Well, not new, but new to me. It’s one of those brutally atheist-socialist-existentialist ones:

The Library of Congress just uploaded a bunch of portraits of American Civil War peoples to Flickr. Public entities providing content for private companies — sure, whatever.

Asylum, almost completed, is the The Civil War-Ken-Burns-style film that I’ve been wrestling mightily with for about a month now, maybe more. I’ve been looking at photos like these, of period mental patients, for that whole time.

Partly because I’m in the middle of The Name of the Rose and love A Scanner Darkly I’m riffing off the fact that these tend to be digital photos of prints of negatives of people, and in some cases the digital copy of the reversed copy of the reversed copy (which we see upside-down and automatically interpret downside-up) is all that remains of the memory of the person. The photos are on Flickr to sort out the multiple layers of disintegrated signs and get people to use metadata to reconstruct the original sign, the name of the signified.

It occurs to me that the issue of Transmetropolitan where they resurrect all the cryogenics people is actually rad — in that book, technology is at the point where we can reconstruct the signified.

Action Comics No. 1, the book that invented both Superman and the concept of superheroes, sold at auction in New York today for $1 million.