It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Today is Blogathon 2002. Short form: participants update every half an hour for 24 hours straight. People sponsor them. Charities get money. Noble!
I happened on the highlight list, which took me to the point of this entry, Diary of a Mad Monk. The guy is planning on 24 biographies of Roman Catholic Saints. The first few entries rock.
This is possibly my favorite blog ever: Pru’s Psychic Spy Training Facility. There’s something tremendously charming about a remote viewing class taught via weblog.
Aimee Mann has announced her new album, Lost in Space, which excites and pleases me beyond all measure. Except not quite all measure, because the discovery that she has put the entire thing up on her Website (Flash, Windows Media, and RealAudio streams only) excited and pleased me even more. So I have at least one point from which to measure my joy.
I blame the tone of that on glenn mcdonald, whose online record review column The War Against Silence is near and dear to my heart. I’d just been reading him to see if he had reviewed Ms. Mann’s latest output. No such luck, although he was as distressed by the new Bob Mould as I am. I’ll have to give Modulate another listen with his comments in mind. In the meantime, if you’re an old school Mould fan who was thinking about his new records, you might want to stick to LiveDog98, as the other two are rather… full of synths and drum loops. They might grow on me. Haven’t yet.
I have nobody but myself to blame for the length of that last paragraph. There is some degree of connection between Aimee Mann and Bob Mould, however. They’re both charter members of United Musicians.
Anyhow, make sure to poke around for the animated stars on Aimee Mann’s site; they contain the two bonus songs from the extra CD you get if you preorder her new album today. Oh, and her Website is entirely Flash, so be warned.
Addendum as of 8/27: this page turns up rather high in certain Google searches, so I went ahead and wrote a brief review to perhaps satisify anyone who got here in such a manner.
The day of typographical entries may never end, but I really like this site on writing systems. It includes both Klingon and Romulan. Good stuff.
Note to self: reinstall the RSS feed when the guy releases the more stable version. Current version is tanking on the Gaming Report feed, which causes my index page to not rebuild, which makes the Baby Jesus cry.
The perils of finding a good typography blog is an entire morning spent on reading cool articles like the one I just found on the erotics of type. Might be one of those days. (Not worksafe.)
Every now and then I find one of those tasty indie fontdesigner sites and wind up spending half an hour downloading a bunch of free fonts and yeah.
“This font was started with the idea, “Make that cool ‘m’ that you see in magazines sometimes. Make a whole font out of it!!” So I did, and it was drab. Meanwhile, a new idea is creeping around. “Make it 2 lines thick, you love to make fonts like that!” So I did. Then, it was not so drab. I named this baby Supreme, because sometimes when you throw spectacular names on so-so fonts, people get all raged up to download them. But this font is not so-so, it is the most. You couple that with the name, and geez, you know what I’m talking about!!”
So Fontalicious is good and I should not forget about it. Like I’m ever going to use any of these. But so pretty!
I’m a total slut for typefaces, so I really couldn’t resist Behind the Typeface Presents: Cooper Black. It’s a big Flash file, around 3 megs, but IMHO well worth it. And actually kind of informative as well as being funny, since I find it interesting to think about how a hot design concept such as a typeface goes from fresh to overused.
Jess Nevins has, impressively, already annotated League of Extraordinary Gentlemen v2 #1. Quick work, that. I’ve linked to the version on Enjolrasworld.com because Jess’ site is overtasked at the moment (ah, Geocities) and because Enjolrasworld archives all the comic book annotations available. Which is darned impressive.
Reign of Fire was bad on so many levels. It was good on one level: exceptional effects. But the people were stupid, they had stupid plans, the biology was fairly insulting, and just oh geeze.
I’m not really the type to bitch about military deployment flaws and so on; I’m not a military history buff and I’d be a poor strategist. Same goes for my biological knowledge, actually. So when I realize I’m shifting uncomfortably in my seat due to the flaws, and when I realize that the logical holes have eaten up the fabric of story and I can’t care what happens to the characters because I don’t believe they could possibly wiggle themselves into their on-screen situation, it’s a bad sign.
The dragons were exceedingly pretty, and there were three excellent scenes involving oral tradition.