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Category Archives: Comics
“The only water in the forest is the river.”
Last week it was the third three episodes of the current season of Doctor Who, with a planet called America and the moon landing and Richard Nixon and aliens you completely forget about once you turn your back and then pirates and alien medical Sirens and this week it’s dead spaceship graveyards and the creepy disembodied voice of Michael Sheen and a mad woman who’s bigger on the inside and who might just be “The Doctor’s Wife” and also the guy who brought you The Sandman is writing the words…
The earth is doomed…
…yeah, but what else is new?
Mad linkage:
Superman is no longer an American citizen. Deal with it.
The uncensored version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray to finally be published.
They might actually release Joss Whedon’s Cabin In The Woods.
Lars Von Trier and the apocalyptic whimper.
Unlike with Natalie Portman, don’t expect a post here called “Who’s January Jones fucking these days?”
Budget cuts curtail the search for alien life out there. 
Also, Natalie Portman’s dad self-publishes a novel about severed heads, stolen presidential embryos, and mysterious clones.
May Day, 1871: The day “Science Fiction” was invented.
Emma Watson leaves Brown.
Speaking of which, the new Harry Potter trailer is kind of epic.
Ayn Rand’s first love and mentor was a sadistic serial killer who dismembered little girls.
Charlie Sheen and Chuck Lorre: Honestly, who gives a fuck anymore?
Mitt Romney’s bullshit is back and it’s not off to such a great start.
RIP Joanna Russ.
Bessel beams are cool, but don’t actually exist.
FYI: It’s Walpurgisnacht!
Before he retires Steven Soderbergh will make Channing Tatum’s male stripper movie.
I don’t know where you are but summer’s here.
Is Netflix helping to reduce movie piracy in the United States?
Giant black holes discovered in the nuclei of merging galaxies.
An interview with Chuck Klosterman.
Big Boi and Modest Mouse are finally working together.
How bacteria could generate radio waves.
Iggy Pop was considered for a judge slot on American Idol and Fugazi may actually reunite some day.
Scientists create stable, self-renewing neural stem cells.
The 10 greatest apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic music videos.
All living humans are more closely related than you might think.
Vigilantes band together to protect NYC sex workers.
What can we learn by comparing the old and the new covers for the Left Behind series?
Unemployed ninja for hire.
from here.
Last night I had the strangest dream…
In the dream, it was the end of the world, or, well, it was the last night on Earth, and the following morning it was all going to end. In fire and flame, buried and suffocated in ash, or via instantaneous evaporation into total nothingness… the how I didn’t know. Things are vague in dreams. They change moment to moment and you just feel things, just know them. And I felt like it wasn’t this year, not 2011, but maybe it was next year, or maybe it wasn’t.
In the dream, some people had known that the end of was coming for a long time. The crazy people, we called them and always had, but they were the ones who had been having the dreams for years now. That’s how we all knew, every living thing on the planet, I mean, that’s how we knew that it was expiring the following morning: we had dreams. Most of us started having them about six months before that final night. In the dreams we were told that our time was finite and we woke up with the certainty of it. The sad, cold certainty of it.
We knew from the dreams and from intuition that most wouldn’t accept this, that there would be fights and attempts to stop it and plans concocted to spirit away or just generally save the human race, and that every effort must be made. But from the dreams we knew that all those plans would come up with nothing, all those efforts would be ultimately fruitless, and in the end… it would come down to the simple question of how would you want to spend your last night alive?
In the dream I had last night, I had tried to get in touch with my friends, but they were all on the other side of the world from me. Whoever they were and wherever I was, they were somewhere else. They had lives to finish living and people to wrap their existence up with. It was just me, me by myself, just as it had always been. And I was thirsty with nothing to drink in the house, so I went to a bar. There were strangers there living like there was no tomorrow, which was fitting because there would be no tomorrow, and everyone was laughing and talking and loud and very, very drunk. A band was playing. It felt like a celebration. The band wasn’t that great, but for the occasion, they were amazing. The music was so loud, so perfect. It felt like it wasn’t just coming from their instruments and their speakers and souls, but that it was coming from inside me. And they were playing this song:
This morning I woke up and the sun was shining. Dogs were barking down the street, my neighbor was mowing his yard, and car alarms were going off somewhere. And I had to pee really, really, really bad. For the briefest of moments, beyond anything else that could possibly be going on, it just felt good to be alive.
Think in images.
Three quotes from Vladimir Nabokov and a couple of pictures from the internet…
1. This:
from here.
“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”
2. This:
by Matt Bors, from here.
“I don’t think in any languages. I think in images.”
3. This:
and this:
and this:
and also this:
Cats quoting Charlie Sheen! from here.
“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”
From the flames…
I really feel this right now:
via the always wonderful Married To The Sea, but I first noticed it here. Also:
And:
Big Morning.
and
and
and
from Three Word Phrase by Ryan Pequin, which is just awesome. Also not to be missed: This strip, which will just make your day.
A brand new day in a brand new year.
via Exploding Dog.
01/11/11.
from here.
From the internet:
The difference between the US version of Skins and the UK version of Skins.
How to use eHOW to turn yourself into a comedic force to be reckoned with.
“Brooklyn style, bitch!”
Bond is back.
by Kelly Reemtsen, from here.
The Day The Universe Came and other incredibly amazing and erotic pulp science fiction book covers.
The afterlife of David Foster Wallace.
What really happened to Endor when they ganked the Death Star?
Hark! A Vagrant and Nancy Drew.
from here.
Twitter’s response to the WikiLeaks subpoena should be the industry standard.
FYI: The Prisoner is probably still my favorite show ever.
Meg Ryan and John (Cougar!) Mellencamp are dating and that’s a little too much for me to handle this early in the new year.
Kepler spacecraft finds hot, distant planet.
An infographic history of the Batmobile.
via Boing Boing.
Mona Lisa landscape mystery finally “solved.”
People can build bombs out of anything. Including vibrators.
The Counterforce post with the best pictures.
Myspace cuts half it’s staff in half.
Here’s 12 ways to spot a cheat.
Literal New Yorker cartoon captions.
What would Jesus do about sex trafficking?
There’s going to be another Neil LaBute movie, this time starring Brendan Fraser.
Did Kanye steal Dr. Dog’s music video?
Also, Kanye got his album cover banned on purpose. Sigh.
Atmosphere’s self-cleaning capacity surprisingly stable.
I really like this mash up between Doctor Who and Dr. Seuss.
Ghostbusters meets Inception.
The eurotrash and their monetary destiny.
The ALA’s Youth Media Award winners.
The 50 best comic book covers of 2010.
Grant Morrison’s 2002 performance piece for Steve Cook.
Charlize Theron to star in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel?
Visualizing the deletion process on Wikipedia.
Interesting photos: The photo that Anna Wintour famously axed from Vogue and Wastelands by Dan Dubowitz.
Climate change to last a millennium. Deal with it.
NASA called 2012 the most flawed sci fi film ever.
Transcending the human, DIY style.
from here.
Three days.
Three days. That’s how many are left in 2010.
That is so wild, right? The end of the science fiction year that wasn’t too science fiction-y, sadly. Or maybe it was and I just wasn’t paying nearly enough attention. Or maybe I’ve just gotten so accustomed to the very pedestrian and incredibly mundane and boringly sexy science fiction-y aspects of my normal life?
from here.
I’m sure it’s something like that. Absolutely. Definitely. Whatever.
Also, this:
from here.
In this year, in this world of internetting and bloggery and social media, I had five very simple goals that I laid out at the start of 2010 and wanted to complete by year’s end. In order of my own personal interest and their importance, they were:
1. Not going to tell you (you’re not ready for this one yet, folks)(and neither am I).
2. Not going to tell you (forthcoming).
3. Not going to tell you (total abysmal failure).
4. Not going to tell you (worked, but was embarrassing and not worth mentioning again).
5. Getting 2,010 tweets in 2010!
The fifth one is the one that I’m going to definitely accomplish. Unless I lose both hands sometime in the next three days. Or lose my phone or computer or both. Or unless an EMP just wipes out all technology in the country/world.
But, well, I just don’t twitter much. And getting 2,010 tweets in 2010 was a silly, frivolous goal that I jokingly threw out on my twitter sometime back in… I don’t know what month, but sometimes those things you only jokingly declare are the ones that stick with you. It was somewhere around the start of the year, I believe, and I think I had less than a thousand tweets then and was probably tweeting an average of four to five tweets a month, roughly.
And eventually I just thought, yeah, I can do this shit, why not? Because it’s stupid? Stupidity has not stopped me from doing anything ever in my life.
Also, this is the 825th post on your friend neighborhood Counterforce. That’s wild. We didn’t make it to 1000 posts this year, but that’s perhaps for the best. Personally, I’m just shocked that I managed to ramble on for nearly 2,010 tweets. I mean, what a silly declaration. Thinking back upon it, at first I was like this:
And then I was like this:
You understand.
Oh man, how creepy is this photo below?
Right?
Also, New Year’s Eve is almost upon us. Time to celebrate!
Also, this is fog porn:
from here.
And this is the first x-ray picture of a lightning strike:
from here.
Speaking of “science fiction,” the recent Doctor Who Christmas special was fucking wonderful.
So fun and smart and a nice little twist on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol cause, hey, why can’t the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future be time travelers and holograms?
Michael Gambon was brilliant, but ruthlessly mean and joyously funny in places. And while the show did play around with some of it’s own rules towards time travel (and that’s why we have rules about time travel, folks: so they can be broken!), I found the idea of one watching their own past and memories change before their very eyes to be fascinating. Plus, the interesting but slight references to “the silence.” And I had to love the nice little nods to the recent JJ Abrams Star Trek movie with the copious lens flares on display of the crashing starship’s bridge.
Honestly, it was just nice to have Doctor Who back. The trailer for the upcoming season at the end of the special was a nice little tease as far as potential goes. Can it be April already?
Also, I’m worried that this (below) is what women must think of me whenever they see me…
from here.
Sigh. And I’m just trying to be normal and cool and down to earth and approachable. We can’t all be perfect, can we?
from here.
Oh well. Remember this always:
from here.
This is a picture from Tron Legacy…
…which I hear was pretty terrible, but that Olivia Wilde was the best part of. Is it me, or is Olivia Wilde totally the new Angelina Jolie?
I mean that based on a lot of things, like her acting ability, her potential, the type of roles she’s taken in the past, but also based on her seemingly having that same ability that Angelina Jolie has to turn straight girls a little curious.
You know?
This is an abandoned theater in Detroit:
from here.
This is a monolith:
This is some good solid crazy fun rough housing:
And this is some old school adorable chillaxing right here:
The last six months or so on this blog and in my life have been… weird, to say the least. I’d go into more details here, but quite frankly, I don’t want to. I’ll just say that due to illness in my family, my life got a bit… derailed and I’m astonished that I’m seeing the end of this year without having gone totally insane. Or maybe I have already gone totally, stupendously insane and it’s just helping me see the end of this year more clearly? Like 3D glasses? That’s a comforting thought, right?
Anyway, at some point this will all be over and I’ll get back to some kind of semblance of “normal,” whatever that is. Are we still doing that? “Normal?”
Hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll be right back to asking “Who’s your daddy?” in no time flat.
This is what religion looks like:
from here.
And this is my basic worldview in a nutshell:
This is an example of the happy medium between sanity and fear:
This is an example of how Batman is both a master of surprise and also quite probably a huge pervert:
And sadly, no matter what we say or do, Lost is still over and done with:
Oh well. Three days to go. And then…
Fingers crossed about something exciting happening in those next three days (after all, a good deal of people on this planet thought that their magic wizard man came back from the dead in that same amount of time) but not holding my breath. Exciting, but not too exciting. Wow me, thrill me, blow my mind, fuck me over and fuck me up (but in a good way, please), but remember that when the sun comes up, I’ve still got bills to pay and TV shows to catch up with. Three days to go, promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep, and a long journey sprawling ahead of us through mountains upon mountains. This is both the place we made together and the journey we started together and I’m gonna be there with you. And wherever we end up, whatever new definition of home or normal we excavate, when we do we’ll turn to each other and say, “This must be the place!”
The batmobile lost a wheel and the Joker got away…
I’m sure I said something similar to this as a kid:
You know?
In fact, as a kid, Christmas left me with more questions than anything else. Looking back on it now, I adore it’s innocent, silly magic, the inherent wonder that comes with the whole season, and the basic premise of Santa Claus, the North Pole, elves building toys for probably slave-like wages, and reindeer and shit, but I remember as a kid… not so much thinking that it was bullshit, but being confused by the holes in the story, the things that just blatantly didn’t make sense or jive with, you know, reality and what have you.
from here.
Sometimes it was just semantics and logistical things that perplexed me, but sometimes it tended more towards the philosophical…
But I guess somewhere in there the ideals and notions I have about the season now – be them naive, hopeful, confused, tattered, reaching, labored, dreamy, and all ultimately cynical – were born:
from here.
Oh well. Hope you had a great one!
