Rob Sterling

A DJ at the local country music station here in Richmond went a little flaky today and started playing Christmas music.

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I like comics; newspaper comics, comic books, manga, graphic novels, all of it. I especially like comics with a single creator - there’s something pure about seeing words and pictures that come from the same mind, both trying to convey the same concept.

By the time I started reading them, newspaper comics already mostly sucked. Pogo an Li’l Abner had both ceased publication, and a good chunk of the strips in the local paper came out of Mort Walker’s studio, which is a polite way of saying they were crap. I didn’t realize they were crap at the time, having no benchmark for comparison, and the only person who told me they had become crap over time was my grandfather. Since he thought the period from 1920 to 1980 was marked by a general trend of everything turning to crap, I didn’t take his pronouncements on comics too seriously. But he was right about them, and maybe about the rest, too.

Read more »

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I added one of those fancy new Flickr badges to the right column. Pretty cool idea, and a nice implementation.

Update: I took it out - there’s something wrong with this template. There’s a glitch in the structure and the Flickr badge was making the problem obvious. I might put it back if I can find and eliminate the error. Here’s the badge, though:

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Recovered photos

Originally uploaded by Rob_Sterling.

Sifting through some of her mother’s belongings, a cousin of my father’s recently found an album of tintypes and photographs dating from the 19th century. The quality of preservation varies from image to image; many are not in terribly good shape and most have darkened to the point where they’re very difficult to make out, but a little scanmanship has rendered most of them serviceable.

Most will require elaborate retoucing, because the surface of each tintype has become pitted and rough. But several are good enough to show after just a bit of work, and here’s one of those. I’ll post more over the next few days.

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I greatly enjoy seeing other people’s iMixes, so I thought it would be nice to link to my own.

(Yes, I know they suck. Thanks in advance for not sharing that.)

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I have to admit, after a little over a year living in the South, I’m beginning to get into this grits business. I used to eat them solely for the sake of irony, but I’m actuallly beginning to enjoy them.

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I’ve posted some pages from the Fortune Magazine’s 2000 Investor’s Guide here. I was one of a handful of financial services interactive marketing professionals to partake in a roundtable discussion hosted by Fortune. The portion of the discussion the editor chose to excerpt is a bit dull, but the photos are nice.

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Krucoff’s got the write-up, but long story short, Google bought Dodgeball, initially a Dennis Crowley tinkertoy project that has grown into the great goat-headed god of pervasive computing social networking. (When you’re drunk, it knows where to find you.)

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I used to have a blog at this site, but I never wrote anything in it. People, though, were forever checking the backend of my email address and asking why I never updated my blog. Out of sheer embarrassment I have decided to scrap it and start over.

Several years ago I published a blog called Boro6. Boro6 was intended to mock stylish hipster blogs that always trumpeted the wonders of life on the Lower East Side or in Williamsburg - at the time I lived in a slum in the Greenville section of Jersey City.

The theme of Boro6 was that no sensible human being would pay $2300 a month for a studio apartment with a view of an airshaft. Eventually I ran out of things to write about, and moved to Virginia. Currently I’m a contributor to another blog called Memefirst. Memefirst is a group blog, and most of the others are Europeans or expat Americans, so I’m considered the “red state” voice. It’s a little wearying, because comment threads are always forty-against-one arguments, and I’m the one.

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