Anyone who walks into the Comic Shop will no doubt hear the familiar sounds of Australia's youth radio network piping through the air vents. Namely that being of triple j. Or to others, "what kind of spit is this?"

Great for listening to all kinds of artists that aren't of the bubble gum pop or middle of the road persuasion. And there does happen to be that kind of market. Kind of market that can spot an album cover from a tiny square portion of the whole?

Probably.

Anyway, so the triple j album cover quiz challenge thingo from Richard Kingsmill is to do that. Spread falls from the list of feature albums played over the course of the year, get them right, score the booty of albums therein.

Working it out proves to be a mighty test of an hour. Resources handily at hand hand over the answers. Got to hand it to the junk about the house in scoring the answers. Mess works best here it seems.

First album cover on the puzzle grid is so undeniably that of The Hives that it's almost Will Sassoish for the man who stands off right on its square. Didn't spot Young Modern right off the bat? Don't even call yourself Australian.

Everything else, sadly having not paid any attention to the album covers (as well as being away from Australian radio for a portion of the year), washes it into the higher and harder stakes.

And that's where the resources of scratching posts and cluttered desks come in handy. Not to mention another eyeball to spot and pick them off.

Copy of the mag magazine at hand to sift through and it happens to contain the albums released for the year? Like that from Queens of the Stone Age and John Butler Trio? How sweet it is.

Then there's the stuff that's not entirely easy to pick up and off of the printed page.

Rate Your Music steps in with a few lists compiled from its users. So many to flush through, and not one of them made easy to run through either. Sanity even steps in to pitch a fork or two, and it's all about looking at the entire year's releases week by stinking week. Architecture In Helsinki and LCD Soundsystem from that round of things.

Makes the eyeballs water at the faraway blinks to recover. Three resources down and handy all to leave but one and two.

Of course, with the spot varnish that is the tiny squares on the quiz, who wouldn't think of using something like Photoshop to blow them up and attempt at rendering the barely there fonts to see? Alas, not much value in that plan of attack after a long while of trying to temper the bicubic/bilinear enlargement process.

So like it's like a weird circle that the final clue to answers on the cover challenge happens to find itself on Zan Rowe's Run With the Hunted blog on the triple j website. Looking over some of her picks of the Best Albums of 2007 so far... it's a bit of creative calendar working when the kids of a nuclear never happen pop up as the real tough nut to bust.

Spend an hour or less, spend some time and peel those eyeballs. That quiz is a fun thing to carve up.

 

What happened to the glitz and glamour of foil and hologram covers on comic books? Sure you can get 20 different variant covers, 19 of which are probably drawn by Mister Turner, but gone are the days of straight to shelf flashy covers. Or you could always go to Dynamic Forces if you are willing to part with your hard earned.

T'was the early to mid nineties, maybe the height of the "speculator" craze that brought about so many variables to the fore. Or maybe it was because the comic companies were just trying to defribulate a market that was all but dead. Either way, covers like Iron Man #290 with its gold foil inlay, Superman #123 with glow-in-the-dark electricity zapping from his new duds, Wolverine #75 with a banging hologram stuck straight on the cover and Spider-Man #25 with its giant hologram cover making it one of the coolest covers of its time.

Either way, these covers were exciting. Even though I wasn't slightly interested in any 2099 series except Spidey, I still had to get every issue #1 just for their kick butt chromium facia.

I'm not saying that chromium, foil and hologram covers are no longer released. Only that their prevalance on the shelves is going the way of the collectors card... only difference is, I was happy to see cards go.

 

For just the month of May this year, Devil's Due Publishing are running a free comic book promotion. Only catch is, you have to rip off the cover of a recent comic from either Marvel or DC.

Sounds interesting and rather costly for the slightly curious. The sheer act of having to deface a comic in the first place notwithstanding, it's an intriguing promo. One that may very well only be worth seeing what kind of stationary/envelope the comic from the horned ones comes in.

At least there'll be something to look forward to. Even if the incoming comic turns out to be as iffy as the outgoing.

Now, to work out which comic will fall down in the act of playing this game...

 

Suspicious and paranoid, it's now possible that a server config has been installed and any incoming traffic through Firefox is being blocked. Time spent working around this is getting into too far a deviation from the daily duties. At least Opera can still subvert the network. For now at least. Either that or they're playing tricks.

So while this was going on, a reading of a few dozen dozen bookmarks was taking a back seat. One in this absence was that of Neil Gaiman's blog. Looks like Gaiman picked out some feedback over his photo that accompanied his Locus interview. On it, whether due to a discolouration in the scan or some such, Gaiman looks like he has a bloody lip.