K-Squared Ramblings

Arm Fall-Off Boy

Somehow I’d missed this one, though I’d seen people toss the name around (and assumed they were joking). But it seems that yes, the Legion of Super-Heroes did in fact once reject Arm Fall-Off Boy:

Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st Century #16, out next week.

Tori at Comic-Con!

I’d been trying to decide whether to pre-order Comic Book Tattoo (the graphic novel anthology based on Tori Amos songs) or pick it up at San Diego Comic-Con next month. Now I know.

Colleen Doran reports that Tori Amos will be signing the book on Saturday. Tickets for the signing — just 200 of them — will be given to people who purchase the book at the con (limited each day, so that they don’t all go on Wednesday).

She’ll also be on a panel on Saturday from 11:30–12:30. Here’s hoping DC doesn’t schedule a “What’s really happening with the Flash” panel at the same time, ’cause if they do, I’m skipping the Flash news. Someone’ll post it online. (Oh, wait…)

I am so looking forward to this…

B5 Script Series Shutting Down

I just got an email with the reminder that J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 Script Book Series is going out of print at the end of the month. Monday, June 30 is the last day.

It’s hardly a surprise, since the series was always advertised as a limited edition.

The weird thing is that they’re also shutting down the related store, with all the quote merchandise, until August. Presumably that includes the Londo/G’Kar campaign signs as well.

Meanwhile, the companion series, Other Voices, with scripts and commentary by the other writers who worked on the show, just released the second book. (To give you an idea of just how much of B5 JMS wrote, his scripts take up 14 volumes. The others add up to just 3.) It’s been interesting to compare the different styles of commentary. Some wrote epics, some did Q&A or interview-style introductions, and David Gerrold simply wrote half a page about why he resisted writing “Believers,” and what he did when he realized exactly why they wanted him to write it.

I hate to admit it, but I’ve only just started reading the bonus volume of the original set last weekend (in between bouts of re-reading The Ringworld Throne and writing). After so many years wondering “what would have happened if Sinclair had stayed?” you’d think I’d be in a bigger hurry to find out. Okay, I was busy with the whole moving thing, and then unpacking, and then trying to catch up on a fan site, and then trying to launch a blog, and I keep getting sucked into comic forums…

I think I need to sleep more.

Surrounded!

Upgrade Priorities

TigerDirect keeps sending me ads for widescreen LCD monitors. I’d love to pick up a 22″ widescreen (right now I’ve got a 17″ LCD that runs 1280×1024), but my computer is in much more need of a mobo+processor upgrade. Especially since something on the system — and not the video card or the monitor — went bad recently and is preventing it from running at any resolution higher than 1024×768, leaving me stuck with a blurry screen on the monitor I’ve got. So I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of a new monitor anyway.

I’m putting that off mainly because I need to do make the time to research what I’m going to get. I’ve narrowed it down to a dual-core AMD, but then I have to balance which processor, motherboard, and memory to get.

Also, at this point, I may as well go 64-bit, which is going to mean reinstalling Fedora. Though in theory I should be able to run the 32-bit OS to start with, which means I could do the hardware upgrade one weekend, and the OS reinstall the next.

The other tech upgrade I’m desperate to get is a new phone. While my ideal phone doesn’t quite exist yet, I’d really like something with better mobile internet access than my RAZR V3T — particularly with Comic-Con coming up next month. They’re usually good at keeping you informed of scheduling changes (unlike Wizard World), but now that I’ve got SpeedForce.org, I’d like to be able to do at least minimal blogging from the convention floor rather than waiting until I get back to the hotel. Posting by email doesn’t cut it, and even with the WPhone Plugin providing a stripped-down admin interface, half the time the built-in browser tells me it can’t display the page. I may bite the bullet and pay T-Mobile the extra $20/month for a data plan so that I can run Opera Mini.

On the plus side, I’ve at least found a way to post photos directly using Flickr.

Pack of Sundogs

Last Wednesday, on my drive home from work, I spotted a sundog on the way home from work. I finally snapped it when I pulled into the parking lot at Trader Joe’s.

The picture on the left was the best of the set, with the best contrast. The red is clearly visible on the end toward the sun, and the reflection is clearly brighter than the surrounding clouds. The one on the right is actually two minutes earlier, and isn’t as good — except that it looks like there are two sundogs (something I hadn’t noticed when I took the picture). Presumably there was a gap in the cloud of ice crystals, and one half or the other drifted out of alignment.

Coincidentally, that was the same day that aeryncrichton sent me a link to these sky phenomena photos. They’ve got several halos, a pair of auroras, a double rainbow with supernumeraries, and a photo of star trails (which is technically a photographic artifact, but still looks nifty).

Comic Con = Cheapskates?

It’s long been a mystery to comic fans why the city of San Diego seems so uncomfortable with Comic-Con International. After all, with upwards of 100,000 people coming in for 4 days, renting hotel rooms, buying meals and drinks, and so on, we must be giving the city an annual boost of extra income, right?

Okay, there’s the usual love-hate relationship between any tourist destination and its clientele. Plus some people get freaked out by anyone in a costume. And sure, some attendees don’t understand basic concepts of hygiene, or bear an uncanny resemblance to the Comic Book Guy. But most of us are normal people (and shower every day). And besides, we’re bringing in all this business, right?

Well, maybe not. The New York Times writes, in an article about Hollywood’s uneasy relationship with the con, that the con is “decidedly low-rent.”

No. 33 on the official tip sheet* lists the grocery chain Ralph’s Market as an alternative to dining out. The Bio International Convention in San Diego, a gathering of the biotechnology industry, with one-sixth as many attendees, produces about double Comic-Con’s $41.5 million in economic impact on the city.

Yes, that’s right. A biotech conference brings the city 12 times as much per attendee as Comic-Con. The city puts up with 6 times the strain on their roads, public transportation, and other infrastructure, for only half the reward?

No wonder they don’t like us.

So here’s a mission for those of you going to San Diego this year: Head down to the reservations pavilion in the convention center lobby at least once, and make a reservation at a nearby restaurant. The Gaslamp District is right across the street from the convention center, so there’s plenty of good food to choose from. Be clean. Be polite. Don’t order the cheapest thing on the menu with a glass of water. Tip appropriately. Overall: make a good impression.

(via Comics Worth Reading)

*Not that I can find this official tip sheet anywhere. Plenty of unofficial tip sheets — heck, we wrote our own a few years ago — but no sign of an official one.

iPod on Random

Caught “Weird Al” Yankovic’s song, “She Drives Like Crazy” — appropriately enough, while on the freeway. I never used to understand why he did the funny voices in the song, until I remembered the Muppets music video of the original song (”She Drives Me Crazy”), with Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog…and suddenly the voices clicked into place.

It’s odd that the intro on the title track to “The Phantom of the Opera” (the Andrew Lloyd Webber show) sounds so much like the MIDI file I found in the mid-1990s. I don’t know if that’s a comment on the quality of my old sound card, or a comment on how many synthesizers were used in the original recording. Either way, whoever sequenced that MIDI file got the timing exactly right.

Photo: Old Balcony

06-16-07_1338.jpg, originally uploaded by Kelson.

This is a picture I took last summer of the balcony on our old apartment. I used it to test using Flickr’s email upload and blog-posting features to upload a picture straight from my phone.

Unfortunately, it needed cleanup. The title (and post slug) end up being the filename, which I suppose I can fix before sending, and the content seems to get posted twice. I suspect the phone is sending both formatted and plain-text versions of the message, and Flickr is reading them both.

Anyway, it’s not a bad picture, so I figured I’d leave it up instead of deleting the test post.

Swoop Warning

Well, that’s encouraging. I mean, nothing makes lunchtime better than worrying you might be about to star in a Hitchcock remake.

Planetary to Conclude

Warren Ellis just posted to his Bad Signal mailing list that John Cassiday has started drawing Planetary #27! It’s been something like a year since Ellis finished writing the issue, and closer to two years since the last issue shipped. Wildstorm even released Absolute Planetary in a not-quite-absolute state, rather than waiting for a story that’s described as an epilogue. (I seem to recall hearing that they planned to add it in a second edition.) Edit: I should have realized from the page count, but the listing at Amazon makes it clear that this is Absolute Planetary Volume 1, and only covers the first 12 issues.

9 years is a bit long for a 27-issue comic book series, but Planetary has been consistently worth the wait.

Firefox Download Day is Upon Us!

Just a reminder: Tuesday is Firefox Download Day, and Firefox is trying to set a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

It starts at 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Saving Time (the Mozilla offices are in Mountain View, California), i.e. 17:00 UTC. You can use a time zone converter to figure out your what time that is in your own time zone.

Only full downloads count, so if you’ve been using one of the release candidates and want your download to be counted for the record, you’ll have to go to the website instead of just using auto-update. Edit: The Download Day page is swamped — just head to Mozilla.com for now.

And yes, Firefox 3 is good. I’ve been using the betas and release candidates for several months, and it’s a huge improvement over version 2!

Announcing SpeedForce.org!

I’ve just launched SpeedForce.org, a companion blog to the website, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning.

Since I started adding news items to the front page of Ride the Lightning, it’s started to get a bit crowded. I thought about converting it to a del.icio.us feed, but then I realized it really ought to be a blog. There hasn’t been a major Flash-focused blog out there since Crimson Lightning shut down, so I figured I’d step in and fill the gap. And I could use the domain I picked up last year!

I’ll be posting Flash-related news there, including a weekly round-up of Flash comics, as well as articles that might not fit into the existing site structure, and (eventually) reviews as well. Some stuff that I would have posted here will end up on the new site. Certainly Flash news, but I may start shifting more comics-related commentary over there as well.

I’ll be refining the look and features over the next couple of weeks, and cross-linking it more into Ride the Lightning. I might keep the current theme with a few tweaks, or I might try to match Ride the Lightning, or I might build something else entirely.

So please, check it out and let me know what you think! I’m open to suggestions as to content, design, etc. And of course bug reports.

TV Shows that Should be on DVD

One nice thing about the DVD market is that it seems like just about every TV show imaginable has gotten released on DVD over the past few years (to the point where, in some cases, it feels like studios are scraping the bottom of the barrel). But if you look at the full list at TV Shows On DVD, the percentage of shows available is actually quite small.

Once the trend had been established, I waited years for first Babylon 5, then Animaniacs, and then The Flash to make the list. I’m still waiting for VR.5, a show from the mid-1990s that, like Firefly and Drive, got half a season on Fox and didn’t even see every episode aired. (Okay, the premise was total fantasy wrapped in a sci-fi buzzword, but the concept, characters, and storyline were interesting.)

So, what TV shows of days past are you hoping to see again? I’m mainly curious about shows that have been off the air for at least 5 years.

Opera 9.5 Release Round-Up

Yes, Opera 9.5 is now available, beating Firefox 3 by just 5 days! Highlights include:

• Opera Link synchronizes your bookmarks, Speed Dial, and notes between Opera on different computers, and even links to Opera Mini on your phone!
• Enhanced address bar searches your entire browsing history, including the contents of each page.
• Security enhancements: malware protection, improved fraud protection, and support for Extended Validation SSL Certificates
• New rendering engine with improved site compatibility and performance.
• Opera Dragonfly, the long-awaited tools for web developers.
• New theme inspired by Scandinavian design.

(List re-used from my Opera Watch post on the then-imminent release.)

Link Round-Up

• Press Release: Opera redefines Web browsing yet again
• Opera 9.5 Changelog (Windows) — My favorite improvement on the Unix side is the 64-bit version for Linux
• Opera Watch: Opera 9.5 Released
• Opera Desktop Features
• Opera 9.5 – the next generation of web standards (What’s new for developers)
• CSS3.info: Opera 9.5 launches with lots of CSS improvements

Digg it or Download it!