Recently in Stuff Category

An interesting discussion of the "long tail" in sales over the internet (and the surprising ignorance of the meaning of the term among certain tech-heads) over at Language Log:

Language Log: The long tail: in which Gauss is not mocked, but TWiTs (and dictionaries) are

As Amazon and other internet retailers have demonstrated, long-tailed distributions of consumer demand -- in the sense of distributions where a large fraction of the probability mass is in the tail -- are a Good Thing for companies that can cope efficiently with orders for the very large array of books, CDs, movies and so on that are not among the top sellers. That's where Chris Anderson's Wired article "The Long Tail" starts. He claims that a much bigger fraction of the (potential sales) mass than you might think is out in the tails of the distribution of consumer demand, and he turns the phrase "long tail" into a bugle call for the redesign of post-modern life.

I note it here because it has a direct relation to what I was just talking about vis-a-vis webcomics. If you look at demand for comics as being such a curve, with the fat part of the curve being dominated by the big newspaper strips like Garfield or Doonesbury, and the rest of the world of comics trailing off to the right, appealing to smaller and smaller audiences you get the same situation as with books, DVD rentals or music. Without measuring, you don't know the exact size or shape of the tail, but would it surprise anyone to find out that it was "long" in the sense that a large part of the total demand fell in the tail of tinier and tinier niche comics?

Nagraj Vs. Shakoora The Magician

Found this link in a discussion thread over on Howling Curmudgeons

Here's a cute little app that quizzes you on (grossly simplifiedm, 12-pixel) versions of Superhero Chest Symbols

Bear in mind that what it's showing you is 12 pixels representing the chest and waist of the hero/villain. Don't try and interpret it as a shot of the logo itself, or just part, or it'll confuse you.

For what it's worth, I scored 20/21 (I got the first one wrong because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be looking at).

Michael Paulus :: Skeletal Systems:

The skeletal systems of various cartoon characters

Update: btw, if you surf to the site and take a look at the Charlie Brown image, there's something that bugs me about it. Why does Charlie Brown's skull have protruding cheekbones? It doesn't seem to be implied by anything on the surface...his head's a big ole sphere, round enough to be used as an impromptu globe, but you couldn't guess that from the Paulus's version of the skull. It just seems like he's pulling in more knowledge of human anatomy than is warranted, compared to, say, Bubbles above.

Language Log: "Ho ho ho", she laughed in a refined feminine way points to some interesting links, particularly an academic paper Problems in the translations of comics and cartoons

I don't post as much at Tartsville, the Sequential Tart bulletin board, as I used to. Partly it's that I'm posting more about comics here, partly it's that the last couple of times I tried to start a discussion at Tartsville (on Count Your Sheep, and on Angel Moxie) it didn't go anywhere. I mean not even a single reply. I can get that here, and if I post here at least somebody might stumble across it in Google, ya know?
Still, it's a good, civil board, with lots of fun indie creators, including my bestest pal Rachel Hartman of Amy Unbounded fame. Though nowadays, she's more of Milkbreath and Me fame. Hey, it won two blogging awards so far, so that's fame--in fact it may be more fame than her Xeric grant what with the relative sizes of the readerships...

Or is Kestrel being an utter bitch to Angela here? "Oh, you lied to me because you secretly wished to be more than friends, even though you never did or said anything to pressure me in any way! Get out of my life!" If you read Something Positive, can you imagine Jhim doing this to PeeJee (if he ever actually figured out that she wants him?)

Read about Parker's eventful day over at mystifying oracle .

The Foreigner - Japan: So You Want To Learn Japanese.

Cruel, but funny.

Just to show what a geek I am, the laughing girl spot illo is Yukino Miyazawa from Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou by Tsuda Masami.

Eve Tushnet has some musings (inspired by Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics) about what art is. Her analysis is mostly along the lines of what makes art good, or at least satisfying to her, but when it comes to defining art she mostly shrugs; she knows she doesn't like Scott McCloud's super-broad definition designed to cut off endless debate about whether comics (or anything else) counts as art, but admits that she doesn't really have an alternative in mind...a reasonable enough approach, but I think we can do a little better. I propose the following: art is anything that intends communication by evocation. I think that's pretty broad--broad enough to include all the performing arts as well as the plastic and even architecture and decorative arts, but narrow enough to eliminate most of the things that are clearly non-art such as natural phenomena, compilations of data and so forth, while allowing wiggle room for things that aren't primarily intended as art but may be done in an artful way. For instance, a rainbow is beautiful, and may well evoke certain feelings and memories, but isn't communication; Pride and Prejudice is art because the intent of the communication from Jane Austen to the reader is to evoke certain feelings and memories that cause the reader to recognize types of people and human situations and not merely to convey certain information and fictional facts about the Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Similarly an ordinary dictionary isn't art, but Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is. The thing that I like about this definition is that it does a bit more than just match certain brute intuitions about what we call art: it suggests reasons for why certain kinds of things are likely to be contentious--for instance in Dadaism or found art where the either the intent to communicate or the ability to evoke anything specific or both are missing.