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This blog is defunct. For a newer blog, see here.

Print comics: only suitable for Barry Goldwater's corpse

Online comics are so spectacularly successful -- probably more successful monetarily than, say, online-based artists or YouTube stars -- because the vast majority of print comics are so outdated, terrible and lazy. Unconsciously, all of us know this; only heavy childhood conditioning can possibly explain why anyone under the age of 60 still reads print comics. But there's good news: the two web sites below are guaranteed to snap you out of it.

First, the Comic Strip Doctor for in-depth analysis and historical background of the most awful strips, in snarky, vituperative detail. Stopped updating in late August.

Still active, the more bloggish Comics Curmudgeon which wryly rips through particularly offensive recent comics.

After a few hours, you will want to light Brad Anderson on fire. Don't. He's just a symptom, not the pathogen.

In which I accept the 50 Book Challenge

...despite the odds, quite frankly, being against me. After all, I'm pretty sure that I've never read fifty books in a year in my life. I tend to read in sustained bursts, punctuating a life filled with many other activities, like playing Final Fantasy games, watching animu, and being lame. In fact: I had only read 16 books by the beginning of fall semester in September, and the first 10 of those were in the first 9 weeks of the year. What, exactly, I was doing with my time from March to August I can't even reconstruct.

But in the last 40 days I've finished 14 more, a pace that would put me at 55 by the end of the year. And all this reading has been good for me, I think. It's helped keep me emotionally centered despite a stressful and problem-mined first half of the semester. So in order to keep me on the right track, I've committed to the famous 50 Book Challenge. That link is on livejournal, but since I no longer use my lj I'm participating in the much smaller Facebook spinoff.

I heartily encourage readers to join me. Literature is one of the few truly beneficial habit-forming stimulants I know. Delicious!

Quick reviews #1

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow: Evocative, but at no point compelling. I got half a bead on some of the outlying characters, not not on the narrator. Enough to make me download Eastern Standard Tribe for a later viewing, but not enough to make me buy it. His strength lies more in short stories, I guess. 6/10

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut: I have to offer a huge dollop of thanks to the Vonnegut fans who told me not to start with this book under any circumstances. Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions were far better; the fact that Kilgore Trout makes glancing appearances in this book says nothing in its defense, as he is categorically not the same character in each. Philosophically ill-formed, lacking the sharpened edges of later works. I'll pick up Mother Night next, then Welcome to the Monkey House. 6.5/10

What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Ralph Leighton/Richard Feynman: Good, but disappointing compared to much of the rest of his oeuvre. I dug most the following: the Arlene stories, Appendix F, and the Mr. Lovingood saga. "100%... minus epsilon!" is an excellent catchphrase. 7.5/10

Idoru, William Gibson: My second Gibson book after Neuromancer. I'm not sure I agree with his picture of Japan; I guess his misspelling aidoru in the title was the wrong foot on which to get off. The more I think about the phrase "like the antipole of American Gods," the more I like it, though I don't exactly know why. In both, though, a minor female character is my favorite of the novel. Features a hikikomori. 8/10

Collapse, Jared Diamond: A little patchier than the epic Guns, Germs and Steel -- which is to say, there are actually a few good stopping points in this one. Did well refining my knowledge of history, anthropology and ecology. Hard to describe as anything other than a tour de force; it makes me want to be Jared Diamond, while at the same time evoking a deep certainty that I never will. 9/10

Let's do the cardbox again

Yesterday, I cardboxed for the first time at Furman. And it's hard to believe now that three months ago I didn't even know what a Leitner cardbox was. Nowadays I consider it the only legitimate means of studying that I regularly do. It is easier, now, for me to think of Aerolith (and its predecessor JumbleTime) as games that happen to share certain prominent but misleading features with real studying. They're like a beach vacation, whereas the cardbox is the cold, rigorous workaday world of tournament preparation. But if you had asked me a year ago, I would have said that JT was essentially all I needed. No wonder I was so markedly terrible a year ago.

I cardboxed during World Prehistory, smuggling my laptop into class. The people behind me could see what I was doing, and I know from previous experience that they often actually care, but I was not interrupted -- perhaps they were distracted by the weighty question of whether H. neanderthalensis interbred with H. sapiens 27,000 years ago. (As for me, I've resolved not to care about any evolutionary heritage question that can't be resolved with mitochondrial DNA. Makes my life too hard.) It was the first time I had cardboxed on the laptop, too, since my hard drive failed a month before. I built up a 9,000-word box on the rickety PC at home, and now, during class, I decided to start up again for the third time. This may seem slightly nuts, but if I weren't I wouldn't be playing Scrabble.

So, how did it go? Well, reviewing words from the top 1k sevens and eights (i.e. words I know already), I got 165 words correct in a row. Then I missed STOLIDER. I hadn't realized that word was a problem for me. I wonder how many times I've missed it already.