Song library meme time: most heard songs. Check iTunes or Winamp or Last.fm or whatever, and post your top five most heard songs. My top five are:

1. Ben Folds Five – Army (119 plays)
2. Ben Folds Five – Sports & Wine (113 plays)
3. Against Me! – T.S.R. (101 plays)
4. Volcano!!! I’m Still Excited – In Green (100 plays)
5. Brendan Benson – Metarie (98 plays)

I cannot remember the last time I played “Metarie”, but after I first heard it I listened to it literally every day for probably two months straight (or more). All of which makes me wish Last.fm showed me on what dates I listened to any of the songs scrobbled. My listening habits would make for a very skewed graph, I bet.

This week on kottke.org, the reigns have been passed over to writer Joel Turnipseed. Some quick posts have kept to the kottke.org style, but Turnipseed’s claim to fame is his week’s worth of interviews. Jessica Hagy, Douglas Wolk, and Ted Genoways are all done, but even more are on the way.

I found the Douglas Wolk interview most interesting so far, understandably. Wolk is the author of Reading Comics, which is probably the best book on the medium since Understanding Comics (though that might not be saying much considering the dearth of books on the topic). The interview, at least, is a must read, and covers many of the points in Reading Comics.

Turnipseed ends the interview on the topic of webcomics:

JT: Given the fanatical culture of comics, it seems natural that there are a ton of comics blogs (and that a lot of comics artists would have blogs), but the comic and the graphic novel don’t really work as an online medium, do they? Is this a fundamental nature of the beast? Or are there people out there making it work?

To which Wolk responds:

DW: Scott McCloud’s whole thing about the limitless potential of online comics hasn’t quite been borne out yet, but it’s still a very new medium. I agree that the Times’s PDFs are a dreadful idea, but there are a lot of Web-comics that have enormous readerships; it seems, in general, like daily humor strips are the format that work best so far. I love Achewood and Diesel Sweeties, in particular; as far as non-humor strips go, Dicebox is pretty wonderful. The real problem is that there’s presently no way for a cartoonist to make any money at all, let alone make a living, doing online comics (that whole “micropayment” thing seems to have fizzled); the few people whose sole employment seems to be doing them are actually making their money selling related merchandise. Is this an insurmountable problem? Probably not — but nobody’s sure how to fix it yet. At least people doing print comics have a tangible object that can be exchanged for money.

As Turnipseed and Wolk mention, simply scanning in a print page and posting it online does not work. But this is hardly news. This approach fails for all the reasons we don’t see any magazine or newspaper scanning its pages and posting the JPEGs. To answer Turnipseed, this disconnect is a fundamental nature of the beast, but no less is it a fundamental nature of other print media. Where comics differ is that you cannot tease apart their text and images to fit a layout the way you can other print content. Strips (the generic webcomic format) fit a bit better on the screen, but this just seems like an inability to think outside the box. As I mention below, I think comics can (and will) succeed on the web, and can even evolve if creators utilize the technology.

Wolk also discusses the economic feasibility of webcomics. Below is my response to this discussion. It is added as a comment underneath the interview, and since all comments are copyright the author, here it is for all of you Creative Commons lovers:

Is the current webcomic business model really a problem? Perhaps in the future some source of income unique to webcomics will be thought of, but right now the shared source of income (advertising, merchandising, maybe subscription) between webcomics and other online media (blogs, newspapers, etc.) seems sufficient. In this light, webcomics are just another type of content, like world news or (appropriately) interesting links.

The only problem I can think of is if this business model is failing for webcomics. Wikipedia has a list of self-sufficient webcomics that seems strikingly short. There are tens of thousands of webcomics being published, but only a handful are self-sufficient? My first impulse, however, is to wonder how this ratio compares to the print world, or to the blog world. (Also, as a side note, this whole advertising/merchandising thing feels like the print world’s rules bleeding onto the internet; it feels wrong.)

If the sources of income are so insubstantial that, for an overwhelming majority of creators, they are barring entry to the realm of self-sufficiency, then there’s a problem. If the number of self-sufficient web creators parallels the number of self-sufficient print creators, then there might still be a problem, but definitely less of one. Either way, I absolutely agree “the limitless potential of online comics hasn’t quite been borne out yet.” Various experimental webcomics have utilized to a small degree the way browsers display pages and people read online, but otherwise the status quo is print comic slapped onto a screen. A focus on exploiting the technology could distance the medium from its print brethren, and open new avenues of revenue.

http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/10/14229.html

The fake subtitles for this movie clip make it seem as though Adolf Hitler is banned from playing iSketch, an online drawing game like Pictionary.

Led me (most obviously) to:

and…

http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/10/14235.html led me to the Wikipedia article on coconut crabs. The article cites the coconut crab as “the largest terrestial anthropod in the world.” Largest terrestial anthropod? But, Spencer, what about the other 70% of the world?!

For the courageous, I present to you the mythical Japanese spider crab. Sure, this monstrosity with devilish legs larger than a human being may look cute and cuddly in drawing, but consider the official Wikipedia image.

Frightening. And a bit too reminiscent of a certain Resident Evil 4 villain.

Not one to leave things on a bad note, I leave you with one man’s dream of traveling the world and discovering the depths of the ocean.