Bewarethewumpus

Author : Bob Newbell

“Your hot coffee, sir,” says the Inteeri waiter as he places the beverage on the table in front of me.

“Thanks. Here’s–” The short alien that looks vaguely like an anthropomorphic armadillo shuffles away before I can offer him a tip. At no time while serving me does he make eye contact. That was out of respect. And fear. I’m nobody important. Just a struggling writer. My waiter probably has more money in the bank than I have. But in his eyes — all six of them — it doesn’t matter. I’m a member of the galaxy’s most terrifying species. I’m human.

My old man was part of the delegation that made first contact with the Inteeri. The aliens weren’t sure if mankind posed a threat to them so their top military officials were tasked with the initial assessment of the human race. On a space station orbiting Inteer Secundum, my dad and the other human ambassadors met with the alien generals and admirals. One of the human delegates had a slight cold. He sneezed once during the meeting. An hour later the entire Inteeri High Command were dead. The earthly rhinovirus proved instantly lethal. With their military command gutted, the Inteeri political leaders unconditionally surrendered to Earth despite the reassurances of a distraught and horrified humanity that the Inteeri deaths were an unintended tragedy.

Someone or something jostles me as it moves past. Some of my coffee spills onto the table. I turn in my chair to come face to face with a rather surly looking Kordann. The creature’s eyestalks quickly withdraw from a beligerent extension to a submissive retraction as its leathery skin turns blue with fear.

“Ten thousand pardons, master,” the Kordann says through its translation device as it glides away on six tentacles, bowing in apology.

Humans made contact with the Kordann ten years after the disastrous Inteeri encounter. Again, the Biomedical Assessment Team determined there was little danger of contagion between the species. Nonetheless, the Earth delegates wore environment suits as a precaution. As the human ambassador walked up with his hand extended to the Kordann prime minister, he tripped. The Earthman’s hand struck the Kordann leader’s trachea, killing the latter. The details of this event bore a more than passing resemblance to a passage in the Kordann Book of Scripture prophesying a visitor from the heavens who would kill a Kordann ruler and establish a monarchy on their world. The religious-minded Kordann quickly submitted.

And so it would go for Mankind’s emmisaries to the stars. The Scottish brogue of Earth’s ambassador to the Relvet would result in “We come in peace and brotherhood” being mistranslated as “Surrender and serve, or die.” In the wake of the fall of both Inteer Secundum and Kordanna, the Relvet surrendered.

On Basura VII, the representative from Earth accidentally knocked over his water glass short-circuiting the computer that managed the Basuran Stock Exchange. A crippling recession and humble request that Basura VII be admitted to the growing Terran Empire followed. The Supreme Monarch of Juppnoi, finding himself trapped on a conference table by the barking Maltese dog of the Earth diplomat, abdicated the throne and turned the Juppnoi Kingdom over to Terran control.

Humanity now dominates much of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. But we’ve turned over all further first contact and diplomatic missions to our extraterrestrial vassal states. A population of 50 billion subjects, none of whom we wanted, is more than enough.

Author : Roger Dale Trexler

THE SENTINEL

They found it.
They found the edge of the universe.
And they found the sentinel there.

EARLIER
Harrison knew this was it. Beyond, there were no stars, just utter blackness.
“My God,” he said. “I didn’t think we’d ever find it.”
Ramsey looked at him. The lines on Harrison’s face were deep. They had met each other as much younger men, each of them searching for something that life was not giving them. They had become quick friends and, in time, inseparable. So, on the day Harrison came to him with his ideas for a quantum drive that could bend time and space, Ramsey had no other choice but to join him on his adventure.
It took twenty years and a billion credits to build the two-man quantum ship, but Harrison was good at acquiring funding for such things. He had an honest face, he joked, and businessmen were always quick to see the potential profit for themselves in his work. He wondered if those businessmen, all in their high-priced suits sipping their expensive wines, were shaking their fists in rage at him.
They had departed the orbital station in the middle of the night. Subterfuge had been the order of the moment, and neither of them had told a soul they were leaving. It was only when the quantum drive came online that anyone took notice of their flight….and, by then, it was too late.
Harrison had flicked the switch, and the ship disappeared.
It hadn’t really disappeared, of course. Harrison’s quantum drive merely slid the ship into an alternate dimension for a moment. The ship sped through that dimension, following a course that Ramsey had postulated would take them to the edge of the universe the quickest.
“But,” said Harrison, “isn’t there more than one ‘edge’?”
“Of course there is,” replied Ramsey. “There are trillions upon trillions of points.”
“Then why this course?” asked Harrison.
Ramsey took a second to reply. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “I….I’ve noticed something about this region of space we are traveling through. Something odd.”
“Oh?”
He drew a deep breath and let out a sigh. “It’s….it’s as if someone has laid out a trail of bread crumbs, in a way. The radiation coming from the stars in this direction—and in this direction only—is different than the radiation from other stars and solar systems in the known reaches of space.”
He went on to explain it, but Harrison did not fully comprehend. He was a theoretically engineer, a man who designed and thought up things no man had ever thought of before, and astrophysics was not his specialty.
In the end, he trusted Ramsey as much as Ramsey trusted him.
They traveled for months at speeds that were hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster than the speed of light.
Then, the day came that the sensors told them there was nothing ahead.
Harrison returned the ship to normal, sub-light speed.
They saw the void ahead.
And they saw the sentinel.
Both men gasped in awe at the sight. For the sentinel was neither machine, nor creature. It was something completely different. It sensed them the moment they arrived, and it started to flow toward them.
It wrapped itself around the quantum ship and Harrison, in a moment of fear, activated the drive.
Nothing happened.
“I don’t understand,” Harrison said, his voice shaky. “We should be parsecs away.”
But I do not wish it, a voice in his head replied. I have waited so long. He….he left me here….alone.
Harrison looked at Ramsey and, at that moment, both men understood. They had found the edge of the universe, and the sentinel was there to guard it. From what, they did not know.
A few seconds later, the quantum ship imploded and the sentinel, who could not help what it was, was alone….again.

Author : Bob Newbell

It’s rotating. It doesn’t look like it, but instruments show that it is. Right now it takes around 24 hours to complete one rotation. Since it’s just over two miles in diameter at its center, the amount of centrifugal “gravity” being generated right now is negligible. That’ll change. The drivers will keep slowly increasing the spin until it’s rotating once every two minutes. That will make the pseudo-gravity 0.45 g. It’ll take most of a year to get it spinning that fast. No matter. I’m in no hurry.

Even now, with the thing less than complete, it’s a work of art. Nearly ten miles long and perfectly rounded at both ends, it’s hard to believe it used to be three gigantic asteroids.

I make way stations. And while there’s an unfathomable amount of engineering that goes into them, anyone who says it isn’t art is a liar or a fool. You can’t totally rely on the equations to tell you what the proper land-to-water ratio should be. The hull specs that will block hard radiation while still greedily gathering up ordinary light to illuminate the interior? Your AI will get you pretty close, but there’s always a small gap between theory and practice. And it takes instinct to bridge that gap.

It’s surprising how many people think we’ve always used way stations in interstellar travel. We haven’t. During the first hundred and fifty years of extrasolar travel, various methods were attempted to get across the gulf between the stars. Suspended animation. Multi-generation ships. Near-light speed schemes. Not one explorer made it to his destination alive.

What can go wrong on a space mission within Earth’s solar system? A technical failure. Psychiatric issues. Medical emergencies. Radiation contamination of food or water or living space. Now extend that mission from tens of millions or a billion miles to one that has to cover multiple trillions of miles. The law of averages wins. Something going catastrophically wrong becomes all but certain.

The first way station halfway between Earth’s system and the Alpha Centauri system was small and fairly unimpressive by modern standards. The crew on the first attempt to reach Proxima Centauri after the station came online barely made it. They spent four months there effecting repairs to their ship and relaxing in an environment that at least approximated being outdoors on Earth. Now there are six stations equidistant between Sol and Proxima. It takes most of 10 years to make the trip, but you have a month or two every 18 months of the journey at one of the stations. You’re not trapped in the same spaceship for a decade. You’re never more than 18 months away from a giant O’Neill cylinder with forests and lakes and deserts.

Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, Epsilon Eridani: They all have a string of way stations reaching back to Sol. And no two way stations are alike. You might explore a jungle on one station and participate in a snowball fight on the next one.

I’ve been working on this station for most of 20 years. A siliceous asteroid, a carbonaceous asteroid, and a metallic asteroid. Bolt them together and fling them out of the asteroid belt and command nanotech machines like a conductor directing a symphony as you travel out between the stars. Twenty years and now the first way station between Sol and Procyon is almost ready. I’ve modeled the beach and sea on Destin, Florida. White sand and emerald water. And an artificial sun illuminated by concentrated starlight. You need that on an 88 trillion mile journey.

With a little editing the Prime Minister of England makes a pretty decent rapper.

Friday, October 3rd, 2014 12:00 AM

(if the above link doesn’t work, try this video below. But fullscreen that sucker!)

This has been Brawl in the Family. Thank you for reading.

Im not even sure where to begin. This experience has truly been a magical one for me. Not only have I been able to do something that I really enjoy, but Ive been able to share that joy with people the world over. The fan response has absolutely been the most fulfilling part of all of this, and I hope that future readers will find the same enjoyment in this little blue-and-white corner of the internet.

Guess I should give one last comic write-up for One Last Song, eh? Well, its a pretty straightforward idea, a look back at various comics in an original song (the third fully original theme in BitF history, in fact, along with 200 and 400). I provided all the voices. And even the right hand showed up for this one (although since I’m a southpaw, the other hand seems a little nuts, to be honest). The big Les Miserables-style number near the end was a very late addition, but it ended up working itself out surprisingly well I think. Hope you enjoyed this trip through memory lane!

The BitF Complete Collection Kickstarter only has hours left until the end!! If you want Volumes 2 and 3, its now or never! (Well, okay, the PayPal preorders will still remain open for a few months)

The big question Ive been getting lately has been, Whats next? A lot of you want to follow me and see my future projects! Well, here you go:

1) Tadpole Treble is the big one! This is the indie game that my brother and I came up with, and Im doing nearly all of the art and music for it as well and its coming to the Wii U next year. Our gaming company is BitFinity, and were planning on doing a frequent developer blog on the site to give readers interesting tidbits that go into designing a game. Im planning on drawing for it as well, so you may want to tune in for that too.

This is our website:http://bitfinitygames.comThis is TT’s Facebook page, which frequently gets updated with new stuff:https://www.facebook.com/TadpoleTreble

And if you havent seen it yet, be sure to check out this shiny new trailer weve constructed for your enjoyment!

We could still use some Greenlight Votes to get on Steam, though, so feel free to help us out!

2) If thats not enough, my buddy Josh Hano hit his goal with Wii U-bound action game Nefarious, and Im handling the soundtrack to that one as well. Nefarious is early in development, but its already shaping up to be a great game, and you can keep your eye on it here.

3) But Matthew, I hear you say, Video games are all well and good, but I prefer still images of Nintendo characters doing funny things! Well, youre still in luck because Im not fully retired from comics. NF Magazine is a terrific spiritual successor to Nintendo Power, spearheaded by some of the top Nintendo fans on the internet, and Im still doing a comic every issue for them. Granted, one strip every 2 months is 1/16th what you might be used to from me, but theyre all in full color and still contain my oddball sense of humor! I also write articles and review for them.

4) Podcasts! Yep, as of right now, were not quite done with them. In fact, Id like to update next month with a post-BitF podcast starring Chris and I, so keep your eyes out. We might even make it a regular thing (for once)!

5) Ive taken the plunge and opened a Twitter account. Im MatthewPTaranto over there (for now) because BitFinityMatthew doesnt fit (and I dont really go by Matt). This account should keep you up to date on various things Im working on in the future!

6) As of now, not only is the BitFinity site open, the forums are as well! Since BitFinity is a wholly separate site from BitF, we thought itd be good to keep the forums separate. However, the Brawl in the Family Forums will still remain up and running as well! BitFinitys new forum will be a good place to talk Tadpole Treble and other developer discussion though.

Andwhat of www.brawlinthefamily.com? Dont worrythe sites not going anywhere (even though shutting it down would probably increase book sales!); youll be able to check back on all 600 comics at any time.

How about the Store? Well, were sold out of everything except Volume Ones and Eight Formidable Bosses Shirts. Both are on clearance sale, especially paperbacks of Volume One, which are cheaper than ever!

And the Forums? Theyre not goin anywhere either!

In short, everything here on the site will stay here for the foreseeable future, so youll still be able to party with the Random button at any time~

Okay then. I think thats everything. Ill still be around, finally getting around to checking my email and such, andoh yeah, writing/designing two absolutely enormous books. Thats after months of constant working and planning to get all this ended in a timely and satisfying fashion! I havent slept past 8:30 AM since the Summer!

But you know what? Im happy to do all that, and I wouldnt trade my experiences with Brawl in the Family over the past few years for anything. Remember, friends, as long as these characters live on through you guys (and Nintendo, of course), theyll continue to have adventures and stories for decades.

So farewell, Kirby, Dedede, Meta Knight, Adeleine, Waluigi, and all the fans out there whove followed this silly comic strip for so long! Thanks for letting me share this part of my life with all of you.

-Matthew Taranto, lifelong Nintendo fan

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With the Cactus Airflow 2L, Citroen thinks it's found a way to bring the cost of hybrid technology down to earth using nothing but air. Based on a production Cactus model, the natty, low-roofed concept car has a unique hybrid compressed air/gas...

This year’s Godzilla was a much better film than the last one we saw back in 1998, but no movie is made without a sin in the eyes of YouTube film critics CinemaSins.

The Cluny Museum in France provides this eye-opening demonstration on how soldier’s fought while wearing full armor in medieval Europe.

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[baconzombie]

I hope I haven’t miscategorized.

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Brace yourselves, Earthbound fans, an unofficial fourth sequel to Nintendo’s cult-classic RPG series is in the works! Set in an idealized vintage America, Mother 4 follows the adventures of a young boy and the leader of a biker gang, who get caught up in the whirlwind of events surrounding a group calling themselves the Modern Men.

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Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

Destiny's infamous loot cave is dead. But a cheeky developer has paid homage to the beloved engram-farming location with a game you can play right in your browser.

Sure, other caves are being touted as successors to the magnetic exploit in Bungie's popular new shooter. You still need to fire up Destiny to get to those locations, though. However, for those times when you need to scratch your cave-shootin' itch away from home, you can play Daniel Rosas' Interactive Cave Shooting Simulator right in your browser.

Granted it doesn't have any actual enemies or anything like that but, man, look all those engrams! This cave isn't stingy at all. Overall, the joke manages to be funny, despite clearly being a quick weekend's work.

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This popular infomercial parody skit from the British sketch comedy television series The Peter Serafinowicz Show has inspired a slew of YouTube Poop remixes on YouTube.

Once an old French man of the May '68 generation said to me: “You can’t imagine what sexual revolution means for us, who grew up in the Catholic country where sex was a sin.” I answered: “It has to be like the Internet for us, who grew up in Soviet Union where information was a treasure.”

For the majority of young men, imagining a Soviet closed society is as hard as it is to imagine the world without miniskirts, contraception, and X-rated video. However, I grew up in a world where any information was strictly controlled. There were a handful of Hollywood movies each year, translations of 20-30 years old sci-fi novels, the first volume of Lord of the Rings (no second and third), only one disc from The Beatles and no discs of The Doors or Rolling Stones. Many foreign books and movies were prohibited or just unavailable: not only the politically charged 1984, but the innocent Star Wars (because Star Wars was a nickname of Reagan’s space program). As a result, the rare lucky ones who traveled abroad, retold movies that they saw (“You know, Jaws has very simple plot…”). We had Samizdat – the underground circulation of typewritten books – but mostly it was anti-Soviet prose and poetry or – rarely – poorly-translated pornography. We had no fanzine system or means for sharing independent information about movies, books, music etc.

I grew up and the Iron Curtain collapsed – and after a few years we discovered the Internet. Soon we could find everything we needed: the full filmography of any director, the receipts of bomb and drug manufacturers, English texts of classics and Russian translations of almost everything.

It was like the sexual revolution for a graduate of Catholic school.

We were overdosed by free information.

The first years of the Internet in Russia were full of ecstasy and euphoria. We believed that information must be free and the times of propaganda were gone: any person who has access to non-censored news would easily choose the truth. We felt secure and safe: we knew encryption and nobody could catch us in our new brave world.

Two decades later and it’s hard to find the traces of our belief in the Russian Internet. The only thing we inherited from the nineties and the Samizdat are the torrents and e-libraries. Copyright is dead: almost any film and any book can be downloaded for free after a five minute search. The film distributors have to make arrangements with pirates about “two week vacancies” after theatre premieres, but the small publishers are just bankrupt. I’m not sure it’s the great result we dreamt in early years of the Internet.

Talking about security and freedom, we have only bad news: the secret service spying (not only in Russia), mailbox hacking, the blocking of anti-Putin sites… the Kremlin controls the majority of online media in Russia and talks about building a China-style Great Russian Firewall.

However the worst is the old good propaganda. Surprise! – It still works! There are dozens of comments on any political post. The commentators write about the wisdom of Putin, the increasing Russian economy and the greedy and guileful United States who dreams to destroy Russia and conquest their territory before a San-Andreas earthquake or Yellowstone explosion ruins their country. It is said that some of the comments are sponsored by a special political center (the pay is 3 bucks per comment), however I’m afraid somebody writes this bullshit for free: sometimes people choose lies even when they have access to independent information.

So, we are lost: there is no freedom of information that we dreamt about and spying and the state propaganda are stronger than ever. It seems that we are like the generation from the sixties who believed that everybody who tasted sex-drugs-rock-n-roll would never be slave of the System.

Nice to know we are not the first to delude ourselves about the importance of new technology and new culture. It is a weak consolation. However, you can envy us: we were so happy twenty years ago when we discovered the Internet and thought we discovered a cure for lies and mind-control. That kind of of happiness is a rare experience.

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Roundabout is a game that contains roundabouts but isn't actually about roundabouts — no, a more accurate title would be: Help! I'm A Limousine And I Can't Stop Spinning.

Ok, that isn't a particularly catchy title (I've never been good at titles). But I took a break from being horribly ill to play this game because I believed I'd be a prime candidate to drive this ever-rotating limo. I've had the experience, you see. I remember fondly playing Kuru Kuru Kururin, a sort of obscure GBA title in the early 2000s, and I had no trouble getting a long rotating stick through Kuru Kuru Kururin's labyrinthine levels.

But we live in the future now, where my senses are dulled from years of existential turmoil and, despite Roundabout having a similar infinite spinning mechanic, I must admit, I'm not very good at the game.

Luckily Roundabout is extremely forgiving, letting you carry on as you smack your poor limo into strategically placed lampposts and cars. Watching my limo explode became a regular experience as I made my way in perpetual spin as you can see above.

Wish to tweet words at me? I can be found here @laserfrog.

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The menu at Fountain City Coffee in Columbus, Georgia is the beginning of an epic breakfast adventure.

Brought to light by Kumanoki on Reddit, this listing of purchasable breakfast goods begs the question — should we sacrifice readability and potentially alienate non-game-savvy customers for the sake of a The Legend of Zelda reference? The answer is yes. Always.

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That you sent an introductory telegram just as a forewarning of more insults to follow?

zooophagous:

boujhetto:

Man’s best friend

I like how he picks him up and is all, “There you go!”

fucked his shit up

LMMFAOOOOO

He just puts him over the counter all “Yeah that’s right Sparky you fuck his shit up”