50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
Two awesome things have already happened today:
1. I woke up at 8:05, and it felt like I'd really slept in.
2. My friend Rich put me in today's Diesel Sweeties:
see more hipster robot webcomics and pixel t-shirts
The theme I use in Typepad doesn't support dynamic resizing, so I had to shrink the image down. You can click on it, though, to see it full size at the Diesel Sweeties website.
They've done another video to promote Watchmen, this time made to look like a 16mm film made in 1977:
If you're not familiar with Watchmen, I may need to explain — well, before I finish that, I will encourage you to buy Watchmen right now and go read it. I'm serious. Don't even eat or pee or anything until you're done. It's that good. There's a reason nearly every comic geek in the world swears it's one of the all-time greatest books, you know.
Okay, now that you've finished reading it, go ahead and eat and pee.
Okay, now it's totally normal for you to want to pick the book right back up again and start over, making sure you digest every single available detail in each panel. You won't catch everything, but that's okay; re-reading Watchmen is something certain geeks do, and every time we go behind the mask we find something we've never seen before.
Okay, now that you've eaten and peed, and read the book again, I don't need to tell you what I was going to tell you, because now you see it in the video.
…I know, right?!
Last time on Podcasts I Love, I showed you Pseudopod, a terrifically entertaining horror podcast that updates once a week.
Now, it's time for something completely different: 60-Second Science, from Scientific American.
Every day, the geniuses at Scientific American spend just one minute sharing something cool and interesting from the scientific world. Their stories are all over the place, too, from planetary science to neuroscience to genetics.
One of the things I love about the podcasting medium — and new media in general — is how there aren't any rules about content and length, so on the same day that I listen to a 40 minute horror story from Pseudopod, I can also get a 60-second lesson about the Triceratops, on the same device, delivered in the same way.
Next time: this is worth the wait.
I heard a rumor that the podcast of the D&D Fourth Edition adventure I played with Gabe, Tycho and Scott Kurtz may be starting soon, so I put on my scouting around outfit, went to the Wizards of the Coast website, and did some scouting around yesterday afternoon.
Guess what I found on the February calendar while I was there? Hint: it looks something like this:
Squee!
This week's LA Daily is about one of my favorite off-the-radar places:
Did you know that around a century ago there was an exclusive, 70-room resort hotel in the hills above Altadena? How about a casino? A zoo? An observatory? A funicular railway that climbed 1400 feet up the mountain at a 62 percent angle to get visitors there and back?
Well, it's true. All of this and more was part of a massive complex of buildings connected by railways that sprawled out across the San Gabriel Mountains from Rubio Canyon to Mount Lowe from 1893 to around 1938. Fires and windstorms repeatedly damaged or destroyed the various buildings, and they eventually gave up trying to go all Swamp Castle on the place and abandoned it, but you can still take a relatively easy hike up the Sam Merrill trail in Altadena to see the ruins, as well as some sensational views of Los Angeles.
Depending on the feedback I get from this column, I may do some more in the future about other off-the-radar places I love, because who doesn't love discovering new places that have been sitting in plain sight for their whole lives?