Heavy (13th August)

[JimRob]

Wow. Figment wasn't kidding on the tenth. Unwholesome truths aplenty.

Gorgeous colours though. They, the panel layouts and the trees remind me of Bill Watterson's later Sunday strips, which is a good thing.

[ZOMBIE USER 8454]

yep! for once i'm ripping off Watterson and not Breathed... i was always amazed at how BW did those beautiful color strips with only 200-something spot colors.

incidentally, 320,000 preventable deaths of children under 5 is only eight days. i would have put a footnote in the strip that said this, but i wanted to avoid getting preachy (well, preachier than it already was). fortunately, this is a 1997 statistic and i think things have gotten better in the past 5 years.

[ZOMBIE USER 8454]

speaking of ripping off Bill Watterson, i was flipping through some old notebooks tonight and i found this sketch i made last december... i thought it was humorous and relevant enough to be posted on this thread.



as for the pirates bit, don't think about it too hard. it's a quote from LeVar Burton in an old Reading Rainbow episode, that for some reason had a profound impact on my friends and i.

[ScottE]

Heighdy.

I think I've finally caught up on most of my reading, and, since I finally have a little time, I can actually do the forum thing. At least until school starts again. Or I decide to get back to work. One of the two.

QPQ is quite cool--I see a little (sometimes a lot) Breathed influence, but confess I completely missed the Watterson vibe. Been a while since i last cracked open any C&H collections. And even then, I'm very bad at noticing other people's artistic influences. Also, I slouch when i type.

I'm also pleased that my second favorite Russian composer is regarded so highly by someone else.

Current matter: how many of those extinctions Figment cites are actually preventable, and how many are a part of the background rate?

Anyway, I think I've shirked all I can for now. I'll be back to shirk later.

[SiameseNick]

speaking of ripping off Bill Watterson, i was flipping through some old notebooks tonight and i found this sketch i made last december... i thought it was humorous and relevant enough to be posted on this thread.



as for the pirates bit, don't think about it too hard. it's a quote from LeVar Burton in an old Reading Rainbow episode, that for some reason had a profound impact on my friends and i.

hahaha! Priceless.

[ZOMBIE USER 8454]

i won't deny being very influenced by Berke Breathed's writing. all i can say in my defense is that HE was an even more blatant copier of Garry Trudeau than i am of him. if that grammatically makes sense. (yes, i VERY split infinitives.) also, i can say with some fanfare that i basically LIVE in Bloom County... i was born and grew up (and currently live) in what was then Breathed's home town, Iowa City. i like to say this is a reason for the similarity, but it's probably not.

the statistic about the extinctions and the statistic about the preventable deaths are both from Carl Sagan's posthumous book, Billions and Billions. needless to say, i don't know any of the details about them, and i probably should have done research.

anyway, thanks for having pity on my forum, guys!
i'm game, who's your FIRST favorite russian composer?

[ScottE]

i won't deny being very influenced by Berke Breathed's writing. all i can say in my defense is that HE was an even more blatant copier of Garry Trudeau than i am of him. if that grammatically makes sense. (yes, i VERY split infinitives.) also, i can say with some fanfare that i basically LIVE in Bloom County... i was born and grew up (and currently live) in what was then Breathed's home town, Iowa City. i like to say this is a reason for the similarity, but it's probably not.

Oh, I don't disapprove; far from it.


Pretty cool that you live there, though. I pretty much live in Tacoma, a place known only by it's proximity to Seattle--a place which I find unbearable (lived there a month, and then I moved away). Tacoma is the birthplace of both Baskin Robbins and Frank Herbert, and not much else.

Even so, I am a perpetual transplant, as alien to the lower-48-pacific-NW as anywhere I've been.

the statistic about the extinctions and the statistic about the preventable deaths are both from Carl Sagan's posthumous book, Billions and Billions. needless to say, i don't know any of the details about them, and i probably should have done research.

Even doing research may not help with a clear answer. In fact, the only clear answer _is_ that there is no clear answer.

Extinctions are very poorly understood, and there's not a whole lot of--um... whadayacall it when lots of people agree? Crap... I can't remember certain words these days... well, anyway, there's not a whole lot of consistent agreement amongst folk who study this stuff.

My own reading confirms that there is an irregular, undercurrent of constant extinction and speciation in between times of clearly marked mass exinctions.

But the background rate is so variable that I don't think it's possible to say that H. sapiens is solely responsible, and therefore that these extinctions are even vaguely preventable.

Most of the extinctions I look at predate hominids anyway, and there's no reason to suspect that the mechanisms have changed that much.

Some extinctions, however, are--in retrospect--demonstrably the fault of Homo sapiens.

It's possible that was a point Sagan himself meant to follow up on.

anyway, thanks for having pity on my forum, guys! i'm game, who's your FIRST favorite russian composer?

Pochyemu, Krasniye Elvisi konyechna!

(DISCLAIMER: Answer may not count as a single composer. Idiom may not be correct. Slavics were never my strong suit, so that may not be correct either. Russian is always more beautiful in Cyrillic anyway, unlike this ugly Roman alphabet. Xlation: Why, Red Elvises, of course!).

(Ya Kosmonavt Petrov!)

[ZOMBIE USER 8454]

interesting... i never thought of species becoming extinct by nonhuman means. i mean, obviously it happens, but i'm always too ready to do the blaming on behalf of my own species.

whadayacall it when lots of people agree?

is 'consensus' the word? my vocabulary has been on the fritz lately, and i definitely need to read more. i wish i had the attention span.

hey, and i've even been to Tacoma! spent a night or two there once, and shopped at Wal-Mart with my dad before we went on a backpacking trip through Olympia N.P. it rained every day, thank you very much.

Slavo bogu shto sevodnya pyatmitza! (i'm taking idiotic guesses on the spelling here.)

[ScottE]

interesting... i never thought of species becoming extinct by nonhuman means. i mean, obviously it happens, but i'm always too ready to do the blaming on behalf of my own species.

<shrug> The reason is plain enough. The extinction rate is a statistic. Most of the human-caused extinctions can be counted individually. Unfortunately, statistics do not apply to individuals; this is easily forgotten whenever people deal with statistics.

Hm. Perhaps I ought to be paying more attention to this stuff in my own comic. I have a few weeks' respite from school, so I might be able to revisit the strip.

whadayacall it when lots of people agree?

is 'consensus' the word? my vocabulary has been on the fritz lately, and i definitely need to read more. i wish i had the attention span.

That's it. Consensus.

hey, and i've even been to Tacoma! spent a night or two there once, and shopped at Wal-Mart with my dad before we went on a backpacking trip through Olympia N.P. it rained every day, thank you very much.

We aim to please. Actually, I wish it would rain more _now_. It's easier to bicycle in the rain than it is in this heat.

Stupid sun is a mass of incandescent gas...

Slavo bogu chto sevodnya pyatnitsa! (i'm taking idiotic guesses on the spelling here.)

I don't think you need chto, unless it's idiomatic, since you say 'today.'

no, ya nye znayu nye monogo russkovo yazika.

Damn. Losing... vital... vocabulary...

[Fhathead]

i won't deny being very influenced by Berke Breathed's writing. all i can say in my defense is that HE was an even more blatant copier of Garry Trudeau than i am of him. if that grammatically makes sense. (yes, i VERY split infinitives

No you didn't.

[ZOMBIE USER 8454]

ok, meet my brother, the gramminator.

it wasn't an infinitive that i split... but whatever it WAS, you can bet your bottom dollar that i split the HELL out of it.

[JimRob]

Don't worry. It's not easy to properly split infinitives.

I support split infinitives, which is odd as I'm the Grammar Stalin at home. (I correct people when they say things wrongly on television, cereal packets, etc.) But, if you can't split infinitives, you can't have 'to boldly go' - which is in my mind better than 'to go boldly' because it preserves the iambic rhythm inherent in the speech.

[ZOMBIE USER 8454]

maybe someday i'll be able to imbellish grammar conventions with the best of them.

i do think, however, that i've done fairly well considering that they stopped teaching anything related to grammar in public schools here, shortly before i went through the system.