Month: August 2006

Make Monsters Weblog

Make Monsters is a weblog dedicated to Dick Smith’s fabulous Do It Yourself Monster Make-Up book.

Published in 1965, the book included detailed instructions for doing movie-style monster makeup effects, geared toward kids. I remember getting my hands on a copy of this book sometime in the late 1970s, probably through the public library. Great stuff.

Anyway, the Make Monsters weblog is documenting going through the entire book and doing each of the projects, like this vampire get-up.

Sharp Reader

A couple years ago I recommended Newzcrawler as my preferred reader of choice.

Newzcrawler was/is a good program but the developer tried to do way too much with the software and it had a number of nasty gotchas which ended up, well, getting me.

For the past few months I’ve been using Sharp Reader 0.9.7 which works just as well and is free. So far, I’ve been very happy with it.

Comic Book Reading Software

I wish there were a comic book reading program for Windows as slick as Comic Book Lover which, alas, is strictly OS X.

For Windows users, the choices boil down to Comical, CDDisplay, or PyComicsViewer (which requires Python to be installed).

For the most part, I use CDDIsplay which is great for what it does, but once you’ve got 20,000-30,000 comics on your hard drive, organizing and managing them becomes a major issue.

Comic Book Lover solves that problem by creating an iTunes-like interface for tracking comic books and attaching metadata to help organize them,

Once you’ve got the metadata about the comics entered, then Comic Book Lover lets you create lists and smart lists of different comic books. Show me all of my Avenger’s comics in which Vision appears. Or compile lists, of say, all Identity Crisis-related books.

Somebody please create something halfway as usable as this for Windows.

Mini Mag Stands and Displays for Action Figures

It’s a problem all of us run into eventually — one day you wake up and that small 100-200 action figure collection has bloomed to 600 or 700 figures. Okay, maybe I’m the only one with that problem. Anyway, how the heck do you display all these action figures without spending more on display cases than on the actual figures (which is very easy to do)?

Mini Mag Stands are an interesting solution. These are round bases with pegs designed for 3 & 3/4″ Star Wars action figures. The bases themselves are magnetic, giving a lot of options for displaying them.

WholesaleCases.Com sells similar bases that are non-magnetic.

I just wish they’d come out with something like this for larger action figures, like the Marvel Legends series, etc.

GPS Coordinates Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number

Hundreds of years after Adam Smith demonstrated that free trade between nations enriched both nations, mercantilism is alive and well even among those who are smart enough to know better.

It is very odd to see someone like Rogers Cadenhead argue against outsourcing on this sort of basis,

I don’t begrudge Seal’s people taking their shot at the Indian dream, but I think it’s in Americans’ self-interest to make outsourcing as expensive as possible.

This sort of myopic (and wrong-headed) version of American — and, even more directly, European — self-interest has helped to condemn hundreds of millions of people to needless poverty around the world. Specifically, American and European agricultural policies and protectionist trade policies have made it almost impossible for farmers and workers in the developing world to be competitive. The result is a double whammy — artificially high prices for goods in the United States and artificially inflated poverty levels in the developing world.

If Europe and the United States were serious about tackling third world poverty, the single most effective thing they could do would be to end their obscenely subsidized support of agriculture and other protected industries.

In a world where technology has largely wiped out the importance of distance, locking out Indian IT workers simply because they live at the “wrong” GPS coordinates is equally absurd and economically damaging to both the United States and India.