A man fishes near a temple beside a river on a heavy hazy day in Beijing’s Gaobeidian village, China. Beijing has temporarily shut down over a hundred heavily polluting factories to combat danger levels of air pollution. Photograph: Jason Lee/Reuters
Simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, when you think about it.
Man, I’m not sure today could have gone stranger if someone had tried to make it that way. Without going too much into work-related detail, it was one of those days when things didn’t go anywhere close to plan, with delays on some things, complete rethinks on other things, and an unexpected waste of a morning in terms of working on something that ended up being unnecessary. Such things happen, of course, but them all happening on the same day ends up giving a particularly depressive, apathetic feel to that day, a sense of What am I doing? and Clearly, I made some wrong choices along the way.
Amusingly/not-really-amusingly, said frustrations happened on the same day that Kate was having a similarly rough day. We had lunch together, and pretty much just moaned at each other about the kinds of days when work gets you down so much that you want to walk away and come back when it’s better, but deadlines refuse to let you. Sometimes, being a freelancer is rough, and it’s normally down to this kind of thing; the feeling of being a particularly unimportant cog in a machine that you can’t quite see, or even understand the shape of.
A derelict house sits alone in a once-thriving neighbourhood in east-side Detroit, Michigan. The story of the city’s decline has become a symbol of America’s recent economic troubles. Photograph: Rebecca Cook/Reuters
What really gets me about this photo isn’t the run-down house – That’s nothing new, sadly, and I feel like I’ve seen many such houses in San Francisco and Portland over the years – but the space surrounding it. Where are the other houses? It looks as if it’s dropped into an entirely abandoned cityblock, like something out of a magic realist film. Beware of that house, everyone: There’s danger and mystery in there.
In his first appearance, Fero is described as a scientist of the occult, a super-detective of the nether world, who is the one man who can thwart the evil doings of vampires and werewolves that have invaded earth from Pluto. Fero’s later adventures had him working on cases involving more standard criminals.
Fero operated out of an office in New York at some point in the distant future. He was a skilled detective and a good fighter. He did not seem to carry any weapons, but did wear a “ray proof jacket.” He also had pills that allowed him to temporarily transform into a giant ape-like creature with superhuman strength. He owned his own interplanetary ship, full of scientific equipment, including a device which could record images of a person’s memories.
I am currently fascinated by the treasure trove of comic characters that are in the public domain.
It’s been a weird day, Internet. Today, I’ve written my final posts for both Comics Alliance and SpinOff Online – although the latter won’t appear until tomorrow and Sunday, meaning that there’s always time for them to end up very outdated before anyone actually sees them, always a potential thrill with writing things ahead of time. This week, I also wrote my final column for Robot 6, all of this happening as I clear my schedule to start writing on a regular basis for Wired.com next week (Officially Tuesday, but we’ll see if I have any space in my schedule on Monday).
It’s a weird feeling, not having CA or SpinOff around anymore; it’s not really sunk in yet. For the last couple of years (Well, year, for CA), they’ve defined the rhythm of my work week and my deadlines in a way that was often frustrating and exhausting, but also somewhat comforting in the regularity: Five op-eds and ten news posts ever week (That’s in addition to the weekly Time essay, the Blog@Newsarama posts, the weekly Newsarama top 10 and my ten Digital Trends posts). I knew, for the most part, what I’d be writing every day, even if I didn’t know what I’d be writing them about, and there really was something to that. There were times when it was a grind coming up with that much information – those many words – week-in, week-out, don’t get me wrong, but there was also some… security, perhaps? Something welcoming about not being entirely lost at sea when it came to output, and knowing that the work was there, if that makes sense.
I didn’t write a farewell post on any of those sites; I came close, twice – The final Robot 6 column makes mention of creators moving on, which was intentional, and the closest I came to actually saying “Byeeee” – but it felt too vain and self-conscious. I don’t know if my absence on any of those sites will be noticed, or remarked upon (Knowing my success with the commentariat at SpinOff, I think it’ll be applauded), and I’m not sure that I want to know. Let those sites, and me, move on and do something else, instead.
(Ideally, I’d like to go back and do stuff for SpinOff and Comics Alliance again in the future, and have told the powers that be in both places that, so hopefully it’ll happen. And I also recommended replacements to both sites, in case they were looking; it’d be great if my recommendations get the gigs, but we’ll see.)
That ending and my resultant melancholy wasn’t the only thing that made today particularly unusual, though; because these things come in threes, today was also the day when I finally made good on my promise to draw D-Man for Dylan Todd (Something I promised earlier this week, but have been meaning to do for far, far longer) – I was, because it’s me, stupidly anxious about sending that to him because I was all “It looks terrible! Real artists have done stuff for that blog!” but he was kind enough to say it was good, bless him – and the day when I found out that I am thanked in the acknowledgments for an upcoming non-fiction book by a writer whose work I admire, but didn’t even think knew I existed, because of “smart things on the intercyberwebnet that helped [him] shape some of [his] thinking on the subject.”
So, yeah; weird day. January, my friends; it’s always a month that feels like a somewhat uncertain prelude for everything else that’s coming in the year ahead.
US soldiers secure a French armored vehicle aboard a C17 aircraft at the Istres military airport prior to take off bound for Mali. French forces are continuing their advance northwards in Mali with over 2,000 troops assisting Malian forces fight islamic militants. Photograph: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images
There’s something about this that feels as if it belongs in a science fiction movie to me; only the car looks like it belongs in the world I’m familiar with.
I was talking to a friend the other day about the problems she was having writing a paper for school; she was telling me that she kept writing things and then realizing that it was all in the wrong order, and that she wanted to keep changing everything even though she wasn’t even finished a first draft, leading to a particularly distracting, frustrating experience. That was this piece, for me; it stubbornly refused to come together, and I was tearing my metaphorical hair out trying to get it into some semblance of coherent argument (I’m not entirely sure I succeeded in the end, to be honest). There was one point where what is currently a paragraph in the first third of the piece was the final paragraph, then in the middle, then somewhere towards the end, and so on and so on. Some things just don’t want to be written, it can feel like.
Little knitted caps are placed on top of fruit smoothies during the 2013 World Economic Forum annual meeting at the Swiss resort of Davos. The event is taking place from 23 to 27 January. Photograph: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
Knitted caps on top of smoothies. Sometimes, the world is a confusing, wonderful place.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Fero, Planet Detective:
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog: