now you’ve seen the first of the two books I’ll be launching soon – the Ancient Greek Mythical creatures ABC book – I’m ready to give you a taster of the second book…
It’s the eagerly-awaited (and very, very late) Ancient Greek Mythical Creatures Colouring book!
Each page of the 34-page colouring book features a traditional border, a line-art version of the artwork, and explanations of the creature pictured and the original source material that inspired it. It forms an excellent companion to the ABC creatures book!
Hello! Regular posting has taken a back seat while I’m teaching, looking after the toddler and move house. However, I’ve been working away at two exciting book projects that I’ll be launching soon on Kickstarter!
The first of these new books is the Ancient Greek Mythical Creatures ABC! This one is of course inspired by my daughter, an avid book enthusiast at the tender age of 22 months and just starting to learn her letters. Each (English) letter is illustrated with an Ancient Greek creature of Mythology, in soft but bright watercolours.
I’m looking forward to revealing more and to sharing the second book with you next week! Details of the launch coming soon!
Moody artwork of Succubi are those sort of things that bring with them questions. The expression, the pose, the setting combine into bringing to mind how things come to be in this moment. A work then of a blue Succubus, which is rare, but also one that expresses so much emotion. Blue demoness by Alexandra Curte This lovely work is by the artist Alexandra Curte and you can find the original page…
While I quite enjoyed Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, I think I'd still rank the first Doctor Strange movie higher than it, for a couple of reasons. First, it had a better, more cohesive story (extensive reshoots and cuts reportedly altered the sequel's original narrative), and more importantly it had Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One. Her presence was missed. I haven't seen the new Fantastic Beasts film yet, but I'll be sure to check it out when it hits streaming for some fun Dumbledore spell casting action.
I always enjoy going through the answers of our user surveys. One that has come up a few times, including the most recent one, is a desire for more mapped LCSH in WebDewey. I hear you! Mappings are a prime example of the value you can get out of WebDewey that just aren't practical in print.
Our current mapping of LCSH tends to be ad hoc. When we're working a certain area, we'll look for relevant LCSH to add on. Once upon a time, the editorial team tried to map all new LCSH every week. That quickly became more than we could chew! And if you've ever seen a mapped LCSH for a really obscure or specific topic, it may well have come from this. As you may know, the bar for authorizing an LCSH is much lower than that for a new Dewey number.
One comment on LCSH mapping in particular intrigued me:
More LC subject headings within the schedules as those tend to be more useful than Relative Index terms. Or at least make them match more
In years past, the editorial team often specifically chose not to map LCSH that were an exact or close match for a Relative Index term. While I can see the logic there, it's not a practice I've maintained. If you browse LCSH in WebDewey, for example, a heading that's not there just isn't there--an equivalent Relative Index term doesn't help.
Of course, it's a different story with keyword searching, which doesn't care about the source of a term. For that reason, I've often created Relative Index terms that differ from their equivalent LCSH--not to be contrarian, but to enhance keyword accessibility. We also have more flexibility with Relative Index terms. For example, we could give two Relative Index terms for close concepts that are clumped into a single LCSH, or use a more internationally recognized version of a US-centric term.
So my questions for you...
What are some specific areas (or even specific numbers) that you'd like to see more LCSH added to?
Do you prefer Relative Index terms that closely match LCSH, or do you want them to diverge?
Any other suggestions related to LCSH in WebDewey?
In panel three, Dabbler really means that altering someone’s mind without their consent is illegal. Super powers are new enough to the public that things like psychiatrists with mental powers aren’t really a thing yet. There’s definitely been uses for mental powers in the past, whether it’s a super, or a vampire from the Twilight Council helping out a soldier with PTSD and the like. (There’s also less sanctioned but still official uses for it like flipping a spy’s allegiance or Secret Service super bodyguards keeping all manner of foreign mental influence away from key personnel in the chain of command.)
That said, most supers (and supernaturals) with mental powers working for the government are part of Arc-DARK or various other intelligence agencies. The consensus is that the American public will be okay if big strong hero smash car on bad guy, but would lose their collective shit if one of Arc-SWAT’s field agents named “Z. V. BIHMP” (Zero Violence Because I Have Mental Powers)” walked up to a rampaging criminal and said “You should surrender yourself and cooperate with the authorities.” and the bad guy said “Okay.”
I know the question you’re asking. Can Sydney’s shield cut stuff when it pops into existence, and did she almost do something really horrendous to Dabbler and Parfait? Well, it can cut through water, certainly. Solids? Honestly I haven’t decided. Maybe it’s one of her power ups. If she can’t, that would mean that someone could zip tie her ankle to a chain link fence and she wouldn’t be able to raise her shields. It would be a temporary state of affairs as she could laser or lighthook the fence in short order, but it opens up a number of tactics that could be used against her.
So, I don’t normally talk about my birthday because I like keeping focused on the comic, but I thought this one time I’d indulge. First off, my birthday is May 4th, which means I was born under the sign of auspicious nerd cred. My birth year… was 1972. Which means I just turned 50. Yeah… I’m at least as shocked as you are. That sounds fucking old to me, too. I mean, apologies to anyone older than me, but 50 is one of those milestones that I think everyone agrees officially makes someone “an old.”
I don’t know what 50 is supposed to feel like, but I definitely don’t feel it. If you’re suddenly picturing some white-bearded grandpa in a straw fedora and a Hawaiian shirt gingerly bent over a drafting table, you can just knock that off right now. Still have a full head of (brown) hair, and no conspicuous wrinkles. The only thing that’s starting to hint at my age is a little more gray in my goatee. I’m not going to pass for 30, but 40? Eh, maybe.
The thing that makes me feel a little better about suddenly being 50 is remembering that Tom Cruise is 60. He was 52 in Edge of Tomorrow, 53 in M:I; Rogue Nation. Or maybe a year younger in each depending on when they were filmed. My point is, the dude doesn’t look fucking 60. Sure, actors have professional fitness coaches/consultants, and some of them get a little nip and tuck here and there. Still, it makes me think that 50 maybe isn’t so old. Also, Keanu Reeves was 50 when he made John Wick. Kate Blanchett was 48 as Hela in Thor: Ragnarok, and she was hella fine in that. Anyway, if I sound defensive, it’s because 50 still sounds old to me.
But let me tell you why being 50 is actually pretty cool. Being born in 1972 means I was 5 when the Atari 2600 came out. When you’re 5-10 years old and neither you nor anyone else has ever played a video game before, they were amazing. Well, some of the games were. The lack of a “seal of quality” on the 2600 library did doom the console because there was some shit game for it. But some of them were definitely fun. Nowadays? Have you ever played a collection of those retro games? Even with the spark of nostalgia on my side, they held my interest for about 5 minutes apiece. The point is, I got to grow up with the video game industry, alongside the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Apple IIgs, the X86 PC Clones. Ah, good times. Especially when Sound Blaster came along and made it so PC’s could do more than beep. Star Wars: Dark Forces on a Sound Blaster 64AWE was the business.
Speaking of Star Wars, that also came out when I was 5. I don’t recall seeing it in the theater, but I do remember seeing Empire. That’s less important than the overall influence that Star Wars had on science fiction in general. Before Star Wars, sci-fi was… well, kind of boring. Yes, Star Trek first aired in 1966, and definitely had a major impact, but other that there was Doctor Who and… a bunch of stuff like Flash Gordon. Not the one with the Queen soundtrack either. It was mostly a bunch of black and white stuff that made space look like basically any other job, only it involved a lot of foil and clothes dryer tubes. But man, after Star Wars came out? If you make a habit of watching bad movies, (or MST3K/Rifftrax) you know that you can gauge a movie’s real success based on the number of terrible rip offs that get made after its release. Jaws? Yeah, there’s a lot of bad shark movies out there. Alien rip-offs are practically a sub-genre of their own. But you know who the absolute king is? Yeah, mother fucking Star Wars. You think Battlestar Galactica would have gotten made without Star Wars? Or Starchaser: The Legend of Orin? (So many of you are like, “the fuck is that?”) or Prisoners of the Lost Universe, or Starcrash or you get the idea. The point is that it changed how people thought about sci-fi, and it changed everything that came after it.
So yeah, my formative years were filled with Piers Anthony and Dragonlance novels, Chris Claremont X-Men, Atari, Commodore 64’s, and Nintendo, Stars both Trek and Wars, the tail end of the Cold War, post Moon-landing America (when it was still majorly on people’s mind and not “something my parents generation did with fucking slide rules”), Robotech (yes, the Harmony Gold version, but it was fucking amazing), and slasher films where actors were covered in real fake viscera and not fake digital gore. I’ve lived through porn being a thing you sneak a look at if you have a friend who knows where his dad kept his Playboys and/or Hustlers to the BBS era of watching a single picture of a naked lady load literally one line of pixels at a time to unlimited HD porn all the time everywhere, and lived through 5.25″ floppy disks and Bill Gates saying that 640K of RAM is more than anyone needed, to “Ug, this Ipad only comes with 64 gigabytes of storage and doesn’t even have an SD Card Slot.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer to be 20 because it’d be a lot more likely I’d still be around to check out the PlayStation 21, but it is what it is. I don’t ever pine for “the good old days” like a lot of proper old people, but being alive when computers basically weren’t a thing to where we are today? From there literally being maybe 13 TV channels to “all media ever on instant demand?” From print porn to omniporn? It’s been an awesome ride so far, and here’s to another 50 years (when I’m sure I’ll insist I don’t look a day over 90.)
Almost done with the May incentive. Probably be up with the next monday comic.
April Vote Incentive is up! Looks like someone had better make sure their life insurance includes acts of Snu Snu.
Alternate versions over at Patreon include less cloth-y versions as usual, but also some of those color changing chokers.
Her shirt, since no one has figured out the kanji yet, says “I ahegao you. (As long as you ahegao me.)”
This page should answer any questions about what’s going on here, in case you weren’t up to speed, or, you know, have just forgotten some of the details of a webcomic from 5 months ago. The TL:DR version is that the symbol on a succubus’s collar is determined by her master. Parfait’s collar looks different than Dabbler’s, but still features the quadruple X symbol, meaning her master is also Tom.
I had to edit this page as I was drawing it. Originally, I figured Dabbler would be incensed by Thothogoth here, but as shown on the page linked above, Dabbler said that succubi like who they are, including their bonds. It definitely depends on who they’re bonded to to some degree, but, again, on that page she also said that the council of succubus Matriarchs provide considerable disincentive to those who think they’re signing up for a punching bag/fleshlight.
So originally, Dabbler immediately whipped out her vierhander (her sword is a 4-hander) and threw down with Tom, but if I’m trying to be true to her earlier statements, then she’d actually be happy for Parfait. It’s still kind of a dick move on Tom’s part though. I mean, normally if your kind-of-current-but-mostly-ex-even-if-you-banged-him-like-three-days-ago-boyfriend basically announces that he’s going to start banging your younger sister because you’re not well behaved enough? Uh, yeah, you’re gonna throw down. But these are succubi, so it’s… a little different for them. It still doesn’t mean Dabbler can’t be protective of her little half-sister.
I’m not sure a soul-eater (yes, she’s holding Blackrazor there) would actually do much to a person unless it strikes the fatal blow, but the way Dabbler is threatening with it here, I’m going to say that anything that gets chopped off by a soul-eater can’t be regrown without taking some really extraordinary measures.
As far as the whole “infinite regen+portal+volcano” goes… I mean, yikes, right? Only, since Tom is a Fiend, he’s going to have some not-insignificant resistance to heat. HOWEVER – lava is fucking hot. It generally ranges from 1,300 to 2,200°F. So 50% heat resistance would still mean getting your dick cooked at, let’s average it out to 1,200°? I almost wrote “Ice Volcano” but that seemed like it would take a little more explanation. Like… a geyser of liquid nitrogen or something?
I don’t think people appreciate how hot lava is. I’ve actually been near lava. My family went on vacation to Hawaii, I want to say it was in 1984 after the volcano erupted and a big swathe of the island got covered in lava. Maybe we went in 85 or 86, because at the time, you could take a bus out to see the cooled flow, which just looked like a million trucks full of asphalt had spilled down the mountain all the way to the ocean, and then melted. Anyway, there was still an active tube of lava running under all the cooled stuff, and we could lean out over a cliff and watch the stuff pour right into the waves. The tourguide said that if the wind started blowing in our direction, we would have to leave right away, because the steam from the lava hitting the water would have all sorts of nasty shit in it and would destroy our lungs.
So standing upwind from this lava that hadn’t had a chance to cool hardly because it was running up a lava tube before it hit the air, from about… 100 feet away(?) the heat from this lava was cooking the oils out of my face. It was like sticking my face into a really hot sauna whenever I leaned out to look at the lava.
I say all of this to reinforce the horror of Dabbler’s threat, but also to tell you that the experience in Hawaii has ruined every movie with lava in it since. That Kali-Ma scene in the Temple of Doom when the guy was in the cage and the trap door opened up below him, then he’s lowered into the lava below? ABSOLUTELY NOT. The instant that doop opened, he would have been blasted into ash like he’d been standing five feet behind an F-16 when it was taking off. The shaft would have focused that heat into a heat laser. Like a blow torch verses flash paper. And the scene in the Tommy Lee Jones movie Volcano, where the subway chief guy is standing on the back of the subway car, surrounded by lava, then he tries to jump over it, but lands in it, then tosses the guy on his shoulder over the lava while his bones melt? How ’bout no! Standing two feet directly above lava means not only are you on fire, I’m pretty sure the ambient air temperature means your lungs would be ash already. Even discounting the heat, I’m pretty sure if my bones were melting, I wouldn’t have the wherewithal to shot-put a human being. Adrenaline? Yeah, probably. Mental faculties? Probably not.
April Vote Incentive is up! Looks like someone had better make sure their life insurance includes acts of Snu Snu.
Alternate versions over at Patreon include less cloth-y versions as usual, but also some of those color changing chokers.
Her shirt, since no one has figured out the kanji yet, says “I ahegao you. (As long as you ahegao me.)”
okay wait i went back and screenshotted some (most?) of the good ones that were like on the main plot here so you all saw the top posts with the Irish Stegosaurus well that evolved into
also kind of unrelated but because of this stupid subreddit im actually not as bad at identifying flags
anyways sorry for the long post i just really loved this whole thing
Almost done with the May incentive. Probably be up with the next monday comic.!['We're shocked by the Notre Dame fire. Click for our tribute to--' [okay] 'Now that we're all staying at home these past few weeks thanks to this new coronavirus, we--' [okay]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/welcome_back.png "'We're shocked by the Notre Dame fire. Click for our tribute to--' [okay] 'Now that we're all staying at home these past few weeks thanks to this new coronavirus, we--' [okay]")
