Bring, Brang, Brung

I haven’t put up any strips for bring it in a while. Just one in all of February, and nothing this month so far.  Early on I was on nearly a daily schedule.  Right now, nothing.  It’s weird, when I was doing it before, ideas would pop into my head all the time, say, when I was showering.  Oh man, that’s it!  I haven’t showered in a couple months! Dang!

No, seriously, I can’t think of a damn thing to do a comic about anymore.  I guess I’m getting a little tired of the two main characters being a kind of Dilbert/Dogbert, Jon/Garfield clueless-straight-man and smartass duo.  I might be able to come up with some more comedy along those lines, but I don’t like it very much.

Ah well.  Thanks to people who’ve encouraged me on it.  I do appreciate it.  I just don’t know if it’s going to go anywhere from here.

Blink/Think

Wandering about the bookstore, I came across Th!nk, by Michael LeGault. It is a reaction against the popular Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. And just reading the description of Th!nk made me loathe it with every fiber of my being.

Here’s the loathsomeness:

Outraged by the downward spiral of American intellect and culture, Michael R. LeGault offers the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling phenomenon, Blink, which theorized that our best decision-making is done on impulse, without factual knowledge or critical analysis. If bestselling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning has become a lost art in the daily life of Americans. Somewhere along the line, the Age of Reason morphed into the Age of Emotion; this systemic erosion is costing time, money, jobs, and lives in the twenty-first century, leading to less fulfillment and growing dysfunction. LeGault provides a bold, controversial, and objective analysis of the causes and solutions for:

• the erosion of growth and market share at many established American companies, big and small, which appear to have less chance of achieving the dynamic expansion of the past

• permissive parenting and low standards that have caused an academic crisis among our children — body weights rise while grades plummet

• America’s growing political polarization, which is a result of our reluctance to think outside our comfort zone

• faulty planning and failure to act on information at all levels that has led to preventable disasters, such as the Hurricane Katrina meltdown

• a culture of image and instant gratification, fed by reality shows and computer games, that has rendered curiosity of the mind and spirit all but obsolete

• stress, aversion to taking risks, and therapy that are replacing the traditional American “can do” mind-set.

It’s classic Cranky Old Man, talking about how the world is all going to the dogs and we need to return to the old days, when men were real men, women were real women, you whipped your child twice before breakfast every day just to keep the fear of God in him, and the Coloreds knew their place!  Well, that last part usually doesn’t get said out loud.  But you get the idea.  It’s Conservatism in its worst caricature.
So, we usually hate things that we deny in ourselves.  Am I in denial of my inner Cranky Old Man, that I react with such knee-jerk emotion to the Cranky Old Men I see?

What if there are no black holes, but there are dark energy stars?

Check it out.  Via Reddit.com.  It’s fascinating for me to read that black holes completely contradict the laws of quantum physics, and have been known to contradict them for many years, with people just assuming eventually the contradictions will be explained away.

That’s not the way we layfolk think of science as working.

And check this out:

The most intriguing fallout from this idea has to do with the strength of the vacuum energy inside the dark energy star. This energy is related to the star’s size, and for a star as big as our universe the calculated vacuum energy inside its shell matches the value of dark energy seen in the universe today. “It’s like we are living inside a giant dark energy star,” Chapline says. There is, of course, no explanation yet for how a universe-sized star could come into being.

Like, whoa.

A Trio of Programming Language Rants from Stevey.

All found on Reddit.

From September 2004: Tour de Babel, an overview of loved and hated programming languages.

A couple months ago: A Little Anti-Anti-Hype, written in response to an article by Bruce Eckel, well known ruby-hater, saying “good riddance” to any fool who’d leave Java for Ruby. Anti-Anti-Hype came across as a python-hating, ruby-loving post, which isn’t really what the deal is for Stevey at all.

In Bambi Meets Godzilla, he talks about what he’s all about, the death of beautiful languages, why he loves (and despairs for) Python, and why he loves Ruby as well and has more hope for it.

Fights

For the past few weeks, the storyline in one of my favorite webcomics, Achewood, has been about the “Great Outdoor Fight — Three Days, Three Acres, Three Thousand Men.”  The sequence starts here, where Ray learns his father’s secret, and is ongoing at the time of this post.

It’s amazingly cool, especially if you know the characters, and can appreciate the suspense of whether Ray is actually capable of walking in the footsteps of his dad, who was “like, the Thomas Edison of handing a guy his ass.”

Meanwhile, in the real world, you have these posers.  None of ’em would last ten minutes against Son of Rodney!