A Guide to Arguing with Stupid People over the Internet, Part I

October 13, 2005 · Posted in General · 4 Comments 

Guideline #1: Sarcasm and reductio ad absurdum are lost on the stupid. If you want to make a ridiculous and obviously false statement in order to make fun of a stupid person's inane argument, please indicate explicitly what you are doing, otherwise your opponent will most likely believe that you are genuinely agreeing with him.

Guideline #2: Just because stupid people don't provide references doesn't mean you shouldn't. Demanding that each study cited as evidence be accompanied by a link to a reputable publication substantially cuts down on the noise generated by completely ludicrous and unsupportable claims.

Guideline #3: Being in the right doesn't excuse you from checking your spelling and grammar and writing logically constructed, coherent sentences. By writing like an eight-year-old child, you make your side look stupid.

That is all for now, but there's an awful lot of potential material here. :/

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Review: Heart of Empire (on CD)

October 5, 2005 · Posted in General, Reviews · 1 Comment 

About two years ago I picked up an indie comic at a Paperweight (our local chain of purveyors of remaindered and rejected books, magazines, comics and stationery imported from the UK, possibly in a slightly dodgy way). It was called The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, part 1 of 9. It caught my attention because of its funky steampunk cover art. I read it, and thought it was kind of cool, although very new-wavey – the titular character has the unique ability to travel between the parallel worlds of the Multiverse at will, and works as an agent of the civilised parallel zero-zero, fighting the evil influence of a race of beings called “the Disruptors”. I thought it was a pity that I would probably never be able to find parts 2 to 9. Then I put it with the rest of my comic books, which were at that stage fewer than ten in number, and forgot about it.

Then came the Great CNA Remaindered Comic Book Special of 2004, and my first real job, which together sparked off my trade paperback collecting habit. Faced with the novel concept of having money, and being able to order things from overseas, I started looking for collections of things I had read parts of and liked. I discovered that The Adventures of Luther Arkwright had been published in a trade paperback, and that it also had a sequel called Heart of Empire. Unfortunately, the only book that It was possible for me to order thrugh my local comic shop was the heinously expensive special hardcover edition of Heart of Empire. So I gave up again.

Then, about a month ago, I found part 5 of Heart of Empire in the shop while idly browsing through comics after a very early ousting in a V:TES tournament. And it was really cool. And then I found out that Bryan Talbot had produced a CD which contains the entirety of Heart of Empire, as well as lots of supplementary material like annotations and the original pencilled and inked versions of all the pages. And this CD could be purchased from his official site through PayPal. So Simon ordered it for me. And then we waited, and worried that it had been nicked at the post office or accidentally redirected to Siberia, but a few days ago it finally arrived, and yesterday I read the whole thing. Well, the whole comic, anyway, and all of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (more about that later) – there are pages and pages of annotations still to go, and other neat things to look at.

Both comics are very enjoyable steampunk stories. HoE is more focused and linear than tAoLA. The art has also evolved and improved a lot (unsurprisingly, since the two books are about ten years apart). tAoLA places more emphasis on the multiverse aspect of the setting, and includes a lot more spiritual and supernatural elements (the mystery of Luther’s existence, his death and resurrection, the nature of his mystic powers…). It also jumps between the main story and a number of flashbacks. HoE is mostly a straightforward tale set in the parallel where Luther was involved in the English Revolution and fathered a twin brother and sister – the sister, Victoria, the Princess Royal, is the lead character. It just happens that the events in this parallel are having a cataclysmic effect on the rest of the multiverse.

The CD is a good deal. It costs £20 (including shipping to everywhere). You get high-resolution images of all of HoE, with the pencil and ink drawings and the author’s annotations, and all of tAoLA as well (I only realised that once I had the CD). The tAoLA images are low-res and you can’t read some of the tiny text, but you get the general idea of what is going on. The material is accessible through an HTML interface, so it’s platform-independent, and you can flip through the pages with your favourite external image viewer if you like.

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