jwz

Mirrored from jwz.org.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/31/oh-and-doma-ruled-unconstitutional/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18768

By the United States Court of Appeals for the First District. Details here; actual ruling here. And off it will go to the Supreme Court at some point in the not too far future. My lawyer friends tell me it’s very well argued and positively backed to the gills with a half century worth of precedent, which is a nice virtue for a ruling to have, especially if one is in philosophical agreement with it.

This is a slightly different issue than same-sex marriage, but it seems to me that if the Supreme Court agrees DOMA is unconstitutional then I don’t see how the constitutionality of banning same-sex marriage is sustainable in any sense. Which bothers me not in the slightest, of course.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/31/and-heres-an-industrial-strength-woodchipper-for-you/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18766

And yet Steve Buscemi is nowhere to be found. Probably just as well. What’s being fed into the chipper are not my enemies (so far as you can prove) but the fallen limbs of the increasingly wan Bradford pear tree you see there next to the woodchipper dude. I do not have particularly high hopes for the rest of the tree making it through the summer, but we’ll have to see what happens. That poor tree.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/31/a-cool-million/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18762

As of about right this very second, Whatever’s stats package recorded a million views this month. Thanks for visiting, folks. Come again.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/31/a-note-about-the-format-of-redshirts/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18760

Many of the reviews of Redshirts note it, and the original subtitle of the book (which you can still see on the Amazon page for it) points it out explicitly, so I thought I’d write a little something about it here. It is:

Redshirts is not a novel.

More accurately, the book Redshirts is not just a novel. It is a novel with three codas.

The “codas” in this case are three short stories presented after the novel, which offer some additional perspective on the events of the novel. The novel itself is a complete story — you can read just the novel part and have a complete narrative arc, plot and character resolution and so on. But the complete experience of Redshirts, the book, includes the three stories at the end. The three stories at the end aren’t throwaway bits; the three stories at the end matter.

This is an unconventional format for a book; I’m hesitant to claim a first, but at the very least I don’t know of another book formatted this way. The closest would be novels that have extensive appendices at the end of them: Dune is one, and The Lord of the Rings (which was written as a single novel) is another. But the Redshirt codas are different in form and function than these appendices.

So why did I format Redshirts this way? Here are some reasons, some practical, some craft-oriented.

1. Because the novel was short for a modern science fiction novel. It’s about 55,000 words. As context, Old Man’s War is about 95,000 words, and the contractual length specified in my contracts for a novel is 100,000 words (we’re given leeway). Bear in mind that novel lengths are not set in stone: average novel lengths vary from genre (your average SF novel is longer than a romance, shorter than a fantasy) and from one publishing era to another — Little Fuzzy, published in 1961, was about 55,000 words, and was just about a standard-sized science fiction novel for its era. I also suspect this dawning digital age of ours is going to bring more flexibility in novel sizes. Nevertheless, right here and right now, 55k is an odd size.

When I sent along the novel, the folks at Tor didn’t blink at the length, but I personally felt there should probably be more there. But I also felt the novel was the right length for its story; I didn’t want to go in and pad it out by a third because there’s nothing that sucks worse than a novel you feel is faffing about to reach a contractual length. So I asked the folks at Tor if they would mind if I added some related stories at the end, which I thought would be interesting and would enrich the entire reading experience. They did not mind.

2. The stories at the end were stories that I wanted to tell but they didn’t fit contextually within in the novel itself. They take place after the novel and deal with the consequences of the storytelling of the novel (and no, this is not a spoiler; it’s not a spoiler to note the universe continues after the events of a story). Jamming these stories into the novel itself would have warped the novel and have dissipated its narrative drive, as well as its tone, and I didn’t want to do that. I mean, I suppose I could have done, and I flatter myself with being talented enough as a writer to make it work. But the thing is that I like the novel that I wrote, they way I wrote it, and I didn’t want to mess with it. So I didn’t. I wrote the stories separately.

And as a result, incidentally, I think the stories themselves are much stronger as well. They are better than they would have been if they were integrated into the novel, because they didn’t have to be beholden to the same tone or structure. I had room to let the stories tell themselves, not fit them into an existing structure. As a result, I think the entire experience of Redshirts as a novel with three codas is better than it would have been as Redshirts, a single, larger novel. There’s something to be said with letting stories be the size they want to be, and then putting them into the right sequence for an entire experience.

3. As far as I knew no one had thought to write a book that consisted of a novel and three separate but related short stories, so, hey, why not? I like doing things that other people haven’t thought to do yet and seeing how they work; often they work out in really interesting ways, some of which are hopefully good. As a bonus, on a metatextual level, this structure works really well for this particular reading experience, and that’s all I am going to say about that.

Or, as a shorter answer: I wrote Redshirts this way because it was the right way to write it. And why write it any other way?

One consequence of writing a structurally unconventional book is that people are used to their books being conventionally structured, so when they get to the codas, there’s a possibility of being thrown for a bit of a loop, which is something I’ve seen in some of the reviews. We’ve tried to make sure in the book design that people see they are separate stories, which helps a bit, but even so.

And naturally, this is fine and perfectly fair. When you play with format, you run the risk of people scratching their head and deciding they don’t like it or that they think it doesn’t quite work. Speaking as the author, I think it was worth the risk to get the whole experience right. I do think it works better than it would have the other way. And as a writer, that’s the goal: Get the thing as right as you can get it, before you get it to the readers.

So. Redshirts: A novel with three codas. I hope you enjoy the whole thing.

joshreadscomics

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joshreads/~3/HVFsF8npKBM/

http://joshreads.com/?p=13721

Spider-Man, 5/31/12

So I’ve done some extensive research (i.e., 90 seconds or so of cursory Googling) and I can’t find any evidence of “Clown-9″ appearing in any iteration of the Spider-Man mythos before this! I’m sure that I’m about to be severely corrected by angry comic book nerds mere seconds from now, but for the moment I’m going to choose to believe that Newspaper Spider-Man has finally risen high enough in Marvel’s pecking order that it’s being allowed to introduce its own super-villains. Naturally its first attempt is Clown-9, an unfunny man with no particular superpowers dressed in an ugly clown outfit, choosing a villain-name based on a feeble stab at wordplay, determined to exact revenge on those who thwarted his attempt at Broadway stardom. Panel one, in which we see this pathetic figure in his underwear as he changes pants, is presumably this feature’s attempt at the “gritty realism” it’s heard so much about.

Gasoline Alley, 5/31/12

Are you looking for a metaphor that’s supposed to indicate something good and yet will fill anyone who hears it with revulsion and disgust? How about “happy as a kitty with a mouth full of mouse meat”? Mmm mmm, mouse meat! Mouse meat in your mouth. So much mouse meat in your mouth that your mouth is full … full of mouse meat. Enjoy!

Marmaduke, 5/31/12

Marmaduke’s owners believe that, if only they violate all human laws to help him satisfy his foul sexual appetites, he will spare them when the Day of Wrath comes. How wrong they are!

sinfestfeed

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2012-05-31&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/31/redshirts-reviews-to-start-your-morning/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18755

Good morning! The Redshirts reviews are coming in more quickly now, which makes sense as we are less than a week away from release. Here are three new ones for you:

1. Alex Knapp of Forbes offers up a combo review of the book/interview with me. He “highly recommends” the book. And also, given Forbes’ business focus, offers up a separate article on How to Avoid Being a Redshirt on a Big Project.

2. Civilian Reader’s review of Redshirts (the first of two, apparently), uses adorable pictures of kittens and puppies. No, seriously, it does. And it is adorable.

3. As a general rule I don’t link to less-than-positive reviews of my work, because, you know, they’re not doing me any favors, so why give ‘em the traffic. This less-than-positive Redshirts review, however, at least makes the effort to be amusing. And that’s worth a link.

daily_wtf

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Long-Glow.aspx

jwz

Interesting, long post on how the hell Linux vendors make their product work now that MICROS~1 has enabled BIOS DRM.

(The tl;dr version: running a custom kernel on modern hardware just became rocket surgery.)

Fedora 18 will be released at around the same time as Windows 8, and as previously discussed all Windows 8 hardware will be shipping with secure boot enabled by default.

Most hardware you'll be able to buy towards the end of the year will be Windows 8 certified. That means that it'll be carrying a set of secure boot keys, and if it comes with Windows 8 pre-installed then secure boot will be enabled by default. This set of keys isn't absolutely fixed and will probably vary between manufacturers, but anything with a Windows logo will carry the Microsoft key. [...]

Secure boot is built on the idea that all code that can touch the hardware directly is trusted, and any untrusted code must go through the trusted code. This can be circumvented if users can execute arbitrary code in the kernel. So, we'll be moving to requiring signed kernel modules and locking down certain aspects of kernel functionality. The most obvious example is that it won't be possible to access PCI regions directly from userspace, which means all graphics cards will need kernel drivers. Userspace modesetting will be a thing of the past. Signed modules are obviously troubling from a user perspective. We'll be signing all the drivers that we ship, but what about out of tree drivers? We don't have a good answer for that yet. [...]

If I take a signed Linux bootloader and then use it to boot something that looks like an unsigned Linux kernel, I've instead potentially just booted a piece of malware. And if that malware can attack Windows then the signed Linux bootloader is no longer just a signed Linux bootloader, it's a signed Windows malware launcher and that's the kind of thing that results in that bootloader being added to the list of blacklisted binaries and suddenly your signed Linux bootloader isn't even a signed Linux bootloader. So kernels need to be signed.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

jwz

Awesome show. How does such a huge voice come out of such a tiny pregnant lady?

I got a kick out of the "we're going to play an instrumental now because she has to pee" interlude.

People who liked Concrete Blonde, Le Butcherettes and PJ Harvey also enjoyed Nico Vega.

Mirrored from jwz.org.

jwz

Mirrored from jwz.org.

dnalounge

While the Permitting Apocalypse is ongoing, here's some more irritating nonsense we got from from Yelp.

This is all just completely stupid and pointless in the grand scheme of things -- Yelp will be out of business eventually and nobody will mourn them -- but it's kind of funny. Yelp's service completely sucks, and their customer service is non-existent and insultingly arrogant toward the businesses like mine upon whose backs they make their money.

Remember last month, when we finally managed to get someone from Yelp on the phone to ask why they wouldn't let us use our logo while communicating with our customers through their service? Her response was, "Your not the only person whose business I've lost over this: my employer is making it impossible for me to do my job." That was awesome.

Apparently my blog post about that got some attention over at Yelp, because a couple weeks later we got this:

From: Darnell Holloway <darnell@yelp.com>
Subject: Yelp- Your Recent Blog Post
Date: May 1, 2012 3:10:43 PM PDT
To: "barry@dnalounge.com" <barry@dnalounge.com>

Hi Barry,

I'm Yelp's Manager of Local Business Outreach. A recent blog post (link below) from DNA Lounge was sent my way, and I wanted to check in with you to see if you had any additional information or feedback about the situation that was described.

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2012/04/20.html

Thanks,
Darnell

--
Darnell Holloway
Yelp, inc.
darnell@yelp.com

Barry wrote back with:

Yes. We want the following:

1. Be able to respond publicly to our customers with our logo as the image;

or if not number 1:

2. Opt out of being included on the Yelp site.

Can you help with either of these things?

A month later, Darnell, who is apparently Manager of Glad-Handing Complainers Without Actually Doing Anything, wrote back with 500 words that said "No". Here's our reply, including some quotes from him:

From: Barry Synoground <barry@dnalounge.com>
Subject: Re: Yelp- Your Recent Blog Post
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 14:53:01 -0700<BR>
To: Darnell Holloway <darnell@yelp.com>

Beyond that, you mentioned in your blog post that there were some businesses you noticed that appeared to have a picture of something other than a person, being used to respond to reviews. It's important to note here that there is a difference between a user account on Yelp, and a business account. A user account is meant for personal, non-commercial purposes, and is used to participate in the Yelp community (write reviews, post in Talk forums, etc).

I understand that. Obviously we're talking about our business account.

A business account is used to manage a listing on Yelp. In order to take full advantage of the features of a business account (ie, the ability to message reviewers), we do require that a business owner upload a photo to their profile. And just as there is a difference in the accounts, the guidelines for acceptable photos differ as well.

Yes, I understand that that is your policy. I am asking you to make an exception to it, so that we can communicate with our customers using your service in the manner that we find appropriate.

Please tell me whose face appears when the administrator of the AT&T Park account replies to their customers.

Please tell me whose face appears when the administrator of the Best Buy account replies to their customers.

We require business owners to use a photo showing their face for two main reasons. The first reason is for your benefit as a business owner. We believe your messages will be received more warmly if there is not an attempt to disguise your appearance, because we have found that users tend to respond more favorably when they can attach a face to name.

That's an interesting theory. Please stop doing me this "favor".

The second reason is for the benefit of the reviewer. From a consumer perspective, a message from a business owner whose face can not clearly be seen may be perceived incorrectly.

Meaning what exactly?

We believe customers respond more favorably when they can see who is contacting them.

Again, that's an interesting theory. Please stop doing me this "favor".

An official communication from my business to my customers must have our logo attached to it, not the face of a random employee here. If you cannot make an exception, and approve our logo image, then we will simply never use your service.

That said, we do realize that uploading a photo may not be for everyone, and we can respect that. But again, in order to take full advantage of your business account, we require a photo in which your whole face can be seen.

This is an interesting definition of "respect". It sounds a lot like "no" to me.

Finally, the conversation you referenced in your blog post seemed out of the ordinary, so the purpose of my original e-mail was to check in and see if you had any additional information or feedback about the person you spoke with.

No thanks, I would rather not rat out the surprisingly honest Yelp employee I spoke to.

Thanks for your understanding,

Thank *you* for understanding that as soon as you approve our logo image for use when communicating with *our* customers on your site, we will continue using your service.

Until you do that, we won't be using your site, and certainly won't be buying any ads or other services from you.

I eagerly await your reply.

That finally got him to stop pretending there was some "misunderstanding" and come right out and say "no":

From: Darnell Holloway <darnell@yelp.com>
Subject: Re: Yelp- Your Recent Blog Post
Date: May 29, 2012 3:14:55 PM PDT
To: Barry Synoground <barry@dnalounge.com>

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately we won't be able to make an exception at this point on the requirement for a human photo. I've had our user support team look into the businesses you've mentioned, and there is nothing to suggest that exceptions have been made on the photo policy in those cases. In some instances, businesses may initially upload a non-human photo to their biz owner account, however all photos still need to be approved by our user support team on the back end before the messaging tools are made fully available. I also wanted to let you know that I will certainly pass your feedback along internally about your concerns with the current photo policy.

Darnell Holloway
Manager of Local Business Outreach, Yelp, Inc.
Tel: 415-230-6525

So, yeah. Screw those guys.

Yelp has gotten a lot of press for running a shake-down operation where they ask businesses to pay to have bad reviews removed. There was even a class-action suit about it last year. We made it pretty clear to them on the phone that we were willing to spend money with them to get our logo approved, but they didn't bite. Apparently they're not just scammers, they're bad at being scammers.

I understand Google's about to roll out their own Yelp competitor. I hope it isn't as much of a dud as Google Plus was.

jwz

Mirrored from jwz.org.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/30/possibly-the-most-squeetastic-review-i-will-ever-receive/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18750

It is here. I am pleased the reviewer got so much out of the book; she is very much the audience for it.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/30/dayton-and-college-graduates/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18747

The New York Times comes to visit Dayton, whose metropolitan area I am (barely) a resident, and to use it as a poster child for the sort of formerly prosperous manufacturing city that is now fighting to retain and attract college graduates who see New York, San Francisco or even Raleigh as a better place to be — because there are lots of college graduates there, for one thing. It’s a hard cycle to break, although to its credit Dayton is now trying (after years of inertia, which basically typifies the human condition, now, doesn’t it).

I’ve been reasonably happy in the area, even in a rural part of the area with even fewer college graduates, but then again I spent my 20s first in a job that nearly weekly took me to LA and San Francisco, and then suburban DC at a job at which nearly everyone around me was college educated. These days I’m settled with a family, I and travel constantly and see lots of people that way, all of which skews my perception considerably. I don’t know that I’m a good test case.

I do have a fantasy that some of the college graduates and/or creative people who flock to NYC/LA/SF/DC/etc eventually yearn for cheaper rents and yards and start looking at towns like Dayton as places to land — which may seem a tad dismissive of the creative folks in towns like Dayton, to which I say: Sorry guys. More would still be better, no? But it’s a chicken and egg thing — need cool stuff in town to attract people, but cool stuff comes with enough people. Or maybe you just need enough people becoming exasperated with paying $2,000 a month for a postage stamp apartment in a big city. Either way, I hope Dayton and other towns like it find a way to get and keep their share of college folks.

joshreadscomics

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joshreads/~3/7Fhu-7IDUmk/

http://joshreads.com/?p=13729

You guys, I am very disappointed at the paucity of entries for the Hilariously Overwrought Rex and June Facial Expression Lookalike Contest! It’s possible that the Saturday of a holiday weekend isn’t the best possible time to post such a contest, but heck, I can’t control when Rex Morgan puts up its most hilarious panels. Anyway, assuming that you were all too busy grilling to get swept up in Overwrought Facial Expression theater, here’s a quick recap: imitate this panel (Rex and June at minimum, add Iris and Mabel if you want to up the degree of difficulty) and win eternal glory AND one item of your choice from the CafePress store.

While most of you have misplaced priorities and spent the weekend “spending time with your family” or “honoring those who died in America’s wars” instead of dressing up like cartoon characters and making funny faces, we did get a few entries. First up are the husband-and-wife team of faithful readers Nate and Hani. Nate is really pushing the envelope in terms of facial expression safety, and I like it! They also used advanced technology to actually insert themselves into a cartoon world.

Faithful readers Dr. Jeff Corey and Lucy Van Pelt (not their actual names) also used Photoshoppery to add to the verisimilitude of their entry, or at least I hope they did, because otherwise they’ve either crashed someone’s funeral or ruined a funeral service for one of their own loved ones:

Faithful reader Mibbitmaker swapped in characters from his Pop Culture Kids comic, who are imagining being someone else pretending to be someone else … well, it made my head hurt just a little.

And, finally, faithful reader Ricky Lee provides the three-way soap opera crossover I’ve always dreamed of:

So there’s your competition. CAN YOU DO BETTER?

ALSO, TOTALLY UNRELATED NOTE: I know that many of you are, like me, fans of Richard Thompson’s strip Cul De Sac. You probably know that Thompson has been stricken by Parkinson’s Disease, though he’s continuing with his great work. A bunch of other artists, including many names you’ll know, have banded together as Team Cul De Sac, have created their own takes on the strip’s characters, and are auctioning them off to raise money for Parkinson’s research. Check ’em out!

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/30/7th-grade-is-over-now-it-is-time-to-eat-frosting-with-a-spoon/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18745

What? It is not customary in your tribe to eat frosting with a spoon upon the completion of the 7th grade? Strange tribe. Strange customs. We will keep ours.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/30/and-now-my-favorite-track-from-the-new-garbage-album/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18740

It’s “Big Bright World”:

The whole new album is pretty darn good, I have to say. I’m a Garbage fan since the first album, and there’s not really an album of theirs I don’t like. They pretty much hit all my “This is my music” triggers and always have. There’s something to be said for consistency.

In any event, the new album is called Not Your Kind of People, and I recommend it; if you like the song here, you’ll like the rest of the album too.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/30/the-view-from-todays-workspace/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18738

It’s too nice to stay inside. Here’s the front porch with dog, cat and computer.

How is your work day going?

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/30/some-administrivia-regarding-the-site/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18734

This is one of those housekeeping posts, mostly of interest to me and the perhaps three people out of the entire audience who give a crap about the fiddly things I do to the site. Hello, fellow OCDians!

Anyway:

1. I fiddled with the sidebar slightly today, to put up a promo spot for Redshirts, give The Big Idea its own promo spot, and to delete the links to Clash of the Geeks and the November Advent Calendar. Clash of the Geeks is still accessible through the Scalzi Creative Sampler link, however (and November Advent is of course still in the archives). The “Random Whatever” feature is also still in the sidebar, just down at the bottom. I’m not sure anyone but me played with it. The Redshirts promo will be up at least through my tour dates, i.e., through the end of June. Hey, it’s my site, I can promote my latest book if I want.

2. Speaking of the book tour, the fact I am flitting around the country for much of June means things might be a little slower around here than usual and/or posts will be shorter and of the “Hey! I’m in an airport!” variety. It’s been an eventful May. I’m not sure a somewhat restful June will be a bad thing. I do have a full schedule of Big Idea pieces, so that’s good. And remember that I’m on Twitter a whole hell of a lot.

3. Going back to the site for a moment, it’s possible that later this evening (i.e., after most of all y’all have gone home) I may fiddle with the site a bit more; it appears there are features of this particular template I may have not yet fully exploited and I want to check them out to see if they are things I would find useful. So if you pop by in the evening and it looks like the site has exploded, don’t panic. Everything is under control. I SWEAR.

4. For you statistics fans out there, this month has been far and away the most trafficked month on Whatever since I switched over to WordPress VIP hosting in October ’08 and started using its stats program to track visitors (see my notation on its reliability for tracking actual visitors to Scalzi.com). In fact, if I get 17k visitors today and tomorrow, I’ll crack one million visitors for the month, tracked (which means rather more in reality).

To assure I reach this milestone, here is a picture of a cat.

There, that should do it.

scalzifeed

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/30/the-big-idea-mark-l-van-name/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18731

Contrary to what the Beatles once said, love is not all we need. But it’s still high up there on the list. What does this have to do with No Going Back, the latest science fiction novel by Mark Van Name? Quite a lot, actually.

MARK L. VAN NAME:

I never set out to make a particular set of points in a book. If anything, I rather studiously avoid worrying about a novel’s themes, because my proper focus is to tell a story; I could no more prevent the themes from asserting themselves than I could stop the sun from shining. Instead, over time a story grows in my mind and my notes, bits and pieces coming from here and there and everywhere, and then I tell it. Afterward, though, it’s impossible to avoid noticing the notions and concerns that gave rise to the work.

For No Going Back, the big idea sounds so clichéd that I’m almost reluctant to type it: each of us deserves love.

For many people, probably most people, this concept is a gimme, a statement as obvious as the sun’s light.

For some of us, though, it is, very sadly, almost impossible to believe. Survivors of abuse, for example, may spend much, sometimes all of their lives fighting against a deep-rooted belief that they do not deserve love, that something in them is so very wrong, so very broken, that what they deserve is what they got: the abuse of those who should have been protecting and loving them. These people can work for decades to try to learn a simple lesson that is immediately obvious to anyone not in their situation: it was not their fault. Many never succeed.

Victims of abuse are not the only people who may have trouble with even the concept that they deserve love. Joining them are many veterans and police officers and EMTs and others who have had to deal with horrible situations and sometimes do things that most others would find horrible. When you’ve committed violence, even in a good cause, even if to protect others, even if only to survive, the stain it leaves inside you can make you wonder in the dark moments before sleep and the darker dreams that follow whether you are worthy of anyone’s love.

Attacking this idea in a far-future SF adventure may seem a bit odd. Doing so in a book whose protagonists, Jon and Lobo, are a man who is the only successful human-nanomachine hybrid, and a large, incredibly intelligent machine built to kill, may seem odder still, but science fiction is nothing if not an incredibly flexible medium for exploring the human condition.

The notion may also not seem to lend itself to the structure and pace of a page-turner of a thriller, but it can, it really can. The story winds a crooked path through the rescue of kidnapped children, the protection of a pop star, a raid on the home of one of the most powerful men alive, and a confrontation in the barren outback of one of the least hospitable of the planets humanity has settled, but the emotional fuel propelling it, though sometimes invisible, is always there.

After all, in the end, few quests are more powerful than those for love.

—-

No Going Back: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

daily_wtf

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Beacon-of-Hope-and-A-Positive-Attitude.aspx

joshreadscomics

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joshreads/~3/ZEhq6ju-Ykk/

http://joshreads.com/?p=13716

Marvin, 5/30/12

At this point in my life I’m pretty deep in the throes of Marvin Derangement Syndrome, so I don’t really ever expect to find satisfaction in this feature’s panels. But I have to admit that I feel a certain amount of validation in knowing that even the other characters in the strip are disgusted at the thought of looking at more images of Marvin.

Ballard Street, 5/30/12

Ballard Street is a generally amusing one-paneler that depicts a mostly interchangeable cast of characters engaging in insane and inscrutable activities, so I usually leave it alone, but I thought that today’s installment, in which the punchline basically boils down to “Chip got drunk and passed out on the couch,” was worthy of your attention.

Six Chix, 5/30/12

I was going to huff that a plant needs the energy it derives from sunlight via photosynthesis in order to engage in the metabolic processes that this woman is demanding, but then I just decided to respect this panel for what it is: the melancholy tale of a person who feels so powerless in her everyday life that she comes home and bullies her plants.

Pluggers, 5/30/12

A plugger’s life is an awful charnel house in which everyone around them is dead or dying.

sinfestfeed

http://www.cartoonlabs.com/comics/index.php?date=2012-05-30&show=sinfest

Sinfest
Tatsuya Ishida