Behind an awful Delphi forums register screen lurks The Warren Ellis Drinking Game! Shame, because it’s damn funny (OK, by the 20th or 30th message the thread drifts into a boring discussion about Garth Ennis and homophobia in Preacher).
Category: Comics
Prophet – Ex-libris – Le site de Mathieu Lauffray Cool-looking French comic I reached by typing words into Google (well, Firefox).
Le Parkour is a sport originating from France which involves treating the urban environment as an obstacle course. In other words, jumping about buildings like Spider-Man or Daredevil. It was used in one issue of Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency comic, and will probably make it into an episode of the TV series, simply because it’s so cool.
Ironically, in a comic (like the original GF story), it appears a lot less novel, because this is what acrobatic superheroes do all the time. On film it would be real cool (see the videos on the linked site for examples, including a BBC ad showing a man – Le Parkour creator, David Belle – beat rush hour traffic by jumping across rooftops, which looks like it was the jumping-off point for the GF story).
Round-up of weird links:
- Jungle girl vs. the Shmoes – a really bad comic, recapped, with pics.
- Isaac Hayes’ Three Laws of Robotics (via jwz).
- Also from Jamie Zawinski, a page where he’s collected a list of “inappropriate language” the lawyers removed from the Netscape Communicator source code for its release. As a bonus, he adds the comparable lines from the Navigator 3.x source. Sample gems:
/* "Object oriented? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" --Dennis Hopper */
// They'll never fix the damned warnings. To hell with quality:
// to make Symantec Cafe function properly -- piece 'o crap compiler)
// ok, we are formatting an image. turn off the buggy piece of crap feature
PissOnThisDocument(fHContext);
/* This function is a complete piece of shit - it takes a billion flags */
# define rename hpux_sucks_wet_farts_from_dead_pigeons
// Read in the user's sig and do Jamie pacifying crap to it
I could go on…
- A directory of heavier-than-air flying machines in western Europe, 850 B.C. – 1783 A.D. by Clive Hart lists various attempts at flight by hopeful fools jumping off castle walls with Chicken feathers glued to their arms, and such.
Fanboy Hell
Sigh. So on Tuesday I passed on a link to an article I found here. Now, I hadn’t read through the whole article, or the other articles linked to in the original post, or the comments posted on it, the first of which is genuinely disturbed by the very mention of this writer.
So I followed another link, and saw Doc Nebula’s rant about Kurt Busiek, which the aforementioned commentator described when he wrote: You have to understand, _his side_ of his ‘grudge’ with Busiek makes him look unbalanced.
. Elsewhere, someone called it truly fascinating in its awfulness.
Damn. It’s sad. That’s probably the most depressing web page I’ve read in a very long time.
And when I went back and finished reading the article on Superhero sexuality I linked to earlier, and saw how, as Doc Nebula himself noted in his conclusion, it has transformed over its considerable length from a witty and cheerful romp into a peeved and sullen rant about his least favorite bits of superhero comic tawdriness, and how he brings up something as obscure as The Liberty Project, dwelling on it just long enough to strongly reinforce the impression that he’s got “issues” about the writer (Busiek) and his wife.
So it becomes very clear that this guy I linked to, this erudite and well-read fan, is, well, a Dark One.
But then, reading Sheldon Teitelbaum’s account of Harlan Ellison’s “feud” with him over here (For 15 years, perhaps longer, the ”shrying” Svengali of Sherman Oaks swings headless chickens about his pointed head while cursing my name in French fanzines and in prologues to failed screenplays.
), I guess the lure of the Dark Side is ever-present in the geek lifestyle.