The Greatest Fan Film of All Time

Hot off the presses... I haven't even had a chance to watch the whole thing yet (it's 45 minutes long) but I like what I have seen so far. Here's the guy's blog who wrote it directed and animated it.

UPDATE: This is fucking awesome! It's funny, it's bloody, and best of all, it rewards people who have been reading comic books and watching superhero programs for the past 30 years.

The Greatest Fan Film of All Time
Uploaded by Bullcrank

Clearing Out Some Links

Here are a bunch of links (some of which my friend SSMW showed me) that have been stacking up, patiently waiting to be posted:

• Stephen King's 24 greatest rock songs ever. I have to admit, a number of these were new to me -- For instance, 'I Want to Help You Ann'' by The Lyres.
• A great wiki for the Marvel Universe.
• Free Documentaries dot org: Q: Who are you guys? A: We are just a few people that want to make a difference and thought putting all these films in one place would make a cool website and a good resource.
• "Baby Got Books" --
  

I like big books and I can not lie
You other brothers can't deny
That when a girl walks in with an big fat book
And glasses on her face
You're all thrilled, wanna talk to her quick
Cause you notice she's reading Dickens

• The What on Earth catalog has some fun stuff, like this voodoo doll knife set and holder.
• The Parallel Information Universe: What's out there and what it means for libraries: Regardless of type—public, academic, school, or special—libraries increasingly provide more people with improved access to a wider range of resources and services. Beyond the improved catalog, for example, electronic databases are superior to printed periodical indexes, digital reference provides expanded availability to assistance by librarians, and networked computer workstations in the library provide users with access to global multimedia resources. There's much more potential. That's the purpose of this article: to take a look at what's out there (WOT) and do a brief analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOTs) in terms of what's good, interesting, or desirable for users (including those whom we might currently label nonusers), libraries, and librarians and the implications for library and information science education.
• Looking forward to seeing "Fog City Mavericks" about the cadre of directors from the San Francisco Bay area, including George Lucas, Clint Eastwood, and Francis Ford Coppola. After I get a look at it, I am going to have to help bulk up its Wikipedia page.
  
• Here's where you can buy a T-shirt with a Venn Diagram that explains the vowel/consonant situation of the letter "Y."

Have Morning Off Work, Here's Stuff From Internet

We're getting our driveway chopped up this morning, so I'm hanging around here for the morning.

Items:

• If you get tired of conversations with people and would rather converse with your computer, this looks promising: For instance, if you're talking about the movie Star Wars and ask what the plot is, the system refers to earlier pieces of the conversation to retrieve an explanation of the movie's plot instead of giving a general definition of plot, or the plot of some other movie or book that was discussed before Star Wars. The other key aspect of SILVIA that makes it different, says Spring, is its ability to comprehend concepts that are worded in a variety of ways and produce uniquely worded responses. "You can speak to SILVIA using whatever phrase you want," says Spring, "and it extracts meaning. And on the reverse end, we have algorithms that can put [responses] back into human language. Sometimes we're surprised at the way SILVIA creates these things."
• Another defense of Wikipedia (one with which I wholeheartedly agree): The implicit assumption, here and in all discussions of Wikipedia -- which nobody bothers to make explicit because everybody knows it -- is that if you get your information from a non-Wikipedia source (the Encyclopedia Brittanica, say, or Eric Blair's immensely illuminating New York Times articles), you don't need to "tell" if the information is true. It just is, because it comes out of a book or a BBC documentary or a professor's mouth. In that assumpion, I smell more than just the Chupacabra's spoor; the idea that books are right by virtue of being books and Wikipedia might be wrong because anyone can edit it -- that just may be the biggest load of crap I've ever heard. In fact, it is a truly dangerous load of crap, because it asserts that the writing of books is different than the act of editing a Wikipedia article; that creating books is some mystical act conducted by holy creatures whose ideas are never spurious, unsupported or just plain crazy. Since when?
• Sometime around 1981 or 82 I said to myself "Self, if they ever make an Iron Man movie, they totally should use the Black Sabbath song in the movie." All things come to those who wait.

Items

From around the Web:

• Lots of funny Marvel/DC action figure skits.
• Similpedia! If you have a block of text and you want to see what Wikipedia articles have to say about the content, check this out. (Trust me! -- Via MicroPersuasion.)
• Also - Numberpedia? Will it work? Why not give it a try? (Via Words at Work.)
  
• Mythbuster Adam Savage on Blade Runner.
• Queen's 'It's a Hard Life' + 'You Can't Hurry Love'.
• Check out Stephen Colbert interviewing Andrew Keen. I thought Colbert was supposed to be the one staying in character as a thick-headed dunce. Keen out-Colberts Colbert!
  

Saturday Items

A few things to mention:

• I'm watching the PBS series Broadway: The American Musical. It's real good. I see that there is a Spider-Man musical that Julie Taymor and Bono are going to work on.
• I am disgusted at how stupid some of my fellow human beings are for passing on stories like this. Let me reiterate -- not naïve, STUPID.
• Here's an attempt to map out the Blogosphere.
• This lengthy essay examines the Semantic Web and looks for analogies to understand it. Excerpts: We have a great model for the Web. It's the page: text with images. We're all familiar with concepts of the page. It's clear, easy to grasp. I'd postulate we need a similar construct or paradigm or analogue for the Semantic Web. We have a long history with read-only text, whether as official public communication, or as unofficial comment. We also have a long experience (400+ years) of experience of a particular technology's deployment of words and images in a page - whether as an illuminated manuscript, or an early printed text with woodcuts. The one new thing added in the Web to the notion of the page - the thing that makes it a Web page - is the hypertext link. The link is really the only core new concept introduced to the page - and more times than not, that link's job is to links to another page. The translation from one mode of non web-page to the Web page is not a terribly huge leap. The link as a concept is almost what we'd call "intuitive" in its use... ...So, if the analogue for the Web is the page, what is the analogue for the Semantic Web? What is the familiar technology (like the page) plus the "new thing" like the Link upon which we can base a description of the Semantic Web as familiar, plus some (single) new concept to extend the familiar? And why is finding this analogue important? Part of the answer to that question may stem from whom do people in the Semantic Web community wish to attract to be involved as practitioners, innovators, creators, discoverers in this space? If it's the same range of passions and expertise that have brought so much to the Web from the arts, humanities, sciences, business and so on, then this question of model becomes critical.

Marvel Super Heroes as Clerks

Via Monitor Duty. Excellent!

And while I was there, I found this far-out action-figure short, featuring Daredevil and Elektra vs Reservoir Dogs, Marvel Thriller Zombies, and a whole bunch of other stuff!

Crappy Weather; Staying Inside to Blog and Do Laundry

Chicago weather is shitty tonight. We knew it was coming, so The ♥G♥ and I did all our errands this morning and early afternoon while the pavement was still dry as a bone. We went to the credit union, the gas station, and TGI Friday's, and then I did some clothes shopping (an atypical activity for me) and she got me a Fantastic Four T-shirt, illustrated comme ça:

Items:

• Timothy Noah of Slate discusses the potential removal of the Wikipedia entry on himself. Excerpt: Talk about humiliating! Wikipedia does not, it assures readers, measure notability "by Wikipedia editors' own subjective judgments." In other words, it was nothing personal. But to be told one has been found objectively unworthy hardly softens the blow. "Think of all your friends and colleagues who've never been listed," a pal consoled. Cold comfort. If you've never been listed in Wikipedia, you can always argue that your omission is an oversight. Not me. I've been placed under a microscope and, on the basis of careful and dispassionate analysis, excluded from the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever devised. Ouch!
• Here's Susie Bright on the Great Scrotum Debate of '07, a debate with which those of you in the world of publishing or libraries are likely already familiar. For those not in the know, the current recipient of The Newbery Medal, the Oscar of children's books, features the word "Nutsack" "Scrotum" on the first page. This accomodates those who enjoy objecting to books without reading them (as opposed to those like me who defend books without reading them) in that they only have a few paragraphs to sift through. Excerpt: Squeamish school librarians, screaming at a single word they deemed "offensive," have put the screws to a scrumptious award-winning children's book called, of all things, The Higher Power of Lucky. Have our public-knowledge custodians lost their scruples? ...This story has pushed the Flying Spaghetti Monster envelope. Ever since Kansas ruled against evolution, and our current President encouraged a world-view that was created in seven days, there is a sense among scientific and empirically-minded Americans that our educational system has lost its marbles. These people, including myself, are the majority, not the Sunday School of the Week Club. We're easily alarmed by any evidence that we've have been swallowed into a Jonah's Whale of a fairy tale that never stops spouting off.
• TBSATIOAAE has three thought-provoking posts on The Wisdom of Clouds -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Excerpts from Part 3 -- The thesis: The world is cloudier. Proposition 1: There are more people, objects and ideas. Subproposition 1.3: There are more ideas. There are more ideas? What a ludicrous proposition. For one thing, it’s impossible to test. Actually, it’s impossible to think. What is an idea? What’s an idea part, what’s an idea whole? How many “ideas” exist in Pirates of the Caribbean? How many ideas are there in the average email or telephone conversation? How would we count them even if we could identity them. It’s a completely jello-y problem, fraught with difficulty, and several times on the train back from Cambridge, I found myself thinking, "it's a very bad idea to say that there are more ideas. How would we know? ...The internet is a new urbanization. It changes what we think and multiplies the ideas with which we think. Come to that the internet actually makes for a globalization. Ready access to sites like Wikipedia and about.com allow us to deepen our understanding of any one of idea and to cast the net in search of new ideas. Even as we become ever more urban, I can be more global, traversing intellectual continents, sailing opinion seas that would otherwise have taken more substantial investments of time and energy. The internet makes me a citizen of worlds outside my own, and this too must multiply the ideas at my disposal. At the very least, it will renew the urbanization effect by which I am exposed to more difference and obliged to offer more explicitness. Access to people and difference of opinion forces me to be more explicit. Access to more intellectual resources empowers my internal hedgehog to cultivate what I do know and it empowers my internal fox to find out things I don't know, in both cases multiplying the ideas I call my own.

Marvel / Peanuts Mashups

Awesome!

(I think this one is my favorite.)