Rarely does my editorial troll uncover material that I want to refer to here, but last night I found this:

NEW WALLACE AND GROMIT!

Free! Online! Did I mention it’s FREEEEE!

It’s only a minute, but still.

One of my correspondents turned in this very interesting news: James Sturm, author of The Cereal Killings, a founder of the Onion’s sibling the Stranger out here in Seattle, and most recently the author of the fascinating baseball comic The Golem’s Mighty Swing, will be authoring a Marvel miniseries starring the Fantastic Four, to be titled Unstable Molecules.

Sturm’s work fascinates me for the same reasons that Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay does: both artists take elements of pop culture generally recognized as fantastic or in Chabon’s term, “Escapist”, and rework the themes from fantasy and wish fulfilment to expressions of personal and social growth and accomplishment.

Anyway, I think it’s innerestin’, cuz comic books is neat-o.

All Roads Lead to Olympic is Anne Zender’s picture post on our recent weekend together in Seattle. She got her pix processed first, darn it, and there’s a lovely shot of Eric and me at Hurricane Ridge which makes me happy.

Earthy: 12240 points. I’d like to thank strategy and luck, and years of reading!

C’mon, show me whatcha got.

Eric, who’ll be here later today for the weekend with his lovely wife Anne, had an unpleasant urban event happen in his back alley yesterday.

He shares some impressions at the link above.

I had every intention of using the Trackback doohickey, but ya know what? It doesn’t work the way it should. So I won’t.

By “should”, I mean I can’t just use the Trackback URL as the link, which is certainly what’s required for widespread, casual user adoption.

Metafilter is, as many of you know, a community website which consists of audience submitted websites. Boingboing.net is similar, but more moderated in structure (a team sifts suggestions for posting). There are lots of others, each with their own approach and ethos, such as the blog-centric blogcritics, the activist Indymedia (invaluable for “radioactive” news stories such as protests, not as diverse as one might hope for analysis: anonymity and paranoia discourages reflective writing, generally) and the grandpappy of all of ’em, the computerly-oriented slashdot, which in turn derives some of its genetic code from usenet, a pre-web news and discussion environment well-archived at groups.google.com.

D’you remember on “Millionaire” how accurate the audience was? I read somewhere that on the show, in 80% of the cases where the audience was polled on the correct answer to the posed question, the audience was correct. Metafilter is like that. To a varying extent, the rest of these sites are was well. The information presented is fragmentary and holographic, and you, the observer of the audience interaction, must assemble the data into your own picture.

The sites express the theory and practice of democracy, the thesis that we all collectively are able to make decisions together that are the least hurtful for the most of us.

Sometimes the reactive power of the collaborative sites is astonishing. Do you recall that big winner for the evening news a short while ago, the angry mom smacking her kid around near an SUV that was taped on a security camera? The day the story broke, there was a thread on MeFi that shortly included a detailed, knowledgeable discussion of the possibility that the woman and her daughter were Irish Travellers, a gypsy-like culture that was able to transplant lifestyle, controversy, and tradition to the United States.

I’d never heard of the Travellers before the MeFi thread. The family’s heritage as Travellers or not is not germane, particularly, to the news story – woman strikes child – and this was only tangentially mentioned in the professional news coverage a few days later.

This is not a unique experience – and it happens on Slashdot frequently as well. Mind you, these sites can be wrong as hell; they don’t offer the same kind of apparatus that professional news sources do. But when they are right, they are right more informatively and faster, it seems to me, than conventional news sources.

Personally, I adore MetaFilter and boingboing the mostest. Metafilter in particular, with its huge userbase (over 15000) is something I ping at least daily, often both morning and night.

I have yet to reflect on this to the point that I can effectively write about it as a discrete topic, but MeFi and boingboing between them, in conjunction with blog sites (that’s many of you, dear reader) and the NYT website, to a lesser extent – it gets used for specific coverage of a topic I want old-style validated reportage on – has replaced my daily paper as the main way I follow unfolding events in the world.

Well, that, and the Daily Show.

I still read the paper, but I kind of buzz through it for orientation, then I read MeFi, then boingboing, then you guys, then the Times, and then I start my news troll for Cinescape, keeping in mind interesting material I saw in the other four places as I look at the entertainment press.

Oh yeah, Google News is right on the verge of being my daily international page. One aspect of it that I perceive is it appears to skew coverage based on where morning is: if you read it when it’s 3am in the UK, you’ll get all the UK’s morning site updates, for example.

Hm, interestingly, that means that without a doubt I am consuming far more news on a daily basis than at any other time in my life.

Even more interestingly, my job is to add to that stream of info while at the same time filtering it for Cinescape’s audience, which I understand to be (online at least) very entertainment-industry in composition.

Uhm, far out. Like.

Heather‘s been invaded by a confused bird.

Hilarious! Perhaps next time, the male of the species, loong feathers and all!

Ihnatko on some bands from the sixties.

See, I told you that you didn’t have to be a Mac techie to find him amusing!

(Dear God, I can spell the man’s last name without checking now.)

I’d been thinking I needed to point out some of the new links over in my sprawled out collection of blogrolls over there, and the latest of Paul’s occasional summarization entries reminded me of this.

So, to wit:

Griff’s ultramicroscopic generally publishes the harebrained reflections of this funny Texian designer. Since I’ve read him, he’s, among other things, proposed that toilet seats are the cleanest surface in the house, noted that his proper nickname may be “Tater-Head”, and of course, offered a reflection on the particular value of olfactory stimuli with regard to bacon cheesburgers. I’d hazard a guess that he’s a big Farrelly Bros. fan. (How’d’ya spell that?)

Do not drink Coke while reading lest you suffer the dreaded snort-attack.

Scott Chaffin’s The Fat Guy (another Texian) has been noted previously here, I think. I enjoy reading it because Scott is prone to neanderthal outbursts of conservatism which he immediately doubts, in smaller type, beneath them. He’s also very funny. The tension between his dead-set certainties and immediate uncertainty absolutely humanizes his presentation, makes him a better read than, say, The Economist or P. J. O’Rourke.

I’m interested in what Scott has to say precisely because he shares his process of perception, whereas when I make the effort (it’s rare, because I get so worked up) to read one of the professional conservatives, I just want march over to their house and punch them repeatedly in the face. I don’t learn anything from that experience, while I do from Scott’s writing. How can I put this? Scott’s writing is lower-case-d democratic, and in my book, that’s a good thing.

He also subscribes to the “leave it be” blogging school, so you can, for example, follow his experience of and reactions to the supposed discovery of weapons-grade nuclear materials by the Turks last week. He’s cooled off a bit here, and then gets the news there were no radioactive materials involved.

I understand he’s in the market for a good tin-foil hat.

Back when I was unfolding that tragedy for y’all, I was happy to find that well-known Macintosh funnyman Andy Ihnatko had revivified his website with a creaking, clanking homebrewed blog apparatus. He’s been posting semi-reg’lar since then, and boy is he funny. I think he’s even funny of you’re not a Mac techie. But how the hell would I know?

Also added that week was Brian Sobolak’s Planetary Delight, in which Mr. Sobolak reflects. Brian was the first person I did not know to write in response to my work that week. His writings reflect what I take to be some wrestling with intermittent depression, something I’m familiar with. It’s interesting, to me, to read his entries because of the familiar ring they have on the subject. The experience of looking at the world and seeing nothing in it that renders pleasure, only reminders of suffering, while at the same time simply shrugging about the perception, is, well, familiar.

Finally, Brian recommended the Amazing K’s Driving through Nebraska, which I heartily second. While K’s compositional style is a bit unpolished for the web (no short paragraphs separated by white space here), his writings are densely allusive and frickin’ laugh-out-loud HILARIOUS.

The density of the postings is such that the effect is overhearing that kind of nutty bohemian-of-all-trades who mumbles in the corner at your favorite coffeeshop. It turns out he’s not so nutty, he’s just had a LOT of espresso, and his stream-of-consciousness runs to, among other things, comparing his dog’s waste-voiding practices to the compositional techniques of Gustav Mahler and Wagner. In fact, his essays tend to be too dense to easily cite, and he’s absurdly prolific (on the day I post this, for example, he’s posted eight entries between 11:26 am and 2:17 pm).

Although there are others in the “new” section, they are clearly better-known and longer-established, so I’m not gonna fret about describing them.

So, ta-ta to you, and see you tomorrow.

Googlefight: hours down the drain. Endless fun. A new gambling opportunity.

via MeFi.

Ken kicked my ass six ways from sunday, btw, the bastid: Mike Whybark v. Ken Goldstein.

On the other hand, this is obviously a conventional wisdom meter: Rolling Stones v. Beatles.

So what on earth should I make of quality v. quantity?

I suppose I’ll take consolation in the knowledge that discernment v. popularity at least provides a sensible result.

I can rest my case with the inevitable Macintosh v. Windows.

nameneko, or something.

Yes, more cats.

Damn, I should tell my wife that this is turning into a, uh, cat-egory on the blog.

I remember seeing this genre of animal pics all over Nippon when visiting circa 1978. I found it perplexing.