Tag: Long

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The “Premio Dardo” award has been sweeping through comics blogs over the last week or two, and Groovy Superhero bestowed it upon my comics blog, Speed Force. The idea is that someone gives you the award, then you pass it along to other bloggers you appreciate.

It’s basically a chain letter or tagging meme, in the form of an award.

I was curious as to where the meme actually came from, and did some digging. I didn’t find much of anything conclusive, but I did find some interesting things:

Premio Dardo: I Entrega de Premios, Best Blog Darts Thinker

  • “Premio Dardo” means “Dart Award” in Spanish, which fits with the “I Entrega de Premios Dardo 2008” text. (This means that “Premio Dardo Award” is kind of like “La Brea Tar Pits” in that it literally means “Dart Award Award.”)
  • The oldest post I could find in English was October 29, 2008
  • Looking up the Spanish phrase from the image, I was able to trace it as far back as February 2008 on Spanish-language blogs.
  • There are at least two versions of the image: One large, with text in the empty space at the lower left. The other small, with a black border and text in the border like the much-parodied motivational posters, and labeled as “Premio Dardos.”
  • There are at least two different descriptions of the award in English:

    This award acknowledges the values that every blogger shows in his or her effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values every day.

    and

    The PREMIO DARDO is designed to recognize unique voices and visions on the Web as well as to promote fraternization amongst bloggers of all sorts.

  • The number of blogs you’re expected to pass along the award to is variously given as 5, 10, 12, and 15.
  • Blogspot’s search doesn’t seem to work.

The text on the oldest version I could find reads:

La I Entrega de Premios Dardo 2008 se abre paso entre un gran elenco de Premios de reconocido prestigio en el mundo de la literatura, y con el reconoce los valores que cada blogger muestra cada día en su empeño por transmitir valores culturales, éticos, literarios, personal, etc.., que en suma, demuestra su creatividad a través su pensamiento vivo que está y permanece, innato entre sus letras, entre sus palabras rotas”. El premio debe acoger en su interior a un mínimo de 15 bloggers

Roughly translated:

The Dart Awards Ceremony I 2008 appears among a large list of prestigious awards in the world of literature, and recognizes the values that each blogger shows each day in their efforts to convey cultural ethical, literary, personal, etc. values… in short, it demonstrates his creativity through his vibrant thoughts, which remain innate within the letters, torn between his words. ” The prize must encompass at least 15 bloggers

I surmise that:

  • Somewhere late last year, the meme jumped from Spanish to English, with only a partial translation of the description.
  • Somewhere along the line, the description fell off, and someone wrote a new one.
  • Many recipients found it hard to choose 15 blogs, and shortened the list. The shorter number got passed along.

I do have to wonder about the branching factor.  Each recipient passes the meme along to 5–15 new recipients, which means that if they react quickly, the number of Premio Dardo recipients will increase dramatically (think Tribbles).  If it started out more than a year ago, it’s had plenty of time to overrun the blogosphere.  I can only assume that a significant fraction of people who receive it just ignore it, producing dead ends on its path.

Or maybe there are just a lot more blogs out there than I think there are.

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Now that it’s live, I’ve downloaded the Google Chrome beta on my Windows box at work.  Thoughts so far:

Good:

  • Site compatibility seems to be fine so far, with a couple of minor issues (see the “Bad” section).  Mostly I’ve tested it with a couple of forum sites, LiveJournal, Slashdot, and WordPress.
  • I like the simple settings box, with “Basics,” “Minor Tweaks,” and “Under the Hood.”
  • It does feel fast.
  • Showing the URL of links in the lower left-hand corner is a perfect compromise between the spatial advantages of a permanent status bar and the extra room provided by leaving it out.
  • I like the task manager for the browser itself.  It’ll be good for developers, but it’ll also be good for users: as the comic points out, if your browser starts chewing up all available resources, you’ll be able to tell what page/plugin/program is at fault instead of just blaming the browser.

Bad:

  • Gears support doesn’t seem to work quite right.  WordPress.com doesn’t detect that it’s available.  Local WP installs with Bad Behavior can’t sync completely.  (It doesn’t send an Accept header on the request for one of the TinyMCE files, which causes Bad Bahavior to think it’s a spambot and triggers a 403.)
  • Cookie management is too simplistic.  I like to accept all cookies temporarily, but clear everything when I end my browsing session, with exceptions for sites where I want to stay logged in.  This is easy in Firefox, a little trickier in Opera, and doesn’t seem to be an option in Chrome.
  • I have seen it pause a couple of times, with as few as 5 tabs. [edit: these seem to be related to Flash content]
  • No Incomplete spell-check.
  • I keep hitting the forward-slash key to search within a page, since that’s the shortcut I’m used to in Firefox and Opera.
Debatable:
  • The UI does indeed stay out of your way.  I guess this sort of makes Chrome the Anti-Flock.
  • DNS Pre-Fetching is enabled by default.  This is different from full HTTP pre-fetching in that all it does it look up the IP addresses of the links that you might click on.  It’s not clear at what point it does this — I don’t remember seeing it mentioned in the comic, which (ironically) isn’t searchable.  I suppose it could either hit the domains of all the links on a page, or just those that would trigger HTTP pre-fetching, or even just send the query when you hover over a link (to get a split-second head start before you click). Update Sep. 17: Google has a blog post explaining pre-resolving in detail. Apparently it does check the domains for all the links on the current page.

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A study recently determined that organically-grown food doesn’t contain more nutrients than conventional food. Um… okaaaay… I don’t think I’ve ever seen any advocates of organic farming making that claim. I’m sure there are a few, but the major themes generally seem to be:

  • More sustainable in the long term (less negative impact on the environment).
  • Less unhealthy residue from pesticides, fertilizers, etc.
  • Better taste.

And, of course, none of these points were addressed by the study.  In short, it’s a classic straw man fallacy.  Sure, I’ve got problems with the terminology used by the organic food sector (foremost: overloading the term “organic”), but this is just missing the point.

(Hat tip to Katie for pointing this one out.)

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The panel for Comic Book Tattoo was great. They had not just Tori Amos but 6 of the writers and artists who worked on the book, and most important of all, they kept it balanced. Too often when you have one high-profile guest, the panel ends up focusing entirely on that person. But everyone had a chance to talk about the process.

One of the things that Tori emphasized was that she’d wanted the artists to have complete freedom, because she’d been on too many projects where someone stepped in and said something like, “Did you think about the demographic?” Rantz Hoseley expanded on that, pointing out that many of the artists kept asking him (or, more precisely, Tori, through him) whether they could do things like do a story without word balloons. They were accustomed to that kind of limitation working on other projects. Ted McKeever mentioned a Superman story he turned in that got rejected because he drew the wrong number of belt loops. And Rantz took great pleasure in telling them to go for it, whatever it was.

At one point, Tori mentioned that when she read the stories, she didn’t hear the songs they were based on in her head — she heard new music, which she’s now working on. She and several of the artists talked about the cyclical nature of inspiration, with different kinds of arts all inspiring each other.

I was in the 5th row, off to the side, which was great — but I also had managed to get a slot for the signing this afternoon. I had to skip a bunch of stuff I would have liked to attend — Pushing Daisies, “Quick Draw,” Battlestar Galactica — but you know, I’m going to see those shows when they come back from hiatus. Who knows when I’ll get another chance to meet Tori Amos?

Update: I’ve posted more photos from the panel.

Between the end of the panel and the start of the signing, I wandered a bit, grabbed lunch, went back to Todd Nauck’s table to pick up the Impulse sketch (he was doing a sketch of Secret, and mentioned that he’d started Young Justice as a huge Impulse fan, then started to really like the other characters, and ended up with Wonder Girl as his favorite because he got to show so much character growth over the course of his time on the book.) I caught up with Katie in the line for Pushing Daisies — she got into both the Heroes and Lost panels — and then headed over to the line for the Tori Amos signing around 1:30.

This was the first time I’d been to one of the big autograph signings in the Sails pavilion. They do everything in multistage lines. For about half the first stage I just pulled out the book and read the first few stories. (I must track down a copy of “Here in my Head.”) Then I got to talking with the woman behind me, who had somehow managed a last-minute trip and gotten into just about everything she wanted to do. (Though she disappeared between stages, so I suspect she didn’t know she needed to get her badge signed to get into the signing, and thought she just needed to buy a copy of the book.) During the second stage, I ended up mostly talking with a man in front of me who had been in the comics industry during the late 1990s and left. He said this con, and the book, had inspired him to try to get back into comics.

I got up to the front of the line around 4:10. I’d been trying to think of what to say during my 30 seconds, and promptly forgot all of it. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite reduced to the level of a babbling fanboy as I was when I got to shake Tori Amos’ hand — twice — and try to say something about how I’d loved her music since college, and got this T-shirt at the first concert of hers I went to, and so on, and she just kept looking at me like she was expecting me to continue, and ohmigodi’mtalkingtotoriamos. I remember she asked me if I was local, and I said something about the LA/OC area, and I wanted to mention catching her show at the Grove last December but said something incoherent instead, and that’s honestly the only thing I can remember that she said to me, even though I know there were several more sentences.

Not my book, but the same page that she signed in mine.
Not my book, but the same page that she signed in mine.

I walked away from the signing thinking, “I’m done. I could leave this convention right now and go home, and I’d be perfectly happy.”

Update: I’ve posted more photos from the signing.

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Wizard World Los Angeles 2008Wizard World Los Angeles turned out to be a surprisingly good con. Originally I was planning to go on my own, but when they announced the addition of Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli) to the Heroes panel, Katie decided to go as well. So we drove into LA Saturday morning, and arrived at the con around 11:00 AM. I was expecting a much sparser crowd based on my experience last year, but that had been a Sunday. This Saturday was a full-fledged con.

Update: The photo gallery is up!

The Floor

I put on my robe and wizard hat.I spent most of the time on the main floor, hunting down back-issues, bargains and autographs. A lot of dealers had brought their bargain bins (some of them, thankfully, alphabetized!), and a lot of them had trades and hardcovers for half-off or close to it. There were also the booths selling high-grade Silver-Age and Golden-Age books, toys and collectibles, and at least two booths selling swords. Yes, swords.

At one point, I overheard two comic-book dealers discussing whether the show was worth it. One of them said that people here tended to be looking for bargains, so it was hard to sell anything else. They agreed San Diego was a better bet.

Marvel Cars: Iron Man and Punisher SUVsI’ve been joking that the logo design for this year’s con (see above) was inspired by the gigantic auto show that shared the convention center witl last year’s con. So I was surprised to find a mini-auto show here: Marvel-themed cars, including Iron Man and Punisher SUVs.

There was a stage set up for Guitar Hero. At one point, I noticed the music was Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It seemed appropriate.

Costuming

Darth Vader and his entourage march though the food court.There weren’t quite as many people in costume as I saw at WonderCon last month (also a Saturday). But there was a large contingent of people in Jedi costumes, some of whom seemed to be sparring with lightsabers every time I walked down the right edge of the dealers’ room. And there were Imperial Stormtroopers directing traffic, making sure people could find the one large panel room that was half-way to the other end of the convention center.

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