Some really disturbing comic book fan fiction

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What do you get when you mashup gory zombie flicks with Marvel super heroes? Some really disturbing fan fiction:



What do you get when you feed the brilliantly psychotic Joker with Hamlet's dark soliloquies? Some really disturbing fan fiction:

Recent photos dump

I've been really busy lately with some of the projects I've been working on. I think it's important to do a huge push towards accomplishing my goals in that direction, at this time, before I miss the boat on something by procrastination. However, I also feel it's just as important to put everything to the side from time to time and sneak away, to make sure you don't suffer the trappings of workaholism. Work is meant to improve the quality of our lives, so naturally you want to carry non-work-related life quality seeking along with you in the times when you may be working harder than usual.

So anyway, I thought I'd dump some photos of things I've had fun doing recently.

I don't have any kids myself, but my brother who lives in the area has eight(!) of them between two wives. I don't think he's Catholic, but there's definitely something Catholic going on here. Anyway, my point is that if ever need to borrow any, I don't have far to go.




Rowan and Chloe hanging out with me at the office.



Rowan and Liam hanging out with me on the street.



Me, Kaitlyn, and my Dad at the Maysville Uncorked Festival. My Dad is dressed funny because he owns a Civil War-themed restaurant downtown and was out at the festival serving up samples of Carolina boiled shrimp (most of my family is from South Carolina). It's really the sauce that makes the shrimp so good. I'm not sure exactly what goes in the Garlic-Parmesian sauce (yellow bottle) besides the obvious garlic and parmesian, but that stuff belongs on store shelves. No bias there, either. It really is that good.

The Maysville Uncorked Festival, incidentally, celebrates the rather underplayed contribution Kentucky makes to wine production. When one thinks Kentucky, they naturally think bourbon. Most don't realize that before prohibition, Kentucky was the third largest grape and wine producing state in the nation. German immigrants brought much of their wine culture to Kentucky in the 1800s, likening the Northern Kentucky area to their own Rhine River region back home. In recent years, while trying to find a substitute crop for the collapsed tobacco industry, Kentucky has resurrected it's wine making image. Kentucky wine, eh, it's alright. I'd give it a few more years before getting excited.

Last Sunday, my Dad, my brother, and I went canoeing on Eagle Creek in Brown County, Ohio. Eagle Creek pulls water off the surrounding glacier-built hills and dumps it in the Ohio River at Ripley.





Shoving off. That's our canoe by the way. It's not a rental. We wanted to call it the S.S. Minnow, but thought that might jinx it considering the fate of the Minnow in Gilligan's Island. Instead, we dubbed it the S.S. Tadpole.




Dorks.




There's a marked difference between traveling the Ohio Rivery Valley by the slow boat and traveling by car. Much of Ohio is a seemingly endless straight stretch of corn, tobacco, and soybean fields. Canoeing the inner veins is a whole different world, shrouded in trees and twists and turns. It could be anywhere. Or rather, everywhere! I'm of the firm belief that if your life isn't at least fifty-percent fantasy, you're not having any fun. Eagle Creek was the Amazon River that day.





My Dad's arm is not sticking up my ass. That is an illusion. He is, however, actually kicking my brother, at my request. Slacker was trying to sleep.

The rock tower in the pics above is the old supports of a bridge that got washed away a long time ago. You can see them from US 52, and everytime I passed by them I thought, "You know, if I ever boat down there, I'm going to climb those rocks". I know, it's weird. I obsess similarly when I see the suspension bridge in Cincinnati, or a rock out in the middle of the water somewhere. I'm gonna go sit on that rock, that sort of thing.




Saw some interesting wildlife. Click the photos to enlarge. The first is of a crane that was camera shy, but out of five or so shots I finally got one of it sitting still. The underside of the bridge had birds living in mud-nests.




These are my favorite photos of the trip, at least from an arrangement perspective.

It's fabulous to steal music!

It's obvious that society has gotten to the point where it completely DGAF about respecting copyrights and paying for music when Cosmo publishes an article teaching girls how to pirate music.

YOUR FABULOUS LIFE
Shameless Money-Saving Trick

Having new tunes is ideal, but shelling out the cash to buy said music hurts. Call up friends, and ask them to burn you a CD of songs they think you'll like. Tell them you'll do the same. Once you swap, you can upload the CD onto your computer and add it to your MP3 player.

Scan of original

Um, yes, that would be illegal.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm no stickler for copyrights or anything -- in fact, I think I just violated them by copying the above verbatim -- but a mainstream magazine telling girls how to circumvent DRM by burning tracks to a CD, ripping it, and copying the digitized goods to your own MP3 player? That's kind of funny. Kinda like if one were to say, I don't know, "Shameless Money-Making Trick: Don't pay for Cosmo! Ask your friends to scan their copy and send it to you as a PDF."

In all fairness, maybe I'm being too harsh. After all, the popular women's magazine does put a lot of their content online for free. But they choose to, and the recording industry choses to DRM their songs. It'd be like Cosmo password protecting their site and the recording industry saying "Don't pay for a subscription. Ask your friend for their password." Something kind of seems wrong about that.

Besides, if Cosmo is telling all the girls out there how to be fabulous pirate wenches, how am I supposed to continue feeling mischievous when I do all of my digital thieving ninja-style? Oh, you can circumvent DRM? Pfft. Any twelve year old girl can do that! They're taking all the fun out of it.

NASA, please pimp your Martian Lander

I'm a little disappointed in NASA. When Pioneers 10 and 11 were launched, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin, a time capsule of sorts for extraterrestrials and terrestrial space travellers of the way, way distant future. Pioneer 10 is still out there somewhere between our solar system and its destination of Aldebaran, a star in the constellation Taurus. When NASA launched Voyager, they upped the ante considerably. Included this time was a gold-plated copper disc (above) containing phonograph recordings and images meant to convey the diversity of life on Earth, along with a message from President Jimmy Carter that reads:

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

Its destination is the Alpha Centauri system, a distance that will take 40,000 years to cover. The symbols pictured above are intended to instruct one on how to build a playback device for the recordings. A full explanation of the diagram can be found here.

Basically, we went all out on creating this monument of civilization, at least as far as the technology of the 1970s would allow. The "Golden Record" has even seeped into pop culture, appearing in numerous movies and television shows, weighing in as the "first contact" with extraterrestrial civilization in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Starman (among others).

So what's up with the picture below?



Do you see the little disc next to the American flag in this picture of the Phoenix Mars Lander? It's a mini-DVD from the Planetary Society. A mini DVD. Kinda looks like a CD you burned on your home computer, eh? Not gold etchings. No fancy cover graphics. Sure, it's a DVD and is said to be filled with messages in the form of sci-fi stories and art inspired by Mars, and for some reason it contains the names of more than a quarter million earthlings, but where's the bling? Where's the glory? Where's the I Am Earth, Welcome! It's a little disappointing. The whole friggin' lander should be coated in hieroglyphics. It should be graffitied from antenna to foot. We need to pimp our landers, NASA, get with the program!

Incidentally, what is the deal behind the quater million names? I should be honest and say I didn't go to the Planetary Society web site to learn the back story on that, and I'm guessing it probably has to do with a fund raising scheme of some sort ($10 to get your name on the Martian disc), but off-hand it sounds scarily like an alien abduction list. Here's a quarter million human volunteers for your anal probes, or some junk : ) Hope I'm not on the list. What's the Privacy Policy of space discs anyway?