Starflier

This is apparently the week of dirty jokes.

Book Review Tuesday is here! More reviews at TheWeinerWorks.com

Pyongyang (DeLisle) A quick and fun sketch of the author’s time spent working for an animation studio in North Korea. I don’t have too much to say about it, other than that it’s quite enjoyable, and that I plan to read other books by the author. This isn’t a memoir like March or Maus - it’s not trying to bring you to a heightened awareness of the universe. It’s not particularly poignant, nor is it trying to be. It’s just an incredible well-told, occasionally quite funny, recounting of a short strange time in the author’s life.

Elbow Room (Dennett) Okay, so I’ve wanted to read a book on compatibilism, the belief that “free will” and a deterministic universe are compatible. This seems crazy to me, and I trust the reasons are obvious.

So, I read this book, and my honest initial reaction was disappointment. A lot of the book is spent talking about computer, biology, evolution, and so forth, which to me seems like a sort of sideshow. If so, it’s an especially egregious sideshow, since Dennett frequently complains of perilously misleading elements stuck into philosophical theories.

That said, as I thought it over and discussed it more with people, I got the basic idea, which (to simplify drastically) isn’t so much that you can have free will in a deterministic universe, but that your idea of what free will means is probably wrong. I don’t want to go too in depth in this review, but as a way to think about it, try to consider what the basic physical rules would be for a universe that permitted your intuitive notion of free will. It’s hard to think of anything that doesn’t posit some cheat that just asserts that you do.

In short, I didn’t get the hit of wild enlightenment I was hoping for. Unusually for me, I learned something, yet left disappointed. I will illustrate by the use of what I’ll call Two Dialogues Concerning Free Will.

Dialogue 1:

Mom: Hey, you wanna see a DINOSAUR?!

Kid: but isn’t that impossible?!

Mom: come with me!

[Cut to: Park]

Mom: Meet the pigeon! You know, according to science, birds are living dinosaurs!

Kid: But I wanted a T. Rex!

Mom: Jesus, kid. Obviously that was never gonna happen.

Dialogue 2: Compatibilist: Hey, you wanna see me combine free will and determinism?!

Zach: Sure thing! But how?

Compatibilist: I’ll show you!

[Cut to: Zach reading book]

Zach: So determinism is still true, but individuals appear to have choices, and we can call that free will if we like?

Compatibilist: Yeah. What? Did you think I was going to claim an individual human could defy causality itself?

Zach: I thought maybe-

Compatibilist: By Descartes’ beard, you’re dumb!

--End of Scene-- So, that’s where I am now on this. Like the kid at the park, I’m not disagreeing with the idea that my initial notion of the subject matter was flawed. I’m just annoyed at the way the exciting revelation was presented.

Vietnamerica (Tran) What a great memoir. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs in graphic novel format lately, and this one was one of the very best, both in terms of its style and execution. I especially enjoyed the way in which the book moved from scene to scene without frequently telling you what year or location it was.

The artwork and, well, comicking itself was just so good that I rarely had to take a second to figure out where the scene had changed to.

The only critique that occurred to me is that the “character” of Tran himself in the story feels very… unformed. Maybe this is simply because it depicts Tran mostly at a younger age, where he would’ve been, indeed, unformed. But, I couldn’t help but feel that the character is so self-flagellating (he is almost always depicted as a sort of know-it-all punk kid) that you miss what could be a more whole interaction between kids and parents. Tran’s past self feels less like a person than a point of embarrassment that the author is covering over with humor.

It still works well enough, but I would’ve loved if, here and there, we had a moment of just Tran being himself, in a way that only develops character, rather than moving forward the book’s telling of history. But, still, quite a good memoir comic, and absolutely beautiful.

We're running out of most tickets for BAHFest MIT, so we've moved over some of the more expensive ones to lower levels. Buy soon or feel shame!

Hey Boston geeks! We moved over some tickets to the $8 student level, in case some people felt priced out by the fancier options.

A few months ago, we saw a hummingbirb making a nest outside our bedroom window.

She laid some eggs and then there were BABY BIRBS and they were VERY CUTE.

Here are some of the pictures my wife and I took of them!

(I am embedding these as tweets mainly so the videos play, but if you can’t see the pictures in your email or feed, visit this post on the site instead, maybe that’ll work!)

hummingbirb mom in the tree outside pic.twitter.com/eYafTo3JXo

— David Malki ! (@malki) February 18, 2017

tfw you are a humminbirb an you are makin a fluffy nest pic.twitter.com/oyWqahMVYk

— David Malki ! (@malki) February 20, 2017

LET'S TALK BIRBS. First, there was mama birb pic.twitter.com/GOESebTWC1

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

Mama birb is good at being fluffibirb pic.twitter.com/O5xKkZWloK

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

WE HAVE ACHIEVED SMALLBIRBS pic.twitter.com/pTu5ifTCQa

— David Malki ! (@malki) March 18, 2017

v.i.b. very important birbs pic.twitter.com/RsdnWYIM64

— David Malki ! (@malki) March 22, 2017

birbs i have known pic.twitter.com/jDAkZiyUBe

— David Malki ! (@malki) March 22, 2017

when u have that best friend from small times pic.twitter.com/vs3T8f1Gx4

— David Malki ! (@malki) March 22, 2017

when u are a hummenbirb mom with 2 growin birbs an' they need that nectarbarf pic.twitter.com/cjOMqsJRRi

— David Malki ! (@malki) March 22, 2017

when u love that nectarbarf from mom—but it gives u the squirty poops pic.twitter.com/jafhO0u1sq

— David Malki ! (@malki) March 22, 2017

weebirbs start getting floofy too pic.twitter.com/cin3bCKElA

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

floofybirbs turn into fattybirbs pic.twitter.com/Ab6plkQROU

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

fattybirbs start fallin out the ding dang nest pic.twitter.com/X1p6RtdBCV

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

until one day…………….. pic.twitter.com/hZGJezRPf5

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

Birbs were gone on Friday morning.

"I hope that's not an omen of anything," said @mrsmalki

That night, we had a baby

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

.@MrsMalki It was nice of the writers to wrap up the birb storyline right as we segued into the smalldude storyline, keeps us hooked!!

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

@malki @MrsMalki David I don't want to alarm you but is it possible that your child is actually just three hummingbirds in a onesie

— Dylan Meconis (@dmeconis) April 6, 2017

@dmeconis @MrsMalki Hmmmmmm……good question pic.twitter.com/yc5Vye66ob

— David Malki ! (@malki) April 6, 2017

@malki @MrsMalki If your baby doesn't grow up to bring the story full circle by being crowned High King of the Hummingbirds I'll be a little disappointed.

— Maija (@maijasauna) April 6, 2017

That’s my little boy up there!! He is TEN DAYS OLD and he is extremely small still. His main interests right now are:

1. Snoozing
2. Slurping down liquid
3. Wiggling

I am told this is normal.

Comics will continue at an irregular pace!! Make sure you’re on the email list or Facebook page or Twitter feed or RSS feed.

Thank you very much for the well wishes you have sent as well! Mom and baby are fine and so am I.

Wooh! Another Space Elevator Bonus defeated. Sorry for the regular nags about the book - I try to keep them as unobtrusive as possible. Plus, hey, bonus comic.

For some reason it felt weird to draw “hunger lines” in panel three. Don’t think I’ve ever drawn those things.

I didn’t even know “tea tastings” was a thing.

dan’s flu is a much better employee

Sorry geeks. Hopefully we'll be able to release the big thing Monday. I promise it'll be worth the wait!

Marvel as Jon Wilson explains spider evolution at BAHFest Sydney 2016.

PS: Just about a week left to get your BAHFest East proposal in!

Was about to play a DVD on my iMac and just realized that it didn’t have an optical drive. Didn’t even think to check and see if this computer had one when I bought it.

Why Do Birds Sing? From BAHFest Sydney 2016