A few of my favourite things

I like webcomics. I read them compulsively, which I consider an extension of being overexposed to the Beano when I was younger. I've also been asked before which ones I read, so I decided to put together a list of the ones I read regularly in ascending order of which I like.

Anyone who knows their webcomics will immediately notice that I tend to go for the story based comics rather than gag-a-day ones. But it still has to be funny. Also, I normally like the artwork to be up to a decent standard, but that isn't always the case.

13. Kitty Litter
The art isn't great but the humour is wonderfully sadistic. Think if Sluggy Freelance were to solely focus on Bun-Bun.

12. Lizzy
Rather inventively uses Flash rather than still images, i.e. stuff happens and speech bubbles appear when you move your mouse over. The plot, however, is yet to really build up and the cybernetic stuff is a bit gory in places. Plus the humour levels are massively inconsistent.

10. Alien Loves Predator
Pretty innovative as far as the art goes. Rather than drawing stuff, this features photographs of action figures against photographs using the gift of Photoshop. The updates have become few and far between recently but some of the humour is priceless, if a bit specific to New York.

9. Maxwell the Demon
The idea of comparing the workings of hell to desk jockeying isn't a new one, but this one still does it wonderfully well with a lot of sharp gags and really nice art. The subplots involving his human girlfriend make for some very funny stuff, and I like the nice touches like Gabriel being a chainsmoker.

8. Belphegor (RIP)
Good while it lasted. It was another hell-based comic, only featuring a lot more of the more classic demonic imagery. It started out as simple potty humour and compuer game references but it eventually managed to evolve into left-wing political satire. Unfortunately, it ground to a halt over a year ago.

7. Applegeeks
This took me a while to get into. Hawk's is possibly the best webcomic art out there, but and he and Ananth have this annoying habit of shifting styles a little too often and taken as a whole, this doesn't conform to any particular style. There will be some favourite story that most people will find, but it may take some searching for. The treatments of Ramadan should dispell any notions of Muslims not having a sense of humour.

6. Hate Song (RIP)
I miss this strip a lot. A lot of really disgusting and incredibly offensive humour that rarely pulled its punches. Kept losing its way a lot but always recovered with something even more disturbing that you'd expect in any one situation. Rather ominously, the banner across the top now says, "changes are coming". Not sure what that means.

5. Scary Go Round
The only British comic in the list but it is incredibly funny in places. John Allison's artwork is good but I preferred his original style to the freehand one that he uses now. The stories tend to meander and not connect with each other and in places they really lose the plot but there are some genuinely charming characters and humour that is far more quirky than most American strips are capable of.

4. Megatokyo
Manga, but made by an American. The pencil artwork, particularly the later stuff, is top notch (despite Fred Gallagher's apparent inability to distinguish between female characters by any method other than changing their hair) and the humour often has me laughing out loud, especially when Ed or Dom make an appearance. Just a shame that the mushy subplots get too self-pitying in places. Some of the parody is classic though, such as rent-a-zilla and the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division, and the overusage of l33t never gets old.

3. Goats
The genious of this in in the writing, with Jon Rosenberg churning out some real belly laughs on a regular basis, although I think you have to have the right sense of humour for it. Not so sure I like it as much post-infinite monkeys, but the gags alone are enough to keep me coming back if nothing else. The art has also come on massively over the years.

2. The Adventures of Dr. McNinja
The concept is easy to explain but hard to visualise. You have a doctor, who is also a ninja. His assistant is a gorilla, his mentor a clone of Benjamin Franklin and his sidekick a pubescent, velociraptor-riding Mexican bandito who grew his moustache by force of will alone. If you think that is daft, you should see his family. The strip is funny going on hilarious and while the art is done in a very traditional outline and ink way, this serves to further the parody. Relatively new but has already proved to be massively sucessful.

1. Sluggy Freelance
The the webcomic I have read the longest and still my favourite. Good artwork (the later stuff at least), funny and at times hilarious jokes and involving plotlines. Often faces criticism for some of the arcs getting overly complicated (especially the ones with the big back stories) and hard to stick with but if you can, it makes the picture as a whole all the more better. The stories don't seem to conform to any one overall masterplan but I see that as simply being more indicative of how long it has been running for. The general style has evolved over time, but Pete Abrhams continues to keep improving his writing and every now and then produces something that outdoes anything else out there. Ten minutes at a party has to be one of my favourite stories of all time.

So that's it.

Conspiracy theorists and GWB are more alike than they think. Discuss.

Something that has soaked up a lot of my time of late (mainly to relieve work stress of getting the new aircraft rack finished) on the internet is visiting 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking websites such as this, this and this (Jon being the one to blame for my interest). For those not familiar with such things, it's more or less akin to the various other conspiracy theories such as those surrounding the JFK assassination or the moon landings. For the most part, they're not quite as sinister as Holocaust denial or as ridiculous as David Ike's lizard people, but there's quite a lot out there, most revolving around the whole shebang on September the 11th being organised by the US government to justify everything that has occurred since, such as the Iraq war. It seems that most of the people coming up with this are either the ones who actively want to believe the worst about the government, the ones who like to think that they're in on some big secret or the plain and simple attention seekers.

Most of this I just find mildly entertaining, but the bit that really winds me up is the continual misuse of science and critical thinking. I do both for a day-job and hate to see them messed around with and as a result, I love seeing the perpetrators put in their place. The straight-up lies and bogus physics are painfully easy to smack down and fanciful interpretations almost as much so. Beyond that, you simply have pure speculative stuff that is impossible to prove either way because the theorists can't back up their facts and they automatically disbelieve anything the authorities say otherwise. And then you have the odd person who claims to have insider knowledge but is in fact full of crap.

The bit where the spurious arguing sets in is when they start cherrypicking facts and deliberately ignore anything that might contradict their arguments. The classic example is poring through transcripts of witnesses' testimonies and picking out any reference to seeing flashes or hearing bangs as evidence of explosives being used in a controlled demolition. The bit they never, ever tell you is exactly when and where these things were reported because they they often occur minutes or even hours in advance of the collapses, which of course means they had to have been something else. This kind of mentality is sent up brilliantly in the spoof Loose Trains.

I peer-review papers all the time for my job and one of the most obvious things that gets alarm bells ringing is when the authors proactively avoid any possible counterarguments to their argument rather than meeting them head-on and systematically explaining why their theory is the more plausible. Conspiracy theorists do this all the time, not in most cases because they are deliberately out to deceive but because they are so sure in their convictions that they are right that they will latch onto anything that supports their case. Everything else, no matter how comprehensive or authoritative, they develop this blind spot towards, dismissing it as meaningless or part of the conspiracy.


Which brings me nicely onto a parallel with the conspiracy theorists' arch-nemesis, the Bush administration. The fact that they told a bunch of lies to justify the Iraq invasion is not in question, but this story caught my eye today, which is basically a retelling of a documentary on CBS. If their version of events is correct, all the stuff about chemical weapons etcetera was based on a lone bullshitter from Iraq who wanted to claim asylum and get a green card. The US authorities should have had reasons to doubt his testimony (the Germans, who had picked him up, expressed reservations about his credibility) but instead decided to base a big chunk of their WMD intelligence on it. Subsequently, the powers that be played innocent, saying they were only acting on information they were presented and they couldn't help it if it was flawed and so on, but I can't help but to think that if they had been willing to look at the whole picture instead of the bits they liked, they would have come to more factual conclusion. Not that that was ever the objective for them, of course. They had a war to start.

I just find it very entertaining though that for all the claims of the governments being these inhuman puppetmasters and so on, it turns out that they're not that different after all. Bush doesn't need some clandestine plot to blow up buildings and blame it on someone else. He just uses the same logical fallacies that the conspiracy theorists have at their disposal. Although, I'll admit, what he achieved with those was far more devastating.