My Top 5 Favorite Web Comics

I read a lot of comics. While newspaper comics will always have a special appeal for me, webcomics have a great opportunity to stand out and be uniquie. They don't have a lot of restrictions that comics that print in papers do. Sometimes that leads to content issues, because the authors can say things they can't say in papers. That's not my favorite part. But they CAN do lots of cool stuff with artwork because of the lack of space restraints. So in this blog posting, I will tell you my 5 favorite web comics, why I love them, and why they are different from newspaper comics, and therefore probably wouldn't work in the papers.

5 - White Ninja Comics
White Ninja Comics don't make sense. There is no continuity and sometimes it is very very absurd. These comics definitely wouldn't work in papers because sometimes they are gross, and all the time they are weird. If you have a weird sense of humor, you will like it but if not you'll probably hate it.

4. Dr McNinja Comics
The second comic about a ninja that I like. This is a lot different from White Ninja. It has storylines, characters, and a lot better art. It's about a guy who came from a family of Irish ninjas and decides to become a doctor. He's like Batman, ER, and Jackie Chan all wrapped into one. And he has a gorilla secretary named Judy. This is more like a comic book than a comic strip, and I really enjoy it.

3 - We The Robots
This is a relatively new comic for me, but I really really like it. It's smart and kind of cynical. These little robots can sometimes have dirty mouths, but I think it has a lot of value. It comments on how people often don't appreciate the simple things, and when they try to they're often foiled. It has quickly risen to one of the web comics that I look forward to reading every time it comes out with a new one.

2 - Wondermark
Wondermark is pretty unique. Every week, the author takes these public domain images of Victorian drawings, scans them, and makes them into a comic that is consistently hilarious. It takes some getting used to, because sometimes the characters talk in a very Victorian style. Still, it tends to be current also. It creates some dissonance because you have some people talking about iPhones using Victorian language. It's almost always funny, and sometimes it's genius.

1 - Dinosaur Comics
And that brings us to my all time favorite web comic. Dinosaur comics is about a dinosaur named T-rex and his friends Dromiceiomimus and Utahraptor. T-rex is an enthusiastic guy who likes to talk about ideas, and Utahraptor is somewhat more grounded in reality and often shoots down T-rex's ideas. The art in Dinosaur comics is actually clip art, and is the same every day. The same six panels are repeated day after day and the text is all that changes. What's amazing is that, at least to me, it's consistently funny and engaging. It's simultaneously the most predictable and the most unpredictable web comic, because you never know what ways Ryan North (the author) will stretch the boundaries of his six panels. Anyway, here's a recent Dinosaur Comic. Sometimes, I really relate to T-rex.

Things You May Have Borrowed From Me

Well guys, I'm about to move. Since I'm about to move, there are a few things that I seem to be missing that I might have loaned out but forgot about. If I know that you have something of mine, I'll ask you about it personally, but here are some things that I know I'm missing, but can't remember who I gave them to. If I let you borrow one of these DVD's, I'd like it back before I leave. Thanks!

Unbreakable
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert
Derek Webb Concert
King of the Hill Season 1
Daredevil
Cinderella Man

Wizard!

You know that commercial where the guys from the 'other' cell phone companies summon a wizard from their van to curse the Alltel guy.



I am SO tired of that commercial. At first I thought it was kinda funny, but now I just hate it. Every time it comes on TV, it makes me want to quit watching TV forever. It always comes on during American Idol and NBC Thursdays, which are the times that I watch live TV the most. I'm not going to quit watching TV forever because I love television more than I hate that commercial.

Aside from that, I also am not a fan of Earth Day, and I don't care if it makes me a bad person. It's not a real holiday and I'm never in the mood to pretend to care about the environment more than I really do.

Why you should give RSS a try

I wish more of my friends took advantage of RSS feeds, because they have made my internet experience much easier. I will share my experience with you now, and maybe you will have a better internet experience too.

Let's say you have a friend who writes a blog that you enjoy reading. Your friend writes pretty regularly, but it's not like he updates his blog every day. You don't want to go to his webpage every single day to see if he's got a new posting, but if you don't go pretty regularly then you will miss a lot of it. RSS fixes all of that.

RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication.' It sends things from the internet to things called 'aggregators.' An aggregator is a program that collects the different feeds you subscribe to all in one place. So, I can get the blog posts from your friends blog sent to your aggreator, and every time your friend posts, you know about it right away.

You can subscribe to any number of different things. Lots of websites allow you to subscribe to their material in RSS form. The symbol for RSS looks like this:

Any URL in your browser that has that symbol next to it can be subscribed to as an RSS. Here's an example:

The result is similar to having your own newspaper delivered to you every day through the internet. You can get news feeds from any number of news sites like CNN. I like to get TV news through a site called BuddyTV and movies through Rotten Tomatoes. I also subscribe to comics, both webcomics and comics that appear in newspapers. Also, Facebook lets you subscribe to lots of things. I subscribe to all of my friends' notes so every time someone on my friend list puts a note up, it shows up on my RSS reader. Almost every blog has an option to subscribe, so if you check your RSS aggregator every day, the content will be different each time you check. I don't go to that many websites anymore, because the content that I want is automatically delivered to me every day. You can browse through the articles in chronological order, or you can filter them by feed or by category. I like to browse through them in the order they were published because it gives me a variety of news and comics and blogs to read, and I don't always know what will come next.

Anyway, there are several different RSS aggregators, but my favorite is called Google Reader. You can find it at google.com/reader. It's easy to add new feeds and it's easy to navigate. Here is a screenshot of what my Google Reader page looks like, looking at today's Get Fuzzy.


The disadvantage of Google Reader is that it's web based. You have to go to that website in order to use it. For Mac users, Apple Mail will get RSS feeds, but I don't really like how it works that much. I recently discovered a program called Vienna that collects RSS like a mail program does, but does it in a better way. I like it because I don't have to go on a web browser to get my feeds, and it will run in the background. When a new article appears, it shows up in the bottom of my screen like a new email would. Here's the same Get Fuzzy comic as it appears in Vienna.

Well, that's it. I hope this inspires you to go out and research RSS feeds and use them for yourself. It helps me to get to stuff I care about so I have more time to do other things rather than surf around sporadically on the web. Maybe you will subscribe to my blog first!

An Acquired Taste

Every once in a while, I make it a point to acquire a taste for something that I don't already like. The first time it happened, it was with cranberry juice. When I first had it, I didn't like the dry aftertaste, but I liked something about it, I guess. So I just drank it every day until I started to like it. I am pleased to announce that it is my favorite juice.

Then, in high school, I got fed up with not liking tea. So often I would go places, and all they had were tea and water, and then I would get water and people would criticize me for not getting tea. "You are from the south, aren't you?" Jerks. I mean, all it is is leafy water. Anyway, I decided that I would show those criticizers and start liking tea. So every time I went to a restaurant I ordered tea. I would drink it when my mom made it at home. Every Wednesday night, I got it at church instead of water. Wouldn't you know it? Eventually, I started liking sweet tea, and now I drink it like it's no big deal.

The next natural step is coffee, but I didn't man into it like I did sweet tea. I had to gradually ease myself into that taste. I would start out getting the Moolattes from Dairy Queen, which are just milkshakes with a hint of coffee. Then, I went to Starbucks and got frappucinos, which are like the Moolattes, except a little more coffe-like. Then one day, I made the leap into coffee made in a coffee pot with lots of cream and sugar, and that is what I drink now.

My next goal is to start liking black coffee. It's gonna be rough. I'm kind of dreading it. I'm gonna have to someday soon just stop putting stuff in my morning coffee and drinking it down like a man. I have hope though, my taste acquiring has been wildly successful in the past. A year from now, my goal is when somebody asks me how I like my coffee I will respond, "Black!"