Get Your War On: The Watch List

"This is it. The highly anticipated premiere of Get Your War On, the new animated series from 23/6, based on the popular comic by David Rees."

Man, I thought this emo shit was for people who didn't have hats

XKCD understands. Blogging to return when things get way more/ way less normal, as they must. Until then, there is only this glimpse of a softer world...

Gargling Pandas

Make your own tonsillitis themed, obscure japanese comic at bitstrips.com.

Equally Meaningless Differences in the World

The late Adam Finley interviewed Achewood's creator, Chris Onstead, at The Black Table.

"AF: Should an artist avoid giving his/her audience what it wants? A recent strip featuring a fully cooked and fully anatomically correct rooster seemed to arrive from a different place than most of your other ideas.

CO: The rooster penis was an element that relieved the incredible tension between Roast Beef and his dinner date. That they could both laugh about it brought them down to earth with each other. I thought it felt perfect given the situation -- a tension breaker appropriate to the fundamental problem of the first date, which is that the basic purpose of dating is to mate and create offspring via the genitals.

This isn't a toilet humor strip, but I'm not beholden to any sort of oppressive distribution syndicate, and I can draw a chicken penis if I think that's funny. Some days I think chicken penises are not funny at all. Some days I hate them. Some days I think stuff like that just belongs in the trash. But whatever, I write a comic strip. Who cares. Greater men than me have gone to their graves having made equally meaningless differences in the world. I just fuck around on the Internet and later some dude buys a shirt so that I can live my life and pay Driveway Tax or whatever. I sleep at night, and one day I won't wake up. On that day, people in BMWs will drive past my house and honk at my neighbor as he tries to back out of his driveway. Fog will roll in. A grown man will get fired from McDonald's. Someone will ride the train home, and it will clang as it passes my street. I will be dead, and they'll put me out with the Monday morning trash, my feet sticking comically up out of the can."

Full interview.

Justified Web Culture

My seemingly lowbrow interest in the Achewood ubercomic- here, here and here- has been endorsed in the Economist's seemingly highbrow lifestyle magazine Intelligent Life.

Two flavours of Achewood. First the direct.


And then in layers of meta-weird.

String Theory- XKCD

Dude all mocking up the lack of experimental predictions made by string theory, and supposing it relates more to some first philosophy than to physics. No you didn't!

Physics resources
Berkeley's video lectures of Physics for Future Presidents.
Modern Theoretical Physics: Quantum Entanglement, course of video lectures by Leonard Susskin- one of the fathers of String Theory. Search for "Quantum Physics" on Stanford Itunes

The Elegant Universe documentary on PBS.
Anything except "What the Bleep do we Know?" Pseudoscience is the superstition of the modern age.

Hallucinations- XKCD

Ninja Turtles- XKCD

Also, Ryan at Dinosaur Comics publishes his 900th strip today, featuring T-Rex arguing with God that the sitcom Will and Grace is "congealed human suffering". I revel in the confusion this causes the world at large.

Have Weekends People! Without them time might seem indefinite, one seamless moment extending into the eternal, history a fragile memory and the future an impossible illusion. Furthermore, The Black Eyed Peas strongly endorse weekends.

Nihilism- XKCD

XKCD. Written by Randall Munroe- a guy who is too smart, it hurts.

Angular Momentum- XKCD

XKCD. Written by some freaky genius at NASA.

Physics nerds the world over are having visions of love and latitude.

Sketches upon the Fluoro-Electric Calfskin

Randall Munroe's XKCD

Working away, reminiscent of an old-timey man building a railway, I thought- "Oh, imagine how marvellous it might be to write upon the Internets!". Behold and Low- my words do seem to dance upon this fluoro-electric calfskin.

Where does old-timeyness meet the Internets? Certainly not in the "Audio-Visual"/many-media'd/streaming this and that which seems to have spread itself upon such locales as the "http:". No, the fusion between the old and new is manifested in the web comic of the artiste. Of course one must sort through the chaff (your choice of threshing or wind winnow) , but scattered throughout lies the glimmer of momentary genius- or at least thought provoking obscurity.

I have oft written of Achewood, Chris Onstead's unfolding opus. However, recently I've stumbled upon several new gems of diverse impression and creation. They are all "weird" and need a while to get into- but resist the tempation to apply this hasty label for a moment or two and delve into the perspective being expressed. Or just click "next".

Well said indeed. From Randall Munroe's XKCD- "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". Flashes of insight sketched upon his pad, always staying a step ahead of perception, each bite an honest expression of his unique individual perspective.

Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics is an execise in structure and liberation. Every comic uses exactly the same series of dinosaur pictures with totally different text, completely changing the focus and context. The best description I've come across is, "Picture watching the same movie again and again, where the dialogue is changed so completely, and with so much skill that you forget that you've seen these images before. Now picture that every day for two years. That's Dinosaur Comics".

Finally, my most recent discovery is far too large to add in here; both literally large in it's expansive and finely drawn artwork and metaphorically huge, in the tremendous depth of melancholy and wonderment I find each stand-alone tale bestows. A Lesson Learned is the unquestionably brilliant work of David Hellman and Dale Beran. Discover it.

Enough undecipherable ramblings from me, for it is now Saturday in fair Amsterdam and this tardy Spring beckons seductively from just beyond my window.