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The Walking Dead started as a Comic Book so I can put this Magic the Gathering related thing in here. Magic the Gathering also has books which we will get to in a moment. Just bear with me.

So Magic the Gathering is releasing special edition Walking Dead Cards. They are completely unique and you can only buy them from the owners of MTG for a limited time. They are very ugly. Judge for yourself.




So people in the MTG community hate these for a bunch of reasons none of you will care about. The argument I find most vexing and want to talk about is the "this contradicts MTG lore". So MTG releases a bunch of books too and have their own universe like Star Wars and Marvel and who gives a crap about these fake extended universes? I have forgotten more Star Wars lore than I can remember and all of it was nullified by Disney anyway. I don't get why people are so hung up on fictional universes. I can get getting attached to a character or story but getting attached enough to send a death threat over it? Who does that?

Zombie movies are in fact my favorite type of movie. I watched into episode 3 of season one a few months ago. I don't think Zombie/survivor stuff really works for a network series with 15 minutes of commercials per 45 minutes of show. Oh no is Glen going to get eaten? We will see when we come back from commercial. And we already know the stars of the show aren't getting eaten judging by whose contracted for how many season. And I don't think survival horror really works well on television where you can't depict a certain level of violence and depravity.

Maybe they can pick a hot girl and then turn her into a sexy zombie like in return of the living dead.

purchased another copy of a very good book (plus some others) to re-read this weekend:



a little unhappily reproduced as an octavo paperback, but nevermind. jean mohr's photography is brilliant.



more here.
https://imgur.com/a/HzMpXJb

haven't ever read a book by berger that i didn't like. everything he turned his hand to he wrote about with curiosity, warmth and humanity. sort of like a british-continental equivalent of john mcphee.

also picked up william h gass's 'omensetter's luck' for another re-read. very good novel.

as a person who has put together 100s of plate section and image inserts for books, i can sympathize. it's very rare that a photo will be taken 'into the gutter' like that. it's normally a stylistic choice to 'bleed' a photo out into the margins/guttering. in the above case, not really much you can do with a large, horizontal, centrally-framed photograph like that. the original book format would have been radically different.

bad publishers/editorial depts very often do treat images disastrously. same with copy flow. a good typesetter should never run, for e.g., a large-extent book (>500 pages) with a small gutter. the mid-section of the book will be difficult to read, especially the cheap glue-bound paperback editions.

bad text layout is normally always for cost-saving reasons. cramming 500 words-per-page rather than a more leisurely 380 WPM, for instance.

mass-paperback formats like the B-type/octavo really aren't worth the hassle. it's all about keeping costs down and extending an old book's commercial lifespan. octavo's, as the name would suggest, are printed in sheaves of 16-pages. a nightmare to start introducing fold-out pages. an alternative is to introduce a 'plate section' of 16/32/64, etc. pages in the middle of the book, a separate and customized sheet typically on different glossy photo-friendly paper, but again, adds a lot to the cost.

there's a certain charm to badly reproduced photographs, or crushing content down to regular print type. some writers have actually taken advantage of it. w. g. sebald was infamous for introducing very vague, blurry, artefacted pictures into his books, which were typically all about fragmented memory, forgotten cultural pasts, smudged over histories, etc etc. you get the idea.

yes the lord of the rings is one of the bestselling books of modern time. publishers can afford to throw some money at that.

although you'll probably only get fold-out maps and appendices in the fancier editions, even still. i've seen plenty of classroom editions of the hobbit or lord of the rings or whatever that just have regular black-and-white landscape reproductions in the front-matter.

always good when books have lifespans like that.

Finished Jurassic Park last night. Never read it, remember the movies somewhat well but haven't seen in many years.
Enjoyed it overall but Ian Malcolms antiscience speeches got a bit annoying.

Malcolm seemed like an antiscience mouthpiece for the writer.

"Macrobiotic eating places a strong focus on natural, organic food. It also advocates for complete elimination of chemicals and artificial ingredients. This no-chemical rule extends to personal hygiene products, as well as other products used in the home. The types of foods allowed vary slightly depending on the person."

https://www.healthline.com/health/food- … %20person.

I regret to inform you that all things are, in fact, chemicals, including your very being. I can get behind eating healthy, but let's not church it up too much and oversell it, eh?

Sounds like a circle of hell Dante forgot about. What is it at that point, a form letter that just says 'too stupid, nah'?

Lol. Great article you found there.