Breakfast Links: Word of the Year, Garbage & Marvel
Well the New Oxford American Dictionary (related to but clearly distinct from and not to be confused with the only lustworthy dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary) has gone and announced it’s word of the year…. locavore! A locavore is someone who eats local produce - you know farmers market style, good for the globe… all that kinda good stuff. And it’s brand new - only two years old! How cute! NOAD thinks is clearly a word on the move, exciting things in store for it and all that.
And while your congratulating yourself on being part of that local eating movement you can also check out this game that tells you how good you’d be at managing NYC’s waste management! I, apparently, would not be that good sending out 1,897,871 tons of refuse across 1,100,499 miles. That doesn’t seem that awesome, although it’d be cool if the game also gave an estimate of what the city was actually doing. Amanda, one of the creators of the game, soundly trounces me by sending the same amount of garbage about 1/3 of the miles I got. That’s not fair though, she knew all the answers!
Lastly if you’re all in the mood now and wanting even more nasty, eco-action Marvel is giving you the come hither eye by letting you subscribe online to their vast archive of comics! That’s right Marvel Digital Comics is $10/month (or $60/year) for which you get access to comics from the past 60 years. Ok, there’s downsides - first you can only view them on Marvel’s site and it isn’t all of their archives, just the “cream of the crop.” Oh and new comics show up only 6 months later. Sure it’s a tepid step into digital, but the quality is pretty good and it’s a neat way to check out what’s gone on - although I suspect they’re worried about this eating into their trade paper back sales, so, for example, you don’t get Miller’s whole Daredevil run and you don’t even get close to no Giant Size X-Men #1. Still, kinda interesting, I hope they open it up more.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:19 am
I’m sure part of Marvel’s move here is also to try and seduce back people who already trade comics digitally (although illegally) on the torrent networks.
In case you hadn’t heard of this, I am told that scanners scan the books into JPGs at very high quality - most even do color correction, etc to make the pages really look nice. They then archive them into special archive formats (essentially renamed ZIP or RAR files). Then you can view them using a handful of apps available just for this purpose.
Or so I am told. I of course would never participate in such blatant theft, especially of creative material.
I may check this out, its cheap enough and I spend that much each month on sillier things. Though the samples they have look great, once you zoom in the text gets a bit fuzzy. I am hoping this is because they’re samples and not an indication of the quality they are charging a premium for.
November 15th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Michael, that is very interesting theoretical information. I may investigate that, for research purposes only, just to verify that what you say is true… :)
Yeah, it’s pretty cool, the quality seemed good enough - but two things, I don’t love subscriptions, although I can see why it might make sense in a situation like this, but more to the point, I’m not sure they really have all the things I want to re-read. Let me know if you do get the sub!
November 15th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
We are still coming up with words associated with agriculture? Wow, were pretty slow on that boat huh? Let’s get with it and round off that category… Alex, I will take agricultural terminology for $1000.
December 12th, 2007 at 7:30 am
[...] word of the year. w00t. The reason for this is that it was voted online. Compare and contrast to locavore, the word of the year for the New Oxford American Dictionary. Not voted for online. My favourite is [...]