On the prospect that Marvel Entertainment are planning to follow up Spider-Man 3 with a spin-off starring Venom:
He's just a psychotic monster who greatly enjoys killing everything in his way. I'm not sure how they plan to make him sympathetic.
You drop him in the middle of a Twilight convention.
Posted by: branded at September 29, 2009 10:17 AM
This seems to be turning into Weird Creatures Week. Yesterday it was the freaky-looking leopard gecko, today it's the turn of the Spanish ribbed newt:
Like the X-Men's Wolverine extending his claws, the Spanish ribbed newt slashes through itself with its sharp rib bones to create defensive spines, according to a new study.
Now I'm afraid to look at the internet tomorrow, for fear of what hideous, spiny creature I'm going to read about next…
[Via kottke.org]
I can't believe Chris Sims has been annotating the Anita Blake comics for three years now. I don't know how he keeps going in the face of such despair:
8.3: Finally, a scene change with some potential!
[...]
Anita has brought another animator, John Burke, to the city morgue and I've got to admit, a morgue in a world of zombies and vampires that has machine-guns mounted on the wall to prevent a mass breakout is actually a pretty good idea. In fact, I'd venture to say that it fills me with hope for the rest of the book, because there's no possible way that a story about corpses rising from the dead could have a scene where two people whose entire function is to raise people from the dead (including one for whom this is a primary source of income) could go to a place where there are a bunch of dead bodies and not get into some trouble, right? There's no way this could possibly turn into thirteen more pages of investigation so boring it makes Matlock look intense, right? Right?
9.1: Son of a bitch.
[Via James Nicoll]
I thought this was my favourite photo of the Millau viaduct, until I saw this.
[Via Flickr Blog]
Some of the petitions at the Number 10 Petitions site which have failed to attract more than 1 signature are real doozies. There are petitions to:
[Via Scaryduck]
Is it just me, or does this newly-discovered variety of leopard gecko look like something that should be starring in a low-budget horror movie?
You know the sort of film: in the opening scene, some luckless bastard with very few lines stumbles on their lair and before he can react he finds himself buried under a swarm of carnivorous1 reptiles.
Next thing you know, they've acquired a taste for human blood and a wave of them is sweeping down on the nearest town…
A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard. Impressively geeky, yet perfectly intelligible.1
[Via The Browser]
Scott Eric Kaufman on looking like a proper expert:
Should you ever be interviewed by The History Channel in your office, it would be best not to have the Wikipedia entry for the topic about which they are interviewing you clearly visible on your monitor. Have a little faith in your expertise or dignity enough to close that damn tab.
Ralf Metzger on the gap between dreams and reality:
Developing the pictograms for the Olympics is a dream for every designer. A dream that most likely will never become reality. Instead you end up doing toilet icons.
[...]
The toilet symbol
Admittedly, it doesn't sound much of a challenge but there's more to it on second glance. If you compare Otl Aichers disability pictogram with ordinary ones side by side, it becomes obvious how posture, position of the head, size of the wheel etc. make a difference between a confident and a helpless representation [...]
If you're thinking that there aren't that many ways to design a pictogram for a toilet door – I know I was – be sure to scroll down to see the last of the designs Metzger showcases, from London's Busaba restaurant.
[Via Monoscope]
Tesco's corporate communications department earned their money this week.
Daniel Jones, also known by his Jedi name Morda Hehol, was asked to leave a Tesco store after he refused to remove his hood. He's claiming that the tenets of his religion require him to wear a hood in public, as thus Tesco breached his right to religious freedom. The firm's response:
Tesco said: "He hasn't been banned. Jedis are very welcome to shop in our stores although we would ask them to remove their hoods."
"Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood.
"If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they'll miss lots of special offers."
Nicely done, though if it were up to me I'd have dropped that last line. Ending on the implication that perhaps Morda Hehol is a Sith would have been much better IMHO. But then, I suppose the firm felt it just had to remind us all that they have lots of special offers. You know, just in case we'd all forgotten that Tesco are a supermarket chain.1
[Via Feeling Listless Miniblog]
Steven Poole takes on the genius of Dan Brown.
But tell us more about the skull, Mr Brown!
He does. Yes, indeedy…
With a single excerpt, Alyssa Rosenberg adds another book to my to-read list:
And then there's the great tragedy of Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate which succeeded in utterly wrecking one of the best fallen angels to appear in contemporary literature, the young woman who calls herself Irene Adler in The Club Dumas, the Arturo Perez-Reverte novel from which the movie was adapted. Adler is unbelievably sexy, extremely tough, and beautifully-spoken; her dialogue is full of literary illusions that might feel pretentious in another author's hands, but work the way Perez-Reverte wrote them and his translator brought them over into English. For example:
"I know what I was told a long time ago. The rainbow is the bridge between heaven and earth. It will shatter at the end of the world when the devil has crossed it on horseback."
"Not bad. Did your grandmother tell you that?"
"I heard it told to a friend, Bileto." As she said the name, she stopped a moment and frowned tenderly, like a little girl telling a secret. "He liked horses and wine, and he's the most optimistic person I know. He's still hoping to get back to heaven."
Shouldn't work, that it does. Polanski eviscerated the character, and everything else about the book. I doubt this Irene Adler will ever get her due on the big screen, or from a lot of eager young female readers, which is a shame. She's fantastic.
Getting a good night's sleep is actually a lot more complicated than one would think.
[Via Waxy.org Links]
A trailer for a 1951 version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck, Peter Lorre and Anthony Quinn. Marvellous.
[Via MetaFilter]
A very clever (spoiler-free) review of Dollhouse season 1 by Amazon user the antiquary:
Ok, so the series starts off with Joss Whedon, celebrated writer-director-composer, except no-one wants to work with him, then he has a hit web show, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and he catches the attention of the dark and shadowy Fox Corporation. Fox wipe Joss's brain to make him forget that he worked for them before and they became mortal enemies. [...]
[FX: applause...]
I'm apprehensive at the prospect of a longer Mayo/Kermode film review segment once Simon Mayo moves over to Radio 2:
[Mayo said...] only "80%" of his show would disappear. His Friday Radio 5 Live film programme with Kermode will continue to run from 2pm to 4pm, giving him enough time to switch to the Radio 2 drivetime show, which begins at 5pm. He said the film show would be "big and sparkly and bigger than ever".
I've been finding their current Friday afternoon slot increasingly impressed with itself of late; way too much harking back to their many showbiz friends ('Saying "Hello!" to …' etc.), far too much comedy bickering when Mayo asks Kermode to define his terms or otherwise explain himself. I'd rather see Kermode given an hour a week to do his own thing reviewing and talking about films than see the pair given two hours to fill.
[Via Feeling Listless]
Charlie Stross, having been on the road quite a bit lately, has come to a depressing conclusion about the state of mobile computing:
The sad fact is, mobile computing is trapped in a local minimum – a sub-optimal point in the phase space of cheaper/lighter/faster from which it cannot escape without some corporate entity somewhere taking a gamble and launching a new hopeful monster of mobile computing upon the world … frankly, the situation has barely improved since 1999, when I was happily toting around a Psion 5MX. It had its drawbacks (it, in turn, had stepped back from the omnicompetent brilliance of the Psion Series 3, which was basically a real computer that did just about everything you expected of a desktop in those days and which you could stick in your pocket), but within those limits it kicked sand in the face of today's mobile gadgets. (And it's the direct ancestor of many of them; it's operating system, EPOC/32, is today better known as Symbian.) Bluntly, mobile computing devices today are crap. Here's why …
I switched from a Cambridge Computing Z88 to a Psion Series 3 to a Psion Series 5, then once Psion decided to concentrate on writing operating systems for mobile phones I went the Palm route (first a IIIx, then a Tungsten T, now a T|X.) Now that Palm have decided to make smartphones and abandoned PalmOS1
I don't need my mobile computer to play my iTunes library – that's what my iPod is for. I don't want to edit multimagabyte photographs, or create home movies on the go. I don't care about a built-in camera, be it still or video. I don't even need a colour screen, if truth be told, provided that the operating system and applications support a decent grayscale display. I'd like it to run for a fortnight on a couple of AA batteries, though I accept that barring a breakthrough in battery technology running for a full working day between recharges is a more realistic aspiration. I essentially just want the ability to do basic computing tasks on the move. Is that too much to ask…?
Gin and Titonic, anyone?1
[Via Making Light]