Picture of the day

Via Comics Alliance: Nerds and superheroes vs. the shitbags of Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church at Comicon.

The future

Tom the Dancing Bug

Comic of the day

Among my many anti-science pet peeves is the seemingly increasing ignorant din over getting kids immunized. Or should I say, not getting kids immunized. So the story goes that in order to protect kids, they should not be vaccinated. Why? Because they'll get The Autism. So ironically in communities where this kind of thinking takes hold, vaccination rates drop, herd immunity is weakened, and kids start dying of easily preventable diseases.

The anti-vaccine nonsense stems almost entirely from a fraudulent study from a British doctor by the name of Andrew Wakefield. A man named Darryl Cunningham decided to tell the tale of Wakefield in comic form. Here is the first panel of the epic strip. Go check the rest out.

I'll note that the story has a happy ending. Last week Wakefield was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and of acting in a "dishonest", "misleading" and "irresponsible" manner by the General Medical Council of England. He was struck off the GMC register, which is essentially the British medical equivalent of being disbarred.

On the negative side, he's still allowed to spout his nonsense, having retreated to Texas (obviously) to set up his base of operations for what he calls "educating" but is more like "getting kids killed from easily preventable diseases." And he's still making appearances on TV as an "expert", hitting NBC Today on Monday. Yay America.

Comic of the day

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Comic of the day

Via Prose Before Hos comes a look at the odd world of right wing rage. I think the tears of blood in front of the mushroom cloud kind of understates how the Tea Baggers are taking it, but no one actually knows what the personification of evil looks like ravaging the personification of liberty while the world burns, so I'll cut them some slack.

Movies that need to come out already

Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World



Looks like a slice of fried gold. As an addendum, it's appears the songs in the trailer and in the movie will be done by Beck, who took the songs and lyrics Brian Lee O'Malley did in the comic book and... Becked 'em up. As if it needs to be said, you really need to avail yourselves of the comic book series irregardless of whether or not you want to see the movie. The 6th and final volume is out in July.

The majesty of sound

The Oscars are once again upon us and that means several films are going to duke it out for America's heart in the categories we have deemed to be of the utmost importance. By that I mean Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. As such the Soundworks Collection has put together a bunch of featurettes about the sound designers, sound design, and sound work of some of the nominated and best films of the year. Here are a few of them.

"Inglorious Basterds" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

"Where the Wild Things Are" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

"Watchmen" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

"Star Trek" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Movies that need to come out already

Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, based on the comic of the same name.

In this scene Nicholas Cage shoots a little girl. Ticket sold.

Video of the day

Felix Baumgartner will try to do this:



And try not to end up like this:


Worth a try I'd say. Good luck to him.

'Tis the season

Big Fat Whale chronicles the atheist yuletide traditions, even if they don't really count as real people.

Good morning, go see 2012

Yes, go see 2012. "It looks terrible" you say. "It is terrible" I say. But it's that magical kind of terrible that never offends or insults too badly, entertains the entire way, provides enough spectacle and unintentional humor to counterbalance the lack of any real drama, has John Fucking Cusack and Woody Goddamn Harrelson in it, and will lose any sense of spectacle, grandeur, or point if watched on anything less than a giant movie screen. Go see 2012, it is a 10,000 foot monument to scientific mumbo jumbo, ethnic stereotypes, plot contrivances, epic destruction, and pointless deaths wrapped up in almost every film cliche and tied off with a bow of the most meanspirited deaths and worldview that might have ever made it into a major blockbuster release.

Speaking of those cliches, Mike Russell of CulturePulp is kind enough to give you the "Make Your Own Disaster Movie" cliche rundown. Does 2012 follow this exact layout? Almost to the letter. But poor Mr. Russell seems to have forgotten about a hundred other disaster cliches that also applied. Perhaps his arm would have fallen off if he attempted to draw them. It doesn't matter, Roland Emmerich didn't forget a single one.

Buy things!

Warren Ellis is launching a t-shirt of the week scheme in which you can buy body coverings emblazoned with the anti-social ravings and angry commands of a professional comics writer. Because why wouldn't you want a coffee mug that asks "Where's my fucking coffee?" or an apron bearing this slogan:

Sunday comix

Welfare wagons

As if you needed another reason to support health care reform, ComicMix shows us another: Superman is for it. I mean sure, he's a border jumping illegal alien freeloader with a forged birth certificate who seems to be in the throes of a full on communist fever whilst he loosely advocates for single payer health care, but he does make a point. Even if he does wear his underwear on the outside of his pants and flagrantly violates our air traffic control laws.

I must say I do prefer his socialist rantings to his racist foreign policy and Asian abuse platform.

Comic of the day

Sean Hexed's A Gross of Goblins

Though an affront to good and all things sensible, collected here you will find a veritable cornucopia...a gross, if you will, of malcontents, cretins, and other rapscallious miscreants presented here for your disgust and adoration.

Cheap Blogging Crutch 06.30

How a Loophole Benefits GE in Bank Rescue
Want to know how GE is able to garner billions in business loans from the TARP program despite not being a bank? So would the government. Thanks to loopholes, namely that GE literally owns two banks in Utah, they get to borrow money at a low interest rate to fund the rest of their bullshit. And you were worried that our elected betters were going to write, enact, and oversee these programs in a shoddy manner.

Ahmadinejad Calls for Investigation Into 'Suspicious' Death of Neda Soltan
What are the odds that she was covertly murdered by either American or British forces seeking to destabilize the legitimately elected government of Iran? It's a shame OJ got framed or else he'd be able to help hunt for the real killers with Mahmoud on some Iranian golf course.

Cheney Worried That Iraq Withdrawal Will ‘Waste’ The Sacrifice By U.S. Troops
The Dick seems to think that anything less than staying in Iraq for eternity will mean that American soldiers lives were wasted or something. You know what I think might have helped contribute to the "wasting" of US soldier's "sacrifice"? All those years the Bush administration spent wasting US soldier's sacrifices. But then again, maybe someone will finally uncover those weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda in a way that completely validates Cheney and Rumsfeld's strategies for the first couple of years of this war.

Romney: Republicans ‘Believe In Allowing People To Have Choice In Their Health Care’ — Except A Public Option
Mitt Romney came out and outlined what the GOP wants the American citizen to get in any proposed health care program that none of them will ever vote for. They definitely want you to have choice and they definitely want things to be cheaper, they just don't see the need to do that in anyway that means you actually get a choice or cheaper health care. Glad that's all cleared up.

"The Commission Has Been Road-Blocked": Republicans' War On The FEC
Did you know that the FEC is a fucked over pile of burning shit that refuses to prosecute election violations because Bush packed it with people who are ideologically opposed to the existence of the FEC? Now you do. Give it a read, it involves criminal actions to suppress and intimidate voters and donations going unpunished and a comical appearance by a person described as "Tom Delay's ethics lawyer."

Michael Jackson's Last Video: One Of The Sets Was A Cemetery
Are you ready for the hundreds of pieces where news organizations take one small thing about Michael Jackson's work and then blow it up to intimate that he was presaging his own demise? Here's one of the first. Christ, I hope no one shows them the Thriller video.

Iran's Post-Election Uprising: Hopes & Fears Revealed
A little tale on Iranian voting, the coup, and the crackdowns all done in the style of Persepolis, of which you should read or watch.

MGM Digital Media
Want the ability to watch several of MGM's most terrible and cheaply made movies on YouTube? Great news then, you can either watch an Inspector Clouseau movie that has Alan Arkin in it instead of Peter Sellers, an Amityville sequel, the Casino Royale that doesn't have Daniel Craig in it, or one of Robert Townsend's lesser works. I don't know what we would have done if you didn't put these up MGM.

Buy two

Out now: the Sarah Palin comic. It's about a mild mannered woman who, while out one day strolling the Alaska/Russia border, is hit by a truck full of radioactive bibles and seal pelts and is forever transformed into Hockey Mom, defender of the tundra.

See her rise to the ranks of governor and be transfixed as her evil archenemies in the media use her one weakness, questions, against her when she tries to bring her frontier justice to the lower 48. But she struggles on to return back to her icy fortress to do battle against those rotten fucking kids of Alaska and the teachers who enable them.

$3.99. Written by Garth Ennis. Art by Ben Templesmith.

Jeffy is dead

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

via Losanjealous comes the Nietzsche Family Circus, wherein a random Family Circus cartoon is paired with a random quote from German philosopher/philologist/barrel of laughs Friedrich Nietzsche. Still funnier than the regular version, more existentially meaningful than Scott Meets Family Circus.

Bill Watterson: Oddly prescient

Watchmen related humor of the day