Milen's New Writeups

Beanworld (place)

2008-12-28T22:47:34Z

Larry Marder's brilliant comic series Tales of the Beanworld is hard to describe to the first-time reader, and it doesn't help that the first two issues contain important events that have seldom been repeated since, outside of reprints. It is a series with endless subtlities, a wealth of means for interpretation, just abstract enough to easily lift into metaphor, but concrete enough to be readable as ordinary stories. The first issue saw print under the Beanworld Press imprint in 1985. Three issues later and it switched to Eclipse Comics for distribution. Its initial run concluded, with many plotlines unresolved (Beanish and Dreamishness, Heyoka, the Mystery Pods, Mr. Spook's Fork and others), in 1993. It has recently resumed publication with distribution by now being handled by Dark Horse Comics. The first new story is "? and !", which was published on the web in "MySpace Dark Horse Presents", and can be found at:

http://www.myspace.com/darkhorsepresents?issuenum=14&storynum=1

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Immortel (ad vitam) (thing)

2005-07-18T08:01:39Z

This....

How can I....

What was....

Okay, from the top. Ancient Egyptian gods come to Future Theme Park Earth in their big levitating pyramid Winnebago 'cause Horus is getting turned mortal after some godly infraction, possibly having something to do with public nudity. His godly cohorts, Anubis and Bastet, are distinguished mostly by their stiff-looking animal heads, their disturbing lack of clothing, and their affinity for freaking Monopoly. How I wish that last bit were not true. Anyway, let's call that Movie A.

Meanwhile there's a white-skinned alien woman by the rather prosaic name of Jill, who looks all the world like a female Keanu Reeves, who copiously cries purest Ty-D-Bowl, who has the driest scalp I've ever seen, and whose doctor wants to experiment on her. Even though their relationship is supposed to be over, she's still visited frequently by her extra-dimensional boyfriend, Darkman. This is Movie B. …

WikiWord (thing)

2005-01-18T20:53:58Z

A WikiWord is, itself, a WikiWord, that is to say it's a word with mixed capitalization in the best CamelCase tradition. Most frequently, these are created by concatenating two or more capitalized words together, without a space between them. Just any capitalization won't do it though; specifically, you must have at least two capital letters each followed by at least one lower-case letter, so capitalized acronyms and abbreviations by themselves won't trigger the auto-linking magic.

The "wiki" of the word comes from the fact that, if you enter something LikeThis into the text on most wiki pages, it'll automatically convert it into a link to the page going by the same name. Most wikis will also create links automatically when you surround them with brackets, much like the protocol used in a certain other massively-contributed knowledge repository kind of site.

Note #1: At least on the wiki package that I use for my own purposes (PHPwiki), the page created from a…

Personal Wiki (thing)

2005-01-18T20:44:38Z

The best personal note-taking facility of which I'm aware of has nothing to do with note cards, notebooks, tape recorders or PDAs. It does need a web server and a willingness to do some typing, but I find that a personal wiki, set up for yourself and yourself alone, can perform wonders when used as a place to jot down thoughts wherever you are (especially if that happens to be a computer-rich zone, like a college campus), and is close enough to a mind map all by itself to be very useful as an organizational tool.

The first thing that makes wikis great for this is the simplicity of markup. To someone who either doesn't already know HTML or wants to read the unadorned source text, wiki markup is about as close to ideal as you can get without going WYSIWYG. Italics are imparted by double single-quotes, boldface by pairs of underscores before and after, and lists are made by merely adding asterisks to the beginning of lines. Start a new paragraph with simple blank lines.…

Fafblog (thing)

2004-12-31T13:20:12Z

Who would believe a site composed of exactly equal portions of concentrated whimsy and political commentary could work so well? Behind the three voices of Fafblog lie both devastatingly intelligent satire and bizarre tales of murderous Santa Claus and Gibletsian conquest.

All posts on Fafblog come from one of three personas, and to understand what is being said (for which you must often read between the lines) you must understand their personalities.

Fafnir is the primary voice. He seems to have little relation with the figure from Norse mythology. He always speaks with a bit of a colloquial shorthand, turning words like "traveling" into "travelin." He's the nicest of the bunch by far, and while seemingly a bit muddled (enough so that his best friend is the irascible Giblets) he's quite good natured. It's he who instituted the occasional Friday tradition of reviewing pie. Sometimes he interviews important figures, such as George W. Bush, or God. The…

August Strindberg & Helium (person)

2004-09-17T10:25:21Z

Strindberg (morosely): "Ah.... absinthe is now my only vice and my last remaining pleasure."

Helium (joyfully): "PLEAS-URREEEEEE!!"

Strindberg (morosely): "How sweet life can be when the misery of one's existence is blurred by slight intoxication."

Helium (joyfully): "MIS-ER-YYYYYYY!!"

Strindberg: (cringes)

August Strindberg is the ever-depressed turn-of-the-century Swedish writer, playwright and philosopher, with haunted, mad eyes and the voice of the tomb. Most of his lines are taken from an English translation of one of his later works, Inferno.

Helium is a high-voiced, pink balloon-creature, ever floating near Strindberg, who is always, always happy and playful, and who hangs around Strindberg for no obvious reason. We are given no insight into Helium's origin or reality.

More mismatched than…