@BarackObama, @GregGrunberg: We’re totally in a comic together!
It all started a few days ago when Greg Grunberg of Heroes and Alias fame started following Wil Wheaton. Greg then mentioned he thought Wil would be great on Heroes. Wil, of course, was happy but tried to maintain ties to reality. Today, the plot thickened when Barack Obama got involved — kind of. Thanks to Wil Wheaton for most of the links.

Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always Graphic Novel Comes to the iPhone
When I was younger Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always was practically my favorite book. I can remember doing at least two book reports on it and purchasing at least two copies of it (one was either lent to a friend or lost outright). I probably read the book a half a dozen times. The Geeks of Doom article talks about an iPhone optimized version of the Thief of Always graphic novel adaptation. This, of course, lead me to Amazon and the knowledge that there actually is a graphic novel adaptation of the book! If you haven’t read the book, you must do so, now.

prop 8 – the musical
The last awesome link of the day brings us once again to Wil Wheaton’s website. He posted the video, found below, of Funny or Die’s latest creation, Prop 8 – The Musical. The video stars just about everyone you can think of and is a hilarious take on the Proposition 8 battle raging in California. Had we known gay marriage could save the economy, maybe the vote would have gone a different way. Want to know more? Check it out:

As you might have guessed, I can see similarities between this award making its rounds and the chain letters my mother ever-so-happily forwards (directly into my Spam folder, mind you ) or the tripe you might find on MySpace, sans the “death penalty” for not forwarding it to anyone. (I hope Justin doesn’t have to stab me with a spork under a blue moon in the middle of November for not passing this on.)

…

(On the other hand, though, there are some great opportunities for a “Six Degrees” game here. I’m just not motivated enough to follow through with it, though.)

No sporking on my end. In fact, I was just motivated enough to see how far back I could chase the chain mail (what a great analogy!). So, if you are daring enough, join me as I chase this award throughout the depths of the internet.

Oh My Seven gave me the award.

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning! gave her the award.

Free and Flawed gave him the award.

I’m a mom in real life gave her the award.

Two Knit Monkeys gave her the award.

Two Dogs Running gave her the award.

Unmitigated gave her the award.

Dogs and Jeans gave her the award.

The Blarney Spot gave him the award.

my2boyz gave him the award.

Diaries of a Domestic Goddess gave her the award.

A Daily Dose of Toni gave her the award.

MammaDawg gave her the award after creating it!

So there you have it. I found the bottom of the rabbit hole. Did I learn something along the journey? Yes. There are a lot of middle-aged women writing blogs on the internet. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

Behold, Justin Cox through the years:

Me in 1952. I was super awesome!

Me in 1960. I later went on to run the Harvard Chess Club.

Me in 1970. Perhaps I was the long lost son of Red Forman.

Me in 1982. Something tells me I couldn't be this groovy if I tried.

Me in 2001. No caption needed.

How awesome am I?

One such link, recently served up by @Overshee (evidently originally offered by @DrHorrible), is so cool that I had to share it here. It’s so cool, in fact, that my feeble writing skills won’t do it justice. Check this out this excerpt from Where the Hell is Matt:

A few months into his [post-qutting globe trotting vacation], a travel buddy gave Matt an idea. They were standing around taking pictures in Hanoi, and his friend said “Hey, why don’t you stand over there and do that dance. I’ll record it.” He was referring to a particular dance Matt does. It’s actually the only dance Matt does. He does it badly. Anyway, this turned out to be a very good idea.

As is the case with the internet these days the video ended up making Matt somewhat internet famous. Then, in a very bizarre turn, Stride Gum found Matt and offered to send him around the world so he could film his little dance at the far corners of the earth. Why Stride Gum? Who knows but Matt isn’t stupid and took them up on the offer. Crazy? It’s not even done yet. Again, from Matt’s own website:

In 2006, Matt took a 6 month trip through 39 countries on all 7 continents. In that time, he danced a great deal.

The second video made Matt even more quasi-famous. In fact, for a brief period in July, he was semi-famous.

Things settled down again, and then in 2007 Matt went back to Stride with another idea. He realized his bad dancing wasn’t actually all that interesting, and that other people were much better at being bad at it. He showed them his inbox, which, as a result of his semi-famousness, was overflowing with emails from all over the planet. He told them he wanted to travel around the world one more time and invite the people who’d written him to come out and dance too.

The Stride people thought that sounded like yet another very good idea, so they let him do it. And he did. And now it’s done. And he hopes you like it.

That’s right, he looked a gift horse in the mouth and asked to do it again, bigger and better than the first time. Evidently Stride Gum has the money to send a happily unemployed 31 year old resident of Seattle around the world twice. The result is pretty impressive. I present to you Matt, dancing, with the people of the world.

I downloaded their template and filled out all the various characters (I decided not to fill in the British pound symbol because when would I ever use it?). I then scanned the form in, uploaded it and took a look at the auto-generated preview of my font.

Justin Sans - A TrueType font like no other!

Now you might be thinking that is some horrible handwriting, why would you possibly want that as a font? In fact, my high school english teacher once told me that my handwriting was the worst she had ever seen. So why a font? Why not? At $9 it’s worth it to have my handwriting be digitally available for whatever reason. Maybe I’ll redo some of the graphics here to have a more personal touch. I’m sure I’ll find something to do with it.

Any ideas? Post them in the comments.

A little known fact about me is that I’m a very large fan of the 1986 film Short Circuit and the 1988 followup Short Circuit 2. Maybe it’s the fact that I enjoy the idea of a lovable, friendly robot constantly looking for input, or maybe it’s the undeniable charm of Steve Guttenberg trying to make money any way possible. Either way, It’s not surprising that I had two links related to Johnny 5. The first, from May of 2007, was an article on MAKE via Engadget about a guy that created a nice, working Johnny 5 out of LEGO Mindstorms pieces. Pretty impressive actually. The second Johnny 5 link sitting in Safari waiting for this moment was an article in the April 3, 2008 issue of Variety. Evidently Dimension Films acquired the rights to remake the Short Circuit film! Usually remakes are pretty crappy, but as long as it doesn’t become a straight-to-DVD pile of horse garbage, or star Shia LaBeouf, it should be worth watching.

I don’t remember when or how I found this next link, but I know it’s been sitting for awhile. It’s the website for the Newseum, which is a cool museum in DC dedicated to news. They have a very cool feature on their site that allows you to view today’s front page’s from newspapers around the globe. It does so in a sweet interactive map. Clicking the location on the map brings up a nice, full sized image from the paper. Here is the front page of the wonderful Orlando Sentinel, political commentary not included.

Finally is the way too much fun Dicewars which is basically a simplified, flash-based version of Risk. It’s a ton of fun. Unfortunately you can’t play other people, but add enough computer opponents and the game is challenging enough.

So there you have a few juicy morsels of internet goodness for your browsing pleasure. Just know that I’m not responsible should you become addicted to Dicewars or Steve Guttenberg movies.

Worker tries to jinx Yanks with buried Red Sox shirt via ESPN.

(Via TechCrunch.)

(Via Shawn Blanc.)

UPDATE: Forgot to put the link in there. Enjoy.

Evidently some pretty smart people at UC Santa Barbara decided to study Indiana’s adoption of Daylight Savings Time and compare their energy consumption before and after the change. The results, thanks to Gizmodo, are rather interesting:

The results of the study say that while lightbulbs are used less because of the added daylight, air-conditioning in the summer and heating in the fall are used more than they would with an hour less daylight. Overall, the cost to Indiana residents was around $8.6 million a year in higher energy bills, plus up to $5.3 million per year in “increased pollution costs.”

Ok. Let me get this straight. Daylight Savings Time increased energy costs by $8.6 million… in Indiana? Imagine what it costs somewhere that really matters, like New York or… gasp, California! You see, a few years back when the government moved Daylight’s Savings Time up a week and extended it another three weeks the idea was that more sunlight during the day would mean less energy consumption. Well, oops.