#January2011
Bulletstorm Demo Impressions: BONERSTORM.
When I take up a cause, I do it full on. Over-the-top and out of control. If you’ve been poking around these parts lately, you know that I have undergone total dickcrush mode for Bulletstorm. Childish, juvenile, and embracing every fucking moment of it. The demo dropped today, and I was fucking stoked. As I downloaded that shit, I threw up a psalm or two dozen to whatever Vaporous Deity wanted to pay attention to me.
Dear Netherworld Otherbeings, please let this game fucking rock.
Sometimes, motherfuckers hear your prayer.
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Variant Covers: Death In The Family!
And a good afternoon to you all. Provided, of course, you’re reading this when I post it. This is Variant Covers, the column where I give the rundown on this week’s comic book releases. As all the women who have seen me disrobe have muttered, let’s get this over with.
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King Of The Flies Vol. 2: The Origin Of The World.
Did you miss out on the first volume of King Of The Flies, or am I the only dumb one? While perusing (far superior) columns today on what’s dropping tomorrow, Douglas Wolk recommended this son of a bitch. Intrigued, I followed the various hypertextual references until I found a preview of the new volume. In short? It’s weird, man. Real weird. Wolk had me at “its look owes rather a lot to Charles Burns’ Black Hole, but it’s also got a sick, surreal vibe of its own.”
Sold.
(And if you haven’t checked out Burns’ latest, X’ed Out, get on it. My favorite graphic novel of last year.)
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Action Comics #897.
Don’t let the cover fool you, Action Comics is some of the most fun I get in my funny books diet today. Quick editorializing: Fuck misleading covers. I understand that some angsty David Finch cover probably grabs the nuts of the average fanboy, but it may also dissuade others. Action Comics is funny, intelligent, and relatively XTREME free. You wouldn’t know it by the cover, though.
This month’s issue has Lex Luthor rolling up into Arkham Asylum and soliciting the help of the Joker. I don’t know where it’s going to go from there, but I’ll find myself rooting for the bastard. A megalomaniacal sociopath on a quest for the Black Lantern energy, penciled by Pete Woods?
Pick it up.
Also In DC:
Detective Comics #837 is dropping, and as I said in my recommendation of #836, the artwork alone may be worth it. It’s Jock, yo!
Frakin’ Sweet: Official Map of Battlestar’s Twelve Colonies.
Enlarge. | Via.
Go on, git! Enlarge that pig. It’s an official guide to Battlestar Galactica’s twelve colonies. BSG dork like me? Yeah, this swag is awesome. The map was “designed by writer Jane Espenson and science advisor Kevin Grazier.” I didn’t know BSG had a science advisor, but I wish I was smart off to pull off such a gig. Would be totally swank.
Want more information on how the map was constructed? Go here for an interview with Espenson and Grazier.
New Picture of Orion’s Belt Is Crazy, Sexy, Cool.
Enlarge. | Via.
This new picture of Orion’s Belt is fucking gorgeous. It’s all neat and stuff to stare into the sky and point out Orion’s Belt, but it’s even more dope when you deconstruct what it actually is:
This spectacular photo reveals the beauty of Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the trio of stars that make up its belt.
This photo was taken last month and captures the three stars that make up Orion’s belt, arguably the most famous part of this particular constellation. The three bright blue stars are incredibly bright, although most of their luminosity is only found in the ultraviolet spectrum, so humans can’t fully appreciate just how unimaginably bright these stars really are.
Alnitak, the leftmost of the three stars, is about 100,000 times the brightness of the Sun when you factor in ultraviolet radiation, while the rightmost star Mintaka clocks in at 90,000 times. Technically, Mintaka isn’t actually a star at all, but rather two stars orbiting one another, but they’re so close together that they appear to be a single light source at our great distance away, which is thought to be about 1,000 light-years. Alnilam is the brightest of the three, with a luminosity 375,000 times that of the Sun.
Daily space porn. Hittin’ the quotient early for ya’ll, with a TLC reference to boot.
Monday Morning Commute: Monster Attaxx!
Sometimes the Monday Morning Commute is prefaced with a short story or anecdote. Not today. Instead, I’m going right for the top-turnbuckle so that I can drop the entertainment elbow. You know the drill – I show you what I’m going to do in my free time to avoid insanity (or perhaps induce it). And then you, as a loyal reader of OL, hit up the comments section and do the same.
Let’s dance, Sally.
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Rockin’ / OFWGKTA – Radical
[oddfuture]
Search Engine Terms: Spanking It To Art.
[Search Engine Terms come from an app in the Word Press dashboard. It tells you the terms that people are using in google to lead to your site. Most of ours are ultra depraved and horrible. And amusing to sick people like me.]
If you can’t fap to art, what the fuck is the point? Particularly art featuring set in latex heaven.
Keanu Reveals There’s A Fourth and Fifth Matrix Movie Coming.
Oh shit, Keanu Reeves has dropped that there could be a fourth and fifth Matrix movie coming. The sound you here is my slitting my throat with an old copy of Wizard. Paper cuts hurt man, but not as much as the continual destruction of every childhood Idol that I worshiped.
Interested? Come in for the deets.
Behold The Center of the Milky Way Across The Entire Spectrum!
Enlarge. | Via.
See that shit? It’s the center of the galaxy you’re currently living in. Alasdair Wilkins explains how this pig was made:
This amazing image of the center of our galaxy is the work of three different space telescopes – Hubble, which photographs objects in the visual wavelengths, Chandra, which looks at X-rays, and Spitzer, which investigates the infrared.
Gorgeous. Astrophysicist Giovanni Fazio explains in Wilkin’s article that when ” you look at the universe in different wavelengths, you get a completely different picture. They are all pieces of a puzzle.” True dat.
Behold Megan Burns’ Space Babes In NYC.
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Up until yesterday, I hadn’t heard of Megan Burns. Thanks to the internets and io9, I am now educated. Knowledge has been acquired. Education implemented. Burns is an artist and is putting on a show this weekend in NYC that celebrates something everyone involved in Omega Level fucking loves: pin-up space babes art. You live in NYC, unlike me, and could actually check this awesomeness out? Here’s some deets:
Burns’ paintings will be featured alongside the neon alters of Pavel Kraus in “Ancient Sci-Fi Update,” at The Proposition, which is at 2 Extra Place on New York’s Lower East Side. The opening reception is today (Jan. 22) from 6 to 8 PM, and the show runs until Feb. 27.
Enlarge.
Go to the show. Go to her website. Show the love.
A Casual Introduction to Time: All of Your Favorite Movies are in 3D.
[Editor’s Note: Intergalactic Space Cowboy Bonesaw proposed he write a column on space for OL every Saturday. Or thereabouts. The Powers That Be (me) obliged. The following is his madness, not ours. I’d say I vouch for it, but I also vouch for fetish porn and child labor. So take it as you will.]
Time is a dimension. It’s hard to perceive it as a planar dimension given that it is not visually evident as we may find height, width, or depth to be, but it can be explained in a way that may give it relevance to other dimensions despite never exactly emulating one. Spatial relativity dictates time’s expansion with the increase of speed. That is to say that as you travel faster on a planar dimension, you’re experiencing time faster as well.
Another force affecting time is force exerted upon an object. This force that is majorly holding our time in check beyond our speed is gravity. The closer to the gravitational field you are, the slower your time is going to be moving. An easy way to think about this is considering that an accurate clock being held a few feet above you will travel faster, albeit a relatively negligible amount, than a clock on the ground.
This is interesting when considering that if we can alter the speed of an object we can consequentially edit its time path. This is relevant when considering that astronauts experience time at a considerably different pace than us here on earth when factoring in their speed with their distance from large gravitational forces.
Absolute time was the principle in which two good clocks should have an identical time regardless of the events leading up to the time checking. This notion was declared false upon the Theory of Relativity’s supporting realization that the speed of light is seen as the same to all beings irrelevant to their movement. Time has since been considered personal as in this instance each observer would carry an individual clock which wouldn’t agree with each other observer’s clock.
Hawking used the example of a cup sitting on a table versus a cup that has been smashed to pieces by falling off of said table. The cup on the table is in a state of order while the smashed up is in a state of disorder. The chances in which an ordered state diminishes into a disordered state increases with time, however we don’t see cups putting themselves back together and flying up to the table again. This is an example of not only a term known as the Arrow of Time, but also the second law of thermodynamics which Hawking uses to govern time. “In any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words, it is a form of Murphy’s Law: things always tend to go wrong!”
