Connexions

[aesmael]

While writing this I finally realised I do not need to link every individual comic page I read - it can be assumed I read the intervening ones and had nothing to say about them. But I am still being inconsistent about it.

=DanShive

1. Some Comic of Mine 007 [I would still like to play one of those Smash Brothers games some day.]


2. Some Comic of Mine 009 [Velocitoaster!]


3. Dan's Transformation Meme [Oh dear. Not going to go look for results.]


4. Teri Student Witch [I like this. Hope he does more.]

8-bit Theatre
No excuses made for finding this funny.

1. Episode 1024: Phase Two [Am I really so far behind?]


2. Episode 1025: In Your Best Interests


3. Episode 1026: Fulfilling One's Role [Meh.]


4. Episode 1027: Superior Position


5. Episode 1028: The Beauty of Nature [Rape comic not so fun. At least the text underneath induced unrelated laughter.]


6. Episode 1029: Viral Heroing [Huh. Black Mage actually has a sensible plan.]


7. Episode 1030: Interior Decay


8. Episode 1031: Sole Food


9. Episode 1032: Damn Yankees


10. Episode 1033: A Matter of Anatomy


11. Episode 1034: Adjustment Period


12. Episode 1035: To Prove A Point [Uh huh. Is this part of the whole 'comic approaching its end' thing?]


13. Episode 1036: Vignettes


14. Episode 1037: Wherein Red Mage Is Totally Fine [So possibly not, or not yet.]


15. Episode 1038: What a Chakra!


16. Guest Comic Surprise!


17. Episode 1039: Luxury Accommodations


18. Episode 1040: Of Monsters


19. Episode 1041: The Only Logical Response [Cats make me happy]


20. Episode 1042: Self-Regulating

Arthur, King of Time and Space
This comic is great. I may not laugh every day, but when I do it is emphatically worthwhile.

1. 1561 [First thought: "this is not one of the ones I get". Looking, looking, looking... ohhh! I love and miss those things! Cool!]


2. 1562 [Heh. Politics.]


3. 1563 [Attitude, mm? And apparently that is a new character so not recognising is okay.]


4. 1565 [This looks ominous.]


5. 1566 [*giggle*]


6. 1567 [Those are sort of like antlers.]


7. 1568 [I really like the style of this comic. Because hee!]


8. 1569 [This one I do not get.]


9. 1570 [Heh.]


10. 1571 [Don't remember who she is. Think we've seen her before though.]


11. 1574 [It's the Western arc. Haven't seen that one for a while.]


12. 1575 [Not understanding why the arc jump in this strip.]


13. 1576 [Ohhhhh. Yeah, that's bad.]


14. 1578 [Interesting.]


15. 1580 [:D]


16. 1581 [M*A*S*H, eee!]


17. 1589 [:)]


18. 1590 [*snrk*]


19. 1591 [Step by step the twisting screw of story written.]


20. 1592 [Hope we get to see more of these]


21. 1594 [She's got him there]


22. 1595


23. 1596 [Laughing in bitter self-mockery]


24. 1597 [They are probably both right]

Casey & Andy

1. Strip 654 [I laughed. Was a bit weary of this comic last time I read Casey & Andy. Guess the break did me good.]


2. Strip 655


3. Strip 656


4. Strip 657 [That's surprising. Quantum Crook is still meant to be nefarious, yes? Wouldn't that be dangerous?]


5. Strip 658


6. Strip 659 [Heh]


7. Strip 660


8. Strip 661 [Cute planet devourer is cute]


9. Strip 662 [Aaaand this reminds me of my previous issues with the portrayal of women in this comic. Satan, presumed second (or third? depending on the handling of Jesus in this universe) most powerful entity in the universe, is saved by a man and his love for her. And fist.]


10. Strip 663 [Is that really lying? The last line bugs me.]


11. Strip 664 [And smiling]


12. Strip 665


13. Strip 666 [King of Sweden makes it worthwhile. Also the Bob joke. Pretty satisfied all over, really.]

And Casey & Andy is over. Time to remove it from the list.

Charlie's Diary

1. Living through Interesting Times [I pretty well agree with him on this. Current situation looks far too unstable for near-future science fiction to be written without looking hilariously wrong right after publication, or even before. That's seemed to me to be the case all my life, and I tend to forget this is actually unusual. Reading the comments reminds me near-future is actually much nearer than I tend to think - currently there is a good chance that a story will look extremely inaccurate by the time it gets published. Predictions about the future, those are nearly always wrong, but casting farther forward has less risk of being immediately and tremendously wrong.
   
   I keep rewriting the same idea over and over attempting to refine my expressed interpretation of this: basically, current rate of change is so high, near-future very likely becomes alternate future by the time it has finished being published.]


2. 25 years ago today, this man saved my life. And yours. [Brings tears to my eyes, this. It's... rather a lot. I was not even born then.]

Dominic Deegan
When I was making these posts previously I had a tendency to omit links to these because I would often find the strips and story problematic but not be able to articulate what bothered me about it. I did not want an unremarked link to be taken as tacit agreement or approval even though in other cases I have been fine giving links without explanation to pages I did not necessarily agree with the thesis of.

Because Dominic Deegan does not have an RSS feed I have been following it with the Morning Coffee extension for Firefox (first brought to my attention by pouringsand), along with 8-bit Theatre, Arthur, King of Time and Space, Casey & Andy, and Errant Story. I was doing that in Ubuntu, however, but I have been using Vista exclusively the past month and did not have the extension active here until tonight.

1. Wednesday, August 27, 2008 [So. Stunt - the misogynist character, whose misogyny is treated as a lovable character quirk - gets transformed into a woman. Ha ha?]


2. Friday, August 29, 2008 [Ha ha, yeah.]


3. Monday, September 1, 2008 [One thing I do like about this comic is the research approach to magic as something studyable and discoverable.]


4. Tuesday, September 2, 2008 [The End.]


5. Wednesday, September 3, 2008 - Friday, September 5, 2008 [Dominic Deegan saves the day again, with the power of his infinite goodness.]


6. Tuesday, September 9, 2008 [Heh. That was a bit amusing.]


7. Wednesday, September 10, 2008 [o.O Soooo the punchline is Luna praises Dominic's sexual prowess and for this she is his hero? This seems to undermine the message of the first part of the strip, saccharine talking point that it was.]


8. Wednesday, September 17, 2008 [Guest comic is smile-causing.]


9. Sunday, September 21, 2008 [I do enjoy seeing people have fun with good friends (and for the past few strips too)]


10. Thursday, October 2, 2008 [Oh well this could be interesting]

Errant Story

1. 2008-08-05 [Back where we left off - elven political repercussions]


2. 2008-08-27 [This really puts me in mind of the high frequency with which problems in genre fiction are approached with violence. Seems to fit in this case, with everything going on, but still brought that to mind for me.]


3. 2008-08-29 [I'll wait until the fight is over to find out what happened. Find it difficult to follow these.]


4. 2008-09-01 [Not so much that the events are difficult to follow in this case, but I do not know the significance of each action.]
5. 2008-09-03


6. 2008-09-05


7. 2008-09-08 [I suspect this is ominous]


8. 2008-09-10


9. 2008-09-12


10. 2008-09-15 [Mistaken. Character development instead.]


11. 2008-09-17


12. 2008-09-19 [Thinking there is benefit to taking breaks from these. Enjoying story.]


13. 2008-09-22 [New chapter. Change of setting?]


14. 2008-09-24 [This does not look familiar]


15. 2008-09-26 [This would seem to abate my suspicion the story has abruptly shifted worlds]


16. 2008-09-29 [Oh, right. We're back here. Yay!]


17. 2008-10-01

Everything Jake
I decided to abandon my previous idea of waiting until I caught up with a comic before sharing my thoughts on it and instead to give impressions as they come. In large part likely because I have a big post sitting untouched for months, of thoughts on several comics I had read previously and now do not recall in sufficient detail to finish the post. So there's a good chance that method just does not work for me.

Everything Jake has been interesting for me to read. My first impression of it was as a daily college comic, a story with the speculative part of the speculative fiction dial turned down to zero. That would probably put it in a minority of one among the webcomics I have seen so far. Instead it seems to be doing something I rarely see done and often say I would like to see more of - starting with a firmly mundane story and slowly introducing sf elements. Strange dreams and mysterious voices, a guy on campus with an implausible degree of technical skill. These intrusions to reality range from the wacky (amok robot pikachu / Wolverine hybrid) to the mysterious (dimension-slipping) and the sinister. Where I am up to so far it is beginning to seem as if the lead's supposedly childish fantasies have some basis in fact too.

At the beginning, when the comic was mostly about drinking and especially 'picking up chicks', it was losing me. There are still elements of this, which I suppose is realistic or at least I am led to believe this is a primary concern of many men in a college environment, but I am not required to find that interesting, and the presentation of it makes me slightly uncomfortable. There are scenes with only female characters talking to each other, however I am pretty sure it has yet to pass the Bechdel / Wallace test.

Otherwise my main complaint is that it is confusing. Not in the sense of a mystery being confusing, but that what is happening is often difficult to follow from one page to the next in a way I think is not deliberate.

1. #343 [Many of the pages are presented in formats other than the regular several-panel comic strip. This one is a couple of panels followed by an exchange in script format. I still don't know if these variances are deliberate technique or evidence of author limitations.]


2. #344 - #345 [I have some trouble keeping track of the characters in this comic (which may well be a problem with me), and much more being aware of their current emotional situations and positions. Possibly this is complicated by the likelihood the current run is occurring in some dimension other than the one the story originated in. Or it might be the original operating under different rules to the presumed set.] - #348 [relationship drama]


3. #358 [Convenient marker of in-comic passage of time.]


4. #359 One Year Anniversary 'it finally happens' [So it turns out the declining of sex was a fake-out, and our hero Jake finally achieves his major goal of the past year of the strip.]

Google Reader Shared Items

1. Practice Plant [via soltice. Thought I did this one already, apparently not. But it is a very nifty robot plant. I want one.]


2. Sick Art! [via soltice. ... I don't know what this is.]


3. Dewdrops [via soltice. I wrote this. This is a story I wrote. And it showed up as a shared feed item in Google Reader. By my fiance, admittedly, but still. Stunned.]


4. Think about it [via soltice. *chuckle*]
   


5. Scientists Chip Away At Mystery Of Stonehenge [via gentle_gamer. Leads here. Interesting. Article reads as if the archaeologists are set in their conclusions prior to establishing supporting evidence, though I do not know if that is a product of my lack of knowledge in the field, the way the article was written and edited, or maybe this is actually what they are doing.]


6. uh-oh [via gentle_gamer. People have been talking about this since the information first became available, and this is from then, but it bears repeating. In preparing for the DSM-V, the people named to work on the section covering Gender Identity Disorder are largely proponents of abusive 'treatments', stigmatisation and conjectures as ill-informed and harmful as the 'refrigerator mother' or mercury ideas of autism.]

Laelaps
Giants at the End of the World [Dinosaurs! *points at pazi_ashfeather* Anyone able to be in Trenton on October 5 and interested in a free lecture?]

Larvatus Prodeo
Is neoliberalism finished? [Something I read to learn. From what I understand, also something I am largely in agreement with, but I want to come back to study the links when less tired.]

New Scientist
Bionic hands get the sensitive touch [Found this more interesting for what it tells me about human hands. Also, was extremely tired when reading.]

the Jordan Cats blog
We have been remiss once again [Sick kitty, hopefully becoming less sick.]