worth the pain of dealing with shipping) comics to some collector who then bitches that I touched the pages five years ago and left a latent fingerprint on Frank Castle’s ass on page 21.
So this morning I bundled up all the issues that I didn’t forsee any interest in ever re-reading (a good tip: I haven’t since I bought them) and hauled them off to Goodwill: the first two-and-a-half years of Buffy, 18 months of Angel, the whole Judd Winnick run of Green Lantern, and anywhere from 2 to 12 of various other series. 200 issues, all told, bundled together into ‘related’ groups that the guy at the store told me would probably be exactly how they’d sell them.
Which is cool. It’s nice to think that all the Buffy issues will stay together and even nicer to think that some kid who would never normally have a chance to read a comic at 2.50 an issue might be able to get 30 of them for 25 cents each or less.
It felt pretty good.
Danger! Danger!
Lost in Space? Returning to TV? And the project involves filmmaker John Woo and Buffy writer, director and producer Doug Petrie?
[breif geekgasm]
Yeah, I’d probably watch that.
K.I.S.S.
An interesting article on Slashdot about Word Processors: One Writer’s Retreat — wherein the author talks about the bells and whistles of emerging technology actually getting in the way of the relatively simple process of writing.
With a new novel to write, the time seemed ripe to switch software. I’d like to say I scoured about for word processors, but I didn’t. In my novel, one character would write computer programs. The story question was, What software would he use? It had to be vi. Vi, a Unix editor for plain text files created in 1976 by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. I’d remembered working with a software engineer, who saw no advantage to word processors and dismissed the “prettiness” of desktop publishing. He did everything in vi. Could I write a novel in vi? I decided, Why not?
Vi fast became — and remains, 100,000 words later — my writing implement of choice. Most of all, what I like about vi is something that is, well, aesthetic. I like vi’s keyboard-only operation. Vi doesn’t assault with helpful balloons or racks of toolbar icons. No, vi has a 70s ambience (no mouse, no GUI) that’s refreshingly clean. In that sense, vi is a treasured software servant. It works well without showy presence and respectfully stays out of the way.
Just for the record, I won’t be writing any novels in Vi. That said, I will point out that I’ve never written anything creative in Word for many of the reasons the author cites in the article above: I like my word processing program to be that: a processor of words… that’s it: no helpful capitalization, no auto-correct, and certainly no desktop publishing features poorly implemented and largely unnecessary.
Roughdraft is simple enough for me.
One Word
Against type
Victor Garber, who plays Jack Bristow on Alias, will guest star on It’s All Relative on Oct. 29ths Halloween episode as a ‘flamboyantly’ gay party planner.
I must see this. I just can’t imagine Garber (whom I really like on Alias) emoting for the camera in any way that involves more than two muscles on his face, so it’s not that he’s playing someone gay that surprises me — it’s the word ‘flamboyant’ that blows my mind.
Whoa
A Polish company has reportedly set a world record, stretching the range of a Wi-Fi network 110 Kms at 2.4 GHz, using an antenna developed by them and an Intel Pro/Wireless 2011 Access Point.
Suh-WEET.
(via Slashdot)“So it’s about Power?”
I place my hands around hers, gently moving her fingers to the correct buttons. “Open your mind,” I say. “Here’s what you’re saying with the TiVo, you’re saying: These are the shows I want to watch. I don’t know when, I don’t know in what order, maybe half of one and then half of another, maybe ten seconds here and there, maybe tonight, maybe a year from now, maybe backwards, maybe in slow motion, probably definitely skipping all commercials. This is what you’re saying: Hey, Mr. TV Man, I am taking your output and pummeling it into whatever shape I see fit.”
A really great little science fiction story. Or… is it?