Links for March 31st 2009 through April 3rd 2009: Internet traffic in Sweden plummets on first day of law banning web piracy [Guardian] – Internet traffic in Sweden – previously a hotbed of illicit filesharing – has fallen dramatically in the first day of a new law banning online piracy. The country – home to [...]
Until very recently Scans_Daily was a livejournal fan community dedicated to comic books. Their main activity was to post scans from comics, ranging from a page though to a significant portion of a comic book – mainly recent releases but also back issues – and to summarise, critique and, at times, satirise these comic books. [...]
Consider these two comic book covers for a moment: Sure, they both shamelessly cash in on Barack Obama’s Inauguration. To be honest, the Savage Dragon cover seems a bit more tasteful than the Amazing Spider-Man one; I’ve not read the Savage Dragon issue, but the ‘bonus’ story in Amazing Spider-Man which justifies that cover is [...]
Links of interest for September 11th 2008: Girl Turk: Mechanical Turk Meets Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals” [Waxy.org] – Andy Baio’s extremely deep analysis of the use of samples in the latest Girl Talk album. While stats like “the album averages 19.8 songs sampled per track” should be really boring, the overall analysis is, for [...]
Interesting links for August 21st 2008 through August 22nd 2008: Monkey Magic – Karen Lury / University of Glasgow [Flow TV, 8.06] – Playful and engaging reading of the BBC Monkey-style BBC Opening for the Olympic Games: “A playful, irreverent choice then: a trailer that reverses a mythic journey (from West to East) and which [...]
Interesting links for July 17th 2008 through July 18th 2008: Michelle Obama’s blog [BlogHer] – In a canny move, Michelle Obama has begun blogging from the campaign trail. It’ll help create her own voice which, at least on the other side of the world, really hasn’t been heard yet. Watchmen (2009) [Apple - Trailer] – [...]
Interesting links for June 12th 2008 through June 17th 2008: Blogger arrests hit record high [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog, says the University of Washington annual report. In 2007 three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues [...]
A few months ago I wrote about my disappointment with a statuette of Mary-Jane Watson from the Spider-Man comics which showed her basically washing Peter Parker’s Spider-Suit whilst standing in an overly provocative pose. There was substantial community dismay at this overtly objectifying piece (especially since MJ has, at times, been one of the stronger [...]
Marvel’s statues folk have really out-done themselves with these uber-sexist models of Mary-Jane: As one would rightly imagine, there is considerable disappointment and outrage about this image. While comic books have never exact been modest in their representation of women (or men), this particular statue is ridiculously misogynistic and patronising, even by the standards of [...]
Having dedicated the final chapter of my doctoral thesis to examining the first two Spider-Man films as an exemplar of Artificial Culture, I really had to buy and watch the new Spider-Man 2.1 DVD, despite my constant annoyance at how these just-before-the-sequel extended edition DVD releases tend to disappoint. The 2.1 DVD set is advertised [...]
