Link Blogging

• How Much Will You Pay for Online Comics?
  Media sources have been seizing on the new hardware as a way to get people to once again buy media (although the ridiculous prices won’t help) instead of downloading stuff for free, since the iPad is a relatively closed system with a built-in store. While Marvel has been experimenting with digital comics for a while now — their subscription service launched in late 2008, but didn’t give readers what they wanted, since the comics could only be read while connected online — this app seems to be a major step forward (if you’re part of the limited audience able to drop big bucks on this new toy).

• And the best Video you're likely to see today is narrated by Neil Gaiman & Animated by Charles Vess! My that was a quick click!
  Hey folks, Harry here with something that isn't set to be a film, at least not yet. Our buddy, Massawyrm sent this link to Neil Gaiman's Blog where he posted a promotional piece that is simply so much more beautiful than that. Imagine you're at your favorite supercool bookstore to hear a live reading from Neil Gaiman... a select piece he wrote for just such gatherings of enthusiasts. Now imagine that a friend gave you special magic cookies that once you ate them, you could envision what Gaiman was saying... but specifically as Charles Vess would illustrate and paint it. That is some special magic cookies - and this is just such a dream.
  
  
• THE SANDBOX EFFECT: Has Auteurism gone too far at DC and Marvel?
  In the 1950’s, French film critics like Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut came up with an idea called the “auteur theory” of film. Auteur theory basically says that film, an undeniably collaborative medium, should be evaluated and analyzed in terms of strong individual creators or “auteurs”. Anyone whose creative presence is so strong it dominates the making of a film can be an auteur. Auteur theory is important because it helped legitimize film criticism. At the same time, even the theory’s strongest proponents knew it was kind of a hustle. No movie is really the product of just one person, no matter how talented they are. Auteur Theory was a means to an end, an extremely helpful fallacy. The theory took hold and crossed over into mainstream criticism where it thrived because it indulged a very popular idea: The idea that nothing of artistic worth can ever be created by committee, and that only focused, singular visionaries can produce good art.
  
  
• The Grand Unified Theory of Artificial Intelligence
  Artificial intelligence research has long harboured two basic (and opposed) approaches – the earlier method of trying to discover the “rules of thought”, and the more modern probabilistic approach to machine learning. Now some smart guy from MIT called Noah Goodman reckons he has reconciled the two approaches to artificial learning in his new model of thought [via SlashDot]:
  
  
• Sleeping Insects Covered in Dew
  glistening in the early morning, these insects look like creatures from another planet as dew gathers on their sleeping bodies.