Gawker’s new site Jezebel is pretty bad-ass, with perhaps the most bad-ass thing about it (besides its color scheme, which is a lot like this site’s) being that it shows the number of views for each article right on the index page. I wonder if that includes RSS views.

From their manifesto:

To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women’s magazine we’d want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don’t much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag.

Jeff Jarvis has a good writeup today.

Recently, my tumblelog got a lot more interesting to me than this one, so much so that I’ve thought several times about switching over altogether, like some of my friends have.

A tumblelog’s a more informal, scrapbook-style blog for sharing things, without all the social anxiety — and my friends at Davidville have invented a wonderfully elegant and intuitive platform at Tumblr to let you get your own in minutes. Please feel free to check it out.

Smith Mag is currently putting out another online graphic novel (after last year’s astounding Shooting War) called A.D., dealing with the survivors of Katrina and its aftermath. It’s a must-read, and Ana from Pulp Secret went down to talk to everyone involved — here’s the video.

Fred Seibert, one of my partners at Next New, let a pretty amazing thing slip the other day — that over at his other company, Frederator Studios, he’s making the new Castlevania movie with none other than Warren Ellis and James Jean.

The funny part was how I found out: in one of our regular, free-wheeling meetings where we talk about creative, I was showing him the mini-social network recently set up on Ning for members of Ellis’ message board, The Engine, as an example of an easy way to create basic community features around a show (which, by the way, our friends at JETSET just did) and Fred did a bit of a double take, and said, “Warren Ellis? I’m making a movie with him!”

Apparently Fred had no idea I’m a fan of Ellis’ writing and part of the loose (and large) community of people whom he’s pulled together on places like The Engine and the Bad Signal mailing list. And it wasn’t until Fred blogged about it tonight that I checked out the Castlevania production blog Ellis is writing and saw that James freaking Jean is providing art direction. This is the sort of thing I could completely geek out over, despite the fact that I missed Castlevania as a game growing up — hopefully, by knowing Fred, I’ll get a peek at the process every once in a while.

I’ve been a big fan of Jonathan Mann’s videos at GameJew since my friend and co-worker Scott Moschella first showed them to me a few months ago. Jonathan usually does these inventive, totally original videos and songs mostly about video games, but yesterday decided to cover a peaceful immigration reform rally in Los Angeles, and when things turned unbelievably bad, with the police firing rubber bullets into the crowd and chasing them block to block through the city, Jonathan and the person filming with him stuck around and kept the video rolling. What they put together is a damning indictment of a dark direction we’re increasingly going in the United States — it’s breaking my heart, and we need to put a stop to this now.

I haven’t had a response to a videoblog post like this since, well, another of Jonathan’s videos, though that was a very different reaction. Think citizen journalism can’t help keep the fourth estate alive? Watch this. Embedded below, and I hope to see this everywhere — across big media and small — tomorrow.

For more, check out LAist, which is updating pretty regularly on the issue at this point.

Update: some pretty incredible video from LA’s Fox11 is up on YouTube, where Fox reporters with press credentials actually get knocked down by police batons, but what’s really depressing are the comments, both on YouTube and Jonathan’s site. Outright racist, horrible stuff in there. Are we doomed? I think we may be. Jonathan responds.