Winsor McKay agrees to make four thousand pen drawings that will move. In this silent film from 1911, cartoonist Winsor McKay (of Little Nemo comics fame) demonstrates some of the first animation, AND it's in color. The actual cartoon starts around the 7:30 mark. [via four color comics]

How to Write a Book in Three Easy Steps. This was actually pretty good.

An brief interview with Ellen Lupton, whose book Thinking with Type I enjoyed very much. "Today, to be literate involves not only reading/receiving, but also making/producing in a range of media. It’s not enough to be in the audience any more."

The Central Division of the Los Angeles Police Department keeps a weekly map of the downtown homeless population. I wonder what data they are gathering besides headcounts. I'd love to see this map cross-referenced with the weekly crime stats, weather, events, etc.

Here's a version of the classic videogame Pong, but this one uses real-time fluid dynamics to vary the gameplay.

From the Free Font Manifesto: "Most typefaces created in the free font movement are designed to serve relatively small or underserved linguistic communities. They have an explicit social purpose, and they are intended to offer the world not a luxurious outpouring of typographic variation but rather the basics for maintaining literacy and communication within a society."

"This past Christmas Vacation my brothers, sister, myself and my girlfriend built a scale replica of the battle of Helms Deep, from the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Two Towers penned by the late, great, J.R.R. Tolkien." And it's made mostly of gummi bears, licorice, and other confections. [via rebecca blood]

In two weeks, the Atlanta Flickr Group is having a meet-up to learn how to shoot strangers: "How to approach interesting people, take their picture, and not get killed or your equipment stolen in the process." Could be cool.

This is where audiophiles go when they die.

This is awesome. The photographer sets his camera timer for 2 seconds, then runs as far as he can before the camera snaps. [via joshua blankenship]

Flickr Treat: A Halloween Story, by the Atlanta Flickr Group.

There's going to be a movie about Helvetica, the typeface you see pretty much everywhere. "Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives."

"Over the past thirty years, a new breed of 'anthropometric historians' has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being." [via justin blanton]

I love Wal-Mart. Both of my local Wal-Marts are pretty incredible in the "cleanliness" category--I wonder how this one slipped through the cracks? Actually, it's not really that dirty, but the "sheer Ramen devastation" and emptied shelves in general is pretty striking. That's a stocker's nightmare. Empty shelves mean 1) you're going to keep losing sales until you fill it again and 2) you've got a lot of filling to do. Makes me kind of wistful about the hundreds of nights I spent stocking shelves at the local Kroger.

The playground of the future may feature "'play workers' to help guide fantasy play"–cuz kids need help with that sort of thing, apparently. Back in my day, we had to make it all up by ourselves (uphill, in the snow, etc). [via andrea harner]

This is great. Area man loses weight by playing the Nintendo Wii.

"I am so tired of books about World War II and the Holocaust being tarted up as nostalgia porn." Bookslut picks the worst book covers from last year.

Marc Singer reviews the MOME Spring/Summer 2006 comics anthology, and riffs on the state of today's independent comics: "When comics aspire to the stature of literature or art they have to succeed as literature or art, not as not superheroes." There's some great discussion there in the comments, where Kevin Huizenga and some others weigh in.

Cinephiles and typophiles might like this growing collection of some of the most original main title sequence designs. [via do]

When I was at the Atlanta History Center on Monday for the exhibit of Martin Luther King's papers, one particular item really caught my eye: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book!! I wrote myself a note to look for it, and I'm glad I was able to track it down. [via bully says]