book interlude

[jazzfish]

Classes are going ... alright? I have no concerns about three of five: Intro to ArcGIS is "just how to use this fairly complicated program," and Intro To GIS and Intro To Mapping are, well, intro courses. I'm more concerned about GIS Programming and GIS Computing but that's mostly because I am annoyed by the professor (and, in the case of Programming, at potentially having to spend $90 on a book to learn Python).

What are you reading?

Other than stuff for class, which is mostly PDFs and video lectures at this point ... oh, I guess I'm still in the middle of Mike Carey's The Unwritten comic, I should get back to those. And I've still got a bookmark in Jessica Fern's Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

Rick Shelley's early-nineties portal fantasy The Varayan Memoir, because I had fond memories of them and they were in the used bookstore. More specifically, I had fond memories of the first but not so much the other two, which seemed odd. Having reread, I can confirm. These ... are not good. Shelley's got some interesting worldbuilding ideas but with maybe three exceptions his characters are not even two-dimensional, they're one-dimensional, and his plots are "a bunch of stuff happens, with no real narrative progression from A to B." I couldn't tell you most of what happens in the second book and I literally read it three weeks ago. The first book sets up an interesting world ("the buffer zone" between Fairy and the 1990s human world) and some potentially intriguing characters and situations. Then the second throws all that away for a stupid end-of-the-world fetch-quest, and the third doubles down on that. Oh well.

Over the last week and a half I also read the entire archive of the webcomic Dumbing of Age, which is a terrible name for a really good comic. It follows a bunch of college students, mostly freshmen, through, well, so far through their first semester and a half or so. (The first nine? years of real time got through I think about two months of comic time.) The characters are an interlocking Absolute Drama-Prone Mess, and it’s genuinely amusing and occasionally actually-laugh-out-loud-funny, and well-written and plotted and drawn. And with a dash of unreality to keep it interesting. The "main" character's a recovering fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which felt pleasantly familiar. (I shook that off mostly during high school, but the process was not dissimilar.)

It's also got an Obviously Autistic character, Dina, who's my favourite (everyone's favourite) who everyone thinks is weird but is also solidly a part of the group. Here, have some Dina comics:

• Dina doesn't understand people ("I prefer dinosaurs.")
  
• Dina likes cereal (I sympathise a lot with Amber in this one)
  
• Dina plays Apples to Apples ("In my experience, whenever someone claims that there is no correct answer, that is never actually the case.")

Sadly I'm caught up as of yesterday evening, so now I get them one strip a day like everyone else. Alas.

What do you think you'll read next?

Jeez, I don't know. I'd like to read either The Dragon Republic or A Spindle Splintered but I do not know that I have the brain for something new. Maybe I'll go back to Mercedes Lackey ebooks.

Comments

[shanaqui]

It's always really funny with one-strip-a-day comics to realise how little time is passing for the characters, sometimes. 😆

[jazzfish]

I'm more used to either real-time-ish comics, or comics without a strong continuity. It's particularly noticeable in Dumbing Of Age because the "contemporary" references remain contemporary even when just "two weeks ago" comic-time they were talking about something from six years ago.

[lee_future]

Glad to hear classes are going OK! New starts are always a bit bracing.

I enjoyed these shared comics. Hope your guests this weekend are a net positive on the stress of all the new.

[mneme]

Hmm. Is Joyce the main character? I thought it was Amber! (it might be Walky, except that "It's Walky" -- the creator's other main long-form comic--has Walky as the main character, but Walky's not NOT the main character of DoA).

It also has gay, trans (but not actually car->person, technically), and non-binary characters. It has a heck of a lot of characters, really, and boy does a lot of stuff happen in those 4ish months (as well as something like 15 years of outside/societal changes to the world, something Willis lampshaded in his recent Dork Tower crossover and a feature of daily strips that maintain internal continuity but still try to make references and/or stay current to the outside world).

[greenstorm]

The dinosaur one is especially funny because our interpretation of dinosaurs has been in near-constant flux since before we knew they existed, from biblical giants to slow lizards to fast predators to nesting birds to feathered and now they've slowed t-rex down again after some stress-test modeling of its bones. And people get upset whenever any of this happens.

Fixed and unchanging indeed.

[jazzfish]

Indeed! I thought that immediately on reading it and was kinda surprised. And later strips show Dina getting excited about new dinosaur information.

I'm sure she has an in-character explanation, and I imagine it boils down to "people are confusing and scary." Which is fair.

[jazzfish]

Thanks! Seems to have been alright, which is nice.

[jazzfish]

My argument for "Joyce is the 'main character' is based on: 1) she was in the very first strip; 2) my sense, not having checked the tags, is that she's been in more strips than anyone else by a significant margin; 3) in the About page Willis says that her character is based on his own experiences. These are admittedly all pretty shaky. And honestly in a comic with this many characters and interlocking storylines it doesn't necessarily make sense to talk about a single "main" character.

I in fact started reading as a direct result of the Dark Tower crossover! I'd heard of "It's Walky" and "Roomies" but only as names, I'd never gotten around to looking them up.