firehose

I’ve had my difficulties with the actual content of comic book letter columns in the past, but I’m not gonna lie: I love those things, and my favorite part is the clever titles. Occasionally you’ll find one that doesn’t really work that well — I love the Punisher, but “Punishing Mails” is about as lazy as you can get — but there are dozens of incredible, pun-filled letter column titles out there.

And to prove it, I’ve picked out twenty-five of the best.

Let’s start off with Batman, because, as in all things, Batman is the best place to start. As you might expect from a title that dates back to 1940, it’s had a few different titles for its letter column. For a while, it was just “Batmail,” but in the mid-’60s, they got a little creative with the TV-inspired “Batman’s Hot Line.”

 I’m think that bat-winged T looks a little more like a whale tail than they intended. That logo lasted ’til the mid-70s, when it was replaced with this thing, which looks so much like the bootleg painting on the window of a comic book store that I had a hard time believing it was real:

By the ’80s, though, it’d settled into the pretty familiar “Bat-Signals” title:

My favorite Batman-related lettercol title, though, is the pun-tastic “Detective Comments.”

Brave and the Bold had a pretty bland title in “Brave & Bold Mailbag,” but I’m including it here because the header includes an amazing Jim Aparo image of Batman kicking his feet up on his desk to read his mail:

The best thing about this? That desk and chair are nowhere near nice and/or bat-shaped enough to actually belong to Batman, which means he had to have straight up busted into a post office and kicked back for a few hours. Makes sense, too: Alfred can’t go through all the mail.

Superman and Action Comics both shared “Metropolis Mailbag” for most of the Silver and Bronze Ages. That’s not a terribly clever name, but I’m into it mostly for the header where Superman is using his X-Ray vision to read a pile of mail, but looks for all the world like he’s getting ready to set it all on fire with his eyes:

Similarly, Superboy‘s fans could write into the “Smallville Mailsack”, which sounds like the filthiest thing you can do to another person:

By the ’70s, Action Comics had distinguished itself by changing the title to “Action Reaction,” which then streamlined into one of the better puns in lettercol history:

Meanwhile, Superboy moved away from the “Smallville Mailsack” (with good reason) and into one of my all-time favorites. The ’90s Superboy comic was quite possibly the most ’90s comic of all time, being as it was a reboot (check) starring a clone (check) with a leather jacket (check) and a fade (check), so after a brief stint of using “Kid Stuff,” they gave it the ’90sest title of all time:

Just to round out the Superman Family, here’s the one from Jimmy Olsen, featuring Jimmy sitting down to write back to you, the fans!

This might seem like just a standard title, but when you consider that it’s actually a subtle play on the title Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, it’s pretty rad.

And just for the sake of completeness, here’s the one from DC Comics Presents, the Superman team-up book, in which the letters appear to be doing whatever letters do to make lowercase letters, if you catch my meaning:

 This isn’t the most famous Captain America letter column title (more on that in a second), but it is pretty charming:

The most famous Captain America letter column title — and maybe the best thing to happen in comics, ever — was recently brought back for Captain Marvel:

Considering that it was a book about a giant red T-Rex that ended the Garden of Eden by stomping an alien supercomputer, the letter column header for Devil Dinosaur is actually pretty understated:

Much like Batman and Jimmy Olsen before him, Deadpool set out to answer his own fan mail. Unlike those two, however, he seems to be taking it pretty seriously:

The original letter column in Doom Patrol was called “Postscripts to the Patrol” (snooze), but during Grant Morrison and Richard Case’s run, it got a weirdly biblical makeover:

One of the best tricks of letter column titling involves bringing in the main character’s powers. Hence, the Flash took a look at his missives in “Speed Reading”:

Or “Recoil” from Hitman, which is a great letter column title for a book about a dude who does nothing but shoot people:

Or, you can go with a vaguely scatalogical pun, much like they did in Justice League International:

Nextwave basically had the perfect lettercol title, which makes sense since Nextwave is basically the perfect comic:

Slightly more subtle, but still pretty great, is the letter column from Secret Origins. It works on multiple levels!

The letter column for Uncanny X-Men was, as you might expect, “X-Mail.” It’s boring, yes, but it’s also right there, and they kind of had to do it. Once the spinoffs started rolling in, however, hey got to change things up. X-Factor went with “X-Changes”….

…while the adjectiveless X-Men title went with the more esoteric “X-Pressions,” so that readers could really tell them how they feel.

Finally, we come to two of my favorites. First, a book that was near and dear to my heart when I was a radical ’90s teen, Gen13, with a letter column title that was as garish and obnoxious as the book itself:

And just to prove that the art of the letter column title isn’t dead, here’s where readers of Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose can write in:

It’s a three-level pun, y’all. And that’s real.

In 2012, Snip Snap had a problem. Their coupon-scanning app had just been featured in the Apple App Store, delivering tens of thousands of users overnight. The problem: they didn't have any coupon-reading software. The company had been reading each coupon and inputting the data by hand. That was easy when it was just a few dozen users and a dedicated team, but now they needed hundreds of thousands of labor-hours to keep up with new users. And they needed it fast.

The average wage on mTurk is $2 an hour

The answer was Mechanical Turk, Amazon's cloud labor platform, which lets requesters call in anonymous workers from around the globe for what the service calls "human intelligence tasks." Using the service, Snip Snap was able to line up an army of coupon taggers in a matter of hours. The app kept running, and the users never knew the difference.

In the eight years since launch, Amazon’s micro-labor platform, also known as mTurk, has become something of a secret weapon for startups. It’s big business too: Analysts estimate the "cloud labor" sector, as it's called, is worth $1.2 billion in annual revenue. But it's also come under fire as exploitative. Researchers have estimated the average wage on Mechanical Turk is just $2 an hour, and some claim that’s an overestimate. Craigslist-style scams are common, in which requesters ask for up-front payments in exchange for later rewards, then disappear. If employers decide a completed task is unsatisfactory, they can decline to pay and still keep the resulting work. As a result, workers complain that many requesters decline work simply to get out of paying.

Experts estimate Mechanical Turk sees as much as $400,000 worth of transactions every day, but despite the money, Amazon has kept a hands-off attitude to the marketplace. Workers are left to fend for themselves.

Giving workers a chance to rate employers

But a new tool may give Turkers a secret weapon of their own. It's called Turkopticon, a browser plug-in that aims to turn the tables on requesters by giving workers a chance to rate employers by reliability. If a requester frequently backs out of paying workers, he'll get a bad rating and workers will know to stay away. Outright scams will be flagged early and the accounts behind them will be seen as untrustworthy. Already, 7,000 workers have installed the plug-in. If they’re going to help make apps like Snip Snap successful, they want to be able to tell who they’re working for.

It seems like a simple feature, one Amazon might have added years ago, but as Amazon sees it, the mTurk community already has this problem solved. Reached for comment, an Amazon Web Services representative said, "There are many tools and forums available that allow workers to share information so they can make informed choices."

"This is not just a way of evening out information. This is a tool to spark awareness."

Still, for the developers involved, Turkopticon means a fundamental shift in the way workers and employers interact, forcing requesters to maintain a good reputation. Mechanical Turk is built on the idea of dispensable labor, which appears when it's needed and disappears when it's not. That's useful for developers, who often need to test out ideas or burn through one-time data sets. If a task can't be achieved through coding alone, they can build Mechanical Turk requests into the code and summon workers on request. It's a unique system, and one that puts the workers at a disadvantage. Requesters have all the power, and workers often have to struggle just to be paid for what they've done. Larger programs like Houdini and CrowdFlower make things a little better, singling out particular skills and aligning the best workers with the best requesters for higher pay, but they do little to change the basic dynamic.

"As work changes, the organizing has to change."

The Turkopticon developers want to change the balance of power more permanently, and the plug-in is just the beginning. "This is not just a way of evening out information," says Lilly Irani, a former Google UI designer who co-designed the project. "This is a tool to spark awareness." The plug-in arose out of research into a Turker's Bill of Rights, outlining the basic worker protections most important to Mechanical Turk's users. The biggest request turned out to be a way to rate employers. More traditional worker protections, like a minimum wage, were much less popular, as Turkers worried they would cut down on the number of available jobs. Actual unions were even more controversial. "A lot of the workers were specifically not interested in unions, although worker-run forums like Turker Nation will do certain kinds of collective actions like boycotting bad requesters," Irani says. "It may be that the word ‘union’ has become too politically charged."

The larger problem is how distributed the Mechanical Turk workforce has become. Amazon makes a point of keeping workers anonymous, only distinguishing between workers that are in the US or those who are not. The only place Turkers can talk collectively is on forums, and most labor organizing tactics start by getting all the relevant parties into the same room. But while technology may have changed the landscape, Irani and her team are eager to adapt. "As work changes, the organizing has to change."

Reddit users' favorite image host knows its market. On Wednesday, the popular image hosting site Imgur launched a meme generator aimed straight at taking over as Reddit users' go-to creation service. All of your favorite (and least favorite) memes are preloaded into the new generator, and a built-in gallery collects all of the most popular memes created that day on Imgur itself. While the web is hardly short on meme builders, Imgur's service comes at a timely juncture. The frequently used generator Quickmeme was banned from Reddit earlier this week following allegations that it had employed bots to vote images created on other website off of certain sections of Reddit. As Imgur is already a fan favorite, the site's generator is sure to catch on quickly.

This year's Minecon, the annual expo of everything Minecraft, will take place in Orlando, Fla. on Nov. 2 and 3, Mojang announced today.

In a video posted to the official Mojang YouTube account, creator Markus "Notch" Persson and Mojang's Patrick Geuder "randomly" select the location for this year's gathering in a rather unusual fashion.

The video notes that hotel rooms and tickets will go on sale next month. More details will be announced at a later date.

Last year, Minecon was held at Disneyland in Paris Nov. 24 and 25. The expo's origins date back to 2010, with the first gathering held in Washington state as an unofficial event organized by fans.

Microsoft is making use of its Skype acquisition for Windows 8.1, opting to bundle it into a final version of the OS. Existing preview versions of Windows 8.1 do not include the traditional built-in Messaging app. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans have revealed to The Verge that the final version of Windows 8.1 will kill off the Messaging app in favor of Skype integration.

Skype is more tightly integrated in Windows 8.1, with improvements to answer voice and video calls from the lock screen. The decision to drop the existing Messaging app is all part of the Messenger service retirement. Microsoft started to force Messenger desktop users over to Skype in April, but the Windows 8 Messaging app was left untouched. The built-in version of Skype for Windows 8.1 will likely work in the same way it does today, as a separate application with close ties to additional apps. Windows 8.1 is expected to debut later this year alongside new 7- and 8-inch form factors.

By Alec Meer on June 27th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

I know how I will die. I am reminded of it constantly, and without sympathy. One shrinking white oblong, to the upper left of my vision, taunts me with the rapid decline of my oxygen; another, upper right, expressionlessly cackles at me with its ever-diminishing power supply, showing me the encroaching demise of the Capsule that keeps me alive.

Of the two, the latter is the most distressing. At least when the oxygen runs out, everything stops and my struggle is over. When the power is deplete, my punishment is two fold, for I grind to a halt and am unable to do anything except watch the oxygen ebb away. The loss of power inverts the horror of air loss, transforming it from too fast to too slow. Instead of desperately fleeing death, I must sit and wait patiently for it.

The funny thing is that I don’t even need these two meters, those monochrome rectangles which pitilessly promise me that my life will soon end, to know that death’s icy hand is on my shoulder. All I have to do is listen to myself, hear my breath quicken and wheeze as the tiny craft I’m in approaches the limits of its ability to sustain life. Unless I can steer it into – what? I don’t know. Debris? An asteroid? A gas pocket? A seeker mine? I don’t know. I don’t know. I can try to find out with my scanner, but it will cost me fuel and slow me down to do so. I may need to go far off course to find the thing that keeps me alive for just a few seconds more. Unless I do that, or by a miracle find what I need lying directly in my path, that sound will intensify, then it will stop, and then I will be dead.

My capsule’s engine does its own breathing. A steady whir at slow speeds, a troubled whine when accelerated, a hollow, lifeless clunking as whatever goes into its tank exhausts itself. When it is all gone, the only noise the engine can make is that of a car trying to start after being left in a desert for a decade. Something tries to find a way to live again, but it is only a forlorn hope for the impossible.

And so I die. Perhaps my engine died first, and I had a chance to prepare myself for the end, or perhaps I asphyxiated 100, 200, 1000, 2000 yards/miles/light years/fathoms from my next lonely destination.

Am I in space? Am I underwater? Am I a nano-scale explorer travelling through the body of some vast entity? It does not matter. I don’t need description and I don’t need colour. I just need to keep moving, trying to outrun those twin deaths. A white cross – much like a headstone, aptly – locates me in this place. An endless expansion of nothing, filled with featureless blobs that might be air, might be fuel or might be danger, is my home. A sheen of cracked blue, a distorted, fractured barrier between myself and my inevitable fate, tells me that this home is hostile to me.

A distance shows me how long I have to find a way to stay alive. If I move in the right direction, this distance will decrease. If I move there too quickly, my tiny craft’s power will deplete. If I move there too slowly, my lungs will empty and there will be nothing left to refill them with. As well as determining the correct direction to travel, I must determine the correct speed in which to travel, a difficult weighing of loss against loss, a balance which may not even exist.

Help is out there, but I must gamble to find it. I can take my time, plan my route and hope I find enough to keep me going at this snail’s pace, or I can ram my capsule into that – debris? Asteroid? Gas pocket? Seeker mine? – and pray it contains fuel or air, not deadly gas or explosive or worse. Collision with the wrong thing costs me some of my twin lifelines, hastens my journey into the abyss beyond this one. But I must collide. It’s the only way.

My destinations are lonely places. They slowly tell me the tale of what happened in this place. I see the signs of life that was once here, but has now moved on, either to death or another distant outpost. My only company remains the sound of my own tortured breath, a drawn-out death rattle in an uncaring vacuum. Drowning. Dying.

I don’t know why I continue. I don’t know what I can do. I have so little hope. My situation worsens, as threats increase in variety and number, seek to provide new obstacles between myself and the next island of nothingness I’m supposed to voyage to.

But I must continue. I must keep breathing. I know I can.

I must turn off all the lights, I must wear my headphones, I must lock the door and I must deactivate all other distractions. I must play CAPSULE, a minimalist, brutal journey with, to and from death, a perversion of Lunar Lander into bleakness and struggle, from Canabalt, Gravity Hook and Hundreds creator Adam ‘Atomic’ Saltsman. I must be moved into existential horror and a sense of complete, inescapable loneliness by the mesmerisingly horrible sounds of slow death and collapse given to it by Robin Arnott. I must tell you that you should too, if you are not too deterred by the concept of a near-colourless journey of sound and survival through a pitiless void that tells you nothing and refuses to lend you any helping hand.

CAPSULE is out now.

Submitted by: sixonefive72

Submitted by: Unknown

I can has MOAR funny LOLcats?

Submitted by: Unknown

Gif your butt over to Animal Gifs for MOAR funny and cute on loop!

Submitted by: Unknown

Check out more funny animals at Animal Capshunz!

Submitted by: Unknown