The Belfry WebComics Index is a site that lists just about every webcomic in existence, and a few that no longer are. You can add any that it’s missing. Even better, if you tell it which ones you like, it’ll compare that to other users’ picks and make suggestions. The top ten are Better Days, Sabrina Online, Faux Pas, Jack (NSFW), Freefall, VG Cats, Kevin & Kell, Peter is the Wolf (NSFW), Ozy & Millie, and Dan & Mab’s Furry Adventures. If you dislike talking animals, you can set the furry-bit to off, to highlight such webcomics as Penny Arcade, Girl Genius, Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire, Sluggy Freelance, PvP, MegaTokyo, Misfile, Schlock Mercenary, Something Positive, The Wotch and many more.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
A little while ago, my dad gave me about two dozen old bronze Roman coins he picked up while vacationing in Britain – they were rather corroded and clumped together, so I’ve simply kept them soaking in olive oil to let the dirt dissolve away.
They’ve now dried out, and I can look at them closely. The largest two are about as wide across as a loonie; the smallest is smaller than a dime, about a cm across. Most, unfortunately, are still featureless and will require further soaking and cleaning – but about half them contain surface shapes that are recognizably profiles.
One of them, I’ve done a bit of Googling, and have identified: the bust is of Valentian I, facing right, wearing a diadem made of pearls and a robe, and thus is from sometime between 367 and 375 AD (and is of type ‘AE3’, which means made of bronze and between 17 and 21mm); on the reverse, the emperor is walking to the right, dragging a captive by the hair, holding a labarum/staff/standard with a chi-rho on top, with the legend ‘GLORIA ROMANVM’. The bottom has the letters delta-SISCE, so it was minted in Siscia; it was minted in the fourth Siscean workshop. To the right of the staff are the letters A/R, and to the left is a round shape which resembles a Q more than an F; I don’t know what they mean, but they allow me to give the official numismatic identification of the coin: “RIC IX Siscia 14c, type xxx”.
I don’t have my digicamera handy, but do have a few links to show what it looks like: http://esty.ancients.info/ricix/typ
While sorting through my late grandmother’s effects, my mother came across a piece which fills just about every detail of the MacGuffin cliche…
It’s a metal circle, a few inches across, with a bit of fluting and fooferaw along the edges. Taking up most of the surface is a design of flowing lines and angles that, if you tilt your head and squint at it, might be some sort of abstract bird. It came in a tooled leather pouch with some designs of its own, including a circle with a couple of tongue-sticking-out head profiles that remind me of one of those old Central/South American cultures. There’s a pin on the back, and a small circle on top – it might be a broach, or a pendant, or some sort of cloak-clasp.
And – we have /no/ idea where my grandmother acquired it. She’d never traveled anywhere near Central or South America, nor did she know anyone who did; and the object seems to have nothing to do with any of her other jewelry or possessions. And my mom said I could have it if I wanted it.
Now, Hitchcock said of MacGuffins, “In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers.” So, should I start preparing for ninjas or the mob? Or should I, instead, expect one or more wandering adventurers to try to fetch it for their own purposes?
Had a rather unusual dream a couple of hours ago…
It started out fairly generic, “I” (who wasn’t the waking me – for one, in the dream, I was school-age, while in the real world I turn 30 today) was wandering through an indoor mall/market type place, looking at the various and varied items being displayed. (Now that I think about it, in nearly all of my dreams, there’s a sufficient sense of ‘place’ that corresponds to real-world location that I could give directions of how to drive there from a real-world landmark (even if the local dream-geography doesn’t quite match the local real-world); but in this dream, the mall-building simply has nothing in common with any waking-world place, and the only directions are towards its ‘front’ or ‘back’.)
The usual dream interactions are, however, interrupted, by a group of people who barge in, carrying weapons and other equipment, who gather up all the sellers and shoppers and hold us hostage. And they say that one of us is the one who’s dreaming, they’re going to examine each of us to find out who, and then (somehow) use the dreamer to get /out/ of the dream before he wakes up.
That’s sufficient to make me self-aware within the dream, and I suddenly find myself, in my waking-body, hiding behind a large merchant fellow, out of the hostage-takers’ sight. (But I’m still also the smallish fellow staring up at the hostage-people. A literal “bisociation”, if you will.)
My memory of the events is already blurring slightly, but the merchant-type people help keep dreamer-me from being discovered by the hostage-takers and their scanner-devices for as long as possible; while the dreamed-me manages to slip from their grasp, making a break for it out the front door and through a manhole cover. The hostage-takers, dismissing him as not-the-dreamer, let him go, and he proceeds to sneak back in through various hidden spaces, spying on them and their gear (overhearing something about having waited a long time for this opportunity, observing a few signs that they’re part of a secret society), helping a few other dream-people slip out, and doing some general kid-level sabotage.
Then – the hostage-takers notice the mall-folks’ efforts, and dreamer-me is suddenly standing before them. The climax of all their plans, and I don’t actually know /what/ they intend to do with/to/on me… but through some of the mall-folks’ willingness to self-sacrifice to protect me, and the sneaky-folks’ efforts, the plans are put in ruins, the hostage-takers taken away by police-officers, nobody in the mall actually ends up hurt. My two selves look at each other, I try asking some questions, get some enigmatic smiles in return… and start dreaming of a Star Trek-like setting…
China is reported to be harvesting organs from Falun Gong members without their consent. Elsewhere, to increase the numbers of donated organs, the organ donation system is opt-out rather than opt-in for the entire population.
Project Aon is the internet-based revival of the Lone Wolf series of fantasy gamebooks, first published in 1984 and now in the process of being released online (with the authour‘s blessing); also available is an atlas, colouring book, and graphic novel. There is also a new traditional RPG being published in dead-tree form.
The Endless Forest is a strange piece of software (that can be a screensaver), where you control a deer in a, well, endless forest. And so do a bunch of other online players. And you can interact all you like with them – with the minor caveat that deer can’t talk.
Subject: Re: Graves’ “Greek Myths”
From: datapacrat@gmail.com (Daniel Boese)
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 11:27:28 +0000 (UTC)
Message-Id: <e2afj0$da0$1@pyramid.sjgames.com>
Newsgroups: sjgames.chatter
On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 03:25:31 -0700, wren ng thornton
<phreelance_spam@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Daniel Boese wrote:
> > Should I simply go back to reading my copies of Robert Graves’
> > “The Greek Myths” and imagining a world where the island of
> > Sicily used to be a giant?
>
> Depends, what do you think of “The Greek Myths”? I haven’t read my
> copy in years.
Well, let’s see…
* A surprising amount of the first book seems to be taken up with
relatively dull “So-and-so ravished such-and-such, murdered her
father, and died in this-and-that a fashion”, in what seems to be a
parallel to the Old Testament’s “A begat B, who begat C”. (On the
other hand, it makes me want to put the whole thing into a digital
family-tree format – or possibly a Greek-Myth-Only Wikipedia. I’d also
like to see a globe-display program like GoogleEarth or NASA’s World
Wind annotated with all the place-names mentioned.) Now that I think
about it, though, many of the more memorable Greek myths are also of
this sort, only with the gods themselves instead of mortals (ie,
Zeus’s various amorous adventures).
* I like his bibliographic references; I’ve already skimmed some of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but now I have a whole library of texts to look
for and enjoy if I can find decent translations – and given that
they’re all well into the public domain đŸ™‚ , most of them should be
online.
* As far as I can tell, Graves makes a better poet than a historian. I
appreciate his efforts in collating and translating all the myths in
their various versions… but I’m extremely hesitant to accept any of
what he says about myths as poeticized history without some other
evidence.
Thank you for your time,
—
Daniel Boese, aka DataPacRat
“Why should I believe that?”
| [ | Current Mood | | |  contemplative |
] |
Subject: A random spectator’s theology
From: datapacrat@gmail.com (Daniel Boese)
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 17:30:57 +0000 (UTC)
Message-Id: <e28ggh$a71$1@pyramid.sjgames.com>
Newsgroups: sjgames.chatter
The current thread(s) on Gibson’s “The Passion” has given me reason to
re-examine my own religious beliefs, and whether they need any updating.
Depending on which definitions are being used, I’m either an agnostic
or an atheist. I do not believe there is any supernatural power
outside of the laws of physics, or in a theological afterlife. (I’m
still hoping for a technological one, though; time travel seems to be
mostly ruled out, so my current hope is for a computer-simulated
re-creation of my mind.)
I use a very simple sentence to explain that [lack of] belief:
Whenever somebody presents me with some idea, whether it being aliens
crashing at Roswell, illuminated conspiracies, whether to buy Coke or
white-cranberry/strawberry juice (I rather like the latter), I ask myself:
“Why should I believe that?”
What reasons exist for me to believe the presented idea, rather than
to disbelieve it, or ignore it?
I’ve looked at cells through a microscope, and at stars through a
telescope. The periodic table and its chemistry work well enough to
make materials and pharmaceutical companies rich; quantum physics (of
some flavour or other) seem to do a good job explaining why that is.
I’ve used a GPS receiver, which uses the math of general relativity,
and they seem to work. In other words, the general process called
Science seems to work – which is a good enough answer to the above
“Why?”. (I’m not insisting that current theories are the be-all and
end-all, either; for example, the Heim-Droescher theory, though not
generally accepted, seems to do a better job of explaining the
universe as a cellular-automata-machine than string theory’s hazy branes.)
And then, we move to religion. The various faiths each make certain
claims, often contradictory – and whenever I ask “Why should I believe
/that/ claim?”, I have yet to find an answer that doesn’t suit some
other faith’s contradictory claim at least as well; in other words, I
reject the reasoning “because the Bible says so” unless I can also
accept the contradictory “because the Qur’an says so”, “because the
Torah says so”, “because the Vedas say so”, and “because the Iliad and
Odyssey say so”.
There is one claim that I don’t refute: “because of a personal
experience of God”. However, I’ve never had such an experience, so I
have to leave any debate over such experience to those who’ve had one,
and with neuroscientists who artificially induce such experiences.
Thus, I find much discussion on the details of religion – eg, whether
a certain semi-historical figure (possibly historical, possibly
mythical) had one thing happen to him or another, or had one attribute
or another – mainly of abstract interest, mostly sociological. (The
interest becomes somewhat sharper when such discussions are used to
justify a religion’s interference in my own life, or the lives of
other people; for example, a particular religion’s definition of what
is and isn’t a “person”.)
Relatedly, simply because I lack faith, doesn’t mean I lack an ethical
system. It just doesn’t necessarily share the same axioms as those of
a religious person. And, oddly, even based on a purely rational
selfishness, what I consider ethical behaviour often closely matches
up with what many religious people consider good. (“If #DEITY says
something is wrong, is it wrong because #DEITY said so, or because
it’s wrong in and of itself? If it’s because #DEITY said so, would it
then be right if #DEITY were to say it was? If it’s wrong in and of
itself, then why do we need #DEITY to tell us it’s wrong?”)
(For an example of a non-religious ethical system, feel free to browse
the one described at http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/ .)
So… have I written any of the above poorly enough to be unclear? Is
anybody actually still reading this message, or have I put you all to
sleep? Have I missed any reasons to believe in one religion that don’t
apply to contradictory religions? Should I simply go back to reading
my copies of Robert Graves’ “The Greek Myths” and imagining a world
where the island of Sicily used to be a giant?
Thank you for your time,
—
Daniel Boese, aka DataPacRat
“Why should I believe that?”
| [ | Current Mood | | |  nerdy |
] |
A friend of mine expressed an interest in my daily browsing, and it took me a little while to note down all the details of my daily newsfeed. It was something I should have done anyway, though, in case this machine crashes.
Anyway – here’s everything I’d need to re-create my daily newsfeed on another computer, only slightly edited to remove a couple of personal details. Note that the ‘**’ entries can be considered a ‘Worst of the Web’ – goatse.cx is only the beginning, and I have something of a horrified fascination with the topic that you probably don’t share.
—–8<—–
Software Installed:
Firefox
Extensions installed ( https://addons.mozilla.org/?applica
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/0
BugMeNot – Generates login/passwords for online newspapers that require them
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/10/
