comics
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2015Ken & Robin have an interesting discussion in the most recent episode of their podcast, on childhood fears. Specifically, they talk about childhood responses to horror stories and movies. I was inspired to write about my own childhood horrors.
Luckily there were no actual horrors in my childhood. Nobody around me was violent or insane or very ill or destitute or hooked on drugs. The years of low-intensity schoolyard bullying was painful but nowhere near my breaking point. Still, I was really scared of some stuff, starting with Selma Lagerlöf.
Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf is one of the…
drorzel | June 21, 2011Josh Rosenau has a post about the supernatural, spinning off recent posts about a recent Calamities of Nature webcomic. Josh makes a point that I think is valid but subtle:
The issue with the supernatural is not whether it's part of the universe, but whether it is bound by the same laws as all the other elements of the universe. The bizarre claim about ghosts is that they somehow obey some laws but not others, for no obvious reasons.
Something supernatural could, in principle, interact with the universe sometimes but not at others. If it is operating outside of natural laws, that doesn't…
drorzel | January 28, 2010I have to go to the Happy Fun Meeting this afternoon, which will be both Happy! and Fun! To keep things lively while I'm there, here's a question that is dorky, but not in the usual way for this blog: What superpower would you most like to have to help you deal with annoying meetings?
The most useful meeting-related superpower to have would be:(survey software)
Bonus essay question: How does the Justice League/ Legion of Doom function when all the attendees at their regular meetings have superpowers? Wouldn't that get out of hand in a hurry?
thusspakezuska | April 21, 2009I love the comic pages in the newspaper. Some of them are just mildly amusing, but some are bitingly funny and offer real social satire (Pearls Before Swine comes to mind here, as does Non Sequitur). But I was definitely not amused this past weekend when I read the April 19 strip of Foxtrot.
In case you aren't able to view the strip: the first panel shows a string of numbers, below which is a key. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a semi-complex mathematical formulation, which must be solved to yield the number, which in turn allows one to substitute letters for numbers in the…
awild | October 15, 2008Apparently, the world's worst superhero is Ant-Man. Great. That's exactly the kind of press we need.