Quite a while ago, Dark Horse Comics rolled out the first few chapters of a faithful graphic novel adaptation of HG Wells' War of the Worlds. I haven't been keeping track, but it's finished now and will soon be availlable in a nicely bound hardcover edition. They've kept the online version intact, though, along with a spiffy collection of downloadable goodies. I think I'll always prefer Alan Moore's version, nestled into a six-issue story arc for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but this version is prettty cool.

Tonight, between games of Mario Party 5, Catherine and I went to Steak n' Shake for yummy things. I obtained, while I was there, a single green crayon. I proceeded to draw a bison. This is my adaptation of that bison -- faithfully rendered in Adobe Illustrator for high fidelity.

Thank you. That is all.

Last year I pulled out a pile of my old photographs and put together a calendar for various friends. It was a fun gift, though I wondered to myself whether I'd be able to put together as many nice shots for 2006. Fortunately, I married Catherine and we honeymooned on gorgeous Mackinac Island, home of the tiniest butterfly conservatory in the world. One room, the size of a small apartment -- packed with over a thousand butterflies. Naturally, I went crazy with the digital camera. The end results were dazzling, more due to the huge concentration of butterflies than my photography skills. I've put some of the best shots together into a 2006 calendar, greetings cards, and other sundry things. Three cheers for the internet!

This weekend, Jason and Steph and I saw A History of Violence.The movie's premise is promising. It's based on a high-quality graphic novel, a distinction that seems to be the new badge of edginess for hip young directors. It's getting rave reviews from critics in high places, and its complement of A-list acting talent gives it instant credibility.

The film tells the story of Tom Stall, an all-American dad in a small town whose diner is robbed by two sociopathic thugs. A switch flips, and he saves the lives of his coworkers and customers with a startling display of brutal heroism. He's an instant town celebrity, of course, and the diner's business booms. But there's something unsettling, something off-kilter, about this gentle churchgoing man with a wife and two kids killing would-be robbers with reflexive efficiency. His eyes say it all: there's something more under the surface, and he's tormented by it.

Sound promising? It is. But A History of Violence never delivers. All the complex themes and challenging questions are left as an exercise for the viewer while the film zooms in for an extended closeup of the blood and the screams and the bruised thighs and the spilled brains of brutal sex and violence. It'd be a shame, after all, to spend valuable screen time exploring the nature of man or the morality and ethics of violence when you could just show, say, Tom inexplicably raping his wife or closeups of someone's jawless face gurgling.

This is a film based on a graphic novel in the worst possible ways. It reminds me how easy of a ride most graphic novels get: they're considered deep if they even hint at moral complexity, but few are ever expected to do the hard work of exploring those themes in the actual work itself. In this way, A History of Violence also reveals precisely what's rotten at the core of the comic and graphic novel industry that spawned its story in the first place.

I'll be writing more shortly -- it'll have spoilers, so if you really want to see the film, don't click any farther.

It's tricky, sometimes, finding music that I like. There's a lot of stuff I'll listen to, and even enjoy, given the chance. (Those who know me know of my prodigous MP3 collection. If I put the entire archive on shuffle play, it goes without repeating for almost two months.) Music that really jumps out and grabs me, and stays in my shuffle rotation for weeks and months, rather than hours and days, is harder to come by.

Long long ago I blew through the 'new releases' section and dug into the oldies and mined the electronica and jazz and... well. I ask friends for recommendations, and I keep my eye open for new stuff. But as I poke around in obscure corners it gets harder and harder to find stuff that really jumps out at me without spending huge amounts of time hunting and asking and googling and so on.

Today, byrne from predicate.org posted a link to Pandora. Created by the Music Genome Project, it cross-references hojillions of songs and artists, creating taste matrixes based on the listening habits of folks all over the net. I logged on and typed in Pepe Deluxe, an old Emperor Norton band I like. I wasn't expecting much.

"Pepe Deluxe features electronica roots, funk influences, danceable beats, heavy backbeat, and vocal samples. Here's a song by Amon Tobin that's similar. It features a slow moving bass line, synth tweaking, a highly synthetic sonority, and prevalent use of groove." Well. That certainly got my attention. I love Amon Tobin -- I have his entire back catalog -- but the spot-on description of that specific song's peculiarities had me interested.

In the first ten minutes of listening I found two songs by bands I'd never heard of whose styles push my buttons in all the right ways. The Horror, by RJD2, and Rubber, by Williamson. Excellent, scrumptious even. There are a few duds in the mix, but I'm really shocked. Naturally, you can rate individual songs as they shuffle through the playlist, tailoring individual 'stations' to your tastes. The first 10 hours of the service are free, with yearly subscriptions weighing in at $36 a yeah. So very tempting.

Upgrading to Photoshop CS a couple of years ago was easily one of the best possible uses for my student ID card. The feature set is great, and the ability to directly convert RAW format images from my Canon 10D is a huge boost ot productivity.

The problem is, somewhere along the line I seem to have made a tweak to the colorspace settings that kicked off a year-long journey into madness. On my desktop machine at home -- my main box for photo tinkering -- images look rich and saturated and all sorts of cool. Once I export them to JPEG, or in fact open them in any program other than Photoshop, they fade into washed-out yuckiness. I've tried converting to and from various colorspaces before exporting, carefully examined histograms before and after export, all for naught. Eventually I gave up and just started color-correcting for what I thought images would probably look like once exported.

Today, some on-a-whim Googling yielded a webboard conversation with someone having the very same problem. The root of the problem? Photoshop offers 'live color correction' for people working on CMYK print imagesIt dynamically adjusts on-screen display to reflect how images would appear when printed -- darker, richer, more saturated. Somehow -- probably when working on a print calendar last Christmas -- I'd turned this feature on and forgotten about it. A quick trip to the View menu,the Proof Setup submenu, and voila! I was still set to 'CMYK proofing.' I changed it to 'Monitor' and everything snapped into place. JPEGs now save just as I see them in Photoshop, and I no longer have to sweat bullets correcting blindly.

Three cheers for Google! And thank you, Richard Sintchak, whoever you are, for posting the solution to a problem that's dogged me for a year.

There's an open field next to the office I work in, and over the course of the summer the patch of weeds in it has turned into a forest of sunflowers. I had my camera with me today, and was inspired -- I took a few shots of the flowers, then of other random objects I noticed on my walk home.

I did some poking around today and found a fun Flickr tool that generates mosaic images from any photoset. There's a certain number of sites that seem to have hit critical mass and become Internet utilities, like water and gas and electricity in the physical world. Flickr, Blogger/Livejournal, Amazon, eBay, Google, PayPal, and so on...

In any case, it's fun and pretty!

Comics are not frequently known for their deep characterization -- at least, not until a reader's been sucked into 5 years of backstory soap-opera-like backstory. The subtle bits that ring perfectly true for a given character in a movie or a book rarely shine through in a comic, and we're left with pure plot to shape our understanding of who they are.

Platinum Grit is an exception (imo, at least). It's a really bizarre comic from Australia that made its debut back in the early 90's. Slowly but surely, the creators put its one-year run online, and now new issues are being published on the web as they create them. The main characater, Jeremy, is a nerdy misfit par excellence. He's sweet and kindhearted and accidentally contacts aliens and is utterly, completely inept with people. The comic is riddle with one-to-two-panel flashback moments, not unlike the split second memories that fill Arrested Development, illustrating the meaning of a particular catch-phrase in the disfunctional family.

The latest issue of Platinum Grit had one of those perfect moments that captured Jeremy's personality. Ready to go out on a date (how that happens is another improbable adventure), his wickedly amused female friend Nils asks if he's been taught about "the birds and the bees." He responds with a huffy, "Of course!" -- but the next three frames offer one of those perfect flashbacks...

And for a moment there, it's perfect. Jeremy, the young blossoming inventor, with his father the eccentric inventor. When it comes time to talk about growing up, it's all stammering, hemming and hawing, and... science! Later, it pays off again, as his date gives him bedroom eyes and asks what they should do next. Jeremy pauses for a beat, turns to her...

"Let's build a rocket!"

I remember hearing Moby for the first time about a decade ago. Cool World had just come out -- a shallow, hypersexualized Roger Rabbit knockoff starring Brad Pitt in one of his first lead roles. I never saw the movie, but Moby's Next Is The E single was on the soundtrack and got loads of attention. Christian Music Industry Boy that I was, I'd heard rumors about Moby being a Christian, and thought his Go release a listen. I liked it. A lot.

Being the conservative kid that I was, the essays scrawled throughout the liner notes for Animal Rights offended me -- the nerve of this liberal! Spouting off about Jesus! But as I got older and grew to appreciate -- if not agree with -- the stuff that Moby was obviously grappling with in his writing, I got back into the habit of listening to his newer stuff. I still don't like all of it -- he's done some weird punk stuff that left me cold, and apparently he even has a few unreleased country tracks lying around that he made for kicks.

Now, though, that scatter shot feel is one of the things I love about his work. He's evolved out of "Techno Poster Boy" and seems to be chilling in "Artist Who Does Whatever He Wants" land. When I pick up a new Moby CD, I'm honestly not sure what I'll hear. There'll be common touches, sure, and he generally stays within arm's reach the previous release's style. From one CD to the next, though, it's cool to hear him experimenting, applying a great ear and good production and his personality to a changing and evolving sound.

It's a refreshing contrast to artists and bands who seem to 'mine a style,' then move on with a calculated freshening-up. U2's new stuff feels like that to me -- less exploration, more thrashing around looking for "a new sound."