Too tired to write anything inciteful [edit: haha, maybe a bit inciteful, but not too insightful], but the Trillian bruhaha continues. AOL has forced 2 Trillian releases as many days (I’m sure Download.com is happy with the traffic that’s caused). And all this because AOL prefers to see IM as eyeballs rather than infrastructure. What’s interesting is watching people bitch and moan. They seem to not understand the AOLTW is a megacorp whose only responsibility is to its charter (profit!) and any largesse is weighed against the (primarily quarterly or annual) impact against said prime directive (profit!). Sound depressing? Welcome to the 21st century. God Bless Amerika!
Can you believe it? It’s Wednesday already.
Hmm, according to the Blogger Pro Post History Report (if your signed on to Blogger, this link should show you your own Blogger post history), this month (not counting this post) I’ve posted 94KB of text on my blog. Since I started using Blogger in 1999, that’s the most I’ve ever used it in a month (#2 is 77KB in March 2000, but mostly my posting seems to average around center around 20KB or 50KB. 94KB is a friggin’ lot of navel gazing. Luckily no one’s been reading any of this stuff, so I’m free to babble on, well, as long as I stay under 6KB for the next two days. After that, I get charged $3. Personally, I’m not sure if being charged/KB is the way to go. It’d almost make more sense to charge based on excessive updates/posts vs. post length?
For those with a taste of chocolate (especially with Valentine’s Day coming up), here’s something else for you to feel guilty about: How your chocolate may be tainted.
The Onion AV Club interview with Frank Miller has some really good bits. One of the more interesting (IMO):
O: One particularly interesting thing about your work is the language your characters use, especially in the two Dark Knight series and the Martha Washington books. How do you develop a realistic-sounding slang patois?
FM: The one in Dark Knight is the one I can really answer. In the other books, it’s just stuff I overheard or made up. But in Dark Knight, it all has to do with the town where [wife and colorist Lynn Varley] grew up. Her brothers—Don and Rob, by the way—were part of a bunch of kids who talked in this very peculiar manner. Whenever I heard it, I’d just go nuts, because I loved it. It was this very sarcastic mode of speech. One time I was in Michigan visiting the family, and I sat the two of them down and had them do it into a tape recorder, and I went back and studied it. Then I wrote my stories, and I would always show those parts to Lynn before I got it lettered, and she’d tell me where I got it wrong.
O: So the gang members Don and Rob in the two Dark Knight series are actually speaking a legitimate street slang?
FM: The way some kids used to talk back in the ’60s in one suburb of Detroit.
I’ve subscribed to Blogger Pro to show my support and appreciation despite the fact that I’ll more than likely be switching soon. Also with the full knowledge that I’ve been saying this for more than a little while.
Microsoft has documentation on MSDN of IE6’s !DOCTYPE switch behavior.
Addendum to yesterday’s thoughts on digital distribution: to clarify, my belief is that a buffet or library model makes more sense than traditional “subscription” pricing (or that “subscripitons” may work, but should include access to full archives, etc). As tablet-pc’s and e-paper becomes more prevalent, this will become much more natural, I believe.
Also, in talking with my co-worker, he validated my thoughts on the issue, and we narrowed it down to an implementation/infrastructure issue and explored a few ideas on actually making it work. We’ll see if anything comes out of it.
I went to the Golden Apple yesterday because I decided that afternoon that I really wanted to get DK2 for some reason. I ended up going there around 7:30ish or so and while shopping around, I found that they were having a 10/$1 sale on about 12 or so long boxes of assorted back issues. And not just crap, but some really really good stuff. I ended up spending about an hour (until closing) rooting around and picking up some issues. I went back this afternoon and went through everything that was left (it started on Friday), and ended up spending $31. You do the math.
Some of my finds included: Electropolis, Terminal City, and Mister X (all by Dean Motter), almost every issue from #1-50 of Sandman Mystery Theatre, a host of The Books of Magic and other Vertigo books, and also a bunch of later Valiant issues (long after I stopped collecting).
Now, the point of all of this? Well, I suppose, that I would buy comics all the time if they were 10 cents a pop. I would buy stuff based on their cover and try something new. This of course, is the point that Scott McCloud tries to make everytime he’s given a talk or interview for the past several years. It’s really too bad that the industry hasn’t moved quicker onto the Internet, as they stand to benefit even more than the Music Industry for several reasons: 1) distribution costs are much higher due to paper costs. Barring legalization of industrial hemp (did you know the U.S. Constitution was printed on hemp?), costs aren’t going to go down. 2a) the comic industry loses way more money than the music industry, 2b) the comic industry is much smaller than the music industry; both of these give the comic industry much more impetus to try a new economic model. 3) the comic industry is overflowing with content, the majority of which comes out regularly, and is serialized.
For every 1 collector, I’m sure there are at least 10 who used to read comics, but don’t anymore because it’s impossible to keep up / too expensive. Just imagine the possiblities having a library or subscription model on that. I mean, the ability to catch up on old issues alone would spur so many new / recurring sales. For those so inclined, imagine being able to add say, the golden age DC books or the early Lee/Ditko books to your personal digital library for your personal browsing. Books that you’d never be able to read otherwise. Personally, I think it would work (especially for periodicals), but hey, what do I know.
<p>Testing <a href=”http://www.exitspace.net/~mike/”>Mike’s</a>
<a href=””>MozBlogger</a>.</p>
OK, MozBlogger works great, it’s very spiff, however, textareas in Mozilla automatically literalize the HTML entities. Which is great, unless you’re trying to type tags. Any way to turn this behavior off?
I agree w/ k-lo that the new Chemical Brothers video for Star Guitar is very cool, but the lo-fi streams offered on their site just don’t do it justice, so I decided to put up a higher quality version online: Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar.mpg [65,360K]. The Chemical Brothers consistently put out really cool vids. Let Forever Be is just awesome (here’s the 11MB Quicktime from their site – I’m too lazy to dig out my mpeg version from the archives).