I hadn't known about Deletionpedia, a site that via a bot archives all the articles that get deleted from Wikipedia as not relevant or encyclopedic enough and such. I'm thrilled this exists, because frequently fan stuff and lists get deleted from Wikipedia for being irrelevant, trivia, or "original research" and they don't always get transferred to a fan wiki. I mean, I can understand why you wouldn't want lists of minor Star Wars bounty hunters or The Simpson chalkboard gags, or the timeline of the Stargate universe in an encyclopedia, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to look such things up. So if your favorite "irrelevant" article vanished from Wikipedia you can actually find it again easily.

First, some art comm linkage (even though I suspect most interested people will already know of these):

yuletart, a multi-fandom art exchange, has started with the nomination process for this year's fandoms. For the next couple of days only the participants from last year can suggest fandoms for this year, but soon it'll open up to new participants. Since I suggested fandoms I guess that'll mean I'm going to do a holiday exchange again this year. Meep.

Also, paintedspires recently got an overhaul and reopened as an SGA flash art community. The first challenge has been posted, and you should all join or at least watch.

In less happy news ( rat health update )

While I'm among the few people who didn't care for that Discovery channel video (you know the 'I Love the World -- Boom De Ah Dah' one?), I thought the xkcd comic referencing it was neat -- however this video reenacting the xkcd version as live action video is just completely adorkable. A prime example for derivative works making the original so much more enjoyable.

I don't often link to random stuff I've come across, but this dragon sand sculpture is very impressive. Here's a photo from another angle where you can see the baby dragon the big one is cradling.

I follow Dark Roasted Blend, because it often has cool photos and links, however yesterday it featured parasites, which is kind of gross, but okay, so I read about a bunch of parasites.

And this is apparently old news, only I still did not know of this cat parasite, toxoplasma gondii, that also uses humans as intermediate hosts, and is known to change behavior in rats and mice (making them loose their fear of cats, so that they get eaten by the final host the parasite needs). It's apparently still speculative whether the toxoplasmosis disease caused by this also affects behavior in humans, though some scientists apparently claim to have observed correlations showing this, but still. The prevalence of humans with antibodies to this parasite, i.e. they either were infected or still are, is really high, actually over fifty percent where I live (more widely spread than in the US where it's a bit over twenty percent according to what i read), it is kind creepy. I mean, it's more likely than not that I was or still am carrying parasites that potentially can make cysts in your brain to change brain chemistry... Maybe the Goa'uld are less science fiction like than I though. Eeep.

This simple online game is really quite addictive. Also I never manage to clear the board of blocks past level five. I have no idea how people are getting high scores like that.

Because I'm still sick and feverish and break out into shivers as soon as I leave my multiple blankets, and can only sleep so many hours a day even when sick, I've been amusing myself with online games.

So far I've played the BBC mystery games Death in Sakkara and The Seven Noble Kinsmen, Grow Island (I'm pretty sure I've played all earlier grow versions as well previously), Escape from Octilien, DayMare Town and a few other escape games I found linked from jayisgames.com, like the Submachine series.

I'm looking for more entertaining games, that work under Linux (i.e. most Flash games will be fine, Shockwave otoh won't work), aren't too hard or frustrating and don't require mouse dexterity or being fast with clicking and such (I'm using my laptop with a touchpad while in bed shivering so having to navigate some arrow quickly while clicking on things is pretty much out). Do you have any recs?

This Flash version of Frogger is awfully addictive.

After a few people commented on how disturbing Superman!Kermit was, I'd like to point out that even though I was unaware of it when I first drew him, TPTB have cast Kermit and Piggy in these roles long before me, as this image from the the 1982 Miss Piggy Calendar shows. And for the record, IMO Kermit as Batman Frogman (as seen here from the 1997 Muppet Parody Calendar: The Sequel) is far more terrifying.

The observation you make in comic fandom that TPTB will always have produced weirder stuff than you could ever come up with and will have done it first apparently holds true for Muppets as well. :)

Once again I'm checking the links of my recs page, and to my dismay it appears that T.O.T.O. aka The Obi-Wan Torture Oasis (formerly at http://members.tripod.com/~SlashGirls/toto/) has vanished. Which sucks, because IIRC the version of Silent Faction by analise and Kirby Crow there was formatted much more nicely, i.e. with graphics and such , than the one at masterapprentice.org I've managed to find. Also, I really like that site.

Well, at least the story is still archived somewhere. *hearts all central archives*

glockgal posted some drawbles and there's one combining Supernatural + Muppets and it's just the best thing I have seen all day.

With each update of my recs page I run a link checker as part of the validation, using the W3C online tools. However a good number of sites, both archives and LJs, have robot exclusion rules, so I can't readily see whether the stories in question are really still there with the W3C link checker. Initially it wasn't a huge bother to check them manually, but by now it's over sixty links. Do any of you who maintain largish recs pages or other link collections have a good strategy for this or an autochecker tool working with a website that's not excluded as a robot?

I mean something like the bookmark editors in webbrowsers that go through links and then show you the broken ones, only something that would check based on a website. I assume html editors or website tools might have such a function, but I code my page simply in Emacs with the help of html and php editing modes for highlighting and such, and I have never needed any specialized programs. I tried one html editor that was bundled with my distro and had been installed automatically as part of the standard set-up (Quanta?), but it all seemed rather more complicated than I wanted to get into for just checking a bunch of links, i.e. I couldn't get the link checker function to work properly with my file at first try. I have no idea whether that was because of the file not being plain html but php mixed with html or something else, but I decided I'd really prefer something simpler.

So how do you check your links?

Seeing how committing to do fanart for comica_obscura actually led to me drawing something (and within a reasonable amount of time too), I've been thinking that maybe some kind of pressure might challenge me and increase my artwork output. Well, pressure beyond having a digital post-it note on my desktop reminding me how much of a slacker I am with a list of fanart ideas I had but haven't drawn yet, which is what I have been doing so far. Not that the "commitment => pressure => results" progression works all that consistently or well for me in RL, but I guess it's worth a try.

Anyway, I thought I might post the list with fanart I've considered drawing in a poll, then you can vote on which one you would most like to see become reality, and I'll do my best to actually make that happen. Part of why these haven't become actual pictures so far is that I have considered the ideas and then realized that they would take some significant effort because most require to draw several people and/or a reasonably complex background, upon which I then kind of went "meep!" internally and proceeded to open some browser window with fanfic. Um well, I have no work ethic, but I'm sure I'd actually feel great if I managed to finish one of these.

Poll #730932 Kick the Sloth!RatCreature...
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which piece of fanart should RatCreature draw?

Along the lines of less complicated fanart I could challenge myself with I considered doing this meme-ish thing I've seen somewhere where you ask people for a character and an emotion and then draw that. Which would fit with my intent to practice drawing emotions more. So if you are interested in me trying that, you could make such suggestions and I'd try drawing them to the best of my ability. That is as long as I know the character and it is not a fandom with actors, meaning basically either DC characters I'm familiar with or who at least are better known (e.g. Arsenal is "better known", Dogwelder not so much), HP characters, or the handful of Marvel characters I know (mostly those regularly appearing in Spider-Man and Daredevil).

Totally unrelated to any fanart stuff, I'm really feeling down that according to that USA Today article Everwood wasn't renewed. It took a bit of joy out of hearing about Supernatural's renewal, even though Everwood's cancellation wasn't unexpected. On top of that so far I've been unable to find a torrent for this week's Everwood ep, which sucks. *sigh*

And if you are like me and have missed the Brokeback Mountain in 30 seconds and re-enacted by bunnies version, you should take a look. It's not quite as good as my favorite bunny-fied movies, IMO, but still fun.

I haven't updated my recs in a long time, however the task to convert the rec folder in my bookmarks to actual recs is getting more and more daunting as time goes on. Since I'm actually somewhat attached to my AU recs page despite all of that, I decided that manageable baby steps are the only way to go, so for now I have fixed the broken links in the existing recs -- at least those a link checking utility showed (linkrot sucks!) -- and added a tiny number of new recs, seven in total, three Batverse, two HP, and two SW. Seven down and not quite ten times as many to go... Well, at least it's a little bit of progress.

I also signed up for a fandom challenge for the very first time. I committed to draw Harry as a platypus animagus for Nimori's Animagus Challenge. When I saw a platypus on the list I just couldn't resist, because while these don't look that vicious they actually have venom and according to the wikipedia: "The male platypus has venomous ankle spurs, used in vicious territorial battles and fights over mates. The poison is not normally lethal to humans but produces excruciating pain and swelling that lasts for several months. The pain is so excruciating that the victim is rendered almost helpless." So while it looks silly it still would be a useful form for him to fight Voldemort and the Death Eaters with what sounds like Cruciatus venom. Besides, since apparently that venom also is only produced during the mating season , the opportunities for crackfic scenarios for Platypus!Harry would be endless too: I mean, obviously it's vital that his animagus form has its best weapon available, and since humans at least don't have fixed mating seasons Harry could have to have sex for The Cause... BTW, last time I looked platypus was still open to claim for fic. *g*

I also found this cool explanation in lj_style how one can turn the simple tag list into a tag cloud with different font sizes depending on how frequently a tag is used. I tried this so now the view of my tags displays as a cloud, not a list. (works only for paid LJs)

Finally, I looked at a ton of Batgirl interpretations because of the recent Batgirl meme. (There's a list in this entry. It's over three hundred by now.)

Does anybody know what happened to the Robin resource site extremerobin.com? Did it move? Vanish? It was a cool site, and I visited it not that long ago. The only trace I could find was an old version still around at its former geocities address. It always makes me sad when good resource sites vanish.

Obviously 6 a.m. in the morning after a night of no sleep is not a time to be able to follow websites on DC's Hypertime, even less so essays on why/how Hypertime is very different from the pre-Crisis Multiverse concept. Still the Hypertime site looks really interesting, and I'm definitely going to check these essays out when my brain is less addled.

Batman continuity has been on my mind a lot lately. I've noticed that I have trouble to keep track of the different versions of key moments in the characters' history, mostly for Batman and Nightwing, because those two are the characters I'm most interested in, and consequently I read more (and more "conflicting") stories about them, but it happens with other characters too. So I decided to make notes of what versions I've read so far. Clearly this is a work in progress, but I thought others might be interested in my efforts at organization.

When I started to organize my knowledge of their origin stories, and to write a post on it, it soon became clear that it would be a very sprawling post, and it got worse and worse, and then I realized that the blogging options for me were either to wait a rather long time, where interesting posts would be scarce in my blog (even more so than usual), because my fannish time and energy meanwhile is going into the monster post, or to make it literally a work in progress, and post it as a series, which would spread the (hopefully) interesting content over a bit of time in my blog (and keep each part at manageable lengths for the readers too).

My first project is trying to piece together an overview of Batman's origin story, i.e. the details of his parents murder, what's known about his childhood, his years of training and travel, as well as key moments early in his vigilante career that formed the present day Batman. Within that, the first meetings between Batman and his enemies as well other superheroes and allies are a chapter of their own. I don't think it's practical to divide it much further, like to make separate sections for "pre-murder childhood," "Wayne murder," "pre-Batman training and travel" and "early career" because in many stories several or all of the above are touched upon, and to separate them would divide the notes on each story needlessly. However the first encounter stories are often separate, and in cases when they are not, like for much of the early history of Dent, Gordon and Batman, and the eventual origin of Two-Face, those are often co-origin stories for all the characters and are the main plot of the stories, so that treating them separately makes sense and is more practical than to mush that together with the often briefer references and flashbacks to his childhood and the like.

Second project will be Nightwing's history, details of his parents murder, the Robin I origin story, how he became Bruce's ward, and the origin of his Nightwing persona. Then at a later point maybe posts on other characters, like Batgirl I/Oracle and Robin III.

The method I've decided on for each of the sections is to first post a list of all stories/issues that I know of which contain relevant information or (re-)tell key events of that time. I'll list them in their publishing order and mark those which I haven't read yet with a "*". In that list I'll also briefly mention why the story is relevant (at least if it isn't self-evident from its title), and for those I haven't read I'll cite the website that referred to them, however my detailed notes only cover the comics I've read myself, and I'll just expand on them later. If those lists are missing important or even minor issues, I'd love to hear about those. I mean, right now I've only read a small portion of the available canon, and browsed a couple of websites, there's no chance these lists are complete.

In the detailed notes I'll mention in the later stories where they contradict the ones published earlier, but not vice versa, mostly for practical reasons, because otherwise the cross-referencing becomes a nightmare fast, and keeping track becomes much harder. Maybe I'll include "bi-directional" referencing in the final version, once I have all notes at hand.

Of tremendous help for staying on top of the continuity facts have been:

1. The Continuity Pages for Batman


2. The Unauthorized Chronology of the DC Universe


3. The Dark Knight FAQs


4. The Unoffical Guide to the DC Universe

In the places where I mention issues I haven't read yet, but have read about in those resources, I'll link to the specific site from which I have the information.

The second post, where I actually start to examine Batman's origin's will follow shortly.

So this morning I browsed a couple of sites about Green Lantern (Hal Jordan not Kyle Rayner), and wow, when DC decides to go for character assassination they don't do it halfway. I mean, I've read Zero Hour so I had been vaguely aware that GL had become Parallax and tried to reset the universe in the aftermath of Coast City being wiped out, and that he's now, after Parallax died saving the sun, become The Spectre to atone or something like that. But I didn't know anything about him, and I didn't realize that he went on an insane rampage, killing and injuring several of his former friends and colleagues, and wiped out the GL Corps as well as the Guardians.

I browsed around these sites and my reaction was pretty much **boggle**. It's not that I'm a Hal Jordan fan, so it wasn't much of a gut reaction to the character assassination, but I kept thinking, what if they'd do that to a character I really like? Like, what if they were to turn Nightwing into an insane serial killer just for kicks because the sales of his book were falling or something?

I was browsing The Continuity Pages earlier, as I linked to the annotations for 1602 in my previous entry, and I found a continuity page for Daredevil, which is a useful overview of the storylines and already has a lot of info on both the first and the second volume of the series. Also useful for me to see which TPBs collect what, so that I can decide which ones I'll probably want to get eventually. There are also annotations for the Bendis / Maleev run on Daredevil, so far only the ones for Underboss are completed. It's not so much annotations for arcane references or anything like that, but it's always interesting and fun to read other people nitpicking comic issues. (I haven't looked at Julian Darius' annotations for The Elektra Saga as I haven't read that comic (yet), but that's there as well, in case you're interested.)

I found a great guide to Cataclysm, Aftershock and No Man's Land. A very detailed timeline of events, and it lists the issues. So check out JYD's Complete Guides to Cataclysm, Aftershock, and NML.