Today, of course, was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Although I don't really have any 3-D pirate-related things to post right now, I do have a seafaring romance between a ferry pilot and a garbage scow hand.

"Scowboat Sadie" was a 3-D parody of the popular "romance" genre of comic books, published in Whack Comics Number 1, October 1953, edited by Norman Maurer and Joe Kubert.

There are two other great stories from this issue online, "The 3-D-Ts" and "Dirty Mouse."

At 3DPregnancy, one of the ParentsConnect family of websites maintained by Nickelodeon, you can view 3D illustrations of gestating babies in utero. There are 42 images, one for each week of pregnancy, showing embryonic and fetal development. (The picture above is the 39th week.)

(A hat-tip and congratulations to Kellie Lambert, in her eighth week.)

I would like to thank Écrans for choosing Swell 3D as their site of the day. Écrans is an online supplement to Libération, the Paris newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. Above is my anaglyphic rendition of Mr. Sartre enjoying Swell 3D on his desktop computer.

I converted this image from a stock photo by Lev Dolgachov (the same photographer who shot the beautiful woman in the white skirt). I may have a use for her later, in house ads or link graphics, or some similar application.

I have been hired to make a basketball game in Flash, so I started by making a nice ball. The game I am making won't be in anaglyph, but I put some anaglyph basketball players and cheerleaders behind the ball for this experiment. I'll keep you posted on the progress of the game, as I continue to work on it.

"The Morning After" is the eighth in my "Antique 3-D Cheesecake" series of glamour stereographs converted to 3D anaglyph. It was published by the Exhibit Supply Co. of Chicago, Illinois, in 1923. More than 30,000 mornings ago.

All right, I guess I'm officially on a food kick. Just as with the bananas yesterday, I converted this avocado from a stock photo by Gudmund Årseth.

I made this 3D image of a bunch of bananas from a stock photo by Gudmund Årseth. I get a lot of good stock images from Crestock, most of them for free. (No, I don't steal them; they have a different free image every day.)

I don't want to overuse words like "awesome," lest they lose their force. Things that are merely admirable should not be called awesome; only those things that inspire wonder and dread for their great beauty and genius merit this description. So, you should understand how serious a remark it is, when I say this site is awesome.

Mark Barcinski and Adrien Jeanjean are multimedia designers in Amsterdam. Their newly launched portfolio website, www.barcinski-jeanjean.com, uses anaglyphic 3-D navigation to display the samples of their impressive work.

The designers themselves are standing in a panoramic view of Amsterdam (which you can rotate 360 degrees by moving your cursor over the arrows to the left and right). Their portfolio samples are represented as paper sheets hovering in a ring around them, as though they were emanating from the artists' minds.

Upon entering, you have the option of playing a little 3-D ping-pong game while the site loads. Even the little game is cool! If it were a stand-alone game rather than a pre-loader, I would still be writing about it: simple and fun, excellent use of 3-D physics.

The blog entry about the site explains how they built it in Adobe Flash with Actionscript 3 and the Papervision3D engine. It will be relatively easy to modify their portfolio in the future, since the data and images are loaded with external XML, so we may look forward to updates.

On Sept. 16, 2001, CNN posted video of a helicopter view of New York City, still smoldering from the deadly attack on the World Trade Center five days earlier. Photographer David Friedman made sixteen 3-D anaglyph images from CNN's video footage. The images are very small; their size was limited by the dimensions of CNN's streaming video. But even at this size, they are haunting images of evil, and the 3-D makes them all the more real.

As the anniversary of the 9/11 attack once again approaches, please remember the victims, and pray for our country.

I made a 3-D anaglyph out of the logo of Land O'Lakes butter, starring their beautiful Indian maiden, who has graced their packages since 1928. From now through October 15, Land O'Lakes is giving away free butter. Buy a pound of their new "half-stick" butter, and mail in the UPC and your receipt with the rebate coupon (a printable PDF), and they will refund your money (up to $4.39).

I am not publishing this at the request of Land O'Lakes, nor am I being compensated to promote their butter. Rather, this is merely a sympathetic response to francophone blogger Kevin, who likes everything about Swell 3D, except that it is written in English, and provides no free butter:

Seul bémol, le site est en anglais mais bon on peut pas avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre.

Merci, Kevin! I have no plans to stop writing in English, but I'm happy to provide the butter free of charge.

The Rosetta craft will be approaching the larger asteroid 21 Lutetia in July of 2010, and will actually land on the surface of a comet in November of 2014, and ride on it around the sun for a year! Stay tuned.

Superman has changed since I was a kid. The art, by Doug Mahnke and Christian Alamy, is some of the best comic book work being done today. The 3-D effects are by Ray Zone. Here are three panels that I scanned. (It's very blue; there's nothing wrong with the scan, this was just a very blue scene in the book.)

The story, by Grant Morrison, is very interesting, I'm sure. When I was a kid, D.C. heroes would fight costumed arch-villains who were robbing Fort Knox or stealing the moon or something. Now, they're always skipping off into trans-dimensional multiverses, battling alternate versions of themselves, while searching their souls for ultimate meaning. So, this is one of those.

I do very much approve of the appearance of Merryman, who forty years ago was the leader of The Inferior Five, one of my favorite comics of all time (besides Groo the Wanderer and Megaton Man). In this series, Merryman has a new role as the King of Limbo, where forgotten superheroes are stored for eternity.

The book, very reasonably priced at $4.50, comes with red/cyan 3-D glasses bound inside, only here they're called "4-D Vision Overvoid Vewers," and they're forged from Superman's own cosmic armor! But you can still cut them out with normal scissors.

In keeping with the whole "alternate versions" theme, this issue has two different covers. I think it's so serious collectors will have to buy at least two copies. (It worked on me.)

Bruce Feist is a high school math teacher in Virginia. Using at least 38 cameras (I'm counting the one that took the picture), he shot this whimsical photograph of a photographer made of cameras. It looks like a robot, or possibly a monster, but a friendly one. Feist calls it a self-portrait.

Today was Labor Day in America, a day for relaxation, and perhaps a last chance to enjoy the outdoor leisure activities of summer. It seemed a perfect time for posting this very interesting 3-D photograph by Ian Straffin of the "Super Spiral," a spinning carnival ride. Ian left the shutter open for three seconds to achieve the motion blur. And yet the ride operator and the seated woman are in razor-sharp focus; neither one of them moved at all, not even to breathe, or scratch their noses! Relaxation indeed.

Ian's photostream on Flickr is full of very good 3-D pictures, too many even to count. Browse through them, when you have the time.