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By Nicholas Eskey San Diego publisher IDW have grown steadily beyond their beginnings of comics. Though comics are still their main focus, the company in recent years has expanded beyond that and into other forms of entertainment. At this year’s Wondercon, IDW Entertainment represented by Dirk Wood, Vice Present of Marketing,  David Hedgecock, Managing Editor, […]

As promised, a new Bloom County comic strip is up—as promised, on Facebook of all places. Creator Berke Breathed announced the return during SDCC, and a lot of 90s kids are over the moon with this. The strip is appearing in a Sunday color format. On subsequent FB posts, Breathed has explained that Opus was jamming to “Thankful” by Glen Phillips, and so with this interactive method, he’as actualy emulating the most popular webcomics. Full circle!

Anyway welcome back, Opus! It wasn’t the same without you.

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By Mark Peters

It’s easy to find articles about words people hate. Just google for a nanominute and you’ll find rants against moist, like, whom, irregardless, retarded, synergy, and hordes of other offending lexical items. Word-hating is rampant.

So if that’s the kind of thing that yanks your lexical crank, look elsewhere: this column is all about word love, word lust, word like, word kissy-face, and word making-sweet-love-down-by-the-fire, as South Park’s Chef would put it.

These words not only float my boat; they rock my socks and warm my cocoa. I love these words, and this is my attempt to figure out why. If such analysis ruins the love, as so often happens in life, big whup. There are plenty of other words in the sea.

wazoo
We’ll never know why intelligent young citizens become proctologists (or how they break the news to Ma and Pa back on the farm) but we do know that words for the butticular region tend to be vivid and fun. Wazoo is my favorite. The OED traces it back to a friendly suggestion made in 1961: “Run it up yer ol’ wazoo!” I couldn’t agree more with a 1975 example: “Dating is a real pain in the wazoo.”

So what’s so great about wazoo? Studies show you can’t say it and be in a bad mood. Try it and see: wazoo wazoo wazoo wazoo wazoo. It’s funny and silly and a blast to say. Surely, it’s a better world with wazoo in it.

Bonus wazoo words: I am also a staunch admirer of gazoomba, bippy, badonkadonk, bottom, tush, fanny, fourth point of contact, and tuchus.

abyss
My mother always warned me to avoid two things: packs of wild dogs and the abyss. Still, I can’t stop reveling in this word. Part of the appeal is its meaning. You have to love a definition this ultra-hellish: “The great deep, the primal chaos; the bowels of the earth, the supposed cavity of the lower world; the infernal pit.” The OED’s secondary meaning is nearly as cool: “A bottomless gulf; any unfathomable or apparently unfathomable cavity or void space; a profound gulf, chasm, or void extending beneath.”

Also, I love looking into the abyss—except when I make the void jealous. The void is very insecure, you know.

buttmunch
When it comes to a perfect marriage of humor and stupidity, you can’t get any better than Beavis and Butthead, and I have yet to greet the day when I get tired of hearing their litany of immature, silly insults, such as dumbass, bunghole, peckerwood, dillweed, dillhole, and butt dumpling.

For me, the dumbass laureate of these words is buttmunch, so I was pleased to learn its origin in the DVD extra “Taint of Greatness: The Journey of Beavis and Butt-head, Part 1.” As B&B creator Mike Judge tells the tale, “Standards at MTV said no to assmunch. So I said, how about buttmunch? So we started saying buttmunch so many times, and then I just inadvertently said assmunch once. And they just heard buttmunch so many times that assmunch didn’t sound like anything new, so then assmunch slipped past ‘em. And that’s the story of assmunch and buttmunch.”

higgledy-piggledy
My marginally reliable memory told me I first saw this magnificent word in a Bloom County cartoon. Lucky for me and the

I first met Josh Goldblum when he cited this website in an academic paper he wrote for the 2007 Museums and the Web conference, entitled "Considerations and Strategies for Creating Interactive Narratives."

After reading that mouthful of an essay, I realized Goldblum could teach you interactive storytelling a hundred times better than I ever could.

Goldblum runs Blue Cadet Interactive, a firm that specializes in building complex, interactive digital stories--he is setting the standard for how we use digital graphics, photographs, audio, and video to create more complex stories on the web.

This week, he's teaching us the fine art of interactive storytelling in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. Click here to read the complete interview.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
How can a fledgling journalist build something more interactive than a simple slideshow? How do we make better interactive narratives? 

Josh Goldblum:
[Readers] know when a lot of work and craft went into a project. They can also generally see when something is based off a template. Continue reading...

"Senior year at any high school across this country is a major transitional period; a period in which students reaffirm their community ties while, at the same time, they prepare to separate from that community. Hurricane Katrina prematurely forced this transition and moment of separation on thousands of seniors throughout New Orleans ... Y06 allows the students themselves to acknowledge exile while transcending it as they explore these transitions online together, while giving the rest of us a unique way of understanding the personal impact of the New Orleans disaster."

That's the logic behind the Yearbook 2006 storytelling project, a unique multimedia package that shares stories, pictures, diary entries, audio, and video from the New Orleans tragedy--all seen through the eyes of high school students.

Josh Goldblum is a digital storytelling wizard who founded the design firm, Blue Cadet Interactive. He shaped the Yearbook 2006 project from the ground up.

Goldblum is our special guest this week, teaching us the fine art of interactive storytelling in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
While describing your Yearbook 2006 project, you wrote: "However, we felt we would need to deliver these photographs in some novel way to differentiate our story from the preponderance of audio slideshows developed by such news organizations as NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com." What did you mean by this?

Josh Goldblum:
Well first off I hope I wasn’t being too harsh a critic of the audio slideshow. Continue reading...

Josh Goldblum, has written it all.

The founder of Blue Cadet Interactive has built interactive sites for gigantic publishers like Random House, international activists like John Prendergast, and the Smithsonian (Catlin's Campfire Stories).

Along the way he's won the 'Best Education Site' award from the Museums and the Web, and a Macromedia Site of the Day award.

Goldblum is our special guest this week, teaching us the fine art of interactive storytelling in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
In your opinion, what are the best interactive journalism and narrative sites? Where should young journalists look for inspiration?

Josh Goldblum:
I like to check on Interactive Narratives which aggregates some great narrative work and has a great podcast. Continue reading...

"The road was all ice. And all I could think about was, "How did I ever survive this?" Because I was dressed in the heaviest jacket with sweaters, with hat - and I was freezing! And I was there as a child with a little blanket and thin prison uniform and - and I made it. It's... hard to believe."

That's Judge Thomas Buergenthal describing his return to the site of the concentration camp of Auschwitz, nearly 55 years after he survived the Jewish Holocaust in Europe.

His story--along with the memories of countless other death camp survivors-- will be preserved forever in digital format at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The virtual exhibit includes photographs, audio, text, and Flash illustrations to help new generations remember one of the worst chapters of human history. 

Josh Goldblum (the pioneering writer who founded the design firm, Blue Cadet Interactive) helped design this complex story. Goldblum is our special guest this week, teaching us the fine art of interactive storytelling in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog: 

 
Josh Goldblum:
I first became aware of the “Life After Holocaust” project while I was working with the Holocaust Museum on a separate Ripples of Genocide project. Continue reading...

"We found inspiration in the journals of Dan Eldon, which are some of the most elaborate, moving and personal expressions in publication today. By incorporating collaged visual elements into the design of a mock travel journal, we had now finally arrived at a structure for the narrative that added even more context to either point of view."

That's Josh Goldblum explaining how he built the Ripples of Genocide interactive story project using Angelina Jolie's travel diaries from Africa.

Josh Goldblum is a digital storytelling wizard who founded the design firm, Blue Cadet Interactive. His group specializes in building complex, interactive digital stories--he is setting the standard for how we use digital graphics, photographs, audio, and video to create more complex stories on the web.

Goldblum is our special guest this week, teaching us the fine art of interactive storytelling in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
What are the most important web skills that young journalists and creators need now? In your opinion, what are the best programming languages, publishing software and web platforms to know? What's the best way to study these methods (in school or independently)?

Josh Goldblum:
I think it is really important for journalists to know the craft of creating sites or at the very least to know what the tools are capable of. Continue reading...