General

A little insight into layoff-happy Thomson Reuters. From the PostSecret website.

Found via Gawker

Sheldon Dorf died yesterday in San Diego from complications related to diabetes. He was 76.

Dorf started Comic-Con in 1970, shortly after moving to San Diego from Detroit. From the San Diego Union-Tribune website:

"He was a completely generous person who was wholly devoted to furthering the comic arts, bringing the fans and the professionals together," said J.M. "Mike" Towry, a computer programmer who was a young comics dealer at that first Con. "He never made a dime off Comic-Con."

In fact, Mr. Dorf walked away from the Con in the mid-1980s, as it was beginning to become the nation's foremost pop-culture extravaganza. Today, Comic-Con is San Diego's largest convention, annually drawing 125,000 attendees.

"We had no idea it would get this big, Mr. Dorf told The San Diego Union-Tribune in a 2006 interview. To me, it's just become an ordeal. I don't know of any way to make it smaller, though. I guess in some ways it's become too much of a success."

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal made a handy-dandy illustrated guide about how to use an apostrophe.

View the full chart here. Found via Laughing Squid.

Scarier than zombies. Nadya Suleman and her demon brood celebrate Halloween.

Picture from the Daily Mail.

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Found via Laughing Squid

No, this is not Seth Rogan. This is an AT&T worker, one of 40 from all over California protesting their CEO Randall Stevenson who was speaking at the conference. According to the protesters Stevenson has yet to sign their contract, they've been working without one for the past 90 days.

Inside the conference, Stevenson admitted to being an avid Amazon-owned Kindle user and relayed, "there will be a day when [we're] not exclusive with Apple."

The CEO pronounces it "con-nectivity" which is what we will grumble the next time we write him a check.

There were two questions asking the executive about the horrible coverage. Each time Stevenson said that they were "aggressively working on the problem."

There were no questions about the protesters just outside the resort's walls.

Follow all the action for the rest of the conference on our Twitter feed @fishbowlla

Good news, kinda. The worst is over - but it's going to take a while for ad sales to bounce back. From Deborah Yao for the Associated Press:

An advertising forecaster said Monday that the worst is over for the U.S. ad slump but that across-the-board revenue growth won't resume until well into 2011.

Magna, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Cos., estimated second-quarter ad revenue fell by 18 percent and said revenue will fall 14.5 percent for the year — the worst showing since the Great Depression.

"The economy accounts for the bulk of that decline," said Brian Wieser, Magna's global director of forecasting. "Every sector is being pulled down by this decline, every media that takes ad support."

Found via Romenesko

The good people of Sarcastic Gamer have "improved" a Microsoft commercial. Thanks, guys.