aaronace

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http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/021123.html

Teenage boy, explaining why he joined the Air Force: We've been around since World War II. We fought against the Germans and sank several submarines. We also killed a whale, but that's not the point.

--Bard High School, Queens

Overheard by: Sunny

20-something dude to friend: Ma-fucking-rines! The Marines! Man, I'ma join up, be a Marine, and go all over the world, fuck, and have babies. I'ma get laid and have a baby in every country: Spain, France... even Pakistan!

--50th & 8th

Overheard by: camillia*

Little boy in army fatigues hiding behind fallen tree: Pow! Pow! Look, mommy! It's the Battle of the Bulge!

--St. Mark's

Lady with Russian accent to salesperson in outerwear section: I don't like the style, it's not feminine. It's like for soldiers, or Chinese people.

--Lord & Taylor, 39th St

Overheard by: mira

Off-duty MTA worker to another: Britain? Whatever man, we beat they ass with... muskets and shit!

--6 Train

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/~r/pa-mainsite/~3/SByklMXaOsw/

Tweets copied by twittinesis.com

So how did I fall for the Bobtail? Two of them live in one of the enclosures and as I cuddled this little armoured fellow, he went on a quest for the warm. Little did he know he was about to hit the overheating jackpot. Not only was he getting cuddled by a Canadian who was desperately unused to the Aussie summer heat, but she was wearing two layers AND long sleeves on her shirt to keep the sun off her albino skin. Bonus! So he had himself more or less his own heat blanket. It was hard to give him back to his enclosure mate who was peeping (thinking that he was getting some kind of food that she wasn't) but rationality won out. It was going to be too hard to smuggle the little fellow back to Canada and too cold for his heat-loving heart to bear. He would have wound up peeping a phrase that wouldn't sound unlike a very small "Fuck off!"

I got to meet one of the endangered residents, Boodie. This little guy was all curled up and refused to move his head out from under his towel to look at me due to the bright sunlight. He's a Bilby and where once these little charmers nearly overrun Australia, they are now estimated to be extinct in less than ten years. The best hope they have is to be a captive breed, but between the feral cats and the mining companies *cough cough* who are stripping them out of their habitat they haven't got a snowball's chance in hell. I nominate letting them use my apartment as a breeding ground/habitat, but the idea of having to shake the Bilbys out of my costumes, hats, and pantyhose and so on is a little daunting. Of course, if I could train them to do some dancing and be entertaining the Aussie government may find some funding in their pockets for a protected area... They'd have to wear tiny little hats, though.

http://www.sjgames.com/ill/archives.html?m=December&y=2009&d=9

For best results, aim to accomplish multiple goals simultaneously.  In this case, the President seeks to create green jobs, which will lower unemployment, boost the economy, move America toward energy independence so we don't have to rely on oil from people who hate us, and protect the environment of the only planet we have to live on.  This is a terrific idea.


Mary Susan Littlepage | Obama Offers Job Proposals, Discusses Improving Economy
Mary Susan Littlepage, Truthout: "President Barack Obama has proposed increasing spending on highway, transportation and other infrastructure projects, as well as increasing tax breaks for small businesses and offering tax incentives to people who make their homes more energy-efficient. In his speech Tuesday morning at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC., Obama also said that small business, infrastructure and clean energy are areas in which Americans can be put to work while putting the nation on a sturdier economic footing."

http://whedonesque.com/comments/22597

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/16433.html

ICv2's sales estimates for November 2009 have been released.

Buffy #30 sold 49,155; the Dr. Horrible one-shot doing excellent business, with 25,326 copies sold; this ends up being ahead of Angel #27, which sells 20,731. Angel: Only Human #4 picks up 11,995.

In graphic novels, After the Fall volume 2 and Buffy volumes 4 and 5 make appearances.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/forbeckcom/~3/hTti2jL8MeA/

http://www.forbeck.com/2009/12/08/twitter-updates-for-2009-12-08/

• Everyone made it off to school and work today! It's the first time I've had the house to myself in two weeks. Time to work! #


• Twittered too soon. Pat threw up in the lunch room, then twice more on the car ride home. Got home and had to turn back to get Ken too. #


• Those who say a computer game can't make you cry haven't seen a kid lose a puffle in Club Penguin. #

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011956.html

First comes Cold Blows the WInd Today. It's a brief note on hypothermia. Very brief. Just a single screen. None of the really horrifying detail about blebs and such that I could have used. The take-away lesson is that cold kills. Don't let it kill you. The comment thread is over 400 entries long, and filled with good stuff.

Snowed In. A review of a book about the Donner Party.

Stop, Drop, and Roll. Winter time brings new hazards, including heaters that produce carbon monoxide. Some notes on same. Over a hundred comments.

Happy stuff: Cold Weather Drinks, including my favorite, Hot Lemonade.

Weather outside: Frightful. My local weather. Lucky me! (Hey, I volunteered to live here.)

Dashing Through the Snow. How to drive in a snowstorm. Short version: Don't. Longer version: If you must, then slowly, and only if you have good snow tires.

Snowday. Ah, storms past! We gots photos!

Fimbul Winter. From last year's Snowpocalypse. Over two hundred comments, and all of them worth reading.

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/021122.html

30-something blonde in office attire on cell: You need to tell Vanessa that she can't be on the show because she's not overweight enough, and s not unattractive enough.

--Whole Foods Market, Chelsea

Syracuse University girl, going up escalator: I feel like I'm in Star Trek! (begins humming Indiana Jones theme)

--Penn Station

Overheard by: Mickey

20-something gaysian: Yeah, he watches Hannah Montana so I don't get why he makes fun of me for watching iCarly!

--Washington Square Park

Teen: I watched I Love Lucy last night. She's funny; she's like the Jim Carrey of the 1920s or something.

--UA School of Music and Art

20-something preppy kid to mother: You know, they really should have a reality show about Midtown.

--54th St b/w 1st & 2nd Ave

Overheard by: Pedro

• 13:00 Constantly fantasizing about leaving NY makes me feel more creative and more alive. That's why I've been drawing for the first time in ages. #

At the recent Porto conference, the Geneva team not only reiterated their claims regarding the frequency of low-mass planets, but actually upped their yield predictions. According to a contact who heard Stephane Udry’s talk, the latest indication from HARPS is that between 38% (at the low end) and 58% (at the high end) of nearby solar-type stars harbor at least one readily detectable M<50 Earth-mass planet. This is quite extraordinary, especially given the fact that were the HARPS GTO survey located 10 parsecs away and observing the Sun, our own solar system (largely in the guise of Jupiter’s decade-long 12-m/s wobble) would not yet be eliciting any particular cause for remark.

http://drawn.ca/2009/12/08/favourite-comics-and-art-books-of-2009-johns-picks/

http://drawn.ca/?p=9809

Big Rabbit’s Bad Mood by Ramona Badescu and Delphine Durand

The most charming kids book I read this year (original review). Delphine Durand’s illustrations are pure joy, and could melt the heart of anyone who forgot how much fun drawing can be.

Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities by John M. Carrera

A beautiful love letter to engravings, bookmaking, and language from bookmaker John M. Carrera, Pictorial Webster’s collects the original engravings from 19th-Century dictionaries into a new pictures-only dictionary (original review). Pictorial Webster’s satisfies my hunger for visual list-making that probably grew out of picture book dictionaries from my childhood, and now extends to things like Blackstock’s Collections and the work of Tom Gauld.

The Gigantic Robot by Tom Gauld

And speaking of Tom Gauld, his The Gigantic Robot was another instant favourite of the year. His usual mix of subtle humour and minimalist drawings are used here to tell a parable about war, futility, and decay. It may not be a meaty book, but Tom manages to say more with 15 single-panel pages than some cartoonists do with entire graphic novels. Visit Tom Gauld’s website.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

R. Crumb’s visual, literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is certainly the most impressive comics project of the year, if not the decade. I usually try to avoid such hyperbole but, even though Crumb claims to have treated this adaptation as an impartial word-for-word illustration job, we must appreciate the context of such a book. That context is not only one of Crumb’s kingly status in the pantheon of underground comics–psyche-driven comics of sex, drugs, desire, and the antiestablishment–but a modern world in which the origins of life on earth are a highly-politicized battle between Darwinian Science and the Hand of God. In this context, a literal adaptation of the bible’s first book–a story of how we came to be–is a statement in itself.

Gig Posters Volume 1: Rock Show Art of the 21st Century by Clay Hayes

Quoting my original review:

Anyone familiar with GigPosters.com knows it’s the site for modern music posters. And with the CD going the way of the LP, and its cover art with it, these posters are fast becoming some bands and artists’ primary means of representing their music visually.

The Gig Posters book features over 700 posters, 101 of which are full-page. And it’s a true poster book; each page is perforated and ready to be torn out and hung on your wall.

It’s a terrific resource for how contemporary designers are fusing illustration, typography, and reinvigorating the world of the poster.

Naïve: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design by Robert Klanten & Hendrik Hellige

Inspired by the likes of Saul Bass and Charley Harper, the contemporary artists featured in Naïve all embrace the virtues of modernism and minimalist design–simplicity, restriction, patterns, and shapes–and even if the work was made with the aid of a computer, the pieces all boast an aesthetic that seems to say, “this was made with my own two hands.” Like the Gig Posters book, this is an invaluable source of inspiration for designer-illustrators and printmakers, featuring favourites of mine like Tad Carptenter, Matte Stephens, Linzie Hunter, and Nate Williams.

Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life (Popular Edition)

That brings us to Charley Harper himself. There’s not much I can say about this smaller affordable version of its larger, more expensive counterpart, that I haven’t already said in my initial review, but I can once again stress that if you had put off purchasing the original behemoth of An Illustrated Life because of its size or pricetag, you have little reason to avoid adding it to your collection any longer. Charley Harper’s work is modernist, abstracted illustration at its best.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

I’ll start by stating that I didn’t love the story, or the characters in Asterios Polyp. But I am a sucker for formalism in comics and artists that play with the medium itself. Usually, cartoonists’ forays into form-bending rarely sustain full-length stories. But in Asterios Polyp we may have the first true formalist graphic novel–a story actually about style and duality that exploits form, motif, colour, and line to their fullest, in a way that could only be achieved in comics.

George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth

Seth’s serialized story for the New York Times Magazine is collected here in a gorgeous volume, which makes the wait for the next Clyde Fans book a little more bearable. Mixing mid-Century Canadiana with death and the passing of time, Sprott is pure Seth through-and-through. The panels are rich in the warm, monotone colours befitting a tale of nostalgia and the oversized pages allow Seth to showcase some of the best-designed page layouts of his career.

Never Learn Anything From History by Kate Beaton

Fans of webcomics darling Kate Beaton finally got a book this year, collecting Kate’s hilarious comics featuring historical figures (if not historical fact). Kate’s expressive characters are up there with the best of Jules Feiffer’s work, and it is always a good day when my RSS reader gives way to one of her comics. Guaranteed to be the only book on your shelf featuring Tesla, Napoleon, AND Stompin’ Tom Connors!

Stitches: A Memoir by David Small

In this memoir, illustrator David Small tells the harrowing story of a childhood spent with unloving parents and the cancer they unintentionally gave him, and subsequently kept a secret from him. A quick but engrossing read, Stitches features some of the most vivid images of childhood to be realized on the comics page, and several truly stunning wordless sequences–appropriate for a story of a child who loses his voice, and finds it again in his ability to draw.

Monsters by Ken Dahl

Monsters barely didn’t make the cut this year, and only because I didn’t read it until just a few days ago, when it quickly secured itself a position on this list. Ken Dahl/Gabby Schulz’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel about herpes is a cautionary tale for, as Jeffrey Brown writes on the back cover, “anyone who has had sex, is going to have sex, or wants to have sex.”

Honourable mentions: Jeffrey Brown’s Funny Misshapen Body, R.O. Blechman’s Talking Lines, Denis Kitchen’s Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, and R. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics.

See Also: Last year’s lists: Matt’s Picks / John’s Picks

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Art, best of, Books, Comics, Illustration, review

http://playthisthing.com/gamma-4

Cactus gets finished making a vegetable smoothie, he then takes out the trash and wraps a Christmas present for his mother. He thinks, "I have half an hour until my girlfriend comes over, what should I do with my time." He decides to surf the blogs where he notices that Kokoromi is having another contest so he checks his watch, shrugs his shoulders and makes a triptastic, shader-loaded, splendiferous little joygasm, composes an audio track for it, sneezes, and then hears his girlfriend buzz the door.

Simply entitled Gamma 4, Cactus' latest is an exercise in baroque minimalism, that is, the game uses one-button (per contest rules), is fairly simple to play, and yet the sync of the music and the shiny, electric visual effects make it feel like a parade. Who would have thought that a game about dancing swastikas (originally a symbol of love) would be so upbeat and poppy? The game is being distributed only with donations, he can't release it for free until March per contest rules, so I'll tease you with some details. You have four symmetrical vectors that leave a trace, if they crash into a wall or a red beam they'll all explode, there are shiny boxes that you must collide with, collide with all of the them to move to the next level, press space to change the vectors 45 degrees. Basic stuff, and once you play through the levels the game burns pretty fast, but the real sheen here is Cactus' expert use of the GameMaker engine's visual tool-set, the quadrangular symmetry, and of course, the burn effect where past traces layer onto the blackness of the background. This is the style the man is known for, and he delivers once again. For an outside observer, the game appears to be a procedural visualizer, like an interactive version of Electric Sheep, for the player you tend to focus your eye on one quadrant, I focused my eye on the upper-left, which on decompiling the game turned out to be the basis, the rest of the screen is extrapolated procedurally.

This game is worth the price of $whatever-you-want-to-pay. I dontated $5, which is the sweet spot for "premium" iPhone games, according to a lecture I attended, and this should most definitely be ported to iPhone. Cactus envy is trite but that doesn't stop me from feeling it.

http://www.peterdavid.net/index.php/2009/12/08/shadow-complex-up-for-spike-tv-best-downloadable-game/

• 18:11 Fannyy Cradock looks like a badly dressed tranvestite #
• 22:43 Head Shot moblog.net/view/916254/head-shot #