Pacificapocalypse

Random Flickr picture

by powerpig

If you have no idea what’s going on here, try this.

So what exactly does the purchase of Marvel by Disney mean?
Maybe a little… something.. like… this:

Donald/Wolverine by SaiyaGina.

Or this:

Beauty and the Thing – - one of several mashups A. David Lewis posted here.

All from Super Punch.

….when you can find parking in the Mission.
Yes, indeed, once again, it’s Burning Man.
Take it away Violet Blue:

While attendees of the yearly arts festival known as Burning Man come from all over the nation and the world, the impact of the costly desert bacchanalia is felt pretty strongly around San Francisco. Many rejoice at the sudden lack of rich hippies and art cars dripping Barbie heads and Legos onto the roads when fog breaks down cheap art-store epoxy, and the ease with which one can get brunch in the Mission. There are virtually no white dudes with dreadlocks for seven square miles. San Francisco smug levels ratchet back to tolerable in the absence of arty hipster trust fund brats and Web 2.0 lets-resurrect-Pets.com-as-a-vlog leeches. Super annoying guys don’t hit on me in bars assuming I know what the hell they’re talking about when they use terms like “the burn,” “the man” and “off the grid.”

And at house parties, there are no chicks that become uncontrollably drunk and then attempt to show you how they can “fire dance,” accidentally setting fire to the host’s potted plant/small dog/infant

From the article, how to enjoy Burning Man and not have to leave the City:

• Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
• Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
• Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.
• Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for five hours.
• Have a 3 a.m. soul-baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you’re hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
• Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don’t go to a doctor.
• Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.

I’ve said it many times, and so I’ll say it again:
I have a perfect Burning Man attendance record: zero.

Shamelessly stolen from Boing Boing.

Carla and I had a nice time at the 2009 San Francisco Zine Fest on Sunday. This week and next, I’m sharing some of the photos I took of the zinesters who came to sell their comics and zines. I’ll post a new photo each day.

This is Doctor Popular, a professional yo-yoist and cartoonist. I bought a couple of “24-hour” comic books from him, which are 24-page comic books that were created in 24 consecutive hours. My favorite is Robots Don’t Know Anything about Twitter. Doc Pop made the comic by tweeting “Robots don’t know anything about…” and used the answers that his friends tweeted back as the panels for the comic. Fun!

I don’t know if he sold out of the print version of Robots Don’t Know Anything about Twitter, as it had a print run of 100 copies (each cover was hand colored!), but he is giving it away as a free PDF. What a swell guy that Doc is.

Handsome mother fucker.

Via Boing Boing

*sigh* I drank the Kool-Aid.
I had hoped that it wouldn’t come to this.

I bought an iPhone.

Here’s the deal. My old phone (a 3 year old Motorola RAZR) that was starting to show it’s age. Not holding a charge very long and problems with SMS and plain old getting calls. Court’s had the iPhone for about six months now and there have been a couple times where she hasn’t been able to reach me and from day one, she cannot get SMS texts I send her – I can receive hers, but when I respond, she never gets them and the “customer service” at AT&T has been, shall we say, less than helpful.
I knew when I upgraded to a new phone, it would be a smart phone of some variety, and after looking at all the models offered by AT&T the iPhone was the front runner.
I’ve always kind of resented Apple product and I wanted to avoid like the plague any sense of buying into the hype (There are currently 246,000 returns for “iphone douchebag” on Google.) oh sure, they look pretty, and obviously they work well, but something about the cult vibe always threw me off – go to an Apple store and… it’s so shiny.  And everyone is so… happy. It’s like Logan’s Run. Just weirds me out. Plus I’m a died in the wool old-skool PC user. But I did it. I slapped down my cash and walked out with a shiny new 12GB iPhone. After some initial dismay (what the fuck? I HAVE to use iTunes? I hate iTunes! Fuck you Apple.) and a few hiccups in configuration (what the hell? What do ya mean it won’t synce with Google Calendar?) and a little frustration on initially synching with iTunes (why the fuck is this taking so LONG!), I think I have it working reasonbly well.

Yeah yeah, the Facebook app is pretty cool, and being able to check your mail and websites on the fly is neat (and there’s even a WordPress app, neat.) but the camera function is pretty clunky and almost impossible to use with one hand.
But I’m going to give it a fair shot. They sell a hell of a lot of these things, so they must be doing something right… I mean, not everyone that bought one is a complete douchenozzle trend whore… right?

Wait… what do you  mean it doesn’t record video?
Seriously?

Fuck you Apple.

photo credit: William Hook

Wednesday, December 10 – Follow-up:

DocPop has a piece on this up as well as a more detailed post over at Laughing Squid.

From You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice:

Emily the Strange is a rip off of a 1978 book character

The page on the left is from a 1978 book called Nate the Great Goes Undercover, by Marc Simont.
The poster of Emily the Strange on the right is from 1991.

WOAH. BACK UP. SERIOUSLY? Yes. The top image is a page from Nate the Great Goes Undercover, complete with text. This book was published in 1978. The bottom image is one of the first images of Emily the Strange ever made publicly available–it was sold, WITH THAT TEXT INCLUDED, as a bumper sticker.

What’s the saying? Oh yeah: Talent borrows, Genius Steals.

Did We Really Need a Robo-Serial Killer?

Via io9

The arthouse gore hounds behind Machined have answered a question you never knew you had: How about a robo-serial killer made from scrap metal in a machine shop? I think the answer is still a tentative “no” even after seeing this mini-epic about a creepy, hairy, shirtless dude who turns a guy he hit with a car into a half-machine serial killer. Now he keeps his robo-pal in the basement and feeds him naked co-eds while watching on CCTV. Really, the entire movie is like this. There is no punch line.

Best comment:

Glad to see people find that cursed “Saved By Zero” commercial as freaking annoying as me.

Nice work.

Via The Consumerist

So sad, after 92 years, a California institution, Mothers Cookies, is no more.

If you’re a fan of those pink and white frosted Circus Animal cookies from Mother’s, either stock up or start priming your nostalgia, because this week the company closed its doors abruptly. They’ve cited the expected reasons—the rising cost of raw materials, and an inability to borrow in the frozen credit market.

That sucks.

So, I did what so many of my generation do in times of grief, I bought a commemorative t-shirt online.
Got the package and couldn’t figure out why it rattled, open it to find that in addition to the shirt, they sent me a memento mori bag of cookies. Check it out!

Avast ye scally wags! ‘Tis only two days until International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Still time to brush up on yer Piratical jabberin’ with such classics as:

• Avast, me hearties!
• Shiver me Timbers!
• Yo ho ye lily livered scoundrel!
• I’ll run ye through with me broadsword!

And of course, Yarrr!!

Say it once, say it twice, say it like a pirate.