http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/09/3d-printer-gun-ban_n_3240710.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology
anyone who says the terrorists didnt win on 911 is an idiot. They hated our freedom and have now created a
nanny state

I don't think they care much about our freedoms either way. I think we are the ones who hate our own freedoms, or the responsibility that comes with it, or both.

Remember the first time you heard this? I do.
The cassette (TDK Metal. Homemade) was brought home from The Post office by my dad, from a co-worker back in 1981.  (...yes my dad was a mailman also.)
 Blew my mind and still does.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/nlaCZ106b5w&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/nlaCZ106b5w&rel=1</a>

Heard it on the radio ... loud .. and got louder every few minutes. It's an amazing display of virtuosity.

Bombino!

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/M-9gQiiE4H0&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/M-9gQiiE4H0&rel=1</a>

Not doing it for me. I need Millar to start looking at stories that do not involve in the intersection of superhero-dom and fame/celebrity culture.  I also am a little tired of the question of super heroes deciding that they will fix the world's problems by applying their god-like status to the problem. If you're going to take this up, you need to either bring a fresh viewpoint to it, or dissect the thing up ... not build the whole story on the fascination itself. Because if you're not using this a means to an analysis (of the intellectual questions, the characters, plots, something, anything) and I feel like you're putting these people/powers on a pedestal, it disturbs me. That's what I see as a constant in Millar's work.

Frank Quietely is awesome but he is not enough to cover the celebrity-fixated quasi-fascistic vibes coming from Millar's writing (didn't these two go down this road before on the Authority?).

I'll probably buy the second issue to see if my concerns are unfounded.  And as always, if you are enjoying the book, and none of this bothers you, more power to you. Enjoy the heck out of it. I'm just saying so far, it is not working for me.

I've gone back to vinyl after so many years.  (a) It feels indescribably awesome and right. (b) It is a constant struggle for me not to double dip. I'm looking at Captain Beefheart, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Style Council, Talk Talk ... etc at the store and I have to constantly struggle with my instinct to grab the thing and run to the counter.  I saw 180 gram  Lick My Decals Off, Baby for 17 bucks and I forced myself to put it back in.

Yeah, I know, I have it on CD and not vinyl, but really ... once I go down that road there really is no coming back (and I already did this with my earlier transition from vinyl to CD in the past).

Self control is not for the faint of heart, I'll tell you that.

This is a topic that is dear to my heart (but not so near anymore since I haven't smoked since '98, maybe).

I smoked between '78 and '98. At around 1990, I was a pack and a half a day smoker.  Then I married a non-smoker, when my smoking was likely to be an issue. I had no intention of quitting.  All I wanted was to reduce it to a point where it would not be an issue. So I started cutting down. The first year, I cut it down to 10 a day, which was the hardest because as a grad student, I was constantly reading and writing and my body had been wired up to that point to smoke while doing either one.  It took me a few months to really get there.

Then the next yar I cut it down to 7, the next year, to 5, the next year to 3, and on and on it went up until around 98 I was pretty steady at 1 a day (I lingered around the 3 a day stage and 2 a day stage for a couple of years).  By the point I was a 1 a day smoker, quitting was very very easy.

My point is, noone becomes a pack and a half a day smoker overnight. You need to undo all the "training"? your body had to go through to get there. You obviously don't need to take as much time as I did. You should be able to speed that up, but definitely give your body time to settle into the new norm before you start pushing it down again.

The thought that guided me in this process was everytime my hand went to a cigarette I would stare at it hard and think "do I really want to smoke this or am I doing this out of habit?" If the answer was habit, I would put it back until the answer was "I want it". If I wanted it, I would think "ok, this is number 7 and it is, say, 5 in the evening. That would leave me 3 more for the day".  The more I kept thinking in those terms and negotiated it, the easier it was to let it go and come back to the same cigarette an hour later.

At the end, I quit completely decisively with no more cravings and did not become neurotic about other people's smoking either.

Best of luck. It is not that difficult to quit actually, if you work with your own body rather than trying to impose your will on it. 

Digital age is fine but it contrasts (in my mind) with the print age, or maybe more fine grained, would be the newspaper serial age, newstand age, and direct marketing age ... which is more about the delivery of comics.

These ages are typically defined by the look and feel, rather than simple time slices in which they appear.  It is really hard to determine what defines the period we are in until you move on to the next one. 

That said and at the risk of sounding like I am back to my fixations, I would like to name the age that we are in after some kind of gas or something that expands forever, because I am going to guess that what we will think in the future that defined this age of comics is decompression.

I love the post zero hour legion as well and that was where I got into them. That said my all time favorite is the Waid/ Kitson Legion

The Waid/Kitson Legion was fantastic, but I feel like you enjoy it more if you are already familiar with the classic Legion. A big part of the fun reading that series was to see how they were putting their own spin on the Legion lore. It was definitely one of my favorites.

I loved the 5 year later run with Giffen and Birnbaums the best, I think, which also followed the same theme: you got to enjoy it more if you were familiar with the Legion lore up to that point.

Makes you appreciate what an awesome body of work Lavitz put together in the 80s.

With a heavy heart, I think I am going to agree to some extent.

I've been following DC comics for a loooong time.  I was actually not that happy with their new 52 thing because I thought it was more a gimmick than anything else. Sure they created some buzz, and sure, they increased their readership for a while, but at the same time, they threw a bucket of cold water on their franchise.  There were especially two books where I saw this:

• Just before Flashpoint, Giffen was in the process of creating a run for the ages on Doom Patrol. It got cut short ... waaay short.
• Lavitz was building a fairly interesting Legion saga. It wasn't there yet but you could see the pieces being moved to their position on the board. Then [bam!] Flashpoint came along and he skipped a step or two. IMO, he has not found his balance yet -- the last two Giffen co-written stories excepted.

Here are some of my problems:

1. Not every series in the New 52 really turned on the post Flashpoint reset, e.g., Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Batwoman, Aquaman, etc etc. Yes, if you look at the Flash, Red Hood, Justice League, Green Arrow, or even Superman/Action Comics, these books did use the reset button to really reset their stories, but, IMO, this came at the expense if the core relationships and character development that made these characters interesting in the pre-Flashpoiknt world (example: to me, what makes Green Arrow interesting is his raving/raging liberal fringe self, i.e., the goatee GA; what makes Hawkman interesting is that he is a militaristic semi-fascist with an incurably romantic, mated for life, yearnings for Hawkgirl/Hawkwoman. You lose these, you are back to the Silver Age DC where every super hero is more or less the same character.)

2. Related to 1, the DCU now suffers from a strange incohesiveness because some books chose to reset and others didn't. While Batwoman (and presumably Green Lantern, though I have not read any past issue #1) have been continuing their story lines where they left off in the pre-Flashpoint DCU, while the Flash and Green Arrow and the Red Hood did a complete or near complete reset. So on the one hand, it looks like Batman has gone through 4 Robins, while teh Justice League has been together for, what, 5 years at most? (Recall that Batman was just a "rumor" when JL first started.) I am not a continuity freak, and I can live with all this because I can look at every book as its own universe, but I gotta admit, this kind of discrepancy kinda bugs me at some level.

3. They did NOT fix the decompression issue.

4. Related to issues 1 and 3: Once you throw away the rich history and texture of your universe because you want to bring new readers, you better make sure you have plans in place to develop these characters and their story lines quickly to bring them back to at least a comparable level of richness to make them compelling enough.

5. John Constantine. I understand that DC wants their property back and they want to do things with him, but this new Constantine on Justice League Dark, and in the new book, just does not sit right with me.  Constantine is not a super hero. He was not meant to be. If you're enjoying it, more power to you, but personally, this is not working for me.

Don't get me wrong. I still read more DC books than Marvel (though less than Image, it appears) and I still love that universe and its characters (I believe Batman, Batwoman, and Wonder Woman are some of the best comic books coming out these days, I loved Red Hood, I Vampire, and Frankenstein, and I have to keep reading the Legion because ... well .. I love the Legion) but I can't help wondering if I would still love these characters and this universe the same way if I had started from scratch with the New 52. I feel like it is my love for the pre-Flashpoint DCU that keeps me going.  They are not losing me, but they are making it hard.

Batman feels like the only legit title in the New 52 stable, with a creative team that loves the character and the passion shows on the page.

I would not short change Wonder Woman. I think of all the not so new anymore 52, that's the one that really moved in an interesting new direction.

Still no Giffen's "5 Years Later" run legion.
Still no Pollack's run on Doom Patrol.

You're breaking my heart, DC!

My understanding is that the historical argument does not lead to what folks who are against gay marriage imagine that it would: Throughout history, marriage was an institution designed primarily to define ownership of property and the way it gets passed along to the next generation.  This whole thing "love" being integral to marriage is an invention that is only a couple of centuries old at best. Let's say a few centuries, to be charitable.  Up till that idea caught on, marriage was understood to be a formal contract, and people were expected to have romance elsewhere, wherever they find it, as long as it was understood that it would not bring children to the inheritance ... hence a woman's "chastity" being a cornerstone of marriage in the days of no birth control, and the children men made outside of the marriage being deemed bastards and no legal claims on the father's property. 

So ... transpose that basic definition into today's world where adoption is common place (there are a lot of children already made, but have no home), artificial insemination and surrogate motherhood are not unusual, and ordinary people can enter into any contractual agreement with anyone else. So as far the true traditional understanding of a marriage is concerned, the one man/one woman requirement is mostly a function of the limitations on biotechnology and social attitudes about adoption.

Add to this traditional understanding of marriage, the modern addition: romance, legal rights wrt one's spouse, benefits, and the other things that define a family as a special unit ... most states acknowledge legal rights and benefits in civil unions, and there is not a lot of push back with respect to that. Which leaves romance. Which is why I think the acknowledgement of romance between gay couples is the last resistance point we're facing, and the biggest one, since it goes up against the notorious "ick" factor,. I think what has been happening in the last few years is that this "ick" factor is weakening -- because ultimately, this "ick" is defined by what you are used to, and human beings, by their very nature, can get used to a lot of things.

So at the end of the day, regardless of what OSC prescribes for us as a society, the direction we are heading is very clear. Gay marriage is going to happen in this country, and everywhere else. It is just a matter of when.

I'm sure y'all have your differences of opinions flare up here, but from what I've seen, there's a great deal of respect for all, and I really appreciate it.  Not all boards have that comaraderie. 

Well ... I'm going to assume that's because we're grown-ups?

11 issues? 

Well, a 4 issue miniseries in traditional storytelling with a 1:3 decompression rate would make about 12 issues, So  I would say that's within range.

So can Snyder be the new decompression punching bag? Can we finally let Bendis off the hook?

I offer my 9 or 10 issue collection of the N52 Swamp Thing to support that. 

I am not sure how much of the Iron Fist was him, how much of it was Brubaker. Either way ... as far as I am concerned, he is outdoing himself on Hawkeye. It's probably his most well-structured, well-thought out, and disciplined story telling. 

Funny how he kept telling these really grand stories on most of his work thus far, and yet he nails it 100% when the story is small and personal, and dare I say, non-consequential.  (Not entirely unlike Kurt Busiek, perhaps.)

While I didn't dislike Casanova, it was a bit too chaotic for my tastes.  I didn't have a sense that I knew what was going on and it couldn't hold my interest as a result.  Art was fabulous though.

I agree. It is a fun little mindbender but I always get the sense that he is making it up as he's going along, with no major masterplan or plot. It's good but not with a lot of staying power.

Just read Storm Dogs #3 - What a fabulous sci-fi series.   This is one I'd classify as "hard sci-fi".  Murder mystery set out on a border planet with acid rain & some really fascinating characters.   I love the full page character profiles David Hine has at the end of each issue.

I completely agree on all counts. It is a terrific book. It's going to be worth a deeper look in a separate thread when the series is over.

Between this and Bulletproof Coffin and Strange Embrace, I am really becoming a fan of David Hine. The dude's really versatile and a damn fine writer.  Maybe I'll also revisit some of the Marvel work he did a couple of years back.

This topic comes up all the time on the Tech Guy Show.  Normally he recommends using a service to scan your photos for you.  I depends on what your time is worth, what the scanner cost and what you'll do with said scanner after this project.  Plus the pros will probably do a better job so I'd look around for quotes.  Here's a link to Tech Guy Labs where he discusses it.  http://techguylabs.com/episodes/862/scanning-photos Hope it helps. 

Thanks. I'll take that as my starting point as I dig deeper into this.

Folks, like most people who survived the pre-digital age, I have loads of old fashioned photographs that I would like to digitize. They are not fancy photographs at all, family pictures typically taken on point and shoot cameras, the colors are not always that great, but you know .. they are high in sentimental value and there are way too many of them to scan on a flatbed scanner one by one.

Are there any good scanners out there that I can use to put the pictures in to a feeder, like I would if I were photocopying a stack of loose papers, and still get a good scan out of it. It's ok if the process is slow (which I suspect would be the case for a good resolution) but I just don't want to sit there feeding them one by one.

I feel like there should be a lot of expertise on this forum, hence the question.

Thanks in advance.

Orson Scott Card hates Downton Abbey.

Why? Does he think it's too gay? [rimshot]

If you stop watching it after the season 3 finale, you'll come away with the feeling that you've watched some of the best television ever. If you keep going, you'll still enjoy it but let's just say the law of diminishing returns starts to kick in around the middle of season four and goes into high gear in the final season.

Can't disagree with you. I tried the first couple of episodes of the last season but I realized I was no longer interested. I think

the reality switch they kept doing between seasons

ended up hurting the narrative of the overall arc.

But ... it is a very good show until the decline starts in later seasons.