1) Father photoshops infant baby into crazy, magical pictures.
2) Put sand on metal plate. Add pitch vibrations to metal plate. At certain frequencies, the sand will form beautiful geometric patterns. Video.
3) How common is your birthday?
4) The smelliest places in New York (and other cities), a chart.
5) Writing advice from John Green, in cartoon form.
6) Ten Famous Filmmakers Pick Their Favorite Overlooked Movies.
1) An Excel artist. I can’t help but be skeptical about this.
2) A graph that would show what publishing’s Big Six would look like if they became Big Four.
3) A tutorial on making seamless cinemagraphs like these.
1) Thinking of getting a tattoo? An infographic.
2) BMX Parkour. Video. So totally cool.
3) Cat Whack A Mole. Only ten bucks.
4) “The Moon Moth” a short story by recently departed author Jack Vance. According to Neil Gaiman, it’s “a perfect short story.”
5) Dungeon Bastard lays down the final word on D&D edition wars. Video. via @lilyorit
6) Heroes and Villains (Common Grounds) A terrific comic.
7) The Douche to English Dictionary, with a special emphasis on dating profiles.
1) Miyazaki talks about why his films go beyond good and evil, in comics form.
2) What happens if you mix Silly Putty with a generous amount of iron oxide and put it next to a magnet? Slo-mo blob attack. Video.
3) Eleven of the world’s most unusual elevators.
5) Cartoonist does 100 self-portraits, each in the style of another cartoonist.
6) Thirteen creepy things a child has said to a parent. Number 3 would be a great start to a story.
7) Why Iron Man 3 Director Shane Black Was Once Hollywood’s Hottest Screenwriter. Word-smithing can be a little different over on the screenplay side of things.
C.B. Cebulski explains how a noob can get hired to work at Marvel as a writer or an artist.
In fact, if you’re published traditionally, they make it super-easy. Super-duper easy. If I had the money to keep current on the Marvel U, I’d mail one of my Twenty Palaces books in.
Check it out.
Update: A lot of new readers have been visiting this post in the year since I posted it. Hey, new readers, check out my books. You might like them.
In an embarrassment of riches, we have two different posts comparing the self-publishing ebook gold rush of today with the self-publishing webcomic gold rush of yesteryear. That first link is to Ursula Vernon, who is awesome, and the second is to KB Spangler, who I had not heard of before now.
Both make similar but not identical points and they’re both worth reading (the first post for the comments; the second post has some important links showing how little some incredibly talented comics creators earn). Important to note: people continue to point out the outlandish rare success stories and say “I want to be like that!” People continue to suggest “Hey, you could just do it for yourself” as though that route is equally attractive and equally beneficial (those aren’t the same things) to everyone. People still talk about it like it’s astrology: the success stories prove that it’s 100% viable while the failures are always failures of poorly applied process (wrong cover, not enough self-promotion, too much self-promotion, you should have bought ads on blah blah blah).
A big difference that neither poster touches on is the payment method. Webcomics are something people want to consume for free and creators have to make their money through merchandise, or selling collections of back issues, or ads. Personally, I read three or four different webcomics and I doubt I would pay for any of them. Maybe Order of the Stick, but even then I would watch for trade paperbacks and then put a purchase request through my library. That’s how I read corporate comics, too. I love comics, but comics are expensive.
People are used to paying for novels. In fact, there’s a general perception that free or $0.99 novels are not very good. When Del Rey set the ebook for Child of Fire at that price, I made a point of including the words “promotional” and “limited time.” I didn’t want people thinking they would get what they pay for.
As for the whole BUY MY BOOK thing… look, you can find out about my novels right on my front page. That one on the top is self-published, but do I want to push a “BUY MY BOOK” message? Nope. I want to push a “READ THE SAMPLE” message. Amazon/B&N/Apple/Etc all let you download the first 20-some percent so you can give it a taste test.
The difference being, you can’t get the whole book for free. If you like it, you have to pay to get the rest. If I like Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, I can just keep clicking the little arrow on the right until I run out of fun or accidentally click an Google ad and shove a couple of pennies at the creator.
The novel is something I can sell. A webcomic is something that draws in people who might someday click an ad, pledge in a Kickstarter, or buy a “Wookie Jesus” tshirt. The difference there is non-trivial and I realize how much that sucks. I am an ass who does not send money directly toward the people who make things I enjoy. Either I get it for free or I ask my library to pay. I have to do the same thing with books, mostly, so don’t hate me.
Anyway, if you’re curious where ebooks might end up, both links are worth reading. Check them out.
1) Homemade “Romance Pants”. Has to be seen to be believed.
2) Ten of the Most Beautiful Libraries Ever Built (in Minecraft).
3) The 12 Most Controversial Facts In Mathematics. I dunno how I feel about the title but the article is cool.
4) “Are you a ‘Single Interested in Michael Crichton?’ Meet the love raptors stalking OkCupid.”
5) 15 Mid-Century Modern Dream Homes that will Kill Your Children. Via James Nicoll
6) An anti-drone hoodie designed to hide your thermal signature from above.
7) Plewds, Hites, and Indotherms: Terms for the graphic language of cartooning. I’d heard of grawlixes before, but the others were names for things I didn’t even know had names. Very cool.
Yeah, I spent an inordinate amount of time this morning putting Comixology on my wife’s iPad and downloading as many of the free Marvel comics as I could snag. I tried for all 700-some, but there were issues with server overload, obviously, so I’m going to try again later.
The free comics (first issues of new and old books) are only available for a short time, so snap them up if you want them.
I have to say that I enjoy reading comics on the iPad. For novels I think paper is better, but the electronic format works nicely with panels and art. I just wish I could afford them.
1) The Macroeconomic effects of Smaug on Middle Earth. h/t James Nicoll
3) Real astronaut tweets with Star Trek actors.
4) Visualizations of mass transit in major cities. This one is for Seattle.
5) Father hires in-game “hit squad” to kill his son’s PC.
6) Only sexy women in stylish boots can protect society from the threat of sharpened scissors.
1) A motorcycle with a track instead of wheels, from 1939.
2) Do people gain weight during the holidays? Science says no, not usually.
3) A six-year-old tries to guess the plots of classic novels by their covers.
4) How much we care about Star Wars, graphed over time.
5) Look at this Instagram (Nickelback parody) Video. Not only have I never knowingly heard Nickelback once, but I have never been to Instagram. I still laughed at this.
6) Why is ‘w’ pronounced ‘double u’ rather than ‘double v’?
7) Author Christopher Priest shares his opinion of Robert McCrum, an associate editor of the Observer.
