I really should set up a program so that once a month, it pops up this XKCD strip as a reminder.

Due to car expenses beyond my control, I'm way too broke to make it to SPX this weekend.

Damnit.

The other day I read the prequel comic for the Transformers movie. It was not so impressive, on several levels, since it didn't cover or explain much of the stuff you'd expect from a prequel. Nothing in it added anything that I'm sure won't be covered by the movie.

But that wasn't what really irked me. No, the part that really irritated me was an almost throwaway line. There's an Obligatory Secret Government Agency, and said Obligatory Secret Government Agency is studying an alien piece of tech they've found. So one of the new guys looks at the pictures on the wall and wonders "Is that Robert Oppenheimer?" And then they go through a couple of other names, and one of the old hands says "How did you think we won the space race?" And in the end they give credit to almost all modern tech, from microwave ovens to digital watches to breakthroughs from studying the alien tech.

Yeah, I bet if we did find alien tech, even broken alien tech, it'd probably lead to a number of breakthroughs. Even if the aliens aren't super-duper advanced, their tech would probably have advanced along slightly different paths and so on. But the writer gave credit for pretty much all of modern society to this alien tech, and that just pisses me off. It's totally devaluing the cleverness and genius of the human race. It implies everything we've done is just from taking things apart and making monkey copies of somebody else's stuff, instead of developing and discovering things for ourselves. Some great respect for the abilities of humanity there, guys.

Come on, we can discover stuff on our own. We're clever monkeys.

Today's xkcd is an idea gone too far.

Today's Map of Online Social Sites.

It's already my background.

Don't read about superhero comics on Wikipedia. Not because it's biased, but because reading the summaries of the stories will make you realize how absolutely stupid many of them are.

This xkcd strip is so true. I know because I totally did exactly that not five minutes later. Not as a joke.

(Crossposted to snarkoleptics)

In an unusual turn of events, one of my offline friends recommended a webcomic to me. That comic was Lackadaisy Cats. She's an artist, and she kept insisting how good the art was, so I went and took a look after I'd caught up with the rest of my morning. And she's right, the art is extremely clean and detailed. And it's set in the late 20s, during the high times of Prohibition and mobsters and bootlegging. And it has scary redneck pig farmers, and all sorts of class.

If I'd been paying more attention to the WCCAs, I'd have probably already found it, apparently it won Best Anthro Comic. I'm not entirely sure it has a set update schedule, but there's enough of an archive to get an idea where things are going.

And the main character has a big dashing hat with a feather in it, and I'm totally a sucker for those.

(crossposted to snarkoleptics)

Today's xkcd is brilliant. And it definitely could only work as a webcomic. Stick figure free software ninja jokes have a relatively limited audience, but I am completely that audience. Everybody here probably already knows all this, of course. There's just so many things about xkcd I like. Unfortunately, I'm a lot worse at detailing the reasons I like something than I am at detailing the reasons I don't. Maybe part of it's a feeling that the world should be more like what happens in the strip. Maybe it's the free mix of math and science and pop culture and romance and idealism and absurdity that just hooks in to almost everything I'm predisposed to like, growing up when and how I did. Or maybe it's the sense where I can look at the comics, and there's the absurd and the funny, and then there's the ones that feel True. I think that's probably the biggest thing. A lot of the comics feel like they're True, not just the ones that have happened to me. (Okay, not the part about walking around the world, but the doing something and thinking that)

(crossposted to snarkoleptics)

And lack thereof. Today’s DM of the Rings shows exactly why most RPGs skip over the whole “romance” angle despite how important it is to many fantasy stories.

And the still frames from LotR are just perfect, along with the dialogue.

I know I've gushed about this comic over on snarkoleptics before, but I figured I should say it here. xkcd is at least seventeen kinds of awesome, and some of the comics on it are the best illustrations of things I've felt. Such as this relevant one.

For a long while, I've thought sexual frustration was one of the main things driving mad scientists. So if they started getting laid, they'd be a lot less likely to want to blow up the world. The last few months of Narbonic have hinted at the same thing, at least in Shaneon's world.

I'm feeling particularly sorry for Madblood, the only kind of relationships he seems to be able to manage are with arch-nemeses. Nd mostly they just play Parcheesi. Find him a nice little cute lab assistant who likes him, and he'd probably end up doing something useful with an arctic base. Maybe that's why Helen's mom cloned Helen, besides all the other crap that comes with relationships.

Hmm. Nobody tell Artie, he'd try and set up a mad scientist dating service to do good, and it'd end up almost destroying the world. Probably because mad scientists don't just tend to go drink when they get dumped.

I wonder if I should post this to snarkoleptics, it doesn't really involve anything useful, though.

Okay, I already posted about it over at snarkoleptics, but I wanted to link it here too. Dresden Codak is a really pretty comic, and nifty. I don't really think I need to say any more about it.

SPX is this weekend. I KNEW there was something I needed to make sure I had this weekend off for.

Hmm. Maybe I can find somebody to swap to cover Saturday for me.

Inspired by a discussion over on Tim's forum...

A lot of the problems in the paper comics industry would probably get a lot better if everyone involved (fans, creators, etc) were getting laid more often.

I'm just sayin.

I'm sure most of you have seen this either thanks to Snarkoleptics or Greg, but Elf Only Inn is back.

I was going to link to today's Wondermark, by David Malki! who's an awesome dude I met at the con in New York, because it's a really awesome comic and a good busting of the stupid "security" rules for airplanes.

But boingboing already did, so I'd be willing to bet you've all already seen it.

Represent, Yelling Bird.

This comic in particular. Of course, with how erratically Sinfest's been updating, I check it once a month or so.