Merry Christmas, Christmas-celebrators out there! Here are some of my favorite Christmas-themed Wondermark strips from years past:
#141; In which the Son of God stands in queue
#260; In which a Plan ends poorly
#363; In which Joy is Mandated
#357; In which Mall Parking sucks
#466; In which Everyone loves the Freak
#474; In which you better Watch Out
#476; In which Suffering was a Waste
And hey, if you’re not celebrating Christmas, that’s okay too — here are a bunch of comics just for you!
Let us say you are idle, this day in September. Let us say that to the cars rushing by outside you are a stationary observer, moving backwards in their memory as they disappear. What use can be made of this time?
The deadline for my comic-coloring contest is this Sunday night; surely you can spend a few hours today in pursuit of this, a task that provides distraction from those things you are not doing anyway.
The television provider DirecTV is offering new customers a promotion; if you were considering their (perfectly adequate, in my experience as a customer for the last seven years) service, you could do worse than saving $100, in the form of ten $10 bill credits. By using my account number — 23334574 — as your referral, not only do you obtain the discount, but I am rewarded somewhat as well. This is no particular urging on my part; simply if you were contemplating the service, on this idle day, regardless.
Finally, if you enjoyed the sight of the ridiculous, entirely un-aerodynamic flying contrivance in Tuesday’s strip, and have twenty-odd minutes to spare on a break from your lack of activity, you may enjoy this remarkable and arresting short film, brought to my attention by kind Marksman Kevin S. It is embedded below; or on YouTube here.
Listen: I will tell you about David Morgan-Mar. Besides being an astrophysicist, he’s a prolific comics author — and he also likes turning his particular intelligence onto overcoming barriers to reading webcomics. His magnum opus, Irregular Webcomic!, sports one of the most comprehensive navigation systems I’ve ever seen (offering separate navigation options for each of different storylines that interweave, for example) and that’s only one of the approximately half-dozen experimental webcomic projects he’s got going at any given time.
His newest contraption is called Archive Binge, and it does a pretty good job of describing itself thusly:
Have you ever found an interesting looking webcomic, looked at the archive, and thought:
I can’t start reading this! There are hundreds of strips to catch up on!
At Archive Binge you can create a custom RSS news feed for a webcomic, which will take you through the archive, at a rate faster than the new comics update. This lets you get up to date on comics with large archives, without spending hours or days trawling the archive in one go.
Rather than spend a whole day or more bingeing on a comic archive, set up an Archive Binge feed. You can start from the beginning, or wherever you’re up to. You can set your custom feed to deliver a strip every day, 4 strips every weekday, or whatever you want, up to 10 strips a day. Anyone can read 10 strips a day! If you get a spare hour and read the next 50 strips, you can update your position in your feed. You can even pause your feed if you go on vacation, and turn it on again when you get back.
And before you know it, you’ll have completed the archive and be up to date.
So, if you’ve put off the idea of going back through the Wondermark archives due to their scale (or the Dr. McNinja archives, or the Girl Genius archives, etc), Archive Binge is the solution. Even better: you’ve read the newest comics already, so you know it gets better. And don’t forget the mouseover texts!
(Also: fellow comic creators: David’s nonprofit service is offered strictly on an opt-in basis — if you’re interested, I encourage you to participate, as it will help me read the backlogs of your long-running comics.) ANYWAY: ARCHIVE BINGE
I found this video, by filmmaker Will Hoffman and presented by the radio program Radiolab, utterly delightful.
I highly recommend the movie Away We Go, the newest from director Sam Mendes. I don’t think it’s for everybody, but for me, a dude really close to 30 who is in the first sort of nascent stages of starting a family yet who’s still waiting to discover what Adulthood is supposed to feel like, I think this movie was utterly, totally for me.
I won’t link you to the trailer or anything though, because with all due respect to my friends who worked on the marketing, this movie (like pretty much every movie) is better off seen totally cold, without anticipating the big moments that the trailer and commercials give away. So, don’t watch the marketing, but do see the movie. (Oh, and if you don’t like it — well, there’s no accounting for taste. I liked it. Let’s not argue about it, huh?)
Finally: take a look at John Krasinski up there. What do you notice?
He’s bearded.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is the only mainstream, non-period American movie in a great while in which the primary romantic protagonist wears a full beard. Leave me a comment if I’m wrong; I’d like to know if there are others!