bestof/comics

This is an old attempt to gather the most interesting bits of kirk.is in an easy-to-browse format.

If you like kirk.is mostly for the quotes and links, it might not be the "best of" per se, but overall these pages represent a big part of my creative output so far in the 21st century. The "best of" parts are shown in their natural habitat, often accompanied by the typical quotes and links and asides.

I've divided the work into various categories, and tried to sort each page into roughly descending order of "interestingness". Sometimes there's a particularly chosen closing entry.

This life is like an Atomic Fireball: once you get past the stuff that hurts it's pretty sweet.


Life is more like chocolate-covered espresso beans: once you get past the stuff that's sweet, it's dark and bitter and keeps you up at night.


Funny of the Moment

"¿Que Hora Es?"...The Mexican Soap Opera for people who only had a few months of Spanish in Elementary School!

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Nostalgic Geek Link of the Moment
The Amiga was the awesome computer of the mid- to late-1980s. It had graphics and sound capabilities that PCs wouldn't get until the early 1990s, and had a built in "genlock" so it could overlay things on video signal inputs, and was ahead of its time in many other ways as well. I never had one, so seeing a site like Amiga Reviews gives me this weird nostalgia for a future that never was. I'm so used to think of the Amiga as a better computer than what I have, that seeing it and its now very dated collection of games is a bit disconcerting. The magazine reviews are from the UK, and the multiple reviewer commentary took years to make it to the USA.

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Political Link of the Moment
And I thought I was a bit upset about the recent elections... (via Bill the Splut)

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Wacky News Link of the Moment
"Look at me! I'm invisible! Time to go hit a bank!"

Duhhhh. Was it the movie Mystery Men that had the hero who was invisible so long as no one was looking? (Along with the Shoveler: "God's given me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well.")

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Cartoon of the Moment
Hey, does anyone have any ideas for what would make a fun party for a gal's sixteenth birthday party? (No dumb jokes, please.)

Ksenia's family is trying to figure it out for her sister whose birthday is in a few weeks... bowlings kind of lame? Are they doing ice skating yet? Too old for that?

Is having a party in the house a good idea at that age? I can't remember many "activity" parties by that age, I think they were mostly at people's houses, parent-sanctioned but without a big parental presence. I had a few surprise parties thrown at me...

Still something out of the house might be good. Any ideas?

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Panels of the Moment


--FoSO and FoSOSO had a very small draw comics/eat chinese/watch movie get-together last night. I decided to work on fleshing out my Young Astronauts in Love idea, just working a few panels to see if I could get a feel for both my tool preferences and if there's a story I'd like to tell here. And in a fit of self-indulgence I decided to post the test panels here.

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Quote of the Moment

My consolation is that I am confident that somewhere at this very moment people are making love.

Annotated Doodles of the Moment
--I created this page of doodles during a company-wide business meeting...I recommend the technique of filling an entire page with small, non-repetitive doodles, it's very satisfying. Just to make my self-obsessive-geekness complete, I made it into an imagemap...hover the mouse over any doodle to find out what it is, or use the tab key to tab through each as a link and see its description in the status bar. (only tested in MSIE)

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Webcomic of the Moment
Peterman introduced me to the webcomic Full Front Nerdity...3 guys (and a webcam) around a D+D table. I don't know if I'm ashamed or proud to say I've never actually role-played. Still, I read the books enough to understand this one and if you're in a hurry just check out this other one that ends with a potentially reusable "zinger".

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Related Joke of the Moment

A fifth-level paladin drives his car to the repair shop.

He gets out and says to the mechanic "It's really weird. Normally I fight for justice and righteousness, but every time I get in this car I have this incredible urge to run over old ladies, drive way past the speed limit, and pick up hitchhiking demons. Can you help me?"

The machanic looks the car over and says "Yeah, I see what the problem is. Your alignment's off."

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Explanation of the Moment
For the unitiated: both the first "this one" cartoon link and the joke deal with D+D's concept of "alignment". See this definition of the concept for an explanation.

Joke of the Moment
Q. What was Beethoven's favorite fruit?

A.

--The only way I could think of showing a sound based joke...

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Geek Fashion of the Moment
WOW. an LED-tanktop that plays "Conway's Game of Life".

I wonder if the idea could be modified to scroll text as well...

Man. I need to have a very unslacky weekend.

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Videos of the Moment
Big-Boys.com is now Break.com... it's still a site with many funny videos and a bit of HAWT GIRLS, but much less raunchy overall than other sites in the genre. This video they captioned Hot. But Not Smooth is the funniest thing I've seen all week. The Thousand-hand Bodhisattva dance is amazing in a different way...

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Financial Question of the Moment
I see more and more poeple using debit cards at stores. For some reason I always use credit card. Actually, and I have very little idea where this bias came from, using ATM cards in stores always seemed vageuly low-class to me. (Maybe it's some weird side effct of the En Vogue "Free Your Mind" lyrics "So I'm a sistah / Buy things with cash / That really doesn't mean that all my credit's bad".)

Do you use credit or debit for most purchases, and why?

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Doodle of the Moment

"The Romance Between A Canary and A Goldfish"

--Someone mentioned this line at the September meeting of my UU "Science and Spirituality" group...

--A crude attempt by me to emulate this really cool series of sketches by my cousin River. The thing is, River is like 8 years old...quite a prodigy! He used a very fine pen (and this is a reduced scan from the one I made, making it look more detailed than it is) and the level of detail and texture was *amazing*.

Thoughts of the Moment

--Here's the history of Thoughts of the Produce Section, plus three more examples here, here, and here. This one I drew at the same meeting that produced that page of tiny doodles.

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Geek Javascript of the Moment

Unix Date:

--Just need something quick and dirty to go from Unix "seconds since 1970" timestamps to something more human readable. Not as quick and dirty as I hoped, it took me a bit to realize that javascript was thinking in milliseconds, so I had to muliply by 1000. Duhhr!

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Article of the Moment
Golfing across Mongolia, one stroke at a time. He's hitting a golfball across the entire dang country, he went 1,234 miles. Crazy and awe inspiring. I suppose if I liked golf at all it would be even cooler.

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Feature of the Moment
Slate has a pretty hard hitting series Dispatches from Fallujah...it's a few steps to getting my head around what it's like to be one of the guys over there... Still haven't gotten around to putting up the Chicago photos, so here's another cartoon for the meanwhile...

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Politics and Sports of the Moment
Heh...Patriots' owner Bob Kraft may have inadvertantly given his superbowl ring to Russian President Vladimir Putin...I had a similar thing happen to me when I was showing off my Atari game "Flap-Ping" to the guy who was running Coolidge Corner Cinema's Atari night...he seemed to assume it was a gift and I figured "why not"...

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Gripe of the Moment
Damnation, I see the Spam bots have gotten into the sidebar comments as well. What self-centered assholes these pricks are, writing such idiotic posts just to try to crank up their Googlejuice. I'm going to take corrective action soon, hopefully without disrupting the usability of the site...I think that "type in what this graphic says" is just awful, one time tokens should be good enough, at least for homebrew sites like mine.

Hmm...doing a little research and pondering makes me realize it's not going to be that easy to stop...I was assuming that they recorded how to enter a comment once, and the reran the "submit spam comment" script over and over, but there's no reason they can't automate the full "get fresh comment form...submit comment" which would circumvent any "one time token" barriers. And a site I ran into mentioned that it's pretty easy for them to run my form through a javascript engine, thus thwarting any advantage then.

I guess content filtering might be my best bet. It looks like spam almost always has "http" in it...so if there's no http, it's probably safe to let it through. If there IS http:// , cause I want people to be able to share links, I might see what happens if I just put up another form, which then might require some additional action to verify the human-ness of the poster.

Damn spammers screw up the net for everyone. Frickin' product whores.

300 Million Americans today! We are "the only industrialized nation in the world whose population is rising substantially"...huh! Is that immigration, or breeding?

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Doodles of the Moment
More Tablet PC doodles... right now I'm fooling around with a pressure-sensitive pen, letting me get variable width pen strokes. I think this gives me a lot more flexibility, and lets me achieve something closer to my "usual" doodling style. So here I'm messing with different pen widths and the like in "GIMP"...

It probably means something that all these guys are looking off to the right, but I have no idea what.

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Quote of the Moment

I finally realize that patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

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Ads of the Moment
This page of old computer tv spots is making the rounds. I got a say, I strongly disagree with some of the commentary... I think the "Think Different" campaign, or at least the spot they show, was terrible, trying to get the product to ride on as many coattails as possible, the very worst kind of "feel good" advertising, making up for in unmitigated gall what it lacks in creativity. (Compare that with the "IBM Linux" spot 6 years after, which I think does a much better job.) And he says that for his money it's "the single best computer ad ever"...but I think it's much less inspiring and relevant then, say, the "Apple Newton" spot he rips on before that.

I just finished Karen Armstrong's "A Short History of Myth". (I was supposed to read it for my UU Church's Science and Spirituality group, but then the Florida trip came up, so I read it in the airport and the first leg of the flight and wrote this.)

So her final chapter argues that the West is really hurting from its lack of mythology; that logos, thought/reason, has reigned surpreme for a long time, and while in many ways it has made life better for the people of those cultures, it hasn't been providing the ultimate answers that those people, neurotic and confused as we are, need.

She seems to especially criticize the attempts to reconcile rationality with myth, claiming that these were paths tried and found wanting in Judaism and Islam, but that Protestant Evangelicalism carries on the hopeless and painful struggle.

That certainly rings true with my interpretation of the tradition I grew up in. I've heard it said that if Christ has not literally risen from the dead, if other events are allegorical instead of literal, if the Bible has not received special divine protection in every verse, than the whole game is up. (Actually the Bible verse is "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain" (1 Cor. 15:14))

That's a very brittle kind of spirituality to have, if you take the obvious literal reading of that line.

And then, even within Christianity, there are things I've been taught that only now do I realize aren't considered fundamental Christian tenants. Armstrong argues that the Orthodox, for example, haven't embraced the rationalist doctrine, are content with a great deal of Mystery, don't buy into the whole original sin idea, and maybe God would have come to us in the form of Jesus even if Adam hadn't sinned. (On the other hand, when confronted with someone looking to pick a rationalist fight, they'll mention this annual Easter candle lighting miracle that takes place in the Holy Land. Given that the person channeling the miracle is searched to not have any lighting implements before going off in secret but that self-lighting candles have been known for a long while, I'm a little skeptical.)



(remake of an old comic of mine)
So, I'm struggling to understand how people accept things that are mythically true, but not factual "reality". I guess it's harder to do in a highly connected world. Historically, you experience myth by soaking it in as your immersed in your culture... but when you start to notice that other peoples believe other things, your own beliefs might start seeming arbitrary. Maybe even evil! Decartes was driven to hunt for first principles when he noticed he couldn't know if his whole external experience was really the result of a demon trying to trick him. (And I know I started to stray from my Protestant heritage when I started realizing that if I had grown up in an Islamic tradition rather than as the son of Protestant ministers, I'd probably be just as fervent about a totally different belief.)

Armstrong thinks that we look to find our myths in cultural figures, like Elvis and Princess Di. And maybe retell our mythologies in great art, like Guernica and "The Wasteland".

Maybe the purest modernist mythology we can have is science fiction. By telling stories of the future, we can escape our paranoia that the stories aren't "really real", because they sit in the realm of Might Be rather than Was. (For the record, this is also the explanation I gave for preferring "space" Legos; cars in the present and castles in the past don't have little dots all over them... but the spaceships of the future might.) Of course, this is slightly more true for Star Trek than Star Wars, the latter just seperating itself by being "a long time ago in a glaxy far far away".

I dunno, just a thought. It certainly puts the hard core fan in a new light. Maybe the overweight fanboy in the full Klingon regalia, browsing memorabilia at the local convention is really a shaman for the modern age.

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Trying to channel pre-new-job nervous energy into straightening the apartment. The problem remains the same: pick a task, finish a task even when I the task takes me to a different room where other tasks start beckoning.

--by Mo, 1997.12.26. Made on Dinky Pad for the PalmPilot. She graciously let me post it here; it's admittedly a little cornball, as are many things at the start of a good romance.

Funny of the Moment
The 25 Best Futurama Moments Ever. A surprising amount of the humor comes through...

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Sketch of the Moment

--Touchpad sketch of a co-worker...I find touchpads much harder to sketch with than normal mice or even the old trackballs, but sometimes it's fun to try to work with the limits of the medium.

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Coins of the Moment
More new nickels. Interesting...it's cropped in close, and I guess that's the way it's going to be from here on in. Also he's facing right, thus ruining one little bit of folklore how Roosevelt, Jefferson, and Washington all face away from Lincoln ('cause he freed the Slaves, or some such nonesense.) (Another CNN story...this poor guy died after a lightning strike. And not to pick on a young man senselessly killed, but I was struck by his photo...it seems like his features could be expanded to fill more of his face...)

Vacation Filler of the Moment
Usually if I'm going away on vacation I prepublish content on kisrael, just in case I can't get to the Internet. When I'm vacationing at home, as I am this week, it's a little different. I just get lazy about updating...so I've decided to dump 32 images I made with doodle for Palm, a delightfully minimalist little drawing program. So for the next 4 days I'll post them in groups of 8...if I'm feeling lazy, that'll be about it for the day. And today...I'm feeling lazy. Just dumping the files to my computer, renaming and uploading took it right out of me.





Doodles of the Moment




The top left might be the server at the same place the booze glasses were doodled in yesterday's set. There's an attempt at a sketch of Mo there, and as for the last two...errr. Well. Isn't it interesting, my friend Erica taught me that it's much simpler to write in cursive with a low-fidelity sketch pad such as this than with my usual printing.

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Film of the Moment
Last night Evil B got me to go see the film MirrorMask...pretty decent, and it's too bad there's not more publicity for it. It's a collaboration between Henson Studios (the similarities with Labyrinth and I've heard The Dark Crystal are pretty strong) and author Neil Gaiman...visually, it's incredibly rich, though the story is thin, surprising given the Gaiman influence. I was going to say that it's kind of lile "Through The Looking Glass" meets Salvador Dali, but it turns out that the overarching art influence is Dave McKean...I'd recommend his page (have to click...they're playing some stupid games preventing a direct link) over the official Sony pictures one.

Unfortunately, it might be a "wait for the DVD" kind of thing, given its poor distribution...here in Boston it seems like only the artsy cinema is showing it.

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Article of the Moment
Slate on the inverse relationship between an institutions health and its tendency to make interesting architecture, the logic being that companies that are still enganged deeply in doing cool work don't have time to make the perfect HQ. I've seen this in action, in a small way, with my dear departed dotcom Event Zero; moving to the new offices (with a conference room sharing the oval shape of the company's logo and with the late-90's cliché blue/orange color scheme) was one of the death knells...a big capital suck that any company hoping to ride out the dotbomb crash of 2000 couldn't afford. Wonder of the Moment
Dan Ellis and the 10,000 year clock. I love how it's built to be self-winding, but also seems to thrive on human attention.

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Doodles of the Moment




Ummm...yeah. The top left one might be a reference to "sex rodeo style". Don't recall if that Young Astronauts in Love is a copy or the origin. The guy with the dartboard is Dave from my Darts team, having a bad night.

I find it interesting how the limitations of the Palm's screen and touch digitizer influence my style, making it even simpler and less nuanced, since I can't generally depending on getting delicate features in.

Final Doodles of the Moment





Well, that's it. I like the guy at top right. The Angriest Eggplant is a rehash. "You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman" was to amuse Erica during an sQ concert when the guest group was singing that song. As for the breasts...umm...well...I think I was imitating some stylized cartoon I saw somewhere, with the breast drawn with a straightish topside and roundish bottomside (in contrast to the not too inspiring twin hemispheres my unfortunate cartoon women usually end up with.)

Thus endeth the doodles. Been one of the quietest halfweeks on the kisrael comments section, so I'm gonna count this run as "not so inpspring".