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Ponygeddon!

YOU SHOULD HAVE SPECIFIED

YOU SHOULD HAVE SPECIFIED

I hope everyone is having as lovely an Easter weekend as I’ve been blessed with (although in my case that’s a long weekend where I can do the same work I was doing during the week… but from home… so I don’t have to walk so far to the tea kettle… or wear pants).

In any case just a last minute note that I’m auctioning off one of the very rate Kate Beaton / Nikki Rice Malki Ponys with all proceeds (and then some) going to the (awesome) Operation Sock Monkey. You’ve got until tomorrow afternoon (EST) so get bidding!

Wickahd Smaht

Did I mention that "Zero Day" is great and is available for purchase and download... NOW!

Content has, indeed, been pretty light lately – mostly because what’s been occupying my time for the last couple months doesn’t really lend itself to discussion. If you think comic writers and artists get frustrated when wanting to discuss work with months of lead time, imagine my frustration when there’s a chance some of the seeds currently being planted will pay off next year. Maybe.

However, I am… slowly… starting to warm to the whole Twitter thing, thus cementing my reign as “that guy who alternates between being way ahead of, and way behind, the curve.” It turns out that the excellent Tweetie client was the tipping point, if you’ve found it equally hard to get into this tweet-business. I’m going to look at embedding a twitter widget here as soon as I get a chance – but I will warn in advance my tweeting is pretty asinine (irreverent if you’re charitable).

So – given that I’ve just returned from a Beantown roadtrip, that included (amongst other things) a visit to Ye old PAX East, and that people seem interested in my thoughts on the same I present one of those grand traditions of lazy blog-posts since time immemorial – THE NUMBERED LIST:

Best Five Surprises in Boston Over the Weekend:

The Crusade

intervention

I don’t know what else to do people. You can come over and borrow my copy of Never Learn Anything From History, you can flip through her exceptional National Post work (which probably plays a larger part than I’d like to admit in why I subscribe to a daily newspaper where I disagree with a significant portion of the editorials). Heck it’ll cost you nothing (but some well spent time) to just go read the Hark a Vagrant archives.

The important thing is that we immediately start the movement to get Kate Beaton officially appointed Canada’s Cartoonist Laureate.

Predictive Search Outliers (or “One of these things is not like the Other”)

Speaking of phrases you shouldn't Google with "Safe Search" turned off

I got my wrist slapped today for not cross posting here more often. The slapper (correctly) pointed out that I e-mail friends and family lots of asides, and post in a number of comment threads on things that interest me, and have started dabbling in tweeting – all of which would make fine content for this here page, which (as you all well know) I tend to ignore when I’m in hardcore “project on the go” mode, and don’t feel like writing anything substantive (or as “substantive” as we get around these parts).

This is all absolutely true. So let’s see if I can’t get better about that, by starting with a quick re-post of a comment I made to Denis McGrath’s great Dead Things On Sticks. Denis wrote a post wondering why he was getting a particularly grim predictive search result about killing babies in Google, and since I’ve been dealing with something similar (albeit on the search side) relating to the High Life website, I thought I’d lay down a quick note on why I believe bizarre, shocking, outliers can get promoted on Google (particularly in lists of predictive results). Read more

Welcome Back!

Now THAT is how you re-launch a franchise.

CRTC Issues Net Neutrality Decision

Submitted without comment.

Submitted without comment.

The CRTC has issued their net neutrality decision. Personally, I’m a little dissapointed in the ruling. Michael Geist points out a couple of areas to feel good about the ruling, but I tend to agree with this quote given to the CBC by Public Interest Advisory Committee legal counsel John Lawford:

“It approves all of the throttling practices that ISPs currently engage in. It requires consumers to prove something funny is going on and consumers don’t have the means to figure out what ISPs are doing and they don’t have the resources to bring that to the commission’s attention,”

Read more

CRTC Lobbies for Expanded Consumer Copyright Protection

Interesting story c/o Michael Geist that the CRTC filing to the Copyright consultation pretty much asks for the same private copyright concessions I think are a good idea for producers, primarily:

  • time shifting
  • format shifting
  • personal backup

Interesting read.

Jeremy Hotz beat me to the joke!

What were they thinking?

What were they thinking?

Jeremy Hotz totally stole my joke this evening. Well, “beat me to the punch(line)” is more accurate. While accepting the Canadian Comedy Award for best male stand-up – he quipped something along the lines of: “Oh great, not winning a Canadian Comedy Award was all that kept me going. Not having one of these was all that got me out of bed each day.” While maybe not quite the same, the RocketAce/Imponderables super-group was racking up an impressive run of nominations for best web video without ever winning the thing (five, last time I checked). I was looking forward to adding to that tally – so I could continue to come up with tortured press release statements such as “Rocket Ace Moving Pictures has been nominated for more Canadian Comedy Awards (in Internet-based comedy) than anyone in history” – all the while avoiding broaching the fact we’d never been able to seal the deal.

Anyway – that’s all done now – whatever will we do now?

Seriously – my sincerest thanks to the incredible RocketAce team (especially Matt, Erin, and Jay) and all the Imp’s. It’s not often you get anything for Internet-based comedy (other than a stack of YouTube commentors saying some questionable things about your mother… which… this is entirely different).