Unqualified Offerings

Realish offers his list of must-have freeware for your clean install on your new machine. No Gimp, which surprises me a little; Textpad apparently gets beaten out by Notepad++.
Browser: Firefox
Email/RSS Reader: Thunderbird
Lightweight image viewer: IrfanView
Open-source image editor: Paint.net
Lightweight music player/burner/converter/swiss army knife: Foobar2000
Firewall: ZoneAlarm
Antivirus: AVG
spyware: adaware
Microsoft Office replacement: OpenOffice
chat: trillian
Zip/rar file manager (better than winzip): [...]

Quondam comicsblogospheroid Sean T. Collins has written a comic, “Destructor Comes to Croc Town.” It’s drawn by Matt Wiegle and available at the website of Top Shelf Productions. Fourteen action-packed pages, go!

Okay, here’s the scenario: Terrorists have planted a nuclear weapon in a major American city and if you don’t stop it millions will die. If you have any sense of honor at all, wouldn’t you give your own life to stop that? Most of us would say yes, wouldn’t we? What about prison? If you [...]

Watched 24 last night. Not watching tonight. It was bad. Last season was bad too, but last season was resonant bad. It was bad in a culturally interesting way. Its badness had a lot to say about kinks in the post-9/11 American psyche. It was martyr-complex bad and torture-justifyin’ bad and bluster/blubber bad in addition [...]