Alot of the traffic that I get here is from folks googling the Codex Seraphinianus, about which I posted a little more than a year ago. The post was to a flickr set that has since gone dark. However, you can download the codex as a cbz via torrent here. You’ll need ComicBookLover or Comical or some goddamn thing to read it.
I am insanely jealous of Ainsley, who now owns the Atlas of Creation. Most of the book is juxtapositions of bad pictures of fossils with bad pictures of conordinal living things (fossil fern, living fern; fossil bunny, living bunny; fossil fly, living fly) alongside the erroneous claim that there are no differences between the extinct and extant forms. Anyway, here’s his example of a living caddisfly:
It’s a fishing lure. He stole the image from Graham Owen, from whom he also stole this:
…which he believes is a living spider. A few pages earlier, he juxtaposes a fossil scolytid with a living pentatomid, saying that the living pentatomid and the 25 myo scolytid are exactly the same thing.
Make sure you click through and look at Graham Owen’s fishing lures, they’re worth it. My fave is the solpugid.
Dark Carnival, 3086 Claremont Ave, Berkeley, 510-654-7323
Analog books, 1816 Euclid Ave, Berkeley, 510-843-1816
The Book Zoo, 6395 Telegraph Ave at Alcatraz, Oakland, 510-654-2665
The Other Change of Hobbit, 2020 Shattuck Avenue betw University and Addison, 510-848-0413
I’m not particularly worried about Black Oak, Moe’s, Pegasus/Pendragon, Shakespear’s, or what’s left of Cody’s.
Add more in the comments, willya?
…being the natural history of an adaptive radiation of small mammals whose key innovation was a remarkable nasal plasticity. Long out of print but not particularly hard to find, I’ve scanned the plates and figures and put them on Flickr. But you really owe it to yourself to scare up a copy of the book, particularly if you’re a fan of the Codex Seraphinianus, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, that kinda thing. The wikipedia treatment is pretty anemic. That’s all the time I got, fortunately for you a real blogger is more forthcoming with details and links, and has even found taxidermied specimens !(1, 2)
I just read Far Seer by Robert Sawyer. Great idea- the story of Galileo set in a society of pre-industrial dinosaurs (he’s got another one about the dinosaur Darwin and a third one about the dinosaur Freud). I say thumbs at 4 and 8 tho. Although the inspiring idea is brilliant and the worldbuilding is too, I was quite disappointed by the execution (especially since Hominids was so well done, at least the first half or so that I read). Read it for the way he constructs their psyches from their instincts, and because hey, dinosaurs. I still have faith in Sawyer to entertain me, but I’ll probably read End of an Era before I read the other books in this series.
[Edit a few hours later: My dissatisfactions are more or less in line with those expressed at Prehistoric Pulp, where hope is offered for the rest of the series being better.]
My copyleft acid reflux has been acting up, I keep starting to draft rants but I don’t have time to edit out the incomprehensible mumblings.
Then Total Dick Head had a thread about how PKD’s daughters asked him nicely to take down the PKD Society Newsletters (good on them for leaving the lawyers out of it), which he did (here’s why), and one of the daughters tried to clarify and it was hard to tell if she being disingenuous, or naive, or sincere under fundamental assumptions different than my own. Anyway, she took a couple of posts on the chin (several were deleted, I might not know the half of it), then a copyright plutocrat came to her defense, then she got frustrated and emotional, and then the Blogger asked nicely would everyone please lay off of her. I had somehow successfully drafted a contribution to the thread, but there is some non-zero risk that it could be read as not laying off of her, which would transform me from lurker to troll. Fortunately I have my own blog. Be sure and read the thread first, it’ll make more sense.
From a 1931 Czech childrens book, Naměsíc a ještě dál.
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