February 2009
46 posts
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“Get off your Blackberry!”
– As said to me, playing DS while walking home, by a man in an SUV.
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March FUG Madness →
I’m no great basketball fan (especially considering the demise of the Seattle SuperSonics Oklahoma City Whatevers) but when March rolls around, I nevertheless get the fever. Not to bet in office pools and to count brackets, but a different kind of obsession: to vote in Go Fug Yourself’s March Fug Madness event.
Go Fug Yourself reports on the sartorial ouches and “what were they...
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Synthesized, Haunting, Beautiful →
Above is a link to “Anything You Synthesize,” which is the title of a swelling, crashing orchestral song by The American Dollar. It is also the title of the haunting video created by Netherlands-based design company, Onesize.
An epic in miniature plays out before us, as if we sit with our chins on the edge of a turntable, watching a record spin right by our noses. Meticulously and...
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Changes coming to the comics - The Oregonian →
Above is a link to an open letter to readers from The Oregonian’s comics page editor. In it, he breaks the news that out of the 33 daily comic strips published in the paper, 10 must be dropped to keep costs down. A list of comics that are not in danger follows the article, as well as a poll as to which comics are readers’ least favorites.
Which strips are considered so popular or...
Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark... →
…is the fantastically curious title of the new Broadway musical about Spider-Man, opening in 2010. Directed by extremely avant garde Julie Taymor and scored by Bono (wotta combo! *snrk*), we can only pray this thing eventually gets a colon added to its title. In the hallowed history of Broadway there are shows like Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, CATS, and now…Spider-Man, Turn...
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Suggested at the SAM
The Seattle Art Museum has recently added something to their display, and it’s not a Pollock: the words “suggested donation” to their ticket fees. Now, admission is not $13, but a suggested donation of $13, which (as a Stranger staffer tested) really is just “suggested.” Want to see the entire collection for $1? $5? $25? Be their guest.
This could be indicative of...
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Steeping in Seattle
Seattle is the home of the behemoth coffee companies, numerous small roasters, and more cafes than you can count per square block. But coffee isn’t the only imbibable that we’re manic about: tea is just as big of a fad, and dueling teahouses dot the landscape all through the city.
Want to know where the best place is to steep Assam and guzzle Gunpowder? Two top notch places are Miro...
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At the Cafe
Child: (Running up to laptop and pressing close) What is THAT?
Me: It's a computer!
Child: How do you make it go down?
Me: Make what go down?
Child: (Pointing to arrow keys) Do you push this?
Me: Yeah, that's how you make things go down.
Father: Come on now, leave the young woman alone.
Me: Nah it's fine.
Child: She has a computer!
Father: HE does.
Child: No she's a girl.
Father: He's a boy. He just has really smooth skin.
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Famicom Chip-Love
Composer Yuzo Koshiro has seen the games industry through its infancy to its present incarnation. Beginning with the action RPG series Ys, through ActRaiser and the Streets of Rage series, he is probably one of the most diverse composers in games in terms of adaptability and variety of musical style. Most recently, he was behind the soundtracks for both Etrian Odyssey I and II for the DS.
...
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Flappin', Flirtin' and Frolickin'
The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization, by the Modern Girl Around the World Research Group.
The “Modern Girl” seemed to arrive everywhere at once, her stylish bags appearing at the train station platform, her high heels beating a rhythm down the streets of Paris, Shanghai, Berlin, Bombay and Sydney. Throughout the interwar period of the 20’s...
WWdN: In Exile: Spoiler Alert: WATCHMEN is fucking... →
I’ve been quietly assuming this movie wasn’t going to be a disaster, and it’s a bit of a relief to hear Wil Wheaton say this, among other things:
“Now, listen, I know that we live in a world where we’ve endured Ang Lee’s The Hulk, Spiderman 3, both Fantastic Four movies, and Indiana Jones Gets Raped Repeatedly While We Are Forced To Watch In Horror, so I think...
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The Guild, Completed!
As mentioned a while back, Felicia Day’s “The Guild” is a fabulously funny webseries that should be avidly watched by geeks, dorks and nerds everywhere. And what better time to get on the bandwagon than now, as Season 2 has officially ended? The season finale episode is chock full of stuntmen, fighting, sabotage, awkward kissing and even a shower scene—and what more could...
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I like to tease
I got excited after finishing up the work on three out of the four header images for an in-progress project…
New website and music portal for my work should be premiering late February / early March!
Expect lots of music. Also aliens.
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The Curies, A Valentine.
Have I mentioned that I adore Kate Beaton’s History Comics? Because I do. She celebrated Valentine’s Day by making little one-off comics of Romance and Historical Semi-Accuracy and posting them on her (currently broken) site.
Did you do something better? I doubt it!
Harrumph.
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Has The Viaduct Collapsed Yet? →
This is what passes for entertainment in this city.
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Absolutely Amazing Video Game Remake Wallpapers →
It’s like looking into the imagination of someone playing the games
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Just petals in the wind...
I grew up in the city; lived here all my life. It may or may not be related, but I’ve always had dreams of flying. Soaring up, beyond the buildings and into a limitless sky. There’s a certain kind of resonance then, on a personal level, that I have with the dreams of the city-bound potted ones in That Game Company’s Flower.
To back-track, Jenova Chen and fellow developers have...
The Stranger's Valentines - The Stranger,... →
The Stranger invited everyone and (especially) their grandma to send in a 30 word valentine for their special someone/thing. The first 2000 mash notes were printed in this week’s physical newspaper, and the rest are at the above link. I’ve already found a couple I know…maybe you’re on there too?
They range from the mundane: “you are my super snuggly cuddly bunny...
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Ghosts in the Open
In a certain corridor in the Henry Art Gallery waits a surprise. Walking down the echoing, empty hall the wall suddenly drops away to your right, revealing a long room far below you. Gathered in rows down the room are kneeled and bent silvery figures, rank by rank, facing the opposite wall. The convocation is motionless, and as you make your way down the long stairs toward the room, you have the...
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Local News | More than 800 show up for one Tacoma... →
“More than 800 people showed up to take a test for a job as a Tacoma, Wash., water meter reader. One job.
Sonja Hall says “the economy and the decrease in available job openings” may have had something to do with the response as well.”
REALLY?
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Visualizing the Death of Comics
The title is a lie. As is the article this one refers to. Comics are not dying, and they certainly are not going to be killed by an iPhone app.
Call me old-fashioned — in an age of computers and screens that I admittedly partake in often enough — but I believe that the future of comics does not lie within the digital realm. A recent article at io9 sprung me off on a tangent of extreme...
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Apocalypse Warning Level: 2
Pea-sized hail and lightning over most of North Seattle.
Level 3 is when animals of all kinds begin dropping out of the sky and speaking in tongues. Call me when that happens.
Edit: I’ve been informed (thanks, Mom!) that this was apparently not hail, but instead graupel. What the crapel is graupel? Read on, with text from the Glossary of Meteorology:
“graupel—Heavily rimed snow...
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Cat gets own show at Seattle art walk. SaRRa... →
Oh come ON. A cat runs around the neighborhood with an automatic camera attached to it, and now it gets a showcase in a gallery? I am weeping for the death of culture once more, and for artists who are struggling now more than ever for wallspace and recognition.
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Get your Freak on
Have you read anything by Warren Ellis? Planetary, Global Frequency, or his masterpiece series, Transmetropolitan? If so, you should definitely be reading FreakAngels, Ellis’ all-new and completely free webcomic series.
If you haven’t, then you maybe, possibly should read FreakAngels. Those who are familiar with Ellis’ brilliant writing also know that his plots often ramble...
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The Grind →
Roleplaying Games belong to a vast genre that spans a good variety of media: table-top dungeon romps, epic linear adventures, free-form character development sandboxes, or flailing at eachother in fields. Aside from the latter, a relatively new blog that’s popped up at 1up.com called The Grind aims to cover the best of what RPGs have to offer.
Headed up by Jeremy Parish — an online...
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How To Cook A Wolf
This is a restaurant that begs for forethought. The name is perplexing if a friend or acquaintance hasn’t explained it to you, or if you aren’t familiar with the 1942 novel by M.F.K. Fisher by the same name. It suggested to me steaks, grills and manly food for a split-second before rational thought could take over, then the polar-opposite, a nouveau-foody disaster, where...
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Cloudherder makes good on The Slog →
Jen Graves, art critic for The Stranger, wrote an article about a local coffeeshop that makes a killer “Roman cappuccino” and referenced a coffeeshop nearby the Pantheon in Rome. That tickled my memory, and made me wonder if it wasn’t in fact one of my favorite cafes in Rome, Tazza d’Oro. I sent off a photo I’d taken a few summers ago to Graves, wondering if it was...
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Scum on the Ave
We were heading into The Dreaming for comics and various geek paraphernalia, when Nick and I noticed this sign affixed to the interior of a dark, almost abandoned-looking storefront. Peering in past the bars on the windows, we could make out the shapes of tables and chairs, but little in the way of a bar or kitchen. Scum of the Earth Church? We started hypothesizing: underground cafe,...
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Watermelon Carving →
Why am I continually fascinated by food art? Maybe it’s the idea of using food as an artistic medium, and therefore rendering that food inedible but more beautiful than before. If I owned a tv I think I’d spend all my time watching shows about artists with OCD carving maps of the Grand Canyon into gourds, or something. (IS there a show for that? Please tell me there is). Anywho,...
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“Amazone” by DobaCaracol. Album:...
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“S: Do not jostle in anger, Leif. Jostle only in love.
L: I only ever jostle in...”
– It’s better left oblique.
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I swear to god, it's not supposed to taste like...
So, I drink a lot of gin, and I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t talked about it with y’all yet. I’ll keep it short: just a list of which gins you should really be drinking and what they taste like.
Tanqueray No. 10- Do not settle for anything less than this (certainly not regular-old Tanqueray— it’s pretty aggressively mediocre.) That said, the Ten is very...
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Heart and Soul (and Flank)
This weekend I was perusing the magazine section of a local bookstore when I came across a glossy mag I had never seen before. Pulling it out of the stand and flipping through, I was confronted by the sight oversaturated photographs of bloody steaks, sides of flesh, art made of animal fat and laminated sausage jewelry. I scanned articles with names like “Phoney Baloney,”...
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While Leif has been working on making our site a more beautiful place to be, we’ve also spent the weekend celebrating the birthday of our own Nickherder.
(It appears he is displaying his very excellent slice of cake to you.)
Happy Birthday to co-founder Nickherder, and a quarter century achieved! I wonder what deep wisdom he has to impart, because he sure hasn’t shared any of it with...