Introducing xkcd

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book, books, comic, Randal Munroe, what if?, xkcd

Just finished reading What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe, creator of the xkcd comic. My next post will be the book review, but since I won’t have time to complete it before this post it due, I want to give you some background about the comic and the author.

If your Facebook friends are anything like mine, you’d seen xkcd comics before. xkcd is a “webcomic about romance, sarcasm, math, and language. The art is basic, often featuring faceless characters, but the level of detail and research that goes into the more complex panels is mind-boggling. Though I understand most of the humor, some of it is over my head, yet I was still surprised to discover Munroe is a former NASA roboticist with an asteroid named after him.

This is one of my favorites:

What If? explores the answers to questions such as “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” and “What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?”

There’s also some “Weird (and worrying) questions from the what if? [submission box]” interspersed. Each has a cartoon answer varying in response from “Thank you, Shelby, for my new recurring nightmare,” and the stick figure calling the police.

You have all of that and more to look forward to from my post coming up on Friday.

-Eliabeth

__11 stages of editing

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books, comic, editing, funny, gif post, humor, humour, stages of editing, stories, woes of a writer, writing

So…Eliabeth and I have just about finished our first draft of the second Blind Sight. After the draft comes the editing. The dreaded editing. Sometimes I get energised to edit and other times I really don’t want to do it. It’s a love/hate relationship for me.

Here are the exaggerated stages of me editing in GIF form that hopefully other writers (from fiction to even essays) can hopefully empathise with. For your entertainment!

1. “I don’t want to do it….why me??? Why can’t I write a masterpiece in the first go?”

2. I finally accept my fate and put my super-editing face on. I’m going to own this!3. I realise the amount of work I have to do.

4. When I find a scene I’m so proud of. “I can write!”

5. When I find a scene I’m ashamed of. “Did I write that piece of crap?

6. There’s too much to fix!

__favourite fictional ships

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augustus hazel, cartoon, comic, cute, fictional couples, funny, humor, love, pda, peeta katniss, public displays of affection, ron hermione, shipping

I’m not someone who particularly cares about public affection, but I can truly empathise with the character’s love for fictional couples. My first ship (you never forget your first love ship…) was Ron/Hermione. I shipped them so hard that I would write Ron/Hermione fanfiction to HarryPotterFanFiction.com to keep the story count higher than the other ships. Ah…my twelve year old self… But hey! It got me into writing!

I also love Peeta/Katniss (Hunger Games), Augustus/Hazel (The Fault In Our Stars), Odd Thomas/Stormy (Odd Thomas book), Liesel/Rudy (The Book Thief), Wade/Art3mis (Ready Player One). They’re the first ships that come to mind. What about you? What are your favourite fictional ships?

– Ermisenda Alvarez

__analogue kindles

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analogue kindles, art, book meme, books, children, comic, funny, future, humor, humour, illustration, kids, parenting, photography, reading meme, technology

I hope this day doesn’t come. 😛

I found this funny picture from George Takei’s Facebook page (he’s amazing!) The winner comment was: It’s one of those analogue Kindles, isn’t it? (by Mark Howlett).

Had to share it! Did it make you smile or laugh?

– Ermisenda Alvarez

__books you can’t put down

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authors, books, comic, cute, funny, readers, reading, writers

Found this little comic and thought it was fantastic! Isn’t it annoying yet wonderful when you find a book that does this to you? You just can’t put it down!

The Unit recently did this to me. Which books have done this to you lately?

– Ermisenda Alvarez

__txt 4 lyfe

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article, comic, drawing, english, funny, harvard, image, language, learning, life, photo, school, skills, text speak, txting, writing

I found this picture and I thought it was pretty funny. With certain individuals you can find this kind of text talk on facebook as well. I’m not a grammar Nazi but I don’t like text talk. I find it can often take more time to figure out what they’re trying to say then it would have taken to write it out properly. When you’re writing in a text message, I understand the desire to shorten, I do too from time to time. But if I have the room, I’ll just write it out properly.

I went to school for so many years so, why throw out all the English I learned? Presumably, despite what the teachers may have liked to think, English’s core purpose (at the very least) during high school was to improve one’s communication skills and confidence with the written language to prepare one for reading and writing (rather than specifically essays, poetry and creative writing skills). So, at the very least I can use full words instead of text speak in everyday life. That’s what I figure at least.

What are your thoughts?

EDIT: Hilarious article, a must read!

“If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html

– Ermisenda Alvarez