Number12's webcomic picks - Live!
May. 16th, 2008
12:51 pm - Dickson's Gym
Hey, is anybody going to be in the Laurel area tomorrow who I might be able to persuade (say by buying you lunch) to come over and help me spread some topsoil? By tomorrow afternoon it should have dried out enough to spread this nice fluffy pile of topsoil over our back yard with wheelbarrows; with just one other person helping out for about an hour it drops a significant amount of time off of the job. Tomorrow is the day due to the weather patterns of the past and next few days. The time frame would be afternoon, say from 1pm on. Thanks.
May. 14th, 2008
04:23 pm - Wow. Thank you all.
Hey, been a little busy to post, but I and Lisa both want to thank everybody who put on and came to Pebbles' shower this Saturday. Lisa and I were very overwhelmed by all of the amazing good wishes and joy that we received. I was personally surprised and gladdend by the book theme for the shower that everybody made happen. I hadn't really been thinking before the party about really having a "village" for the values that I had been hoping to somehow help my child find, but now I realize that you will all be a good influence on her and help her discover many wonderful worlds! Really, the hope that this gives me is the best present of all.
You may have seen my sister's post for her photos from the party, if not here is the link: (ETA: Photos were taken by vval and posted by cchan.)
http://s235.photobucket.com/albums/ee28
She made sure to get pictures of everybody who attended. I took some pictures also and here's a link to mine. I of course generally forgot to make people the subject of my photos, so these are mostly of the decorations and the amazing food that everybody prepared:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Lisa.J.Dick
By the way, a few of you haven't seen the final baby room pictures either; Lisa sent out an email but if anybody else is interested, you can see some shots of the wall stencilling that Lisa did for the room here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Lisa.J.Dick
Apr. 17th, 2008
10:16 pm - Progress!
Another super busy week, and good stuff got done.
Mainly, the hardwood floor was installed in the baby room, and we moved some of the furniture in with Lisa's sister's help this week. Here's a picture:
( Here's another picture behind a cut )
Also awesomely, the siding guys finally arrived and slammed some siding on the addition. Ahhhh, it's finally more weatherproof. This contractor has been a pain in the ass, so even though the siding on the addition was great looking, they left without completing the reinstallation of the house siding to the new corners. That story probably won't end well, but anyhow here's a picture:
( Here's another picture behind a cut )
Comics. Last Blood is yet another comic written by the fictional Bobby Crosby. It is characteristic of other such comics in that the update schedule is filled with long unexplained gaps, one of which is occurring right now, and each page produces hundred and hundreds of IQ-lowering forum comments, punctuated by occasional rage-filled replies from the "author". Also typically however, the comic is great, with absolutely beautiful art by partner Owen Gieni (who manages to keep the characters anatomically correct in this one). The plot has everything, from zombies to vampires to Hitler and WWII action. Sort of Buffy meets Saving Private Ryan mixed with some X-Men and smashed into Snakes On A Plane.
Well, I guess that's all that has to be said. The archive contains several issues composing a complete "chapter", it's a very satisfying read but take it slow.
Apr. 6th, 2008
09:39 am - Look what you did
Here are a couple of photos of what got accomplished yesterday, thanks to the amazingly steady hand of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
vvalkyri. It really seems like a shame to put the second coat on.
Yes, it is extremely similar to the original color. Except this time the walls and trim have been cleaned up a lot.
Time to jump on the bandwagon with today's link. The latest webcomic buzz is over the out-of-nowhere Kate Beaton, who can pick up a ballpoint pen and draw the most expressive and funny comic you'll ever see on the subject of various historical figures. Great distilling of complex events that we've all read about in school, or enlightening references to some obscure but really fascinating corners of the past that you'll spend hours reading about on wilipedia.
Apr. 5th, 2008
01:26 pm - Spring is here
Many, many thanks to patches023 for helping me with the wall prep and primer last night. I had forgotten how much ..fun ..painting is.
Ah spring, a time of rebirth! Several of my favorite comics seem to be restarting. After a long and unexplained hiatus, Elf Only Inn seems to be back. But more astonishingly, Casey and Andy just restarted! Andy decided to respond to the hundreds of requests a month he gets to continue it, and has grudgingly decided to at least finish the entertainingly tangled time travel story that he left off in the middle of when he decided that he couldn't stand to do the strip any more. In the new (to me) discovery department, I guess that many of you already know that Studio Foglio, in addition to Girl Genius, has re-released all of the original Buck Godot issues on the web, and is now producing new pages TuThSa. The new pages have a somewhat annoying feature in that the author seems compelled to explain, repeatedly, that Buck isn't "just a fat guy", but is in fact an altered human from a high gravity world. However, I rather liked him better as an ordinary big guy with a personality to match, jez what's so bad about that? Also, relatedly, I am looking forward to new issues of Sunrise, a new amateur comic with a great tag line: "The airship age we never had." Not exactly in the same class artistically as Studio Foglio, but the artist obviously has fun portraying his colorful and bigger-than-life turn-of-the century characters.
Not much happing this year in NewSpace I'm afraid, but the ESA's cargo vehicle (Automated Transfer Vehicle) launched and docked with the space station last week! Read about it here to bring a tear to your eye. Things are finally starting to happen up there, I predict that the station will soon be a self-sustaining international destination, far from the white elephant that some predict.
Apr. 1st, 2008
12:36 pm - Anybody up for painting the baby room?
Hi all,
Lisa and I going to try to get the nursery (formerly the office) repainted starting this week and completed over the weekend. During the week, Lisa is doing prep work (scraping, spackling), then on Friday night I'll try to get a coat of primer on while Lisa is out to dinner and on Saturday do the actual paint (with a fall-back to Sunday). The paints are of course all low VOC. Is anybody interested in dropping by to help out Lisa during a weekday or me on Friday or Saturday? Thanks.
Status: Lisa is doing very well so far, at about week 29 now. The addition failed to meet a couple of deadlines last month but is still moving ahead, so we decided to decouple the baby room schedule from the addition schedule; our temporary office is now in the living room and will probably be moved into the addition just before the baby arrives. Gonna be a close one though.
Here's a webcomic I found just yesterday: Ardra is a pretty neat comic struggling to get out of a complete mess. An odd fish female scientist decides to conceive and raise two children comletely "logically", does a little genetic manipulation to get twins, but that's when it stops being easy. Shunted from guest artist to guest artist (starting off being drawn horrifically by the author himself), the stylistic transitions in this comic are jarring although the characters are so strong that each artist's interpretation of them manages to hit the mark. The current art is the most polished and fun version, and what do you know the artist is Trevor Adams, the genius first artist of "Least I Could Do."
Feb. 21st, 2008
10:26 am - It's Just A Flesh Wound...
but it's a flesh wound that's going to make everything harder for about four weeks. I got some stitches on my right hand yesterday, mostly the pinky finger and a couple in the next one over. It was a saw accident, ugly looking but extremely fortunately not too deep. Amazingly, it took over an hour and a half before they got to my case in the emergency room; it was a reminder that American medicine is an exercise in patience. Anyhow, this changes a bunch of my construction plans; to stay on schedule I'll have to hire people to do some of the stuff I would otherwise have done myself to save some money, such as the electrical and siding. Aside from that, the house additon is coming along nicely, and Lisa is doing well too.
Between Failures's introductory scene reminds me of my friend Vygis. After that, it starts to follow the standard slacker comic script, but it's so beautifully drawn that I don't care.
Feb. 6th, 2008
10:16 pm - Donkey Ridin' Donkey Ridin'
Here's a big catchup entry. Pirate Feast was awesome as usual, and Lisa had a great time. A couple of days later, I was trying to figure out where a few notes coming together in my head were from, and finally remembered that it was this great song. So I looked it up on YouTube and strangely nobody else out there did it as the sea-chanty that it clearly is. But here's a couple of links:
Great Big Sea concert
Jumpy videos like this really give you a feeling of being there
The bard of Cornwell?
My intial searches, on "Pirate Feast", produced this video with somebody I know right at the "bow" of this formation. Also, this is the least shaky video posted by this user. Anyhow, the trick to finding Pirate Feast videos is to add "Chort" to the search.
So, I was hunting around on YouTube for my 15 minutes of fame as posted by shadowcaptain, and it turns out that searching for "Jonathan Coultan Dancing" produces hundreds of hits, including the spookily related to my intended search Gina Feels Fantastic, and this justly famous amazing Code Monkey dance that has catapulted this girl to semi-fame.
So the kid's coming along well. Lisa and I took the infant CPR class last week (our initial reaction: Oh crap, we're parents! This kid is so screwed!) and worked on the house. We gotta get the office cleared out into the new addition in about a month to keep on schedule and get the nursery started. So here I am typing. D'oh!
Regarding work, I'm no longer pulling overtime, and glad about it. Here's what happened: Our project got driven into a brick wall over and over until somebody else at Goddard woke up and realized that we were miles behind schedule. A month of replanning and repraisals ensued, everybody in the project was demoted, and several new people were brought on board to try to fix things. We've spent the intervening time just trying to help these hapless folks get up to speed, and now they're on their own. One of the boards I was working got given to one of the new guys, and I'm a little sad, but he is a really good designer and has a lot of good ideas. The board will get changed around, but I take with me the consolation that I designed some pretty nice circuits and got to use my brain for something resembling electronics design so I'm happy. So now I'm down to just one board and it's a pretty reasonable workload.
Of course it doesn't help my productivity to find lots and lots of great new webcomics. I'll never get around to writing a separate entry for each of these, so here goes some one-liner reviews for my own link storage purposes.
Nerdgasm, man I love it when women draw comics and draw their real bodies. Mostly the author and her friends, these fannish freaks are people we all know and love. The humor is familiarly weird, sort of the anti-S*P M-W-F-ish. Also, the author's Hilarious LJ.
Ugly Girl, as you read from the beginning it starts off the ultimate making fun of stick figure comics comic, and then gets deeper. Every character in this comic is named by what they are to other people, every character has a unique eye shape pattern, and eventually you get a chance to empathize with every character. Updates M.
YU+ME Dream, seemed to kind of wander around at the beginning, ended up becoming a typically overdramatic teen lesbian love story leaving all that stupid "Dream" stuff behind, then, wow, I guess you should just read it. The drama! M-W-F-ish. Also, another LJ that I like to check every once in a while
Voids. A "New York" story of a mopey 20-something girl with a couple of aquaintances who ordinary things happens to. Is it going to tie together into some kind of great cosmic plot, or is it going to be as pointless and coincidental as life really is? See the author's flikr account to get an idea how the artist is developing the comic based on her photography. W-ish.
The Sealed Gate. There's a lot of these "the author is pulled into a magical world" comics out there. But this one is distinguished by great clarity of line and coloring. Very nice. Tu.
I-287, another freshmen in college strip by a college freshman. You can't tell the two main characters apart for most of the first 100 strips. Distinguished by a hilariously violent female hall-mate character and a sudden clarity of writing resulting in plots which shroud subversive points in a very funny way and continuously improving art.
Farlight Saga: Ethos. Typical fantasy medieval world comic with several animal races, except that it repeatedly explores unusual concepts of helping others overcome grief and anger non-confrontationally, possibly as a tool for mitigating war. This is one of those comics that I mentioned earlier where a writer essentially goes out and buys professional art a page at a time whenever funds are available, so no regular update rate.
Good Ship Chronicles. You can tell from the site layout that this is supposed to be a parody of ST:NG, except that the art is utterly fantastic, the characters are really interesting, the author is for some reason using reality-show interview scenes to get the characters' viewpoints on things that happen in the comic, and it's not nice -- the jerk characters never turn loveable and there's shocking death and violence which is not sugar coated in the way we've all become accustomed to.
We The Robots, gee, in the far future the robots have formed a society that looks just like ours! What a great vehicle for poignant commentary. Actually, it's done quite well, this is your M-W-F dose of self-recognition.
No Pink Ponies, although it's never said as such my feeling is the title refers to what a geek girl looks for in comics. A funny sitcom-ish scenario, a young woman with several humorous character flaws starts a comic shop of her own for all the wrong reasons, gets a tight circle of nerd friends as well as customers who deserve occasional abuse. Will she ever get the guy she's fallen for? Will the comic-shop geeks ever get names? The art and storytelling are so confident because the author cut his teeth on "Gomen Nasai", an early-web classic that I can't seem to find the link for. Currently on haitus, used to be M-W-F-ish. You can also read his other current comic, Marry Me, supposedly involving the fictional Bobby Crosby as writer although I don't buy it.
Lizzy, old school use of Flash animation to tell a stoy. Each comic consists of one or several dynamically shaped panels which have stuff that you click on to get an animation that tells a tiny piece of the story. Quite a story it is too, the product of years of fiddling around with characters and concepts while listening to what must have been some really loud heavy metal. Warning, contains everything from ordinary nudity to non-consentual sex and other metal fantasy staples.
Toothpaste For Dinner. A pretty good comic I guess, but oddly the reason why I found out about it is that Jeffrey Rowland pointed out a funny picture in the author's 2005 t-shirt photo contest. Amazingly over 300 people sent in pictures of themselves wearing shirts from this comic in order to get prizes. Then they did it again in 2006. What I can't get over is how attractive most of these fans are. What is this, Sluggy or something?
Don't get me started on all the cool spacecraft launches coming up this month. Gotta go to bed. Thanks for reading.
Jan. 28th, 2008
07:59 pm - It's a girl
Lisa had the "anatomy" sonogram today, the baby is alive and well, and now we know the gender. This way, I know that although I may have to deal with some pretty horrendous teenage clothing fashions, at least no "saggin'". Altogether, starting to look forward to this more and more. There's still plenty of work to get done before the birth though.
Other than that, I have to thank my sis for all the work she's done to help out Dad, both from the East Coast and going out to try to help out in person. She's quite the hero both to him and to me.
Jan. 14th, 2008
Jan. 4th, 2008
09:35 am - Ground Truth
Well, as most of you know, Lisa and I are back from San Diego, and glad to be on the ground again. The situation with Dad continues to be poor with lots of lovely new developments, my sister and I are trying to do what we can from the east coast to help while his well being is in ML's hands. Nuff said.
Had a fun time killing off 007 on Tuesday. I'm back on the razor blade at work, it sucks being away from home for most of each day. Warm weather and calm winds are on the way this weekend, so this Saturday morning I and Seylar are going to try to get the roof on the addition if anybody wants to come by and participate. He can only work until noon, so it will all be pretty early morning, but in that time we should be able to add the last little rafter segment and start nailing on plywood. This isn't even the smallish work party that we'd put together in December, so again I'm holding off on putting out a call for hands, but if anybody wants to come by for the fun, please do.
And now, you must all sing this song:
Dec. 27th, 2007
09:07 pm - Poor Lisa
She had a pre-natal massage at a local spa today to strengthen her for the discomfort of the upcoming plane trip and it made her feel more relaxed than she ever imagined, but unfortunately she had to spend four hours with Dad and ML's family after the massage, and it's all undone already! There's not much that can be done, it's hard to blame what seem like generally good kids for not being up for understanding what's going on with their grandmother's crazy boyfriend. And generally, it's not his fault either; he's got equal doses of bipolar syndrome, COMS (Cranky Old Man Syndrome) and age-based regression into childhood. Only one of these has any hope of being worked on, and the other two make it even harder than it would normally be.
Since I heard at least two people on this trip refer to something as "sick" without a trace of irony, I must now mention the webcomic Carl Is The Awesome. It looks like something a junior high school boy would draw while not paying attention in Algebra class. But read Tear Stained Makeup by the same author to have this conceit wiped away, so you can just appreciate Carl's fun ride of a comic.
Dec. 24th, 2007
11:04 pm - To all a good night
We survived the big Christmas Eve dinner. Lisa was a saint through the whole thing. Dad was on his best behavior, which was still a white knuckle ride at times although he had probably taken extra drugs to smooth himself out. ML's daughter's kids weren't quite as bad as we expected, they seemed normal enough, easily bored kids with lots of chaos and shouting. Caroline liked the nice calender that cchan8 had sent with us to give to her. We were a little shocked at how mean people were to ML tonight; it possibly explains their attitudes to Dad as well. It seems like such a different world out here. Tomorrow, hang out with Dad, just Lisa and I with him while ML goes over to her daughter's house for a while.
Comic found just today: Multiplex. It picks up with the photoship vector graphics where Scary Go Round left off. As with most webcomics about movies it delivers hilarous jabs at bad movies, and has other touches of true to life humor that comes only from having been in the crap job world.
Dec. 23rd, 2007
10:56 pm - NOW LISTEN!
Day 2. Was helpful around ML's house fixing a couple of things. Dad was more manic though. The title of this post is his favorite loud attention getter. Here are a couple of photos from yesterday:
( photos behind cut )
Dec. 22nd, 2007
10:14 pm - First Day in SanDiego
Slept in a lot. Went to ML's & had lunch. Went out with just Dad & Lisa and went to the local library, drove down to the beach which was of course incredibly beautiful and Dad got involved in a beach volleyball game. Saw the sunset with colors so vivid it was like pools of brilliant white-hot molassas. Following Dad's directions, we managed to get lost driving to meet ML at a resturant, however when it became clear that Dad had no idea where we were, I shifted from "driver" to "navigator" mode and got us to the right town and we found the place. Showed Dad and ML the photos and videos from Cora's wedding after dinner. Time for bed.
Of all the people doing guest strips for Wapsi Square this week, R. K. pretty much nailed the feel of the comic better than anybody else. What was up with that "sad kitten" guest comic anyhow?
In space: an update from John Carmack, and Masten reduced their first prototype to a pathetic pile of tangled metal. SOMEBODY LAUNCH SOMETHING ALREADY!
Dec. 21st, 2007
08:03 pm - On the ground in San Diego
Made it okay. Sooooo tired. Dad seems to be doing well, a lot calmer than when he phoned us all last week.
Today's Google made me read xkcd.
Hey, here's a neat bit of space news. 1-in-75 odds that a very large asteroid could impact Mars this month!
Dec. 16th, 2007
12:45 pm - Look what you did
Thanks to everybody who came over yesterday! As you can see, we made it all the way to roof trusses. Shortly after this picture was taken we threw a tarp over the whole thing and it will hold until Lisa and I come back from California. The rain held off just long enough. Thanks to red_lynx heptadecagram and frost_knight for your invaluable and generous time and work.
Comic Link: For those of you who enjoyed "That 70's show", "WKRP in Cincinatti", or who just somehow lived through the era (that includes me, folks), this new comic 1977 is for you. Starting off with the classic scenario, bum with guitar answers ad for room for rent, meets guy with lots of money but no real plan, they become roommates and eventually try to start a band, spend a lot of time stoned. Well drawn, still waiting for some direction, but generally pretty funny. I find it humorous, however, that the author can't quite depict a world without computers or videogames as we know them today.
Dec. 12th, 2007
11:06 pm - Dec 8th report
The first year of Pretend To Be A Time Traveller Day had a modest showing, read results here.
On the theory that the Roving Mouth Of Hell will not reach my house until mid-afternoon, our party for framing the addition is still scheduled for this Saturday, the 15th, starting in the single-digit hours. Anybody interested is welcome to stop by, either to join in or point and laugh.
Today I wasted a crapload of time reading the entire archives of Punch an' Pie. This is the sequel to the enormously fun Queen of Wands, and I picked the link off of the QoW web site. When I got there, what to I see but a guest strip by Chris Daily of Striptease. So I hit the "First" button, and there's another guest strip? Ok, apparently it's a team up with Aerie writing and Chris drawing. This made me sad, because I really liked Aerie's art, and I never could get into Striptease. However, Chris seems to be keeping reign on the anatomical improbabilities that plagued that comic, and it's just great to read Aerie's writing again, it really shines through and we get to see more of what happened to Angela.
Space link: On a recent nasaspaceflight.com forum thread flogging the Falcon-9 for the nth time, somebody mentioned that you can just type "N1 rocket launch" into YouTube and see with for yourself the previously super-secret launch videos. They're AMAZING, because these are soviet-produced, and the heroic camera angles (coupled with tactful omission of the actual rocket explosions) just send shivers down your spine.
Dec. 8th, 2007
08:16 pm - Get thee to Glen Echo!
I was planning to go to swing dancing tonight, although inertia was beginning to set in. Then I checked the schedule. Holy crap, the Jive Aces are playing!!!!!. Anybody reading this in time, drop whatever you were doing and go, these guys are insane good. I'm leaving right now to see them.
Comic link: Part of the inertia factor came from this delightful discovery: The author of Unicorn Jelly finally started up a new strip yay! Ok, she's been at it since 2005, but her web site is such a maze that I just never found the link until now. The new strip is called "To Save Her", and has all the multiverse drama of the original strip, but it seems like she's abandoned the circa 1987 drawing program that was used on Unicorn Jelly.
Dec. 5th, 2007
11:33 am - 2001
12th week sonogram came out ok yesterday, whew! The baby is much more like a baby now, albeit just 3 inches tall. The basement of our house addition is done, now trying to finish up the framing plans and order materials.
Here is a fun space link, with garnet_rattler in mind: Rediscovered history, the Soviets "returning" a lost recovery-practice Apollo capsule complete with how this forgotten footnote was found in the archives of a Hungarian newspaper, leading to first hand accounts and photos. Very funny story of the ship's band leader making the mistake of arranging and performing a certain Beatles song for visiting dignitaries.
While we're reliving the 1960's, thought I'd mention my recent experience when Lisa rented "Breakfast At Tiffany's" a couple of weeks ago. What a great time capsule of a movie! Sort of the "Casablanca" of it's time.
Continuing the chain of connections with the following comic link: Since the purpose of the Internet, much like the Globe Theater, seems to be an outlet for gender change stories, most young authors attempt to distinguish themselves by finding a unique angle. Exiern combines this genre with the "Barbarian warrior" scenario, laughs ensue. Blonde-haired giant from the northern lands Typhan-knee (Tiffany, get it?) is battling a wizard who casts the spell which turns him into a woman. Now He/She, along with the well-endowed princess he was trying to rescue, travel the medieval land trying to find a way to reverse the spell, having adventures and meeting colorful characters. The art is unbelievably fantastic without being overworked, but what's really interesting is that the writer just contracts it out to some graphic design company or something. I've been seeing a lot of this recently, it seems as though the NewComics industry is growing up and looking a lot like the OldComics industry, just with less newsprint involved. Anyhow, update rates are sporadic, based on when the author scrapes up enough income to publish another page.
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