Coming to Kindle and Smashwords

Coming to Kindle and Smashwords
November 2013

Oct 25, 2013

Here Are 6 Seconds From 'X-Men: Days Of Future Past'
                 
In the future, maybe all movies will be Vines. Until then, studios will use Vine to tease the trailers that tease the movies. Cool. With the first trailer for "X-Men: Days of Future Past" due out on Oct. 29, 20th Century Fox release six seconds of the trailer teaser to Vine on Thursday. It looks good, if brief. Watch below.

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The Assassin's Gun: Internet Liberty Gone Way Too Far

by
From my National Post column: when anti-social behavior masquerades as "free speech".

It’s not just bomb-making instructions and Daniel Pearl murder videos that you can find online. Joining them now is the world’s first downloadable gun.
Meet Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, who posted downloadable blueprints for a plastic handgun onto a server in New Zealand. The handgun’s components can then be “printed” and assembled by anyone, anywhere with access to 3D-printing technology. Three-dimensional printers create shapes out of sheets of plastic. At present, those printers are very expensive, but undoubtedly not for long.
Within 48 hours, Wilson’s gun blueprints were copied 100,000 times. They were uploaded onto other file-sharing systems all over the planet. On Thursday, Wilson received a letter from the U.S. government demanding that he take down his blueprints. Wilson has said he will comply, but of course it’s now far too late. His gun is available to anyone willing to undertake a few minutes of Internet research.
Wilson now insists he was just trying to start a conversation about appropriate government restrictions on Internet speech. “This is the conversation I want,” he said to Forbes magazine. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing?”
To paraphrase an old joke, however, you get a very different conversation with a question and a gun, than with a question alone.
Wilson, a libertarian activist, calls his gun “the Liberator” — implying that it will empower the beleaguered individual against the forces of state tyranny.
But you won’t be wanting to take “the Liberator” with you into the field against Bashar Assad’s goons. Wilson’s gun fires a single bullet at short range with limited accuracy. It’s main utility is its ability to pass a metal detector. It is, in other words, an assassin’s weapon.
Cody Williams has declared his purpose on his website, Defense Distributed: “to defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute … such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.” Wilson told an interviewer that he hoped “to literally materialize freedom.”
Anti-social behavior will always be with us. It’s the accompanying sermons that stick in the craw
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Rom Coms that didn't make it....
rom-com couples
 
It's time for some real talk: Your favorite rom-com couple most likely wouldn't last in the real world. Below, we've assembled 10 movie pairs whose love probably didn't make it past the closing credits.
Think we left out any ill-fated rom-com couples? Tell us in the comments!
  • Sandy And Danny From 'Grease'
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    This couple's inevitable breakup has nothing to do with them being so different and everything to do with Sandy getting fed up with Danny using all her hair gel if they ever moved in together. Get your own, Danny Zuko. Get your own.
  • Alison And Ben From 'Knocked Up'
    whodudo.net
    Yeah, because relationships built on the solid foundation of a drunken one-night-stand always work out. (Oh, we kid, we kid.)
  • Blane And Andie From 'Pretty In Pink'
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    Why do Andy and Blane break up? Because any scenario where Andy doesn't eventually end up with Ducky (pictured above) is a travesty.
  • Ben And Elaine From 'The Graduate'
    mattsko.wordpress.com
    We think Ben and Elaine got married -- then promptly got divorced. The only thing worse than a meddling mother-in-law? A meddling mother-in-law you had an affair with. Yikes.
  • Dionne And Murray From 'Clueless'
    fuckyeahstaceydash.tumblr.com
    Sorry, guys, Dionne and Murray's love is just too tumultuous to make it past the twelfth grade. Unless Cher plays mediator for them for the rest of their lives, there's no way Dionne and Murray are going to stay together. Sad, but true.
  • Annie And Sam From 'Sleepless In Seattle'
    gifsoup.com/
    What spelled disaster for these two? That moment at the end of movie where Sam's 8-year-old son tells a taxi driver, "I'm going to meet my new mom!" Slow it down, guys.
  • Tracy And Dexter From 'The Philadelphia Story'
    http://yotb0ka.tumblr.com/
    Yep, we're going old school with this one. Tracy had the option of choosing a safe nice guy (played by Jimmy Stewart) or Dexter, the charismatic bad boy (played by Cary Grant) she'd already divorced once before. She chose the latter. Good luck with that, girl.
  • Zack And Laney From 'She's All That'
    butlercat.tumblr.com
    Laney is too cool to stick with someone who'd place a mean makeover bet on her with his pals. We're guessing she hightailed it to art school on the east coast, sans Zack.
  • Jerry And Dorothy From 'Jerry Maguire'
    favimages.com
    "You complete me." "You had me at hello." These two are going to run out of sweet nothings to say to each other eventually -- and it's not going to be pretty.
  • Edward And Vivian From 'Pretty Woman'
    mrhankey.tumblr.com
    Is it just us, or did Edward spend the majority of "Pretty Woman" trying to change poor Vivian? "Buy new clothes," "stop fidgeting!" "put a coat on." Rude. In our ending, Viv says buh bye to Edward, gets her GED and eventually becomes a kick-ass businesswoman in her own right
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Interview with MAD's Jack Davis about his Tales From the Crypt comic book days

at 4:26 pm Thu, Oct 24, 2013 • 2 •
Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says: "We just published an exclusive interview with MAD magazine cartoonist Jack Davis, who spoke to us about his Tales From the Crypt years in the early 1950s. Our article, which features a new drawing by Davis of MAD publisher William Gaines posing alongside the Crypt-Keeper, coincides with Mondo's Tales From the Crypt exhibition opening on October 25, 2013, in Austin, Texas.
It was Bill Gaines who gave Davis—recently honored in a 2011 Fantagraphics retrospective book called Jack Davis: Drawing American Pop Culture — his first break. The young artist, who’d been drawing since kindergarten, had published comic strips in middle school and high school, in the Navy, and at the University of Georgia. When he graduated in 1950, he hoped to land his dream job working on the newspaper funny pages so he could afford to marry his college sweetheart, Dena Roquemore.
“I wanted to be a cartoonist and get syndicated,” says Davis, who worked as an assistant to Ed Dodd, creator of the syndicated “Mark Trail” comic strip, while he was in college. “I figured I had to go to New York City because that was where everything in publishing was, including the comics syndicates. I took a year at the Art Students League in New York, and I’d look for work. I’d go up and down Madison Avenue, where I was rejected at the syndicates and at a lot of the publishers.”
But not all of them. “I saw a comic book one day and went down to the offices of Entertaining Comics, where I met the publisher, Bill Gaines. My work was bad, and they liked it,” he says, laughing. “They gave me some stuff to work on right away, and I was very excited about that.”
Soon, Davis, who was sick of being a starving artist, developed a reputation for speed, as an artist who could sketch and ink sometimes three pages in a day. “I’d have to be fast, because when you turned them in, that’s when you’d get your money,” Davis says. “The faster you drew, the faster the money came in
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Artist Anthony Howe Talks About His Stunning Wind Sculptures

By on October 24, 2013

Artist Anthony Howe talks about his stunning wind-powered kinetic sculptures in this video feature by The Creators Project. For more on Howe’s hypnotic sculpture work, see our recent post.
Anthony Howe Wind Sculptures
Anthony Howe Wind Sculptures
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Workwankers, Illustrations of Unlikable Characters in the Design & Ad Industries

By on October 24, 2013
Workwankers
Workwankers is an illustration series of the many unlikable characters who lurk in the design and advertising worlds. The series is by Joe Sayaman, Peter Cortez, and Sam Mylarczyk of Mizaplas.
Workwankers
Workwankers
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