Alone and Unobserved

I laughed long and loud at this, so I had to share.

P.S. If you don’t already read Wonderella, you should.

Joey Comeau’s limpid prose has been mentioned here before (specifically his deviant and often horrifying collection of short stories, his disturbing erotica and his delightfully dark webcomic) but I have somehow never brought up his blog. How you guys put up with such carelessness on my part is beyond me. Go forthwith to his website, ASofterWorld.com, where you will find a new webcomic, yes, BUT ALSO a blog post from Mr. Comeau FOR FREE. Today’s is an especially good one; it is about the experience he and his brother had at summer Bible Camp as the children of an atheist, and how he did not get to eat cake, and how he wept bitter tears as a result. Good times!

You can read his blog on his website, or you can subscribe to the site feed, or you can add him as a friend on LiveJournal. IT IS YOUR DECISION.

[Via Dinosaur Comics]

Go to ThePhoenix.com to read this article, which features two of my favorite webcomics of all time, plus two more! Along with interviews with the respective creators! I can tell you’re just as excited as I am, which is as it should be.

(Also, I passed my oral exam. Yay!)

From the Wonderella RSS feed: “Wonderella would like to wish a Happy Gay Pride Week to the gays and Happy Figure Out Your Issues Week to the bisexuals!”

And here’s the latest Wonderella comic, for your delight and enjoyment: Trading BRACES

NOTE: I do not condone making fun of those plucky but confused bisexuals.

I regularly read xkcd, an irreverent pen-and-ink webcomic by CNU physics graduate Randall Munroe. And, as some of you have noticed, I regularly share episodes of these comics in my “Pizzo’s Shared Items” sidebar. But some of the recent math-oriented ones have been too good to resist, so here they are, resized for this space. To read them in the original dimensions, click on the image.

Certainty

Factoring the Time

Labyrinth Puzzle

Tabletop Roleplaying

For those of you who have been avidly reading Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North, but have been in despair about how best to foist your obsession on your loved ones/acquaintances/enemies, the moment you have been waiting for has arrived! NOT ONLY does Dinosaur Comics offer a line of twelve (12) brilliant, side-splitting and/or puzzling greeting cards for every possible imaginable use (except Guy Fawkes’ Day salutations), but now you can also purchase them individually, instead of saving thirty dollars and buying them as a set! Peruse the entire line here!

Tonight I attended the contra dance event at the First Unitarian Church on 13th East. The venue was smaller and oddly shaped (the room was apparently one of the church foyers), but the mood was upbeat and the music was infectious, toe-tapping stuff. Most of my partners were good, but I did have a few stinkers—although I have to admit that they probably thought I was the stinker, and you only have my word for it that the problem resided with them and not me. But all in all it was jolly good fun, and I hope to repeat it twice a week for the foreseeable future. Don’t worry; I’ll only bore my readers with it if something truly memorable happens.

Such as the fact that I wore one of my favorite T-shirts to the event, the one that reads, “When I play doctor, I play to win.” It was the star of the evening, with several people asking where they could go to purchase one. I was happy to tell them, and I’m happy to tell you, that you can buy your very own “playing doctor” T-shirt right here. Tonight’s shirt was an even bigger hit than last week’s, which pictured a deranged stalk of broccoli saying, “I am considered extremely macho by broccoli standards.” (You can buy that one here.)

When my roommate moved out in December, the apartment was suddenly much emptier than it had been. I realized I now had twice as many rooms to furnish and decorate as before, and I reacted promptly by writing down a list of potential furnishings and then forgetting about it.

Well, thanks to Chris Yates of Reprographics fame, my apartment (while no more furnished than before) is a great deal more decorated. You see, Chris belongs to an exclusive fellowship of webcomic artists called Playground Ghosts (which also includes David Malki ! of Wondermark, Chris Dlugosz of Pixel and Bernie Hou of Alien Loves Predator), and besides designing and selling his own stuff, Chris also makes a lot of Playground Ghosts merch. Here are some images of what I bought:

The Nine Ghost and Pink Disappointed Ghost, front and back.

The Ghostlings, looking fierce

Man on an Island, all alone.

The Playground Ghosts, arrayed for battle.

From the awesome Dinosaur Comics comes this awesome—if garbled and puzzling—take on marriage.