I have taken the liberty to tell your ghosts to go

Well, I told myself no more clip entries. And at the time, I meant it. Days like today make that stance really hard, because so much happened!

We're going to start with Barnes and Noble, who's being very, very dim about digital distribution. Basically, they approached DC for digital rights to distribute their top 100 DC graphic novels (most of them Vertigo titles, originally) on the Nook Color. DC said no.

DC then said yes to Amazon Kindle Fire getting that same deal, and from everything we know, Barnes and Noble lost their minds. I do believe it is the first time that a brick-and-mortar business, to protest digital sales, has pulled physical printed books in retaliation.

And for me, that's far from a good sign.

Meanwhile, Facebook got caught in a direct lie; the problem is, it's not the first one. And the bigger problem is, they're not the only one doing the tracking.

Given ten more years, we'll have a whole new working definition of what privacy means.

It is now possible, says the New Scientist, to encode messages in bacteriological DNA. While I realize my musings on this topic reach into the realms of outer hyperbole, I'm still giggling at the mental image of some document service in the future being asked to translate a snake.

From Cute Overload (trust me, I don't anticipate linking from that blog that often) comes a walking AT-AT (Greyhound model). The pup doesn't look that comfortable, but at least it seems semi-well designed.

From the wilds of the SL Marketplace comes the Human Fish avatar! Um...I think when people say "Half fish, half girl", that is NOT what they mean.

Due to massive online (and offline) protesting, involving thousands of emails to their office, actual letters, letter-writing campaigns, petitions, and a ton of negative press, Netflix has decided to junk the whole Qwikster concept. Great idea, geniuses, but could you have done that before you made the announcements, so you wouldn't have lost 25% of all accounts and an insanely huge market share? Way to keep failing.

Some enterprising young Minecrafter wrote a program that replaced all mob spawns with Endermen. Then he sped up the day, removed sunrise and sunset, made every monster check for an action 40 times a tick instead of once, and...well. This was the result. About 200 years of Endermen-based ecological devastation.

Finally, someone found some archival footage of early motion-capture actors (wherein the actor sits and performs a scene, while being sketched; the days of dot location and greenscreening were still far, far in the future) leading up to the Alice in Wonderland animated feature, and paired it side by side with the finished reel. It's fascinating, especially as Walt Disney seems to have simply kept the audio from the test session!

And my goodness, isn't that enough for now?

Oh, wait, no...there...is one more thing...

I'll just leave this here. (That image may be NSFW, even though the lass in question is facing away from the camera. You'll see what I mean if you click it.)