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My Daughter Is A-maze-ing
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Wedge Antilles
I’m no expert, but I suspect Wedge Antilles may be one of the most underrated characters in the entire Star Wars canon.
The original three films were my favorite movies growing up. I must have watched the whole trilogy dozens of times over, but I didn’t even realize Wedge was a recurring character until I re-watched them with my own children. I’d thought “Wedge” was a call sign or something.
But no, the Wedge in A New Hope that makes the run on the Death Star with Luke (and saves his butt from a TIE fighter) is the same character who flies into the second Death Star with Lando Calrissian in Return of the Jedi (after saving a bunch of other pilots’ butts from TIE fighters)–not to mention his feats on Hoth. What a freaking badass!
Maybe the reason I didn’t notice sooner is because I didn’t pay as much attention to the characters in my stories back then. (It may have also had something to do with the fact that the spaceships were one of my favorite parts of those films–often irrespective of what they were actually doing, let alone who was flying them!) His characterization is understated enough that it would have been easy for me to miss. But he really is an actual character! He doesn’t have a ton of dialogue, but we have enough to tell he’s brave, modest, calm under pressure, supportive of his squadmates, and has excellent tactical sense, in addition to being an ace pilot.
…That’s it, that’s the whole post. Sorry, I just wanted to gush about my new geek crush for a bit. See you tomorrow!
Filed under Microblogging, Reviews
A List of My Favorite Integers
I know, I know, it’s the sexiest title you’ve read all year, but please keep your undies on. We’re in public.
- 0 and 1 – Zero and one aren’t actually on my list of favorites, but I have to give them respect for essentially making all other numbers possible (and also out of professional obligation as a programmer).
- 2 – Two is such an underrated number. It seems so plain and innocuous, but it does so much! It’s the first prime number, the base (binary) that makes computers possible, and the smallest whole number that makes possible multiplication, exponentiation, logarithms, and rationals! It’s small but mighty; if it were a character in a fantasy novel, I think it would be a dwarf.
- 3 – Not a huge fan of three, but I really like multiples of three? I don’t know, man. I didn’t build this head, I just live in it.
- 9 – Nine! Oh man, I love nine. It sort of seems like it should be prime, but it’s a perfect square! Kind of goth–like, at first it looks like it might murder you in your sleep, but then you get to know it and realize it’s actually really sweet. (Four is a square number too, but four is suuuuper boring. A square of nine has that nice little dot in the center–so much more aesthetically pleasing.) Nine is probably my favorite number overall.
- 12 – Twelve has the charming, sophisticated air of someone with a lot of practice at being modest because they know they have a lot to be modest about. It has a lot of factors, so it makes an excellent base! You can divide it evenly by two, three, four, and six. Much more sensible than base-ten, which only has five and two as factors. It’s not just some math-nerd hypothetical, either: we actually use base twelve! Take a closer look at the next clock you see, or the next carton of eggs you buy.
- 13 – Thirteen is considered unlucky in some cultures, but I think it’s handsome. So close to the extra-factorizeable twelve, yet it’s prime! Very chic.
- 21 – Another one of those numbers that seems like it ought to be prime, but isn’t. I don’t care much for seven on its own, but when you combine it with three you get some interesting results.
- 27 – The first cube after the mediocre eight; nine extended into the third dimension. Seductive, strong, complex but understated. Kind of reminds me of my spouse. I think if twenty seven were a person it would probably be non-binary and pansexual, too.
- 60 – Sixty is that really fit, smart friend that everyone loves, and they’re sometimes a dick about it, but if you need their help they’ll show up without fail. It has even more factors than twelve! Sixty is probably the number base that super-intelligent space aliens would use. Just look at all the different ways you can slice this bad boy up: two, three, four, five, six, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty, and thirty! Man, I’m getting hot just thinking about it. Oh, and in case you think this is another example of some obscure math nonsense that no one will ever use in real life? Take a second look at that clock…
- 64 – Eight may be mediocre, but it gets a major glow-up when you square it. Sixty four is a little hyperactive, but in kind of an endearing way, like a dog. It just has a big heart, you know? (Personally, I think all the powers of two seem a little hyper. Like they’re constantly bouncing up and down on their toes, barely containing their urge to show off just how extra even they are. “Look, look! You can divide me in half eight times!” Sixty four is big enough to know it could show off, but small enough to be modest and without the inferiority complex of poor thirty two.)
- 101 – Ahh, just look at it. So nice and symmetrical. And it’s prime! A lot like eleven, which almost made this list, but one-oh-one beats it out for mostly the same reason that nine is better than four and twenty seven is better than eight. There’s just something a little unsatisfying to me about a symmetry that pivots around an absence. I much prefer when there’s a thing in the middle.
- 111 – Cute but weird, like a pug. Has the same nice symmetry as one hundred and one, plus it’s a pleasant repeated digit, and it’s another number that really seems like it should be prime, but isn’t. But then for some reason its factors are three and thirty seven–blech! Somehow that ugly, bizarro combination comes out super cute?
There aren’t many numbers bigger than one-eleven that stand out to me in particular, so I guess that’s it. Oh, wait! I almost forgot:
- 69 – LOL
Class, We Have A Substitute for Today
Running low on spoons at the moment. I was going to have my “comments are back” announcement be today’s post, but then Chris Ferdinandi, one of my favorite bloggers, wrote a post about “Spreading Joy” and I had to share. Here’s an excerpt:
Yesterday, I found myself being extra friendly even when the guy behind the deli counter at the market was standoffish at the start.
He opened up eventually.
I told a woman I loved her anchor-pattern dress (because I love anchors and really did!), and found out she was headed to a wedding on a boat that afternoon, and was there to pick up a cake!
I’ve gotten so jaded and angry (because there’s a lot to be angry at) that I’d kind of forgotten how to have real, genuine joy.
It was a good reminder that I need to hold on to that, because fascism hates joy and spreading it is anti-fasc.
There’s lots more great reads on his daily developer tips page. Most of them are programming-related, but quite a few of them (like this one) aren’t. Go check it out!
Filed under Reviews
I Tweep for Humanity
- What a Tweerp
- While My Guitar Gently Tweeps
- That’s Twinge
Some of my favorite tweets weren’t my tweets at all, they were conversations between me and my best friend. We were both on Google Buzz–I think we might have been the only ones–so we were able to comment on each other’s posts privately. Here’s a few of our briefer exchanges:
Me: “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.” -Rod Serling
BFF: But the acoustics are amazing!
Me: So are the sets!
The casting is good too, but the scripts are usually just embarrassing.
Me: Naaails to the left, duct taaape to the right–here I am, stuck in the middle with gluuue~
BFF: You’re describing how I mounted my computer monitor to the wall
To this day I’m not 100% sure he was joking.
Me: If mathematics is the study of pure logic and abstraction, then philosophy is the mathematics of language.
BFF: ?
Me: Could you please be more specific
BFF: ??!
…I have no idea what I was saying, either.
BFF: Anytime I say anything worth quoting, you should attribute it to Mark Twain instead.
Me: -Mark Twain
Like any good hacker, when Mr. Twain learns a new system his first instinct is to try to break it. Sometimes I call him the “anti-mnemonic” because this instinct kicks in without fail any time I’m trying to remember something (No, no, no, it’s “righty light-y, lefty heft-y!”), but he’s expressed the urge in other contexts, too. Such as, for example, lame jokes on Twitter:
Me: I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, there isn’t really any bad news.
BFF: …the bad news is, I was lying about there not really being any bad news.
The other bad news is, I’ve got one more for you. Don’t worry, I’ve saved the most self-indulgent best for last, complete with commentary:
Guess what? Chicken butt.
Ah yes, a classic. But wait, it gets “better!”
Guess why? Chicken pie.
Uh oh. I sense sleep deprivation…
Guess when? Chicken pen.
All right, I think we get it now.
Guess where? Chicken hair.
*sigh*
Guess who? Chicken poo.
I’m surprised I held out that long before resorting to poop, honestly.
Me: Guess how? Chicken cow.
BFF: You are such a menace on Twitter!
-Mark Twain
Further Tweminiscing
Yesterday was my birthday! To celebrate, I’m going to take a break from all this boring old fiction and get back to something more self-indulgent exciting: tweets I wrote 15 years ago!
A lot of my old tweets were reposts of other people’s blogs, articles, and essays, or sometimes even just quotes. This one is special because the person I’m quoting is my dad:
“Home is where people get your jokes.” -Dan McCrimmon
Love you, dad ❤️
Some of my tweets reminded me of moments and ideas I’d nearly forgotten. Usually this was a good thing.
Watching an…interesting movie called “Tank Girl.” Confused, but in a good way. This must be how dogs feel.
Tank Girl is a cult classic, one of the earlier comic books to be adapted to film. Recommended. I still think “confused, but in a good way” probably is how dogs feel, but after I got stoned for the first time I decided that was a better approximation. (Watching Tank Girl while stoned would be like how dogs feel on the 4th of July.)
Some reminders were more mixed.
Last night I sewed a ripped seam in my pajamas; it was the most accomplished I’ve felt all semester. Why am I in school, again?
Honestly, sometimes I still feel like this is among my top ten achievements in life.
Re-reading papers I wrote in high school. Man, the old me was so awesome. What the hell happened?
Yeah…college did things to me.
Then there were the reminders of things that haven’t changed at all.
Times change, but people remain insane.
Sometimes the insanity is more…prominent…than others.
“Where is my watch?” *searches* “Hmm, that’s odd, I can’t find it any–oh. It’s on my wrist.” #22andgoingsenile
Still just as senile at 37. That’s…good? That’s a good thing, right?
Oh yeah, I was gonna eat dinner at some point. #oops
Oops.
Younger Me Was A Twiit
I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately–y’know, catalouging all my life’s deepest regrets, just your ordinary early-onset midlife crisis–and I ended up going through some of my old Tweets. Here are a few gems I thought were embarrassing enough to be worth sharing.
I posted this sequence while reading Harry Potter #7 for the first time:
Neville Longbottom is a f***ing badass.
If I were a girl, I would be crushing on Neville Longbottom.
Look at your man. Now look at me. Now back at your man, now back at me, now…back at your man. Sadly, your man is not Neville Longbottom.
He is totally pimp, is what I am saying.
I’m particularly amused that I wrote “if I were a girl” instead of “if I were gay.” In retrospect, I probably should have noticed something odd about that.
Here’s another one on a similar theme:
I’m perfectly comfortable with my heterosexuality, but if A**** Diaz ever came up to me and said “Will you marry me?” I would be like “HELL YES WHEN CAN I START”
This one is doubly funny because not only did the artist in question turn out to be a super hot girl, I also ended up marrying a guy.
Here’s a couple about sleep deprivation:
Today’s word of the day is: FARTCHKNACKER
(I didn’t get much sleep.)
That’s an understatement. Here’s another:
Dreamed I stayed up till 4 doing reading for class. Didn’t actually stay up till 4, but now I feel like I did and my reading still isn’t done.
I think that between them, those two tweets sum up the majority of my college experience.
Here’s an attempt I made at a 140-character poem, just after shaving my head for the first time:
Commit! the imagined is strongest becoming real. Unrequited acts are ghosts of shadows: a memory of warmth beside the moment before sunrise.
It’s not a great poem, but it’s a sentiment I could stand to be reminded of more often.
One more for now. I wrote this one while working a part-time construction gig over the summer:
Boy, I just love using my caulk to plug holes.
Sorry, that one’s still funny.
Amber Smalltalk
How come nobody told me about this before? Amber Smalltalk is a dialect of the Smalltalk programming language, which is what caught my attention. I have been a fan of Smalltalk for years, but the image-based development environment proved a little too cumbersome and monolithic for my tastes. Amber to the rescue!
Amber is a Smalltalk language for web development. Now, as I understand it, there is already an excellent Smalltalk-based environment for web development called Seaside. However, what sets Amber apart from other Smalltalk variants for the web is that it is client-based, and compiles directly to JavaScript. This means, among other things, that you can go try Amber out right now using nothing but your browser! It’s the perfect “gateway drug” for the wider Smalltalk world! I find this especially appealing because it means I won’t have to learn JavaScript to do portable, client-based web programming! Hurray!
After my initial “project” (modifying the “counter” example to count only by primes), I’ve started working on a web-based game. It won’t be the much-anticipated port of my game “Press A to Win” (my apologies to both of you who were hoping it would be), instead it will be a game about numbers! A game about finding numbers’ unique prime factorizations, specifically. What? Why are you looking at me like that? Of course it’ll be fun!
Anyway, you should go check Amber out. It’s great. I’ll have something more for you to look at next week. Until then, stay curious!
Webcomic Roundup
I’ve already been over some of my favorite bloggers in the past, but you may have noticed that bloggers aren’t the only thing in my sidebar. Although I enjoy all art forms, comics are a particular pleasure for me, and since webcomics are usually free I tend to read a lot of them. Here are my favorites:
- Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell might well be my favorite comic of all time, online or off. It hits all my weak points: alternatively funny, serious, and touching, with a story featuring both technology and magic, told through expressive and well-rounded characters. It’s smart, imaginative, and very well-written and drawn (though, like many of the comics on this list, its early pages are much rougher than its later ones). Tom plans each page meticulously and has probably had the entire story planned out start-to-finish since the beginning–relevant plot details will regularly be foreshadowed many months or even years in advance. In short, it’s excellent, and you should start reading it from the beginning right now.
- Dresden Codak is the kind of comic that could only have existed on the internet. Especially in his earlier stories, creator Aaron Diaz frequently makes various scientific references that will leave you feeling really stupid, then really smart after you’ve been to Wikipedia so you can get the joke. His art and writing are both brilliant, a little surreal, and frequently esoteric. The biggest downside of his comic is that it only updates about once every hundred years. You can start reading it from the beginning here.
- A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible–hm. Well, basically, imagine Dresden Codak turned up to eleven. Kind of. Very surreal, very highbrow, frequently makes literary and/or philosophical references that will leave you feeling stupid and/or smart, occasionally flirts with continuity but doesn’t really make a habit of it. Written by Dale Beran and drawn by David Hellman (who also did the art for Braid), it updates approximately once every thousand years. You can read it from what I suppose is technically the beginning here.
- El Goonish Shive by Dan Shive is something of a guilty pleasure of mine–it’s a fun, quirky story about a group of teenagers featuring magic, aliens, relationships, and frequent shapeshifting and gender-bending. It’s funny and cute and I like it, okay? Stop looking at me like that. The first comic is here (and yes, the art and writing do in fact get way better).
- Oglaf (EXTREMELY NSFW, by the way) is, well…I’m just gonna quote the ‘warning’ page directly: “This comic started out as an attempt to make pornography. It degenerated into sex comedy pretty much immediately.” Yeah, that about sums the whole thing up. Written by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne, it’s fantasy-themed, frequently inappropriate, and always funny. Make sure nobody’s watching over your shoulder, then start from the beginning here.
- Lackadaisy is the tale of a group of charismatic bootleggers in prohibition-era St. Louis, told by the master of brilliant and hilarious facial expressions, Tracy J. Butler. Oh, did I mention the bootleggers are anthropomorphic cats? In addition to the main storyline (which you can read from the beginning here), her website features a number of vignettes, side stories and sketches that are often even more hilarious than the main comics. This one about waffles is one of my particular favorites (don’t worry, it’s spoiler-free).
- Cerintha is a fantasy webcomic set in an alternate universe shortly before the fall of Rome. The art isn’t as impressive as many of the other comics on this list, but Cope (the author) keeps drawing me back with intricate plotlines and fun, interesting characters. Be warned: although the comic is frequently funny, the overall tone of Cope’s stories (including his previous comic, Atavism) tends to be pretty fatalistic. You can start reading Cerintha here.
- Speaking of dark and humorous, The Perry Bible Fellowship has some of the darkest and humor-iest on the ‘net. Nicholas Gurewitch masterfully juxtaposes cartoonish, childlike visuals with morbid, sexual, or just downright terrible stories. You will laugh, and you will feel like a horrible person, and then you will click the ‘next’ button. Go ahead, you monster.
- Continuing to speak of dark and humorous, never forget Garfield Minus Garfield, the greatest existentialist-humor webcomic ever accidentally written. I’ll let the comic’s description speak for itself: “Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.” I have honestly never laughed harder than I have reading this comic. Start here, then keep going until you can’t breathe. Trust me, it’ll happen sooner or later.
- Switching gears, Erstwhile is a comic that re-tells many of the lesser-known stories by the brothers Grimm. Each story is adapted and illustrated by a different author–Gina Biggs, Louisa Roy, and Elle Skinner. If you like fairy tales (especially the original versions), give them a look! Their first story is The Farmer’s Clever Daughter.
- Finally, there’s xkcd–a nerd classic. If you haven’t heard of Randall Munroe’s comic yet, you should get out from under that rock you’ve been living beneath and go check it out. Unlike most of the other comics on this list, there’s no real need to start from the beginning, since only a few of his storylines are continuous–it’s probably better to just hit the random button and go from there. Enjoy!
How about you? What are your favorite webcomics? Let me know which ones I’ve missed in the comments!
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In Search of Secrets 