<p>This is a story of homicide detectives whose cases relate to a super powered being (a 'power') in some way; a power killed someone, a power was killed, someone was killed while in a costume... At its core its two things: a super-hero story and a detective story. Across the board excellent character development with two lead homicide detectives and all the way through the reappearing cast of heroes and villains alike. The aesthetic absolutely nails noir detective movie with heavy shadows and great body language mixing in the brightness and boldness of spandex heroes. This is (and I'm not just saying this) The Best Dialouge I've ever read. Less of what is said and more of how it's said. Great banter full of the quirks, sentence fragments and dramatic / comedic pauses of real life. This is on my top 5 favourite current books.</p>

<p>Published by Image / Icon.</p>

<p>See Also: Ultimate Spiderman, New Avengers</p>

<p>I've been working at The Dreaming for a few weeks now. Its a comic shop on the Ave. in the U. District of Seattle. Its owned and run by just one dude, Aron. Let me tell you, working at a comic shop is <em>awesome!</em> My last shot at working at a comic shop was ...sub optimal. I attribute that to the management not being very friendly or not 'in the trenches', but mainly to the fact that i was one of 15 or 20 employees at two locations of the store. Here, its just me and Aron (someone also helps him with the wednesday order breakdown).</p>

<p>Also different is that I'm just working on projects not running the register and stuff. I like that. First up I'm alphabetizing 20,000 or so back issues. Then doing some sort of clearance sale to trim a lot of the fat. Later,  I'll be building some software that helps reduce some of the mundane work of subscriptions, re-/ordering and maybe P.O.S. stuff.</p>

<p>Lately, I've started reading more single issues again to cover some of the areas that Aron doesn't like/have time for/know about. I bring home a pile of some title read as many as there are to get caught up on it, then write up a little review, design up a little card (4 x 6) and tack them up at the shop on the shelf. Its a lot of freaking fun.</p>

<p>This is quickly becoming a dream job. Given nothing totally wonky happens in the forseeable future, I could see myself staying with this for quite some time. Knock on wood. [ Knock. Knock.]</p>

<p>I'll post reviews as I write them.</p>

<p>its been awhile.</p>

<p>awhile since my last post. and awhile since <a href="http://veganstraightedge.com/articles/2005/8/30/2/i-got-a-job/" rel="bookmark me">my last job</a>. today i talked to a proprietor of <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;hl=en&amp;q=the+dreaming,+seattle,+wa&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;z=11&amp;ll=47.70052,-122.330704&amp;spn=0.216732,0.468292&amp;om=1&amp;iwloc=A" rel="bookmark met">a comic shop</a> here in seattle near my house about doing some work for him. it sounds promising. or at least hopeful. i'll be talking to him again in a few days. so fingers crossed...</p>

<p>For a long time, I've been using tags on this blog to show a kind of keywords or categories to describe a post. I've been using an AppleScript for MarsEdit called Tag Maker written by <a href="http://garrickvanburen.com/tagmaker/">Garrick Van Buren</a>. The way his script works is that when you have a word selected in MarsEdit and select his script it adds a few links in parentheses after the word. Running the script on "MarsEdit" would give you:</p>

<code>MarsEdit &lt;em&gt; (&lt;!--// Technorati START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://www.Technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; t&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// Technorati END //--&gt;  &lt;!--// DELICIOUS START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://del.icio.us/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; d&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// DELICIOUS END //--&gt;  &lt;!--// Flickr START //--&gt; &lt;a href="http://Flickr.com/photos/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt; f&lt;/a&gt; &lt;!--// Flickr END //--&gt; )&lt;/em&gt; </code>

<p>which would look like this MarsEdit <em>(<!--// Technorati START //--><a href="http://www.Technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">t</a><!--// Technorati END //--> <!--// DELICIOUS START //--><a href="http://del.icio.us/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">d</a><!--// DELICIOUS END //--> <!--// Flickr START //--><a href="http://Flickr.com/photos/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag">f</a><!--// Flickr END //-->)</em>. The Flickr code I added to his script then submitted that and keyboard shortcut instructions back to him. He released an updated version that included both changes. Very cool, that was my first patch submitted to anything.</p>

<p>After some time using it I started to notice three things. 1: I was getting lots of questions about what the <em>(t, d, f)</em> was all about. 2: No one was clicking on any of those single letter links. 3: My blog wasn't coming up in the Technorati index as posting anything about anything. After a while I realized that the word that I'm linking is as important to where I'm linking it to. So by that logic any post that I used this script on was telling Technorati that i was writing about the letter 'T'. Ugh. Not good.</p>

<p>I've been meaning to change the script again so that the word that I have selected gets the link around it linking only to Technorati. Since del.icio.us and Flickr don't really do anything with incoming links. I finally made those changes today on a 737 flying from Seattle to Baltimore stopping in Kansas City. I sit on the floor in front of gate 38 waiting to sit on another 737 to take me to see my girlfriend.</p>

<p>The changes / simplification I made to Garrick's script could just as easily be made for Flickr, del.icio.us or any other tag name space. I just don't really care about those. The modified version of the script outputs this markup now:</p>

<code>
  <pre>
    &lt;a href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/MarsEdit" rel="tag"&gt;MarsEdit&lt;/a&gt;
  </pre>
</code>

<p>I'll clean up my code and comments and post the Apple Script here, too.</p>

  

        
  [...] If you’re using my TagMaker script with MarsEdit, shaners 0 matic 8000 posted a patch for better Technorati placement: Reworked tagmaker script. [...]

<p>A year or so ago, I heard someone mention <a href="http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/">the million dollar homepage</a> in a blog or something. I thought it was hilarious. And Genius. The premise was as a part 'Internet History' you could buy any number of contiguous pixels in a rectangle for one dollar per pixel. The site was selling ads for a total of 1 million pixels. 1 million pixels, 1 dollar each... wait for it... 1 million dollars. Fucking crazy right? Well, it seems to have worked the site is totally covered in ads, so presumably they made a million freaking dollars on a gimmick.</p>

<p>Then later on I saw a site called <a href="http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/" rel="bookmark">Websites as Graphs</a> which turned a web page into a tree diagram illustrating different type of html tags with different colors and showing the nested structure of a page. Its pretty neat.</p>

<p>At the bottom of the results page, the page where you diagram would be shown, there was a little blue box with a 1 number in the middle of it. Curious. I followed it up and it was <a href="http://www.onethousandpaintings.com/">1000 Number Paintings</a>. The guy who made the diagram site also did a <em>little</em> painting project.</p>

<p>The schtick was 1000 paintings; all 12 inches square, all the same blue background with a white number in the middle. Every one had a different number from 1 to 1000. They're all for sale and different amounts based on a couple variables. First is its number. 1000 minus the number on the painting is the base price. So let's take 37. 1000 - 37 = $963. 724 would be $276. So the lower the number, the higher the price. Also a factor was how many paintings had sold thus far. Initially, there was a 90%. For every 100 paintings sold discount would go down 10%. So after 500 paintings sold (which is about what its currently at) the price is 40% off. All paintings were a minimum of $40.</p>

<p>So even at the minimum he would make 40 grand if he sold them all. Of course, these kinds of things don't always sell all of them, but the earlier lower number would balance that out, because they would be so much more. You can see which ones are still available and which have sold. It doesn't show you the order, which means you can't figure out the discounts on each, but needless to say, he did good.</p>

<p>That idea later got eli and I thinking about this kind of thing. After talking about we decided that people care more about the <em>story behind the art</em> more than the actual art. For example, if you saw a 8 inch square canvas painted all blue with a 2 inch tall white Helvetica 1 right in the center at a garage sale, knowing nothing about it, would you pay $999 for it? Neither would I. But if its a limited edition, hand numbered, color vinyl, tour release, blah, blah, blah, would you? I still wouldn't, but clearly some people would.</p>