my.bicycle

Directing the new Star Trek movie? Young Kirk? Young Spock? JJ Abrams says it ain’t so .

Plush headcrabs from HL. Unfortunately, they're only 1/4 scale; they can make your kitty into a plush zombie kitty, but not your human friends. (thanks, monty)

The Worm Within —a tale of an American in Belgium who found a trespasser in his person. (...) but the beef worm could grow more than just a few meters; it would keep adding to its body, lengthening and snaking through the miles of intestine. I have it on good authority that, with the small and large intestines combined, it could reach the moon, loop it twice, then come all the way back down to earth and you’d still have enough left over to play skip rope with. New Tapeworm Fad Diet Sweeps Hollywood — The Weekly World News . “You can eat whatever you want and never worry,” confides one dieter who claims to have lost 73 pounds in eight days.

Marcus, at gravestmor, describes the film as ‘ Sin City meets Blade Runner meets Metropolis meets Waking Life ’ (though hopefully not the latter) – and, from the looks of it, I’d add Alphaville . —BLDGBLOG: Paris 2054

Google bought SketchUp a little ways back. As predicted, there is now a free (personal use) version of it available. There are video tutorials . How cool is that? Windows version available now. Mac version coming soon.

Stonefridge , a Google Sightseeing destination where Stonehenge is re-created in all its majesty with old refrigerators. ( warren ellis )

Wondermark by David Malki; 165: In which Opinions matter (This observation could not be any more brilliant if it had a searchlight attached to it.)

I want a War Sim... ...where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a ‘nuclear missile silo,’ only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage. I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another ‘orphanage’ turned out to be a NOD ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn’t level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier’s daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan. Every War Sim has a ‘Fog of War’ that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown ‘Fog of Bullshit’ layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it t...

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.” (Smedley) Butler came forward to the U.S. Congress in 1934 to report that a proposed coup had been plotted by wealthy industrialists...

As cultural critic and New School University professor McKenzie Wark sees things, today’s battles over copyrights, trademarks, and patents are simply the next phase in the age-old battle between the productive classes and the ruling classes that strive to turn those producers into subjects. (...) Wark’s opus A Hacker Manifesto brings together England’s Enclosure Movement, Das Kapital, and the corporate ownership of information—a process that Duke University law professor James Boyle called “the Second Enclosure Movement”—to create a unified theory of domination, struggle, and freedom. Hacking is not a product of the computer age, writes Wark, but an ancient rite in which abstractions are created and information is transformed. The very creation of private property was a hack, he argues—a legal hack—and like many other hacks, once this abstraction was created, it was taken over by the ruling class and used as a tool of subjugation. ...

Pandemic Studios, makers of Destroy All Humans and, more dear to my heart, Mercenaries , has launched a mysteriously named “ everybody pays ” site for their to-be-discussed Project Q. It looks to me like it must be a sequel to Mercenaries ...

Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. — Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials Over at Empires Fall , you can read topical events involving the affluent effluent that are currently enjoying power in America. It’s hard to believe that what should be a marginalized cadre of small-minded, grotesquely conservative frat boys, has taken their agenda and procured a lock on all three branches of government. Where we are supposed to have checks-and-balances against each branch we have instead h...

If you love zombie movies, you should read Monster Island , by David Wellington. It follows the tropes of cinematic zombie lore, and pays its respects to the genre, all the way to the ending! It goes beyond homage to incorporate some insightful ideas that are new, and makes interesting use of the media (prose instead of film) to good effect. While Monster Island is entirely self-contained (unlike the pandemic it describes), there are two more novels following it, which I am about to greedily download: Monster Nation , and Monster Planet . The first book is soon to see print; there are plenty of links at the site to online retailers. All three books are available in their entirety to be read online, or even on your iPod. If anyone is using Plucker , it’s a cinch to download and read on your Palm device.

According to The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia , Anson Williams of Happy Days fame has a Bacon number of infinity. ( chad underkoffler )

Quake Deathmatch finals: Thresh vs. Billox : It looks like Billox was probably bad in previous life, and the shut-out, complete humiliation heaped on him by the shiva-like, contextual god of death that Thresh personifies in this match, can only be some kind of karmic retribution.

Apparently datamining techniques used on large piles of cheaply purchased old debts is turning into a major business opportunity for unsavory characters. It’s one thing to go after people who still owe money, but these companies are commonly going after people whose debts have passed the statute of limitations, and are even able to illegally influence our mysterious yet all important credit rating while they’re at it. Crap, this doesn’t even have to be an official business; just take this home-brew if you need a new kind of Start Up business. There are already phreaks out there cold-calling to get AmEx numbers . Why not skip ahead a step, purchase a list of old debtors, and actually have a foot to stand on?

Kevin Smith has a special tribute sell-out moment to YouTube as part of his promotion for Clerks 2: Passion of the Clerks . Look for the reasonably-subtle Silence of the Lambs reference.

Read free Image Comics online. I recommend The Walking Dead , and Invincible , both by Robert Kirkman. Or you can check out a nostalgic one-page of Frank Miller’s Batman taking on Osama Bin Laden in Holy Terror !

NERSFW horrifyingly non-PC female yakuza exploitation flick trailer that features more questionable content than you can shake a broken bottle at. However, if this is your thing, there is a guide to this whole “pinky violence” subgenre available to you. On a side note, if you ever get tired of watching Shintaro Katsu being such a cool good guy in Zatoichi films, check out a couple of Kamisori Hanzo (The Razor) movies to increase your sense of moral dischord. (inspired originally by this boingboing article)

Arriving in a new town for the very first time, dressed in a confused mishmash of brown leggings, a priestly robe, chain mail jerkin, leather gloves, three magic rings, a large amulet necklace and a pointed wizard's hat, any number of distraught mothers will approach me and beg that I find their missing children/husbands/swords. The Escapist - Quest for Glory

Some people link Pom Poko with eco terrorism. What do you think about that? Takahata-san laughs. “I did not know about this point of view. They consider the tanuki to be terrorists? But they are the victims. The film depicts a drama; it is the end of a world, the end of the tanuki world. I wanted the viewer to look from the point of view of the animals and try to make us perceive how our world appears to us seen from the outside. However, the terrorist label does not disturb me. Today, terrorists are public enemy number 1. But historically, terrorism was sometimes a mean of asking attention of the established society. This state of mind existed until in the seventies. Terrorism sometimes had the capacity to make the world or people reflect on their condition.” —from an interview at Ghibli World

“ XXXX GALUMPIA ADULT XXXX ” is a site that looks like it should be full of adult images, but isn’t. You could probably still get an employee enquiry out of leaving the front page on your work monitor though, even as a joke, so be wise.

Earlier I posted about Negadon: the Monster from Mars , a CG homage to the Toho/Toei rubber monster schockfests of yesteryear. It’s now on sale for ¥3360. If, on the other hand, you prefer your rubbery monsters to solve their differences singing and dancing instead of fighting, you can wait for the Bollywood version , Negatandoori . It features a 20 minute musical number of unprecedented scale featuring a dance-off between the Japan Monster Self Defense force and the titular monster.

I would really like to get my hands on a print of this algorhithmically generated art that greatly resembles the topography of a very complex urban landscape.

The Henson Creature Factory-riffic Farscape has finally started showing on very late night Japanese broadcast TV, but they are not including the original English audio track, so I would have to watch it in Japanese, which is no fun because I miss subtle plot points pretty frequently. However, because I am such a fan of Henson, I have the Storyteller series on DVD; when it was unavailable in the USA, one of my treasured media possessions was a collection of Japanese VHS tapes that I had picked up in a used video shop in Osaka. Now I have that series on one DVD, and the Greek Myths collection as well. I also have a copy of Mirrormask waiting to be viewed, and have not yet made time for it. Originally I hear it was planned to be a sequel to Labyrinth , but I have since heard it is more intended to be a spiritual sequel to that movie, inasmuch as it will live on forever in various current home video formats and account for reasonable yearly sales, despite a poor initial showing in theat...

BoingBoing was confused about a commonly seen, PTA-enraging, comedy sketch from Japanese TV . I don't blame them. ( WFMU's Beware of the Blog )

“I came back for my own purposes,” said the Time Traveler, looking around my booklined study. “I chose you to talk to because it was . . . convenient. And I don’t want you to do a goddamned thing. There’s nothing you can do. But relax . . . we’re not going to be talking about personal things. Such as, say, the year, day, and hour of your death. I don’t even know that sort of trivial information, although I could look it up quickly enough. You can release that white-knuckled grip you have on the edge of your desk.” I tried to relax. “What do you want to talk about?” I said. “The Century War,” said the Time Traveler. I blinked and tried to remember some history. “You mean the Hundred Year War? Fifteenth Century? Fourteenth? Sometime around there. Between . . . France and England? Henry V? Kenneth Branagh? Or was it . . .” “I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he ...

Pictures of overloaded transports.

Pre-orders for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT ( MAKE: Blog )

Arif , who covers some Smiths and Tears for Fears songs, along with his original work. ( copy, right ) What the fuck? Is this German? Austrian music hoaxes at WMFU ( the other michael )

I was trying to find legal text examples for “ Do NOT Try This at Home! ” when I found CatEnema.com

Nullsleep and Bit-Shifter are going on TOUR! And not just some rinky-dink tour, but a full-on worldwide invasion (I’ll leave their title in their ALL-CAPS): INTERNATIONAL CHIPTUNE RESISTANCE WORLD TOUR 2006

Apple - Boot Camp : More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

If you run a Windows box and want a terran visualizer less demanding and more mundane (heh) than Google Earth , check out Desktop Earth . It shows a satellite version of the world, with the illumination zone clearly delineated. It’s kind of useful, at-a-glance for people who interact with multiple timezones.

Ian McDonald, the author of River of Gods , offers online his Hugo nominated short story, The Little Goddess .

Michel Gondry, primarily of fame for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, previously directed music videos. Crazy music videos. Like Cibo Matto’s Sugar Water , which is a visual palindrome.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much. —William Hazlitt My father died suddenly on the 13th of March, and my family and I went to the USA to deal with the funeral and family matters. The truth is I have been and still am pretty much out of it. The other day for about 15 minutes straight, I found myself in a panic; I could no longer tell time on an analog watchface, and was even having trouble parsing the meaning of a 24-hour displayed time. Am I late? Am I on time? ; it was strange and disorienting. Last night I found myself unable to move for about ½-an-hour, until finally I felt some weight lift from my neck and shoulders. Grief manifests in very strange ways, and I am just trying to ride it out right now. (Many of you will notice that a lot of posts have gone up at once. I managed to edit a backlog over the weekend, and have just run through a rash of publishing button mashing. )

Yuke’s developing View game Rumble Roses developer will put a combative spin on at-times contentious ABC talk show; Star Jones-Reynolds in talks for cosmetic-surgery DS title. ( more ) —News at GameSpot

One of my favorite manga artists, Taiyou Matsumoto, creator of Number 5 and Ping Pong (also a fun movie!) was introduced to me 13 years ago through his comic Tekkon Kinkurîto (English title: Black and White , serialized in PULP Manga in North America). Because Matsumoto trained in Europe, Tekkon Kinkurîto is perhaps influenced toward euro-comic style, and is even more confusing philosophically challenging than other Japanese manga. In any case, I am stoked to find the series will have a full length animated movie . Comics Preservation by Jonathan Barli is an archive of classic comics, protecting them from being lost to the ravages of time. ( the other michael ) Check out these desktop wallpapers for Clive Barker’s Great and Secret Show , Transformers , and Brian Wood’s Supermarket . ACT-I-VATE , an online comics cabal is producing tons of interesting and unusual, very Comics Code Authority -unfriendly works. In particular, I am enjoying Panorama , to whi...