I bought a comic book

It’s about the game Life is Strange.

Somehow, in the years I’ve been a nerd, I’ve never been a comic book nerd. I read comic books when I was a kid, most kids do, and I liked Spider-Man. He talked through the action and had kid problems. My friends liked Deadpool when I was in highschool, so I was vaguely aware of the B-list superheroes of the nineties and 2000s at that time. I just never bought the books. When I was a kid and they were cheap, I didn’t have the money to blow on them. Now that I’m an adult, each one costs like $4-$5 and they provide like 20 minutes of entertainment at most. Honestly who the heck would bother.

Well me, now.

However, I picked this up as a ‘graphic novel’, which is really just a collection of a 4 book arc. It’s about 100 pages and it talks about what happens to the main characters of this video game, Life is Strange, after the events of the game. It cost me $10 for the whole book which just about puts it at a palatable level considering I am so starved for events featuring the protagonists, who are slightly, but only slightly, rounded characters, but with personality traits I see in myself and my friends,

Life is Strange is a choose-your-own-adventure type game, a genre on the upswing the last time I wrote something here, which has now, a short five years later, already reached its peak and is on the turndown. One company in particular, Telltale Games, was associated with the genre, throwing it into the mainstream with a 2012 release of The Walking Dead. They continued to release high profile games based on existing IPs like Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, and Batman, but recently, halfway through another Walking Dead Game, they went bankrupt, effectively annihilating the choose your own adventure type game genre, as they were still the major developers.

Life is Strange was not created by Telltale, but a French developer called Dontnod, a bunch of 40 year old dudes with an obsession with Americana and what they presume life was like for teenage girls in the USA in the late 2000s.

They were weirdly correct.

While as far as I know, I was not a teenage girl, I was friends with many, especially during that time. We did so much of the same stuff the protagonists of the game did, it’s eerie to me.

For example, there’s a scene where Max and Chloe, the protagonists, had just gotten done trespassing and having fun all night, doing drugs and stuff and breaking and entering. They woke up and listened to Bright Eyes. Bright Eyes. I cannot tell you how many times that very thing occurred to me as a young adult. Here’s the highly boring scene.

 

Max and Chloe dodge the problems of popular girls, being caught doing drugs, getting around without a car or money, dealing with adults who don’t care about you, smashing stuff in a junkyard, and meeting up at cheap diners. All standard teenager crap, and it seems and sounds boring, except, it isn’t.

Max has been given the power to time travel, that is, change her decisions in the past to improve the story (like holding your finger on a page in a choose your own adventure story), and she and Chloe are investigating the disappearance and likely murder of a girl from the city. This gives everything they do, from talking to people in school, to breaking and entering for fun, a usefulness and a purpose in the context of the game that gives you the reasons to do them, and it plays out much like it always felt like it did in real life.

As a teenager, everything feels like it matters and it’s intense, and you just don’t realize it isn’t and that it’s all, by and large, stupid. Hence, you see the dumb stuff teenagers do and you don’t get it. By putting their actions in the context of weird time travelling murder stuff, you feel that necessity and importance in their actions that teenagers do.

 

 

Here’s a video Blackstar, Narcogen, Jillybean and I did. We played through the whole game and talked about it and why we felt it was good or bad, and what we liked.

I liked it because so many of the situations they were put in were those I myself was in, and the way they felt was the way I used to feel as a young adult.  The games continue to promote that feeling within me. It feels like teens feel. It doesn’t of course, it’s the reality of being a teenager turned up to the max, but that’s the only way to make it feel right.

It’s the same reason I like Twilight, but that’s for another time.

Anyway, that perfectly constructed atmosphere is why I actually bought, with my own money, my first actual comic book. I’ve even pre-ordered the next one.

I’ve gone full nerd.

I’ve got a bunch of domains that are slightly irrelevant. Who needs timfletcher.de?

I think this qualifies as an e/n site.

I don’t think anyone uses the term anymore, but I recently heard it again, and I think it is. My old favourite was imovaherenow.com. I think it was run by  guy called Adam Cernese, who I just tried to look up, to no avail. Anyway, he was fantastic.

 

He just linked to cool stuff he found on the internet, and it didn’t matter what it was, pornographic, insensitive, or otherwise. Back in those days, boy I sound old. Back in those days we all used online aliases, hence Funkmon. I’m still regularly reluctant to use my actual name online. But because of that, we didn’t have to worry about what was posted, and our jobs would never found out. The only way I found out Adam’s name was looking up the whois details provided, by the way, by networksolutions.

 

Anyway, an e/n site was a site that meant everything to the poster, nothing to the reader. A lot of it was ranting, a lot of it was dumb links, and a lot of the sites turned exclusively into pornography. Eugh. But still, there was good content there, and they were fun to read. This was before the term blog entered popular usage to describe the sites, iirc, though blogger was around. Many of us called them ezines or e/n sites. Blogs were more personal.

Now, the internet is trying very hard to be professional, with real journalism and whatnot, and e/n sites and personal blogs aren’t around much anymore. Even when people try to talk about subjects like terrorism, racism, and stuff like that on their blogs, they lexigraphically put on their asbestos underwear. Screw that, just talk about it, guys.

 

But, anyway, I think my blog, consisting entirely of stuff that nobody cares about but me, qualifies.

Chemistry

The mechanisms behind chemistry are physics. Whether it’s Schroedinger equations or more classical stuff (rare), it’s all physics. However, the way chemistry is taught, it’s all magic.

It’s like knowing how to use Windows but having no way of knowing how it interfaces with the hardware, but being able to program. It’s terrible. How does a hydrogen bond work? Why is an octet in the outer shell stable? All of these answers are basically “magic” in chemistry.

Sitting alone listening to love songs.

It’s what I do. Paramore don’t get much crap from people for some reason. They hit it big with Misery Business, Decode and The Only Exception, and they’re not getting the kind of bullshit that Avril Lavigne gets. Whenever Avril gets brought up, people say “I liked her early stuff, but she sucks now. She sold out.” Bull. Avril writes every bit as well as she always has, and her last record, Goodbye Lullaby, was an exercise in not selling out. Whatever. I just hate the double standard. Hayley sings worse than Avril, and writes music that’s no better than Avril’s, and her band is objectively less talented than Avril’s. I think the only difference is that Avril writes conventional songs, you know, like, with chords and normal progressions, whereas Hayley writes weird ass songs in drop C# that will stick out like a sore thumb as being very 2010 in about 10 years. That being said, I love Paramore, and I have a large print of a photo I took of Hayley Williams on my wall as we speak, which was a hit on Reddit, back when Reddit had only been uncool for about a year. 3200 views y’all.

Anyway, the love song. It’s probably the best rocking love song I’ve heard, and would appreciate any suggestions to the contrary. Still Into You.

Note to angry Paramore fans:

I know Paramore is a “band” and I try to keep that in my head, sometimes, except Hayley is the one signed to the contract, and she pays her bandmates from that. She also writes the songs, though Taylor has been helping her since Riot!, with help from Josh Farro for their first three records, and I think Jeremy has a credit on one of the new songs. We must note also that due to Paramore keeping a cohesive style in all four of their records and inter record singles despite the addition of York on Riot! and the departure of Josh Farro on the singles club, there is only one constant in the band’s writing and production process, and it must be significant to have kept all the other variables at a minimum. And, as Jeremy left the band just before AWKIF, Taylor joined just before BNE, and the Farros left before Singles, there is only one band member who has been there the whole time. And we know who that is. Hayley Williams. “Paramore is a band,” she says, but that’s only because she says so. The rest of us know what it really is. Hayley Williams.

The street of two Luxembourgs.

This is the terminus of Rue Des Deux Luxembourg in Athus. It goes on, obviously, into Rodange, but Google Street View hasn’t published its Luxembourg data. The two Luxembourgs are Luxembourg, the grand duchy, and Luxembourg, the province in Wallonia. The two were once one, but were separated in 1839 with the Third Partition of Luxembourg, Luxembourg’s largest loss of land in a long history of losses of land.

This region of Belgium has been particularly fond of Luxembourgish, or as we normal people call it “weird ass German” but since world war two, the fondness for the German dialect has dropped sharply. I wonder why. Regardless, in Pays d’Arlon, basically the area around the Arlon arrondissement, though I would also put Virton and Bastogne in here, Luxembourgish is still used commonly, and some street signs are even bilingual! This in itself is another challenge since Luxembourgish has no standard written form, and tends to just be spelled phonetically.

The official flag of the province is also based in the neighbouring country, with the same colours in the same position, though this is rarely used. I wonder if it’s not used for the same reason that Luxembourgish is falling out of favour. National pride, perhaps? Here’s the one I’ve seen.

Interesting, no? I do wonder where this comes from, as it’s also on Esch sur Alzette’s coat of arms.

The one on the Luxembourg coat of arms is actually pretty different. I’ll look more into this. And by the way, look at that coat of arms of Esch sur Alzette. How literal can you get?  There is this tower that Esch sur Alzette represents itself with, which, by the way, I’ve never seen, and I’ve looked, and it’s on top of water, presumably the Alzette. If you didn’t know, you could assume as much from the big Luxembourg things to either side of the tower. There wouldn’t be a tower like that on the Moselle or the Petrusse…though, admittedly, it could be on the Sure, which, coincidentally has a massive castle in a city called Esch sur Sure. The coat of arms of that city includes a pig hiding underneath a dildo tree. Not a joke.

I don’t even know what I wanted to point out here anymore.

You know, one day I’ll tell the exceptionally boring story of how I came to be such a big fan of Luxembourg. Here’s me and my dad in the capital like a billion years ago. I’m really attractive.

Call me old fashioned.

This is not a blog. This is some kind of website with news articles powered by a content management system that is optimized for blogs. Sorry, Skepchick, you’re just the best example.

This is a blog. It’s got an archive on the right, no blogroll, but that’s not that important, though I do like them, and it has a title, then a headline followed by the text. Then, you know what happens when you scroll down? More headlines and more text.

And another thing!

How have we let blogs be taken over by corporations and large companies? Even “new” internet companies like Gawker and Cnet and stuff are bloated and shit. Blogs should be personal. And some personal blogs, like Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy, are now run by magazines! Eugh! Internet, what’s happened to you?

Come on, dudes.

James May’s Man Lab

 

 

I’d forgotten that this show existed. I loved the first two series, and hence, I’m pretty upset with myself for missing series three…particularly because they addressed one of my favourite subjects: bullcrap cryptozoology.

 

http://www.skegnessstandard.co.uk/news/local/skegness-sea-monster-revealed-to-be-bbc-hoax-named-susan-for-top-gear-presenter-james-may-s-man-lab-series-1-5039877

 

So, James May came out with a skeptical perspective, as expected by me, though he has, in the past, said some dubious things. Far from even entertaining seriously that there might be a Loch Ness monster, they accept that most of the photographs are hoaxes. While this is probably not true, and most of the photos are misidentifications, it’s a warranted opinion that there isn’t a monster in Loch Ness. All the evidence is consistent with there being no monster, even if there is, which is a possibility.

So, because they think that the Loch Ness monster photos are hoaxes, and they bring lots of money to the area around the Loch, they decided to do the same with Skegness, a resort town in England.

They created a needlessly elaborate contraption to film and hopefully put online to create a stir. And it did. It even hit the Daily Mail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2189371/Forget-Nessie-Skegness-Monster-Mysterious-sea-creature-spotted-bobbing-coast-beach-resort.html

 

Fantastic. This news is two weeks old, I think.

Testing.

I am testing my Transformer, which I should have been using like six weeks ago, but am only now using. This thing is pretty nifty, once I get past the tiny keyboard.

Also: currently rereading The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. God damn, he is amazing. I feel like his interest in scientific skepticism, and indeed science itself, closely aligned with my own. I would have liked to know him, but he died when I was just a kid. His candle burned out long before his legend ever did. Apologies to Bernie Taupin.

Joe Nickell’s a cool dude.

There’s this guy named Joe Nickell. There’s a distinct non-zero chance of me going over a few of his books or articles here. I’m a pretty big fan of his, and he’s always been super nice to me when we’ve met. We hung out for much of CSIcon in 2012. Here’s us in Halloween costumes.

He did his makeup himself, by the way. He’s done everything. He even has a list of what he calls “personas” on his website, numbering in the 4 digits, most of which have documentations. So, from this zombie thing, he is now a makeup artist, a movie actor, and a zombie. Three personas right there! The guy’s pretty cool. He also doesn’t have a computer.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do lately is write more things down. Dr. Nickell carries a notebook of good ideas with him at all times, then works on them. And, due to his wide range of interests, he stays productive and goes through his notebook much faster than one would think. If he gets tired of writing, he’ll paint. If he gets tired of that, he’ll do something else. The guy’s really amazing. Magician, private investigator, glass blower, poet, this guy’s done it all.

Anyway, his primary job is as a writer, and I love that stuff. I read things he writes in The Skeptical Inquirer, some of which can be found online at http://csicop.org, but some of which can’t. In addition to this, he’s written a few dozen books. They are all interesting, and indeed excellent bathroom reads. This is a major category of books for me. He put two out in the last year, if I recall correctly.

CSI Paranormal, which is available from CSICOP for only $5 (I bought two copies at that price), focuses on the art of paranormal investigation, but in a light manner. Benjamin Radford’s book, on the other hand, couls almost be seen as a textbook on how to investigate the paranormal, albeit an interesting one. Dr. Nickell instead tells us all about how he does things, some past stories he likes to tell, and how his process allowed him to keep abreast of the reality of the situation, and not get caught up in either the gullible believer mindset or the armchair debunker mindset like so many of us on the internet.

The Science of Ghosts was also released, and it’s about twice as long as CSI Paranormal, with a special focus on ghosts, investigating them, and how their existence is perceived to have been evidenced, at least by those who buy into it. Split into many 8-10 page chapters discussing specific cases and subjects for which he’s specifically researched, the book is almost a definitive skeptical book on ghosts; a specificity often lacking in modern skeptical literature. I love it.

Anyway, as said, there is a non-zero chance of me going into further detail on these books later.