- Walk the ancient streets of Pompeii with Google Maps.
- Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers’ Heads by 2020. Well of course they do. [via]
- “People with sharper senses of smell really have a nose for relating to others’ emotions, new research suggests. [via]
- Empty L.A. They’re impressive images, though I’ll admit I’m not familiar enough with Los Angeles to know how crowded these locations are normally. [via]
- And finally, 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee. [via]
photos
Wednesday various
- The most controversial magazine covers of all time [via]
- Meanwhile, and incidentally NSFW, Sean Lennon recreates his parents’ famous Rolling Stone cover. Personally, I find the new photo to be exceptionally boring and actually a weird reversal of John and Yoko’s original. There’s also maybe something a little creepy about their son recreating that photo, especially if the naked woman holding on to him here is some kind of stand-in for, or commentary on, Yoko Ono. But in general, I just find it pretty uninspired.
- The Origin of Glenn Beck. The more things change…
- Hot on the heels of charges of sexism in certain science fiction anthologies comes word that it might also be a problem in the horror genre as well.
- And finally, hey! My sister is going to Mars — I mean Sydney, Australia — for her honeymoon!
Wednesday various
- Patton Oswalt on the joy of failure:
I never want to get to a point where I feel like I’m done. Or like I got it. You always want to have that, “Oh shit, this wall just collapsed, and there’s a whole room behind it to explore.â€
I posted a quote from the interview just the other day, but I think the whole thing’s worth checking out, even if you’re not immediately familiar with Oswalt’s comedy or acting. I also like what he says about the internet:
We haven’t seen it yet, but there’s going to be a generation that comes up where the new trend will be complete anonymity. It’ll be cool to have never posted anything online, never commented, never opened a webpage or a MySpace, never Twittered. I think everyone in the future is going to be allowed to be obscure for 15 minutes. You’ll have 15 minutes where no one is watching you, and then you’ll be shoved back onto your reality show. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong.
I’ve read mixed reviews of Oswalt’s new movie, Big Fan, but I’ve heard a couple of really intelligent interviews with him and director Robert D. Siegel, so I’m eager to check it out.
- Fox rebooting Fantastic Four. This seems to be the new thinking in Hollywood: if your last attempt was a financial or critical failure — and the 2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer movie was arguably a little of both — don’t even wait, just re-boot the whole thing. Studios used to wait a respectable few years, time enough to slink away and let the shame and stink of failure dissipate, but that’s happening less and less. Eight years separate the abject failure of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin and Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the franchise with Batman Begins, for instance, while only five years separate Ang Lee’s Hulk and Edward Norton’s (not so incredible) version. The gap is narrowing — and with the recently proposed Battlestar Galatica re-reboot and this Fantastic Four news, the gap seems to be disappearing altogether. As Gerry Canavan jokes, “In the future franchises will be rebooted before the first film even comes out.”
Still, I guess one way of looking at this is that Hollywood is now committed to remaking movie franchises over and over again, no matter how many times it takes, until, finally, they don’t suck.
Although, as the AV Club points out, this may just be fallout from the recent Disney acquisition of Marvel:
Before Marvel settled down with Disney, it had tumultuous affairs with several other studios. With Sony, for instance, it had a baby called the Spider-Man series. And Marvel’s time with Fox produced several offspring, including film series based around the X-Men, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four. By the terms of that arrangement, Fox has the rights to make movies around those characters (plus Fantastic Four hanger-on the Silver Surfer) in perpetuity so long as it doesn’t stop making them.
This too-soon reboot, then, might not go anywhere or even be expected to go anywhere. It may just be a ploy to hold on to some rights that would otherwise revert to the Mouse.
- Speaking of the Disney/Marvel merger, while I think it’s too soon to know for sure what (if anything) this will mean for the future of Marvel, I tend to agree with Mark Evanier’s take:
This isn’t about publishing. Disney didn’t say, “Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!” They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them…..[T]he future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn’t mattered for a long time.
And while I tried my own hand at some Marvel/Disney mashups two days ago, I think I prefer these more artistic ones. [via]
- I worry that some future journalism students will see this story and wonder, “what’s the big deal with paying your sources?” [via]
- And finally, some terrific photographs of the same spots in New York City, composited into a single shot based on similarity. It’s a neat trick. [via]
Sometimes, April isn’t so cruel after all
Today was a pretty good day, all things considered. How was yours?
“Photographs, eh?” he asked him knowingly.
I played around with my new camera a little today. Here is my not even remotely tidy cubicle:
And here is our dog in the backyard earlier this evening. As it happens, it was his birthday yesterday as well, although he’s already ripped up most of his presents.
